104. Care for Yourself Like a Pro... Because You Are

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck.

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Well, hello. Hello, ladies. Welcome to the podcast. Hope you're having a fabulous day. I want to talk to you today about caring for yourself like a pro, because you are a pro. This idea around self care is something that is, I think, thrown around a lot and downplayed. And, you know, oftentimes those of us that are type A personalities just think of it as a, you know, fluffy kind of optional, something we do with our birthday money or on Mother's Day or, you know, it's massages and pedicures. But what I want to talk to you today about is thinking of yourself as an asset. And that as an asset, caring for yourself becomes not optional, but to make the impact and be the CEO and the mom and the spouse, the daughter, the community leader, all those things that you want to be, you first need to care for yourself. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. So how are you? I'm doing well. I am still recovering from being sick. So if you hear that, that tone in my voice, it reminds me of Phoebe on Friends with her sexy voice when she had a cold. She liked to sing because she thought she had a sexy voice. So that's what it always reminds me of. Gives me a little chuckle. But otherwise I'm doing really well and so many exciting things coming up for me. And we have spring break coming up, which I'm really excited about. Have a trip planned for that. And I just got back from Speakonomics. E Women Network hosted, hosts a conference around the business of speaking. So I attended that here in Colorado and that was amazing. It was so instructional and inspirational and just great to be around a bunch of women entrepreneurs. It was so fun. And I'm also thinking ahead to our women's success summit that's coming up and that's happening on April 12th. And I would love to have you there if you're in Colorado or if you want to fly in for it. It's going to be an amazing day of inspiration and instruction and really to pour into you as a woman entrepreneur. And so I'm really excited about that. Okay, let's jump right in to our content for today. And really just thinking about ourselves as the asset. Right. And I know for many of us as Women. This is a total departure from how we were raised. I know it is for me. But you know, if you think about, did you become an entrepreneur so that you didn't have to work for horrible bosses ever again? I know I did. That was one of my reasons. But I feel like sometimes I've become the horrible boss. How about you? Can you relate to that? Have you become the horrible boss that you never wanted to work for? And how you treat yourself as the, as the employee or who has skipped lunch or skipped sleep or blown off your workout or blown off plans with friends or family or worked too many days in a row to count without a break. I'm raising my hand. I've been there, right? So we often are suspending self care for the right reasons because we've got a deadline or a big project or something big going on. But sometimes it can become a pattern. And I want you to just start thinking differently about caring for ourselves. I'm not even going to use the phrase self care if I can help it because I feel like it's so I. We're desensitized to it because we've heard it so often, right? But really it's caring for ourselves. And when I made the shift that I'm going to talk with you about today in this episode, when I made this shift, it has changed everything with how I think about caring for myself. And so I want to offer that to you because you will not become the whatever is. If it's a million dollar, multi million dollar, whatever, whatever size of business that you're building, you will not become that size of a business or a CEO or an entrepreneur without taking care of yourself, right? And I like to think of it as what if you considered yourself a multi million dollar asset for your family, for your legacy? How would you treat yourself for your business, right? Because you are, I mean, even if you haven't yet made a million dollars in one year, like what if you add up all the money you've made over the years of being in business, you are an asset. And you are an asset that creates money, right? That creates income, that, that sustains your family, that, that creates the, the value and the income, the revenue that your business needs that your family needs. So if you start thinking about yourself as an asset, it completely changes the role of self care. And so I, you know, I'm a hockey fan, right? If you know anything about me, you know, I'm a huge hockey fan. So I think about the self care routine of a professional hockey player to you Know, for them to remain in tip top shape for the season because they are a multimillion dollar asset to their team, to their family, to the sport, to the league, like they are an asset. And they have to treat themselves and their development mentally, physically, and the sustainability of their body and their mind. For, you know, they have, I think it's 82 games in a season. Each season lasts 82 games. And for us as CEOs, as women, we are in the game every day. Or maybe it's, you know, if we don't work on the weekend, it's 20 days a month and you know, if we amortize that over an entire year, that's 240 days a year. Our season never ends, right? We're always in business. So how much more do we need to care for ourselves? Right? And so that's what I want to talk to you about today. And so the self care mindset to me is really that, that we are an asset to our family, to our business, to our clients, to our team. And so if we were to think about ourselves that way, how would we be caring for ourselves? And I believe that caring for ourselves builds trust with us. And when we trust ourselves more, the, the greater we trust ourselves, the greater our growth can be, right? We are, we trust ourselves to go further, to open up, to more, to take on more, more projects, more work a larger business, a larger team, because we trust that we know we're going to care for ourselves even in any one of those conditions. But if we don't trust ourselves, that we know we have terrible boundaries, that we're going to allow ourselves to work all the time, that we don't feed ourselves properly or move our bodies, then anytime we think about growing and expanding our business, we, you know, you can feel that clutch inside, like, oh my gosh, there's no way I could handle it all right? And that's because we don't trust ourselves to handle it. We don't trust ourselves to care for ourselves. And so, so it goes back to what I was saying earlier is you don't become, suddenly become a millionaire once you've made it to a million dollars, for example. Maybe that's not your goal. That's my goal. But you don't suddenly become a millionaire once you've gotten to that point. You're becoming her all along the way, right? And you are doing the actions to become her. You're caring for yourself in order to become her. You are caring for your business, for your clients. And so you become a Millionaire all along the way, not just all at once when you suddenly get to that place. And so caring for yourself is a part of you becoming that woman, that CEO now. And so it's not that you're too good to do, you know, things like laundry or cooking or cleaning or whatever. It's that you value and honor your time, you value and honor your energy and your health so that you can be the best that you want to be in all the different roles that are important to you. Because we're not just CEOs, we're. We might be moms, we might be sisters, we might be wives, we might be daughters, we might be community leaders. We might be, you know, for me, I'm a team member. I'm a hockey team, hockey teammate, right? And so all those different roles, it allows us, when we're caring for ourselves, to show up as our best self in all those places with intention. Right. And so I did a little research, which was really fun, about what? How professional hockey players care for themselves. So I just thought I would share this with you. It's in mainly five, I'm sorry, four areas. And it encompasses physical care. So that's regular exercise. Of course, rest and recovery is part of physical care and injury prevention. So for us, maybe that's like, you know, ergonomics in the workplace. Right. And. And going to the doctor and getting regular health checkups and taking care of issues that are going on in our body before they add up. And so hockey players are also practicing mental care, they're practicing nutritional care, and they're practicing spiritual care. And so they. It's all four of these areas that work together to create a professional athlete. And so for us as CEOs, it's these four areas that work together to create the CEO, the spouse, the daughter, sister, friend that we want to be. Right? And so if we're making sure that we're fueling ourselves in these five areas and taking care of ourselves, we build that trust. And so I want to just encourage you to create intention in each of these areas and how you're caring for yourself. And how do I do this? So I do this by my. I use a full focus planner, which is a written planner. And there's a part when I'm planning out my week, whether it's Sunday night or Monday, where I plan and I put intention around these five areas in my life every day. Well, in the full focus planner, it's five areas, but dovetails perfectly to what I was just saying about physical care, mental care, nutritional Care, spiritual care, right. So I set intentions around sleep, around food, around movement, around connection and relaxation and recovery. And so I wanted to just walk you through some things to think about and how you can begin to incorporate more care for yourself in your daily weekly life and routine and build that trust with yourself. And you can do it a little bit at a time, right. So here's some steps, couple steps that I want to suggest that you take if you're, if you're all in, right. And this isn't a perfection game. I am not perfect at any of these things, but I am doing my best. And I have awareness that I want to take good care of myself. And I think that's really important piece is just having that intention of wanting to care for yourself. So I want you to think about step one is to make a list of what would be really caring for you. Like think about how you spend your time. Yes. Work time and also non work time. How are you spending that time? What are you doing in that time? And what are some things that you want that would be really caring for you to add in or subtract from your schedule and from the thing that the things that you're doing. So think about what in your life takes you away from what's most important. So for example, one thing that is always top of my list is grocery shopping. I hate food shopping. And so, and I just felt like it was such a waste of time. I mean, obviously it's not a waste of time. My family needs to eat. But it was not how I wanted to be spending my time. And so I decided I was going to get help with that. So think about what are other areas. So maybe it's know, I know around here doing laundry is always a huge deal, right? So doing laundry or cleaning, cleaning the house always felt like such a, I don't know, waste of time. Even though I love a clean house. But no one, you know, I, I didn't really get any help with that. So what are things that come to your mind that would, you would love to offload that would allow you to spend more time caring for yourself and connecting with others and doing the things in your life that are the most important. Right. So make a list of those. And then I want you to think about and think about it in these four areas, like physical care, right. What are some things that would feel really caring to you, to add to, to be caring for yourself? Mental care, nutritional care, and spiritual care. I want you to think about those four areas and what would be very Caring for you in those areas. What do you want and what do you want to get rid of? And then next, I want you to think about what's one doable step in each one of those areas. So, for example, I feel like I would love to offload cooking and meal planning and grocery shopping. Like that whole meal thing is just a big problem for me. And so if I could get rid of that's. That would give me back like hours and hours in a week. Right? Okay. So that is a really great item. And think about what's one step that you could take with that. And so for me, I'll just give you an example of how what I've done is I have a subscription with my grocery store where they will deliver my groceries. And so I can do grocery shopping. It usually happens early on a Saturday morning. I can sit in my chair, my easy chair with my cup of coffee, do my grocery shopping. I don't have to leave home. I can, you know, chat with my kiddos as they're getting up. I can do my meal planning and. And then the groceries get delivered to me. And so that for me feels really, really caring. Now, in a perfect world, in a world according to me, I would love to have a personal chef, but I'm not at that place where I can afford a personal chef right now. Right. So taking one little step of having the groceries delivered and getting to order them online is, feels for me, really caring. And next, you know, maybe the next step it would be that I would have someone come in and do some cooking with me for dinners. You know, let's just think about what are some of the small steps that you can take. So that's really caring. Think about physical care, whether it's exercise or rest and recovery or preventing injury, like what is a step that you could take? So for me, I create a plan each week on and I just write out each day and then what is how I'm going to move my body that day? Now, I don't have a membership to a fancy gym or anything like that. I do all my workouts at home. And that feels really caring to me because I don't have to get dressed and go somewhere and drive and whatever, but I just have a simple plan. So then I just have to follow my plan each day and I don't get myself in a big tizzy or get critical. If I not able to do the workout or something happens or I get sick or whatever, I just go with it. But at least I have a plan to move my body every day. And then so once you have one doable step in each one of these areas, so maybe it's physical care, mental care, nutritional care, and spiritual care, then, you know, start small, start affordable, and get some wins under your belt. You know, this is not an opportunity to. Like many of us do on January 1st, we're like, I'm gonna work out every day this year. And then we get to, you know, quitters Day, the 19th or whatever, and we're like, forget that. Pick a small step. Practice that small step. Get those wins under your belt. Like, for me, for physical care, my. My goal is to. I have an apple watch. So my goal is to close my move ring three days a week. And my move ring is not that aggressive. And so to me, that's just so doable and so caring. So it keeps me getting out there and. And moving my body, but it's not so aggressive that it shuts me down. So when I'm talking about self care, that's what I'm talking about. And so I want to just encourage you that self care, caring for yourself physically, caring for your mental health and managing your stress, that could include. Right? Caring for yourself nutritionally and spiritually and connecting with others and connecting with yourself. That is all care. Self care. That is not optional. I want you to think about, how can you care for yourself? How can you think about yourself more as a valuable asset to your family, to your business, to your team, to your clients, and care for yourself accordingly? And so I hope this is inspiring to you and just think about yourself, you know, as a professional, a professional athlete, you're a professional CEO, right? But if you. If you had a professional athlete in your home, how would you be treating them? How would you be encouraging them to care for themselves? Right? And offer that same care and that same thoughtful consideration to yourself. All right? Okay. So I can't wait to hear. I would love to hear from you. Okay. I would love to hear how you are caring for yourself and maybe some changes that you're making to care for yourself. And let me know, Reach out on social media or if you're on my email list, which you should be, reply to me and you'll get an email about this podcast episode. Reply and let me know how you're caring for yourself. I would love to hear it. And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous day. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Hey, if you like this podcast, I would love for you to become a.

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