The Self-Care Bank (S20E8)

So I was really interested in the, or I was really curious, rather, about the interest that this idea of the self-care bank generated after I shared it last week.

And it's a concept that first came to me a few years ago for a retreat that I ran.

And maybe we need to run that retreat again.

It was a one-day retreat, which was all about our self-care bank.

How do we top it up? what happens when it starts to run empty and what are the things that we need to look out for that can drain it without us realizing that's what's going on and even as I say that it's a bit like if you look at your your bank account and you see that there's a deposit has come out and you didn't even remember spending that money or worse that um somebody has taken it uh without your knowing you know there are so many ways that this metaphor can work for us and um i'm also very mindful that i spent 20 years working in financial services so uh maybe you can take the girl out of financial services but financial services never quite leaves the girl I'm not sure people forget I said that one so basically what I'd really love to explore is one of the key areas that I outlined at the end of the last episode is And next week I'll also have a special guest with me exploring another one of those areas.

And then we'll close the following week, we'll close the whole season the following week before I break for the summer.

So the particular extract that I'd love to turn our attention to today went like this.

If you notice your reserves are depleted, that you're close to emptying your own self-care bank because you've had no energy left for the things that restore you and keep your account topped up.

Remember, even noticing this can be part of how you begin to shift the outlay.

Self-awareness with self-compassion is our most powerful asset because it helps us see the truth of our experience, not so it exhausts us further and we collapse under it.

But so we can also see the tiny steps we can take to change things in some small way for the better, whatever better might mean for you right now.

So what this speaks to is something that, you know, if you've been listening to the podcast for a long time and, you know, other teachers talk about this too, you know, this idea that, you know, we have to have an awareness of what's happening in our lives, in our, you know, the way that we think and the way that we recognize like how we respond to things happening around us and inside us.

We have to have that self-awareness in order to be able to affect any kind of change.

You know, we can't change things unless we know it's there.

And so having an awareness that our reserves are low is actually such an important part of this whole topic of resilience.