Caregiving – Thoughts on Guilt & Compassion
It’s been a rough two months, and during it all, I’ve been thinking a lot about caregiving and compassion. By that I don’t just mean simply compassion toward others, as important as that is. I mean compassion toward oneself. In reflecting on this, I’ve begun to believe that guilt in a caregiving situation may be […]
How Do You Treat Yourself When You Fall Down?
Failures, mistakes, embarrassing fumbles – we’ve all been there. We’ve all found ourselves in that agonizing moment of realizing that we just put our foot in it… or made a thoughtless error… or got rejected… or failed to produce our intended result – or, or, or… the list goes on. These things happen to all […]
The Gift of Discomfort
Have you ever noticed how desperately we as human beings want to make things better for people we care about? I’m thinking of those times when someone we love tells us something that feels painful or defeated or self-critical or stuck. It’s so natural for many of us to jump instantly into soothing or problem-solving […]
Setting Healthy Boundaries
In my last two articles, Finding Time When You’re Too Busy to Breathe and How to Make Choices When Everything Is a Top Priority, we dove into the challenges of finding time for yourself in the midst of a busy schedule full of obligations and important responsibilities and of making conscious choices between competing priorities. […]
How to Make Choices When Everything Is a Top Priority
In my last article, Finding Time When You’re Too Busy to Breathe, we explored how to define our personal goals in a flexible and sustainable way; how to integrate the activities to achieve those goals into an already busy schedule; and the values conflict that can arise when we’re having to make choices between incompatible activities […]
Finding Time When You’re Too Busy to Breathe
The majority of the coaching clients I work with are juggling numerous roles, projects, demands and priorities. Typically these include things like owning and running a business, being a parent, working a job, birthing a creative or entrepreneurial project, helping a spouse, caring for an aging family member or ailing friend, volunteering their time, and […]
Self-Care for Everyday Caregivers – Part 2: Implementing Self-Care
In Self-Care for Everyday Caregivers – Part 1, we discussed the applicability of concepts like compassion fatigue and burnout, which are familiar terms in the helping professions, to parents and everyday caregivers. We also looked at the imbalance that can occur when our compassion vessels have their caring spigot open without being adequately refilled – […]
Self-Care for Everyday Caregivers – Part 1: Symptoms of Burnout
Do you ever struggle with making time for self-care despite signs of burnout? Are you so busy caring for others that you either forget to practice self-care or find yourself putting it off indefinitely? You are not alone. In my coaching practice, I work with many women who are juggling their role as a parent […]
Honoring the Shape of Your Own Life Journey
When it comes to our life journey, where did we get the idea that we have to move through it in a straight line? We’ve all heard the phrase “It’s the journey that matters,” and yet we still persist in judging ourselves based on where we are in that journey relative to our goals: those […]
The Challenge of Personal Responsibility
What does it mean to take personal responsibility? And perhaps more importantly, what does it require of us? It is easy – and often familiar – to come at the world from a place of being constantly “at the effect” of the things that happen in it. This includes events over which we feel powerless, […]