192: Self-Care

I get sick and tired of people thinking that self care is getting manicures, pedicures, and spending money on exterior things for themselves, and not really focusing on the importance of taking care of your insides, if you are confused about what does true self care look like then you have come to the right spot My name is Dara Tomasson and I am the life coach for quilters I help you live the kind of life that you really want to have If you want to find more peace, tools, and resolution to living the life that you want, you’re in the right place.

My name, is Dara Tomasson, and this is episode 192, the Quilter’s Coach Podcast. Self care  is exactly that. It’s the way that you take care of yourself. we are complex humans. We have physical bodies. We have emotional experiences. We have mental work, right? We are physical, mental, emotional.

if we don’t take care of all of those, Parts we suffer. So if we think that just getting your nails done and Some retail therapy is gonna take care of you. That’s a lie. It doesn’t take care of all of you  athletes that really excel are the ones that get a mental coach, 

They have these strategies they have these tools and so You  I’m curious about what your definition of self care is one of the things I see and like to share at the beginning of these podcast episodes is when I see my clients coming ready to the membership calls 

They’re like, I have a problem. I need to take care of my emotional self. today on the call, one of my clients, shared a win. she said she has a room that she just goes to now and she just sits.  And one of the things that she’s doing is she’s just allowing all of it. And one of the problems that a lot of us have.

Especially as caregivers, as nurturers, we take on other people’s problems onto ourselves. And so it’s like we’re a Velcro. this person’s problem, this person’s problem, and they just keep attaching and just gets heavier and heavier. I was insta, I have an Instagram friend whose daughter has some addiction challenges and it’s really hard letting them have their own experience, their own recovery, and we don’t want to become codependent. So this is always going to be a fine balance, right? How much responsibility do you have to take care of other people? How much responsibility do you have to take care of yourself? do you have healthy, ways of taking care of yourself or do you have a lot of buffering because you just don’t know how to resolve conflict. 

So I made this definition and I like to think about definitions is like they’re always evolving and growing. I said self care is treating yourself with the same unconditional love and gentle attention you’d give a precious baby. honoring your physical, emotional, and mental needs without judgment, just as you’d never shame a baby for being hungry, tired, or needing comfort.

 I want to ask you, what are some of the tools that you have used for self care in the past?   If you say going shopping, that is a tool. But just the old fashioned magazines where you would buy  items, they would have good, better, best. So you could buy shoes that were good,  then you could buy shoes that were better, and then you could pay a little bit more and get shoes that you pay the most.

 They’re the best. So in our own self care, we do have good practices.  Are there better ones? And so the more that we can start questioning that, the more that we can start looking at these strategies, the more clarity we can have on, hey, this is what works best for me.  one of the things that I love to do for self care is I love going in my hot tub.

I live out in the country, and quite often the stars are out, and I just love to have that decompression time. My days are really full. I’m in that phase of life where I’m needed first thing in the morning. I drive. I deliver children to school,  big children. Then I work during the day, 

I’m back on doing all the driving sometimes. It’s usually sometimes it’s 330 I’m and I’m back on driving so  having that opportunity to just be with me and my body and letting myself feel that warmth and letting  that time to decompress and to process the day That has been a really helpful self tool.

We also have a fire in our fire room, so if the hot tub didn’t get turned on, I can go in there and sit in front of that fire and feel that warmth. that connection. Sometimes self care is going to bed early and waking up early so I can go for my walk around Westwood. And sometimes that means I’m wearing a headlamp.

So this, I want you to start getting creative about what does self care look like for you. Now,  I have some different ideas that I want to play around with when we talk about self care. We have our physical. What are some physical things that we can do that are self care? Brushing and flossing our teeth bathing regularly, wearing clean clothes, wearing clothes that fit your body eating really healthy foods and making sure you have healthy foods that you love.

One of the things that I’ve been prioritizing is making sure that I have kiwi. Kiwi has been really helpful for me to have regular bowel movements. It’s been a really nice fiber that I enjoy eating. I eat the kiwi with the skin on and two kiwi a day are really helpful for me. So I make sure that I always have a container of kiwis in my house.

My kids have been really loving grapefruits and oranges. And so I prioritize making sure that there’s grapefruits and oranges in my house. And different proteins that are accessible to them so that they can cook their own foods, they can see what works best. that is one of the ways that I can have that self care, like that really healthy, good food for me and for my kids.

Making sure that I have clean clothes and clothes that I enjoy. So one of the things I did for self care is getting a color analysis so that I can see, Oh, these colors look really good on me and I can clean out my closet for things that don’t work well for me. I want you to write down a bunch of physical care things that you’re going to do that will actually be non negotiable.

We often put ourselves on the backburner because we have a lot of responsibilities. One of the clients I have was talking about her five year old granddaughter. she’ll do anything for her but she won’t treat herself in that same way.

And that’s being very neglectful of herself. Okay, and so that’s going to have an impact on her relationship with herself.  Now, the next part of self care is the emotional aspect.  So are you being emotionally aware and are you taking care of yourself emotionally?  So if you’re not spending a lot of time with friends, are you having friendships?

I actually coach women on friendships a lot.  And so one of the things I did this past weekend when I went to a basketball tournament I purposely made myself, I could sit in the car, in the van during the ferry ride, it’s an hour and a half, I said, no, Dara, we’re going to be social.

We’re going to go make some new friends. I met a bunch of the moms from the group that’s a year younger than my son. I had a delightful time. on the way back, I said, you could sit here by yourself, or you could develop some friendships.  I was very proud of myself because I don’t have a lot of time for friendships other than at the basketball games.

So even during the basketball game, between games, there’s a little five year old. And I said, do you want to go outside and play? The playground. I could have read my book or something, but I said, no, I’m gonna do this thing.

 I really love little kids and I miss taking my kids to the playground. So I created that experience for myself. these are, I’m just giving you examples. They don’t have to be fancy, they don’t have to be crazy. They just are, how am I going to meet my emotional needs?

What are my emotional needs? What are the things that make me happy?  Do I really enjoy Doodling? Do I really enjoy challenging myself to learn new things? I have a son who loves YouTube and it’s hilarious what he watches one time he was watching a YouTube up on the five  deer of the five  What was it the five?

He’s just always challenging himself,  but emotionally. So now we have the mental. So that would be under the mental. maybe you do YouTube university. You’re like, 

I want to learn about moss. I want to learn about felting. I want to learn about free motion quilting. I want to learn about how to fix my own sewing machine. Like we really could learn about almost anything. I want to have more joy. in fiction reading. So I want to read a whole series.

I recommend the number one ladies detective agency. I love that series so much. are we meeting those needs?  one of the things that I think would be really helpful,  It’s to take an inventory.  So if you just, and this doesn’t have to be that serious. Inventory sounds heavy duty, but I think it’d be helpful just for the last couple of days. 

Just asking yourself did I get seven or eight hours of sleep?  How much time did I spend on my screens? Did I have some meaningful conversations with people? look at those emotional, mental, and physical elements and get curious how am I doing with my self care?

Am I doing those things? Am I managing my mind? if someone said something to me that was crazy, did I go and gossip? Did I just let it go? What did I do? I don’t know. How am I overall doing? be like an observer, put on the lab coat, And say, how am I taking care of me?

we spend a lot of time and energy taking care of other people and monitoring that. But I can promise you, the more that you can do that for yourself, it will improve your mental, physical, and emotional health in exponential ways, because whatever you feed will grow. So if you start feeding your own mental health. 

your own emotional health, your own physical health, then it will just keep getting better and better. So then you can look at the budget, right? You can take that inventory and you say, Oh, I can see that I’m spending my budget on a lot of I’m taxing myself on a lot of physical things, like I’m expecting myself to do a lot of physical, and I’m beating myself up, and I’m eating a lot of sugar and flour, and so I feel sluggish, then I have a nap, and then I beat myself up.

It’s not going that great, okay? But you need to do that inventory, because you’re putting on the science, like the lab coat, you’re able to get perspective. All right. Now, the next thing I want you to do is I want you to imagine if I was to budget. So let’s say I gave you some money and I said, okay, for every hour it’s a dollar.

I say, okay,  so you have 24 hours a day   how much of your day do you want to be spent on emotional, physical, and mental?  And then you can say, Oh, I want at least  7 to go to sleep. I want at least 3 to go to food, right? I want to have three healthy meals or whatever that is. 

So then you can decide. If you don’t know it, it’s Oh, the day just went. I didn’t even know where the day went. we can all relate to that.  Now this is the last tool and the last idea I want to share with you. this concept  is so helpful  and it has helped me  in so many ways.

I actually started this. I think we  all do this in certain ways, but I remember doing this when I was free motion quilting for hire, I would be quilting late at night and I remember I would finish up that quilt. I checked the back before I cut it all off.

And then I’d say to myself, tomorrow, Dara would be Kind of discouraged if she doesn’t have the quilt up  it doesn’t take that long depending on how big the quilt is to pin the backing on and everything. I would say you know what my tomorrow Dara, my future Dara, she’d really appreciate if This quilt was done up. 

And so I would just do that. my current Dara was taking care of future Dara.  when I brush my teeth, my current Dara is taking care of future Dara because then she’s not having gingivitis.  Do you see?  I’m curious, how often do you take care of yourself? 

Now I remember when I was first learning  about life coaching tools and  this new way of thinking about myself. I remember Jodi Moore saying what would happen if I told you I would give you a million dollars if you made sure that you had healthy food to eat for an entire year?  And I was like, Oh my goodness.

Yeah, I would always make sure there’s eggs in the fridge, that there’s celery, that there’s broccoli, that there’s peppers.  I would just always make sure I had really healthy food in my house for me for a million dollars. Yeah, I do that.  And that really has stuck with me.  I would make sure 100, 000 percent that my kids would have food for lunches, food for breakfast, healthy, good foods for them.

So why wouldn’t I do that for me?  hopefully this podcast has opened your eyes to different ways of thinking about self care.  If you like getting your nails done, and if that does feel very special, that’s fine. But there are so many other factors of self care that are important.

In the month of April, coming up 2025, we are going to be learning how to become more resilient and how to resolve conflict. And, I have to tell you, you have to start doing it with yourself first before you can really do it with other people. Inside my membership, I have how to have difficult conversations, how to improve your marriage.

I have those courses in there already. You can do that on your own, but we’re going to be fleshing out those tools and really getting our hands into how do we make that our, a new habit that we just start doing on our own. I can’t wait to see you there. And don’t forget,  I have those free coaching calls that will give you clarity on why you aren’t meeting your goals.

So go ahead, pick those because they will go quickly. Take care. Bye.