Leading With Love 💕

Hello CadreSphere, Anila here from HabitAware. I work and live in mental health. In mental healthiness, how about that? I have... An alphabet soup of mental health conditions, body-focused repetitive behaviors, which include hair pulling, skin picking, and nail biting. Hair pulling is my venom of choice. These are self-soothing mechanisms. I have had bouts of alcoholism. I have anxiety, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and I had a dance with cancer, breast cancer specifically, two years ago. or three years ago.

Time is flying. And I'm coming to you through my lived experience, through all of that, and through my work at Habit Aware, and in all of the 40 years of me being alive, this idea of leading with love. That. Coming to this decision that that is the framework that we should all be living under, but who wants to be told what to do? But that is just a better way of living. It just puts us at ease. Woo! It helps us stay peaceful and happy. To be quite frank, the last few weeks I was not leading with love, nor was I leading with anila, meaning putting myself first.

And that is kind of an ongoing trait of mine as a people pleaser, to always be putting other people first, but sometimes first, other things first, other, you know, even strangers. So today I kind of wanted to talk about that. Leading with love also means leading with yourself. Also means taking care of yourself. So I'm sitting here by my prayer table, which quite frankly has been neglected for many, many months. I used to have this ritual of standing here and lifting my weights and saying my prayers and going through even this little light up board of people that I would put on here.

I would hear that someone was not feeling well or was sick or whatever and prayers for good health putting them there and just every now and again glancing over here and saying, you know, kind of hold space for those people. And all these little rituals again kind of fell off and I wasn't leading with self, which is leading with love. By putting myself first, we think that that's so selfish. And I know we've heard this before, that self-care is not selfish. Self-care fuels you to be able to take care of others, but it's just that little reminder of Yeah, when my brain is rush, rush, rush, go, go, go, and doesn't take time to pause and sit here for the two minutes it takes for me to read my I am affirmations and just do this like five times, like, why?

was I denying myself that? And I ask you, what are you denying of yourself? What are you saying, oh no, I'll do that later. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll read that book. Tomorrow I'll take that walk. Tomorrow I'll go to the gym. And tomorrow never comes. So leading with love means leading with self, means putting yourself first above everything else so that you can then have the energy and the desire to give that energy to other people. I have two young kids, I have a husband, I have a dog, I run a business, I run a non-profit, and there's a lot of things pulling for my attention.

But when I give myself that time first and I say, oh, I'm going to answer Anila's call first of what does she need to be filled up, just everything else shifts inside me physically. I can feel I'm standing taller. I'm feeling more confident. I'm feeling lighter. And I hope that that is something that you can take away and start looking at and paying attention to of where in your life have you done this where you've put yourself last and kind of started feeling like you're boxed in and When you can kind of push yourself out of that box and say, nope, I matter.

I matter. You matter. And take care of yourself first, how that transforms the energy around you. My kids are happier. I'm not snapping at them when I ask them to do something to help clean up. They do it right away instead of being annoyed. that energy just shifts. So yeah, leading with love means leading with self. Thanks for taking time with me today and I hope to see you soon.