19. Self-Care Starts with Awareness: Assessing Your Baseline

Welcome to The Nurses' Breakroom with Jenny Lytle, RN! In this episode, we dive deep into the first step of the Becoming Method: establishing your baseline for effective self-care. Understanding your current well-being is crucial for personal transformation and growth.

Join me as I introduce the Wheel of Life exercise, a powerful tool that helps you assess satisfaction in key areas of your life, including health, relationships, career, and personal growth. By gaining clarity on where you are now, you can create a meaningful self-care plan tailored to your needs.

Discover practical strategies to track your progress, celebrate small victories, and enhance your self-awareness. Whether you’re a busy nurse or a healthcare professional, this episode will equip you with the insights you need to prioritize your self-care journey. Tune in and learn how to start your path toward a healthier, more fulfilled life!

Grab the resources mentioned at www.jennylytle.com/selfcarebook

If you're feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or like there’s never enough time, I’ve got something just for you! Head to https://selfcareisntselfish.com to grab your FREE copy of my book, Self-Care Isn’t Selfish: The Compassionate Nurse’s Step-by-Step Guide to Personalized Stress Relief. It’s packed with simple, effective strategies to help you prioritize your needs—without guilt—so you can feel energized, focused, and ready to take on the day. Go to https://selfcareisntselfish.com 

Looking for connection with people who get the stress and self-care struggles of nurses and caregivers? Check out https://thenursesbreakroom.com

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennylytlern/

More ways to connect here: https://linktr.ee/jennylytle

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:29

Hello and welcome back to the Nurse's Break Room with Jenny Lytle, rn. Today we are diving into the first step of the Becoming Method. The Becoming Method is a framework that I developed that goes along with the nursing process to help us be able to just clearly lay out steps needed for a transformation, and each one of the letters means a particular thing, and so the B in becoming is baseline. So we are going to start with where we're starting from, and it's important to understand where we are, because we need to know where we are before we start making changes, so that we have a clear picture of progress that we've made. Sometimes things don't happen quite as quickly as we want them to, but having a clear picture of where we're starting from enables us to look back and see hey, you know what I really am moving in the right direction, and so not only that, but it also lets us know that there are some things that maybe are going a little better than we think they are. So, jumping in for this baseline, we're just taking a snapshot of where we are right now, and that allows us to reflect on our current well-being and how things are in different areas of our life, and we're going to look at things physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. If we don't know where we're starting from, it's hard to make meaningful changes, and it also helps us to be able to track progress and celebrate small victories along the way.

Speaker 1: 2:22

One of the simplest ways to assess our baseline is with a wheel of life exercise, and it's possible that you've done one of these before. It's something that I do regularly because it's just a great tool to assess our baseline, and it looks at key areas such as health, relationships, career, personal growth, and you rate each of them from one to 10, and you do it quickly and without overthinking. Whatever pops into your head first is usually a good indicator of how satisfied you feel. And keep in mind it's about satisfaction, not about gratitude, not about how good things are compared to other people. It's just things can look great on the surface, but if you're feeling some sort of dissatisfaction or unrest with those things, then there's probably a reason. Something may need to be tweaked a little bit. And once you've rated these areas, then just take a moment to reflect. Are there parts of your life that feel bumpy, are there things that need more attention or areas where you already are really thriving? I encourage you to do this exercise today. Just take a few minutes and honestly assess where you're starting from. You can actually draw a circle and give it concentric rings and rate things from zero to 10, with zero being in the middle, 10 being on the outside, and then draw a line to connect those dots to things. Now, if you're somebody that thinks I'm not doing all of that, then that's okay too. You can just write down these different areas of your life and rate them from zero to 10 and just see where they are.

Speaker 1: 4:13

Again, this is not about if your family life is, if you feel like things are a four, you want things to be a lot better than they are. That doesn't mean you're not grateful for your family. It just means that you know that there's some improvements that you would like to make, that there's some room for things to be better. So the most common categories for the Wheel of significant other recreation, spirituality, career, finance and personal growth. If those are ones that you feel don't really apply to you, or there's maybe something that's really important to you that's left out of there, feel free to adjust that as needed. This is meant to be your wheel, your snapshot of where you are right now. Feel free to adjust or tweak that as needed. Now, once you're able to see that, once you have your baseline, the next step is figuring out where you want to go.

Speaker 1: 5:20

The overarching premise of the Becoming Method, and of any of the work I do, is seeing where we are now, where we want to go and how we're going to get there. And so, once you've done the wheel exercise, once you know your baseline, the next step is figuring out where you want to go, and in the coming episodes, we're going to explore ways to make simple, small changes that fit into your life, helping you to make steady improvements without feeling overwhelmed. And so next time we're going to talk about how to identify what excites you and brings you joy, but for now, focus on understanding where you are today. So remember that self-care starts with awareness. So take a few minutes today to assess your baseline and then join me next week as we continue building a personalized self-care plan that actually works for you.

Speaker 1: 6:22

And you can head to my website where you can download a free guide that will walk you through the Wheel of Life exercise, and it's actually my book bonus guide. So my new book is Self-Care Isn't Selfish the Compassionate Nurse's Step-by-Step Guide to Personalized Stress Relief, and that is available in paperback and hardcover and Kindle on Amazon, and soon there will be an audiobook version as well. But you can go to JennyLytlecom slash self-care book and download the exercises that are included in the book, and one of the first ones is the Wheel of Life exercise. Until next time, remember, not only is self-care not selfish, it's essential if we want to continue to care for others and live our best lives.