Celebrating YOU ✨ Self Care

Happy Sunday, Cadre. How are we doing today? My name is Jean Nichels. I'm so glad to be here today on this beautiful Sunday. I live in Minneapolis and it is sunny in 70. Play 70? Yeah. It's a nice day. I'm just gonna hang out here for a hot second also because I live in Minneapolis. The Vikings are playing in Dublin. Hey Luke, how's the road trip? Hey Rick, how's it going? You guys are doing great today. Hey Jules, nice to see you. Happy Sunday. Very excited to have you all here. Hello Elise, nice to see you again.

So Elise , fun fact is just in my spin class, made it home in time to jump on to Cadre. So great to see you. So today on this beautiful Sunday, let's just dive right in. And fun fact, funny that Luke is on today because I was gonna talk about you but now I'm outed because you're on the call. But here's the deal, self-care. I might even consider changing this to self-care Sundays because I feel like there's a really big shift in the air. Not only are we transitioning seasons, we're entering into this season of harvesting.

So if you're in a farming community, now is the time that we take in all the things that we've been planted, all the seeds that have been planted, all the fruits that have grown. Hi Alison, nice to have you here. And it's that season where we transition from busy summer life to kind of a slowdown where we appreciate the changing of the leaves, depending on what state you live in. And you start to feel a shift in the temperature, you see a change in the daylight as it gets darker earlier and stays darker longer in the morning.

So our bodies naturally are starting to feel like it's time to slow down, time to reset a little bit. And so today I wanted to talk a little bit about self-care. And I talked about it a little in my spin class this morning, so Elise, I apologize if this is a repeat, but really we are so great at investing energy outside of ourselves, giving to the people that need us, booking the trip, taking the phone call, waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about what it is that we forgot to do or need to do for a person in our family, a person that we work with, somebody in our community.

We are overloading with giving externally. And so I found that I needed to be really intentional with some self-care activities. So I talked about for the last few months I've been doing a daily cacao ceremony and it's funny. I just stopped one day and it wasn't that it wasn't grateful anymore because a cacao ceremony is a hard opening ceremony. And it's a time to allow yourself to find moments of gratitude. And it wasn't that I'm done with it. It's that I was done with it for right now. And I, I chose congratulations.

Okay, I'll come back. But when I think about self-care, it's really that, that point in time of saying, I've given a lot to the outside world, outside of myself. And now it's time for me to give back to me. But it's hard. If you are someone who has a hard time taking a pause and not saying yes to everybody else, give a heart. If you are someone who does a really great job of saying yes to help everybody around you, give a heart. Whatever it is for us, we're really great at helping everyone around us.

And that is a beautiful gift of being human. But as I started to mention, I'm finding that I give so much. I do a lot of sound bass. I teach a lot of spin classes. I coach a lot of people. I have a lot of clients, right? The list goes on and on for each of us. I'm not unique in that. But when we don't fill our own buckets, that's when it can be tough. We find that we can get depleted. Our bodies will just naturally shut down. You'll wake up one day and you'll feel simply exhausted. And not because you overdid it the day before , but maybe you just haven't been giving enough to yourself that lately.

So on Sundays, I'm going to offer some insights into ways that we can help take care of ourselves, take some self-care. And why I was going to share about you, Luke, was if you 're not following Luke on Instagram, maybe you want to. I'm sure he'll pop in and share stories about it. But he was explaining to me recently how he does his own type of retreat. And I forgot the name of it, Luke. So if you want to type it in the chat, you can. I think it starts with an S. But he does this event where he takes time just for himself and he goes away and feels his soul.

And if you think about the word retreat, retreat in and of itself, it's a treat for yourself. We're giving it that gift back to ourselves. We're taking that time for ourselves. And so today, I am having a mental health day. I broke down in my spin class. I am getting on the plane tonight to go see my family. And I don't know if I get to see them or not because they are having some mental health issues with one of my nephews. And I just decided I'm going to get on a plane and I'm going to go be out there.

And I have some friends that I'm meeting up with. But I'm just making myself available so that if they can, if they find the time, if they need the time, if they need a break, that I'll be literally parked in a coffee shop in my favorite location. And they know where it's at and they can come see me if they want to. And I'm just going to be available because I live in Minneapolis and they live in California. So I can't always be physically available. So I'm going to do that. But I'm also realizing that I'm a very high -end path.

That's not new. But I feel it in my chest. I feel a heaviness in my chest because I know that there's something big happening right now. And I don't know what it is. And I don't have to. But what I recognize as well is going to California isn't just about me being present for them. I recharge in the ocean. I recharge at the ocean. I am a water person. A hundred percent all the way through. So when I need time for myself, I will hop on a plane and I will go find a beach. I will get on my bike. I'll ride to the lake.

I will go sit. I've been sitting by the Mississippi River since I was 10 years old. And I didn't know why. I would just ride my bike, find a little swing and I would watch the water flow. And when I was 10, I didn't even understand it. But now I do. I understand that that's one place where I feel relaxed. I feel connected to the earth. It could be a waterfall. It could be a lake, a pond. It doesn't even matter. It's just something about water and the animals that live in the water. So for me, self-care is booking a ticket and getting on a plane and going and sitting by the ocean.

Or it's getting on my bike and riding to the river or the lake or walking my dog and sitting by the Mississippi and watching the waterfall. Because without those moments in time, I only have a small portion of what I can truly give to the world around me. So without doing self-care moments, whether it's my cac ao ceremonies and it's 15 minutes of me sitting with my cacao practicing gratitude, or it's 18 minutes of a meditation that one of my coaches gave me that they want me to listen to for 40 days.

And I haven't started it yet because I didn't know which day I could begin. That I had the 20 minutes to do this meditation. So I'm beginning tomorrow by the ocean. It's finding those little bitty things. And fun fact, 20 minutes of a day is 2% of an entire day. There are 1,440 minutes in a day. Let's say we sleep seven of them. Science says we should sleep somewhere between seven and nine hours a day. So let's pretend we get seven hours of sleep. So those hours don't even count. Those minutes don't even count.

So 20 minutes, 2% of an entire day that I'm spending for myself for self-care. Now if we jump onto a cadre session two more times in the day, that's 4% of my day. And I'm spending taking time for myself. So what are the benefits of taking self-care? Because I get a lot of pushback when I'm coaching leaders and I'm working with clients when I offer them the invitation to do self-care. Self-care can be as simple as going to a spin class and having somebody yell at you the whole time. Right, Elise?

We're going to a sound bath when you come into town, right, Jules? But why is self-care important? I'll give you some of my reasons. And I 'm going to continue this conversation and we're going to use this as our theme for all of October for sure. So self-care Sundays through October, at the very least. But here's what happens. When we take, I'm going to say 4% of our day, 45 minutes sounds like a lot of time. You can break it up as much as you want. When you take that time, it allows your brain to reset and calm down.

Because when we are in our work or in our days or driving our cars, there's so much activity that's happening in our mind. But our brain needs 8 minutes, a minimum of 8 minutes of complete silence for it to reset. So 8 minutes is what? 5% of a day? It's a very small portion of our day. But our brain needs 8 minutes of silence. So when our brain gets that, we are more calm. It can think more clear. It allows us to continue to move forward in a way that is healthy for us. Because our brain controls a lot.

Our heart is our epicenter. The energy measurement, megahertz energy measurement of our heart, has a higher megahertz energy than our brain and any other organ in our body. So our heart is truly the epic enter. Now our heart not only pumps blood, but it's the area in which we feel everything. So when we are super tense, our blood pressure goes up. I happen to run with very low blood pressure. And so there are times where I feel like I'm barely alive because I barely have a pulse. So I can feel the extremes of when I'm stressed and when I'm not stressed, when I feel a motion or I don't feel a motion, I can feel it even more intense in my heart.

I've practiced so I'm focused on it. But when we give ourselves self-care, going to get a massage , going for a walk, meditation, taking a bubble bath, sitting in a hot tub, going on a retreat, when we allow ourselves those moments of self-care, it allows our entire system to find calm. It allows us to get out of our head. It allows us to get into our heart. And it allows us to show up better for everybody around them. Now I'm going to be super vulnerable in the last minute here. When I get too much pressure, I get too tense.

I have too many things that I'm trying to solve, too many people I'm trying to help, and I don't take self- care. I literally explode like a three-year-old brat. I'm not even kidding. I have a temper tant rum. I stomp around my apartment. It's embarrassing, but I'm going to tell you that's true. And it's not because I want to be that way. It's because I'm carrying so much energy that I have to let it out. And that's where my brain goes to the point in time when I was a kid, when I could just get all the energy out of my system.

People will take, I've gone out into the woods with a therapist before, or I have friends and we'll go out into the woods and we will just scream because there's actually a therapy called scream therapy. And when you just viscerally scream and get it out, out in the woods where nobody can hear you hopefully, it allows your systems to just reset. So self-care in all different kinds of ways. So I'm only scratching the surface with the conversation today, but my invitation to you today is this. Whether you can take 20 minutes of time today or not, my invitation to you is this.

What is one thing that you can commit to every single day for the next seven days? We don't even have to make it a habit yet because maybe what you decide isn't the right thing yet. But if you do seven days, I bet you could do seven more after that. So what is one thing that you can do for yourself for the next seven days starting today? My second invitation to you is type it in the chat. So brainstorm right now, type it in the chat. You can listen to it now. You can listen to it later again. Come back into it and type in the chat because when you type it out, when you physically write it out or when you say it out loud, your whole system hears you.

It feels it. And then you can commit to it. So here's my thing. I have an 18-minute meditation that my coach gave me that I need to do for 40 days for myself. So I'm going to commit to starting it tomorrow morning. And for seven days, I'm going to do it and I'm going to write notes about it. And when I come back to next Sunday, self-care Sunday, I'll let you know how it went. So come back and join me and tell me how your self-care went. And if you need ideas, ask. We got you. And if you're looking even just to get more inspiration, check out Rick.

He comes in here on lives throughout the week. Check out Luke. Check out any of the amazing contributors that are out here. Look at your schedule. Pop it onto your calendar. Set a reminder and just go for it. So I'm going to do two things. Jules, I knew that you were applying for that job. I loved your text that you sent me and congratulations on getting it. Anybody earned it? I know you did. Jules put in here to not forget that all the reasons she's switching her career pass. Ooh, good for you.

Elise says she's going to journal and meditate each morning before her workout. Good for you. I'm also going to hold you accountable to that one because I see you often in the week. So everybody, I hope you have a great day. Luke, good luck on your walk and your adventure. I'm so excited to see where it takes you. And I'll talk to you all soon.