Fueling Your Success: The Essential Role of Self-Care

Achieving ambitious goals requires performance and productivity. Since we use our mind and body to do the work to achieve our goals, we need to take care of them in order to optimize performance and productivity. Like any machine such as a car or an airplane, they need to be taken care of and maintained or they break down or become less efficient.

When our goals are for our career or business, it can become challenging to take care of ourselves as we get busier. The busier we get and the more responsibility that we take on during our progression, it can be tempting to sacrifice ourselves and our health because there is so much to do. The tragic joke is that as we get busier, have more responsibility, and more stress, it becomes even more important to take care of ourselves in order to maintain our productivity, performance, and personal satisfaction. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we are at higher risk of running out of energy, feeling exhausted, getting sick, injuring our body, missing opportunities, making mistakes, and errors in decision-making. There are standards, practices, and checklists for maintaining airplanes so that they fly safely and don’t crash. It’s similar with ourselves. We can get away with sacrificing ourselves for a short time but eventually the consequence will catch up to us and our productivity will drop.

To maintain ourselves, we need to take care of ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. These are the foundation for ourselves. The body is needed to execute actions so taking care of it requires proper sleep, exercise, hydration, and food. That’s what the body needs. When we take care of our body, it will have the energy and ability to do what we need it to do.

The mental and emotional parts of ourselves are needed for focus, decision-making, strategy, planning, judgement, and facing challenges. If we neglect these parts, we become less efficient and prone to making errors. To maintain our mental health, we need to get adequate relaxation and a variety of thinking activities for mental exercise such as puzzles, board games, reading books, creative endeavours, etc. Maintaining our emotional health requires processing our positive and negative emotions so that we don’t get stuck with them and they don’t linger longer than necessary. Negative emotions lingering hold us back. Positive emotions lingering can hold us back in that we keep revisiting them instead of focussing on the present and what’s needed to move forward. Some processes that people use to process emotions are speaking/venting with a trusted person, writing in journals, meditation, rage rooms, speaking to a therapist, etc.

Spiritual health is about our connection to your source whether it’s a religion, a belief, philosophy, life purpose, or something else that guides the way that we live. It’s about living and acting consistently with those beliefs or values so that we are settled and comfortable in who we are. It includes our connection with ourselves and with others. Maintaining our spiritual health may include routines and practices whether it’s gratitude, prayer, religious practices, affirmations, or something else that you have created. The important thing is to stay connected and grounded in who you choose to be.

Since we are the ones who generate everything in our lives, we need to take care of ourselves to be productive and to maintain the goals in our lives. It’s up to us to make it happen and we are our instruments to realize those goals. This doesn’t mean that we have to do everything ourselves, however we are accountable and responsible for the goals being achieved.