Self-Care is Essential to Genuine Leadership
BY: ANDREA CRUM For Genuine Leadership Tips, follow ANDREA.CRUM_ on INSTAGRAM)
At its core, genuine leadership is all about leading with your strengths in balance.
It’s about knowing who you genuinely are (i.e. who you were created to be) and then consistently keeping those strengths at the forefront of what you say and do when you lead.
When a woman is genuinely leading, she SHINES from the inside out because she is using her God-given abilities and making the most of them.
She is no longer sitting back; she is standing out. Not even on purpose, it happens naturally.
So why then do many of us women leaders default to leading in a way that doesn’t highlight our strengths or who we genuinely are?
The two most common reasons I’ve seen…
We do not know who we genuinely are. For so long, we have either underappreciated our strengths, or we were never clear what they were, to begin with, or we succumbed to the comparison trap of trying to be someone we are not (likely unintentionally).
OR
We are so buried in the PIT of stress, overwhelm, and exhaustion that our best qualities do not naturally emerge. They have become suppressed. When we are in the PIT it’s common to become more easily frustrated, prideful, aggressive, arrogant, disengaged, discontent, bitter, and the list goes on, because we are, well, stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted.
Today, I’ll focus on the latter because I’ve found it’s near impossible to do the work of discovering who you genuinely are without first doing the work of getting out of the PIT.
The PIT is a Place in Time. It’s a season, not a lifetime. Or at least it doesn’t have to be.
To get out of the PIT you need a lifeline though and that lifeline is essential. That lifeline is time devoted to you. In other words, SELF-CARE.
As women, we are notorious for taking care of everyone, but ourselves. Yet, when we are depleted, we have nothing else to give, and we sink further into the PIT.
Taking time for ourselves is not only essential, it’s the single most important thing we can do for our families, our friends, our colleagues…and, of course, ourselves.
For many of us, our first response to this idea of SELF-CARE is, “I don’t have time for that.” And because that is oftentimes our natural instinct, we continue to not take care of ourselves, and we fall further and further into the PIT. It’s a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle that doesn’t yield the best results for us or for those around us.
So, we need to stop the cycle and start the resting and re-setting of ourselves so we can lead more genuinely in our homes and in our organizations.
To do that, some self-care best practices include…
Carving out time for yourself daily. Use this time to center yourself with anything that lets your mind relax and re-focus like…
Reading your Bible
Praying
Meditating
Journaling
Listening to Music
Reading something light-hearted
Practicing new habits that help get you in the right frame of mind like…
Waking up an hour earlier so that you can have time for yourself daily
Picking up a new (or old) hobby like knitting, writing, drawing, puzzle-making
Instituting a no cell phone zone for a time when you don’t check your email or social media.
Having a daily “to-do” dump, where you write down all the things swirling around in your mind and determine what (if any) you need to take action on.
Exercise and drink lots of water.
When we are taking care of ourselves well, we are better leaders, better mothers, better wives, better friends, better humans. Once you get comfortable out of the PIT and back on solid ground then, if you haven’t already, you can start the work of discovering or uncovering who you genuinely are and begin your genuine leadership journey.
To get more genuine leadership tips, FOLLOW ME on INSTAGRAM at ANDREA.CRUM_. Hope to see you there!
Building her 25-year career from an intern to a member of an Executive team, Andrea Crum knows firsthand how challenging being genuine in our leadership approach can be all while juggling organizational expectations and happy home life. It’s the reason she founded Genuinely You Leadership, LLC and is launching the talk show GYRL Talk on the Zondra TV Network this Fall. As part of her organization, she develops and encourages women who deal with similar struggles and successes to lead more genuinely. She believes that when a woman is genuinely leading, she will SHINE.