Me Time ✨

Good morning, Cadre family. Happy Sunday. My name is Jane Nichols. I'm super pumped to be here. This is my sidekick, major. He is also excited to be here on this beautiful Sunday. Hope you're all having the best day. Not a perfect day, but maybe just in this moment, the best, best moments. It's funny when we say that to people, right? What does best mean? It could mean something extremely different to me. Best morning to me is just sleeping in a little bit, having time to grab some water, being able to look outside the window and see what the day looks like, and taking my dog for a walk.

Good morning, Jocelyn. How are you today? Happy Sunday. I was just commenting on the conversation of the best. We talk often about. I hope you have the best day or the best time. But really, what does that mean? It means something so different for everybody. Jocelyn, where are you calling in from today? Where are you located? Maybe even just what state? I'm curious, always curious. I am in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm amazing. Thank you. I am having a great day. I overslept. Can you really oversleep on a Sunday?

Really? What that means is I slept in longer than I had intended. Columbia. Oh, I love South Carolina. I've been to Charleston. I have not been to Columbia. And this morning. So my oversleeping I've mentioned before, on Sundays, I am training for a couple marathons. That sounds really crazy when I say that out loud, so let me qualify that. I am running some marathons for charity in honor of my mom and dad. And there are training programs and I am not good at following structure. And so today I wanted to get up early and run because it was 90 plus degrees and really humid yesterday.

And it's going to be about the same today. So my goal was to get up early and do the run before I. Before it got too hot. And here we are. It's 10:00 and I haven't started running yet, but instead I slept and I nourished my body. So today, on me time, I wanted to talk about a couple of things. I don't know if you've seen on the Internet or heard from friends. There's this. This challenge that's been going around. It's been going around for quite a while, and I don't believe it's only in the United States.

I think it's in other countries as well. But it's called the 75 hard. And I want to bring this into a conversation at some point with my friend JC, because I think we would both have a really good conversation around this challenge. But the 75 hard. If you've heard of it or if you've tried it, you know that it is a difficult challenge to do. If you've never heard of it. Here's what it is. I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget any of the details. But for 75 days, there's varying check in or varying things that you need to do every single day for 75 days.

And if you don't do it for one day, so if you miss one thing in one day, they say that you need to start over from scratch. So there's no opportunity to fail in this challenge. There's no opportunity for grace to say, I'm having a day today. It's a challenge that says every single day you do this, and when you don't, you start over until you get to the 75. So it requires you to diet. It allows you to choose what kind of diet you want to have. So maybe inside that diet, you want to. You want to just simply eat clean for 75 days.

Maybe that's what it is. Or maybe you want to give up sugar for 75 days so there is flexibility with that one. But then the requirement is that you work out two times a day for 45 minutes. One of them has to be outside regardless of weather. Drink four and a half liters of water. Read ten pages of something educational nonfiction every single day. Avoid alcohol. And there are no cheat days. So a lot of times in diets, you might build in a cheat day. And then this one is a cincture for me. You have to take a photo of your body every single day.

So when I heard about the challenge, I was like, oh, this sounds fun, because I'm always up for a challenge. I'm always up for something that might improve my mental health, my physical health, my strength. And then I went online, and I read through it, and I know some friends that have done it, and I know a few that are doing it now. And I'm always curious as to why. Because every challenge is going to work so different for somebody. So I'm saying this challenge, and for somebody out there listening, they might be, heck, yeah, let's do this.

And they go do it, and they love it. And I. And I think that's beautiful and great. The part that I. That gets me isn't about the diet or getting outside or drinking all the water, because I need to drink more water. I'm so dehydrated today that I'm gonna run, and I'm nervous because I know I didn't hydrate enough yesterday. But the one that gets me in here is the photo every single day of your body. Because at the end of the day, like, it's almost like getting on a scale every single day. Like, if I get that much data in my head, I'm going to be judging my body every single day for 75 days.

Now, I don't think that's the intention of this, but that's what it will trigger in me. And maybe there are other things in that list that might trigger you. Good morning, Jules. I love the idea of getting outside every single day and getting outside first thing every single day, and even in the winter. Like, I'm not afraid of that. Running in the rain. I'm good with that. I have a dog, so no matter what, I'm outside every single day anyway. So that one, I feel like it's easy. And exercise is simply about moving your body and doing all of that.

But I do struggle with the one where it says you have to take a photo of your body every day, because in the essence of taking care of me mentally, emotionally, physically, I'm not sure that one works. But when I thought about the challenge a little bit more, I thought about it in terms of what might be the possibilities that we could create for a 75 day challenge of me time. Now, I haven't written anything up, and I don't have all of it figured out yet, but I am going to commit to figuring out something that would provide options for people to consider doing for 75 days.

And I might reach out to some of my Cadre peers and see what they think and see what they might add or include. One of the things that I did, and this is my second focus point. For me, time today is gratitude. Now, we see that a lot, or we might hear it a lot, practicing gratitude. And for some, it can be like, yeah, yeah, I'm thankful for my. My life. Yeah, yeah, I'm thankful for whatever. And it's just kind of like a flippant. Yeah, I remember I need to do that. Ooh. Jocelyn, you're a member of e two m fitness.

And as much as I hate the photo thing, by doing it, it showed me how my body was changing, even when the skill says different. You know what? Thank you for that. I just want to say thank you, because that perspective might be a perspective that I needed to shift my own mindset. Typos, I don't care about those, but I love that you. What you wrote in there about the photo, because to me, I think about that as a hurdle, a mental hurdle a mental challenge. And for this program that you did, you were able to see it in a different way.

And I appreciate that you offered that, because I think so much of the time, it's about perspective. And, you know, there are really great people on Cadre who are psychologists and psychiatrists that go deeper into the science of some of the psyche things than what I know. Cause that's not my background or my trade. But what's beautiful about that is, like, for one person, it might be a trigger of something where someone spiraled them down. Oh, thank you for sharing that, Jocelyn. I don't think I know enough about dysmorphia, and so I'm going to do some research on that.

But I really appreciate that you shared sometimes with different things, you can see that there was a trigger for me about taking photos of my body. Not that I don't love my body. I do. I love my body today for what it is and what it can do. And I love my body, what it was before and what it could do then. And so sometimes I feel like there are different elements that just might trigger somebody. The word diet can trigger somebody. So how might we use something different? So when I think about 75 hard, and something that I would like to incorporate in is the element of gratitude and thinking about what gratitude can do for us on a day to day basis and how it can help shift mindset.

When I got my master's degree, I wanted to create something that could help people just show appreciation. And so my master's project was to design a gift of gratitude. And what people would do is I reached out to a group of people, and I picked one person. So in this instance, I picked my brother to start, because I wanted to do something simple. And I reached out to my nephews and his wife and his in laws, and my parents and a couple of his old friends that I could find on Facebook. I creeped him, and I asked them to send me the five things that they are the most grateful for, or the things that my brother, how they impacted them in their life.

And they all sent it to me. And then what I did is I took. And if they had photos, I asked them to send photos. And then I took all the photos. And I had a girlfriend who's a really creative designer at the time. This is way before canva. And I had her make a cute little background, and if someone sent me a photo, she'd use a photo, and if someone didn't have a photo, then she'd use this cute little background. That we designed. And on the front of the card, it would say one gratitude statement and the name of the person.

And we made a deck of cards, and I bundled them up in a little package, and for his birthday, I sent them to him. So for his birthday, he got a deck of 56 cards that was a random number. That's how many I got. And he could go through and read all these cards of different gratitude that people had for him. And he loved it. He cried. He doesn't cry much. Don't say anything. If you know my brother, don't tell him I told you that. But it was very emotional for him. So I was like, okay, cool. So I. I did a sample of another, like, ten people, and I did this for birthday gifts one year, and I just collected these samplings for different friends that I knew, old boss that I knew.

And then for one of them, I did an actual book. So apple at the time, you can make an Apple book of photography. And so I took all the photos, and then I took all the statements for the one person, and I put the photos on the two pages and wrote down all the statements and gave them a book. And then after I graduated from my master's program, I stopped doing that. And I thought about it the other day, but what I loved about that was we were able to so simply lift somebody up by sharing gratitude.

So when I think about 75 hard and what I might add or do something different with, and the purpose of this 75 hard really is around that physical element and getting exercise and moving and taking care of our bodies. And so I really do get it, but I think that there's something more to it. And I think about, what if we expressed five things of gratitude every day to somebody else? I think about, what if we shared five things for ourselves that we're grateful for, because we are so giving to everyone outside of ourselves that we oftentimes forget to give to ourselves.

And so I've been on a search for the last few years, ever since I dove into this gratitude project, because it really, I don't know, everybody can say there's something that really gets them. Gratitude is the thing for me. Like, I don't know how to explain it. I definitely took pieces of that from my mom and dad. And so I just am always, if I find a book that says something about gratitude, I am a sucker. I will buy it and. Or I'll stand in the store and I'll look at it before I buy it. I've gotten smarter that I found recently that I'm really enjoying is called a dear, dear universe book, and I thought I'd share it.

Today. I have a stack of gratitude books, but what I like about this one is it gives me a daily practice. I'm not always great at writing. I had a traumatic relationship a long time ago where they would use the things that I would write in my journal against me, and so feel a lot of emotion saying that out loud. So I've been for a really long time afraid to write. But I love writing, and so I will find books like this, and I may or may not write in the pages because I also really love books and paper, but I might just write on a post it note and then just throw it away because I'm still breaking through some of that trauma.

But what I love in here is that it has a section in the here that says, in the morning, you know, what are you thinking about right now? What is your intention for today? And then what am I grateful for right now? And it asks to check in how I feel. How do I feel right now, and how do I want to feel at the end of the day? And then it gives you an opportunity at the end of the day to just reflect back. How did I do? Did I check in? What do I want to set for an intention before I go to sleep? The last thoughts in my head before I go to sleep.

Not something I scroll with on instagram, but something that I want to set for an intention and a feeling for tomorrow. And so I don't do it every day. I'm not great at doing things every day, and I've already shared that I'm not great at writing because I still have a little bit of that fear that I'm working through. But I love what this inspires, even if I just simply think about it before I go to sleep and when I first wake up in the morning. So my invitation to you is, if you were to do a 75 day activity, maybe we don't call it hard.

What would you want to incorporate to create a new habit? And maybe, maybe we create a menu that says, here's your menu. And now let's commit. Pick these five things, and then for 75 days, let's hold each other accountable. Jules wrote in here to get her kids moving. Last winter, she created a 30 day challenge. We did one exercise a day for 30 days. Day one, we did 30 sit ups. Day two, we did 30 push ups, etcetera. Yeah. So there are really creative ways for us to shift not only our bodies physically, but our minds our hearts, our energy, our soul.

Um, so my challenge or my question for you is, what would you want to see if you were to do something for 75 days? And it doesn't have to be 75. It could be 30. It could be ten. Right? What's something that would inspire you to commit to that would touch your mind, body, and your heart? So let's think about this together. Maybe together we designed something. But stay tuned because I am in a very big creative journey right now, and this one is something that's hitting home. I just haven't figured out what to do with it yet.

So on me time today, I just want to share with you that we all have opportunities to move. We all have opportunities to be grateful. Even on the hardest days. Find one thing. Maybe it's the color of your toenail polish or a simple little puppy you saw on the street. One thing that you can do for you. I love this Jocelyn tiny acts of kindness. And also, thank you for sharing that doctor Ezi helped you a ton. I am going to do some research on that because I'm really curious. Find or create an inspirational quote.

Yeah. So thank you for shining up today. Thank you for showing up today. And I look forward to having more conversations with you. I'll be here tomorrow on Monday for professional development day, and I'm going to type in the comments a little later about the brainstorm for our own 75 Cadre challenge. I hope you have a great day and I'll talk to you soon.