Tag self worth

A day for you

Every year we get excited and anxious over Valentine’s Day. Excited because spring is not far off and anxious because, a lot of us are looking to be coupled up! Too much emphasis is on “coupling” and not enough on selflove and selfworth. That’s why it’s also a perfect time to really hone in on self-nourishment and selfcare. So, here’s 5 Valentine’s Day Selfcare ideas to get you through the rest of February. Needless to say, selflove is not a one of but a practice we should carry 365 days a year.

Valentine’s Day

While we celebrate Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers, love and, romance the day itself, has its origins in both pagan and Christian beliefs. The Catholic Church recognises three saints named valentine. But it’s unclear who the actual Valentine was for which the day is named. Who ever it was, he was martyred and became a saint according to catholic tradition. In pagan tradition, it’s actually an offshoot of the feast of Lupercalia, an ancient roman pagan festival held on February 15.  While the modern version of Valentines Day is soft and romantic, Lupercalia was anything but! It was violent, bloody, full of animal sacrifice and rampant sex.

But, lets get back to the fun of today and the notion of love and connection. The greatest thing you can do for yourself this Valentine’s Day, is to love and treat yourself how you want to be treated. These 5 Valentine’s Day selfcare ideas are just a few of the many tips and strategies I practice for myself. Let’s face it. If you don’t learn how to love and appreciate yourself, how can you expect others to know this? Standards, boundaries, etc, are all established and depend on you and the way you perceive and value yourself.

The Valentine’s Day and self love connection

When it comes to self love and selfcare, your approach should be similar to how you view Valentine’s Day-a special time for love! Selfcare and self love are special and intimate practices we need to carry out on a daily basis for a healthy mind-body-spirit. Also, how you allow other people to treat you, says something about how you see yourself and the value you attach to yourself. Are you worthy of being treated with respect, compassion, love and consideration? If all of those things are true for you, then you will have no problem expecting others to treat accordingly.

Here are the 5 ideas for Valentine’s Day selfcare

1. Take yourself on a date.

2. Make a selfcare journal.

3. Give yourself a 24 hour social media and technology break.

4.  Reconnect with friends and loved ones.

5. shore up and recalibrate your boundaries.

More on these selfcare ideas

1. Taking yourself on a date is about intentionality and perception. Also, it’s an exercise  in learning to feel comfortable with your company and not worry about how other people see you. If you’re feeling super anxious and uncomfortable about going out to a restaurant, theatre, etc by yourself, that’s telling you something. It could be anything from being a people pleaser to someone who who needs other people to give herself value. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, forces you to go inwards to the place that need your attention (i.e. healing, etc).

2. Either buy a journal for selfcare or make one for yourself. There are so many ways to customise a journal and make yours for what ever you want. A selfcare journal is a great way to do a self check on a daily basis. Also, you can use it to track your progress in terms of personal growth, documenting things you want to address, and so forth. You can also pour out thoughts without feeling like you’re being judged and it’s literally a space that’s yours alone.

3. Take a 24 hour social media and technology break and stick to it. There’s so much noise and distraction from social media and all of our tech gadgets, that we lose touch with ourselves. Social media keeps us hooked on other people’s drama and lives.  Constantly dealing in to social media traps us in comparison and competition mode and disconnected from our own lives and reality. Very little of social media is actual reality and much of it negatively affects our mental health.

More on this

When you are always looking at other people’s lives you rarely appreciate or have any gratitude for how far you’ve come. When you take a break from this, you can focus on you, set goals for yourself and take stock of life in general. Unplugging for tech and social means you can get out into nature, connect with other humans in the real world and realise that the world is huge and full of great potential.

Some closing points

4. Reconnecting with friends and loved ones is super important for our mental health. Since humans are social beings, we need real human contact and connection, not scrolling through endless pages of social media. When we spend time talking and socialising with other people we can pour into and support one another. We can share stories and life events as well as gain counsel from trusted people in our social circles. This is also a great way to expand your social circle too, when you get out and about.

5. Finally, shore up your boundaries! Setting healthy boundaries is crucial for not just your mental health, but your overall well-being. It’s how you set the terms of how other people engage with you and how you honour yourself. This is also connected to your self worth and the stories you are telling yourself about yourself! If you struggle wit being a people pleaser, setting boundaries are really hard for you.  You can read more about that in a previous post, when you click right here!

Time for some me time

As I mentioned before, these 5 Valentine’s Day selfcare ideas are just a few of the many tips and strategies I use to stay aligned and healthy these days. None of it starts out easy, but investing in yourself with help of a coach, counsellor, etc is the first step. Selfcare is a journey that empowers to reclaim all aspects of your life-from your health and wellness, to your sense of self.  There’s so much time to get on the right track to transforming your life in a way that’s meaningful for you and will also allow you to reclaim your authentic self. Also, sign up with this link for a FREE 20 min clarity session to help get started on your self are journey!!

People Pleasing

It’s no big secret that many of us are either people pleasers or recovering people pleasers. What is new, is that women all over the world, are finally saying enough is enough! While some folks are probably saying, what’s the big deal? The major problem with this disease to please, is that it hugely impacts so many areas of our lives, not to mention our over all health and wellness. For many women, people pleasing is a default and often takes over their lives. Often times, they don’t see it because they’ve been conditioned or domesticated to this state. In short, people pleasing is so insidious that we women, miss it’s huge negative impacts on our lives.

Some signs of a people pleaser

1. Apologizing for things that are not your fault.

2. Agreeing with whoever is in front of you.

3. You can never say no or, finding it extremely difficult to say no.

4. Your sense of self worth depends on how others see you.

5. Changing your personality depending on who’s in front of you, or fitting it to meet other people’s expectations.

6. Prioritizing the needs of others over your own-every single time.

7. Hyper criticism of yourself and others

More on this

As a people pleaser, you often take responsibility for other people’s emotions. You might also feel anxiety around them possibly targeting you as the source of their issues. This often leaves you feeling fearful and that you’re walking on eggshells around a minefield of someone else’s emotions or emotional responses. Let’s not forget, in the case of women, this behavior is amplified even more.

Remember that saying, “she’s trying too hard”? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. People pleasing usually draws you into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone. That also means, changing who you are to be accepted by the masses or modifying your external appearance to fit a certain ideal. Are you seeing the pattern here yet? That gnawing feeling of inauthenticity or sense that you’re not being real, is typical of people pleasing folks.

Is this you? 

Struggling or being unable to say no is also a behavior that’s typical for a people pleaser. For her, its easier to make excuses to get out of a commitment. But even that is anxiety and fear inducing, often leading to feelings of regret or self-criticism. Also, shifting your actions to fit into what you believe is expected of you is another characteristic of people pleasers. If this is you, just no that awareness is the first step toward healing from this way of being.

Woman to woman, I definitely feel your pain and as a former people pleaser, let me just say, I get that this is not easy to get over. But, growing and healing from this state is more than possible. Not only that, it is necessary in order to grow and evolve  into the best version of yourself. Also, this a must if you ever want to break the yoke  of domestication and laying on the altar of other people’s expectations. Another thing to consider is, if you feel like you won’t  be valued or appreciated without any of this “stuff”, know that you’ve probably got the disease to please!

A few things to really think about

Being a people pleaser has a number of ugly side effects and if you are one, you’ll recognize some of these effects:

1. An inability or lack of self-care. When you suffer from “pp” (aka, people pleasing), self-care is at best an afterthought and at worse, completely absent. Prioritizing your own health and wellbeing drifts farther and farther down your to-do list.

2. Simmering resentment is another consequence of being a people pleaser. Always sidelining your own needs, wants and desires, eventually leads to a build-up of resentment and bitterness. This sometimes manifest in you getting sick, feeling stretched beyond your limits or burnout. Also, that resentment can affect your mood and temperament.

3. Critical and judgmental. Feeling judge-y much? Yeah, you’ve probably got some people pleasing tendencies going on there! Sometimes our resentment can manifest in hyper criticism (of ourselves and others) as well as judgement. There’s literally no room for grace, either for ourselves or for other people.

4. As i mentioned earlier, people pleasing behavior is really bad for your health! The constant stress of trying to be everything to everyone, elevates your stress hormones. With that comes other issues like chronic illness, insomnia, and the list goes on.

Final thoughts

Clearly, being a people pleaser is not all it’s cracked up to be and is something no woman on the planet, should subscribe to! Half the battle is recognizing people pleasing for what it is-a destructive behavior that imprisons you. It traps you in an ever repeating soul-numbing cycle that robs you of your health and ultimately, of living a fulfilling life. Check out my post budget-friendly selfcare strategies for 365 days a year right here! In that post I discuss some great ideas for selfcare that are both realistic and effective.

As always my door is always open to women who need the support of a safe community and guidance. With that in mind, book a free 30 min session with me or follow me on instagram (you can dm me as well) too!

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Okay, let me start by saying, I  love men! well, most of them. The sane ones; not the cheating-lying-controlling ones!

Now that that is out of the way we can all move on ladies. When I look back at the younger me in my 20’s and 30’s, I really want to smack her! I love her but, gosh was she naive. It would have been great to have a single woman’s guide to navigating this particular journey!

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As I sit here musing on the past and contemplating my upcoming birthday (every year comes a lot quicker), I find it difficult to accept the fact that as a single woman, I wasted a lot of time land energy looking for validation and my own self-worth in the eyes of a man-another fallible human being.

Unfortunately, I feel that we have been “bred” or “conditioned” to looking for validation outside of ourselves. From the time we’re young girls, we are taught to “seek” approval and to be viewed as “good” girls, “giving” and yes, “womanly”. But all that really did (at least in my case) was solidify the notion that I was not enough and that I needed outside validation in order to feel “worthy”. As a single woman in 2018, I can’t help but cringe at those memories!

Over time I grew to resent the role and position that I had been forced to live in by both my culture (as an African woman) and society as a whole. There is nothing uplifting or growth-inducing by being made to feel that you have no worth if you haven’t birthed a child or are someone’s wife! Traditionally women are made to feel all levels of stress (pressure) and angst to get married, birth children and become the perfect daughter-in-law!

What hypocrisy and bondage! It took me a long time to break that conditioning and along the way, I made a lot of mistakes with the opposite sex (I’ll talk more about that later) but better late than never right? Suffice it to say, personal development goes a long way towards freeing yourself from toxic relationships, etc.

This series is dedicated to all the women who traveled the same road and earned her own battle scars and is finally learning what it means to be free! I figured I’d do my civic duty by sharing some simple truths and perspectives in my version of the single woman’s guide to a drama free life. Here are a few things I wish I had learned when I was younger:

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Here are a few helpful tips and pieces of advice I wish I had had as a single woman, all those years ago:

1. If a man you’ve just met tells you to smile, tell him to stay in his own lane and piss off! (I’ve always detested when people, usually men try to take ownership of my emotions). Own your emotions and every other part of you. You are under no obligation to “perform” on demand!

2. Don’t give your number to guys you meet in the parking lot of the post office, grocery store or the club. Chances are, he’s a “collector”, cheater or player (I’ll explain later). Take my advice, it’s not worth the drama. Plus, if he turns out to be stalker-ish you won’t have to change your number.

3. If he only wants to meet at your place doesn’t want you to meet any of his friends, family, etc he’s probably married.Kick his ass to the curb; again, you don’t need the drama and it’s a waste of your time anyway.

4. If it feels like he has to “fit” you into his schedule or his life, chances are you are not a priority for him-it’s time to cut that cord! Most honest men will tell you (i.e. your male friends) if you’re really important to him and valued, he won’t have to “fit” you into anything. A wise assessment from a veteran single woman once shared this nugget with me!

5. Never, ever have intercourse with a man who has not been tested for STD’s (and yes, I mean actual proof!); you’re literally TSTL (too stupid to live) if you give him a pass. Remember my mantra: self-care is healthcare, ladies!

6. If after you’ve been dating for a bit, and he starts making “suggestions” about what you should wear or “improve” your appearance, it’s time to give him the ax. Depending on the context, (I’m being generous here) this usually marks the subtle beginnings of control and or manipulation. Make him aware of it, shut it down, or better yet cut those ties.

These are just a few sage words for the single woman’s guide to drama-free living. I’ve got a growing list for the rest of the series. What are your tips for single women in the current social climate?

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Tonye Tariah, Holistic Health Strategist and founder of Freedom at The Crossroads Blog, helps free women from inaction and unhealthy habits so they can get fit, healthy, and live free. Her approach is “the cookie cutter method only works for cookies,” meaning she helps each person in a unique way helps them transform their lives from the inside out. She’s not about helping you lose weight quick. She’s about changing your habits and helping you fall in love with yourself so you can live a life with pure joy.

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