39. Healing Girl Summer: Drop the Self-Fixing and Embrace Connection and Playfulness

In this episode, I’m inviting you to step into a summer that’s not about self-improvement or rigid healing schedules. Instead, it’s about rediscovering the playful spirit within us all. I’m exploring why summer has always felt like a season of magic and possibility to me, and how we can lean into joy, connection, and those simple, soul-nourishing moments we often forget.

I’ll share my own journey, like teaching a creative writing workshop this summer, to show how choosing playful, aligned activities can become a healing journey in itself. I invite you to find that one thing that lights you up and weave it into your days...no checklists, no pressure, just a summer of finding us again.

Tune in to learn how to make this your Healing Girl Summer, and get your free Healing Girl Summer Bingo card by messaging me on Instagram @HealThriveProsper. Let’s make this the summer of joy!

Transcript

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Welcome to Heal Thrive Prosper. I'm Andrea Tanase. And if survival mode made you forget who you are, I'm here to help you remember. After hitting rock bottom and rebuilding my life from the inside out, I now guide people like you, the cycle breakers, the strong ones, the overachievers, to unlearn harmful patterns, reclaim your worth, and build a love and life that feels like freedom, not survival. So grab your favorite snack and let's heal, thrive, and prosper together. Welcome back and happy summer. And honestly, this whole past week, I've been sitting with something and wondering why I've always loved summer so much. And even if you don't resonate with that, that's okay. Stick around. I'm gonna tell you, or more like show you through my experience how to make the best of this season. And like the title says, drop the self-fixing and really embrace that spirit of summer that I found uh I've really resonated with. So what if this summer wasn't about optimizing your schedule, making the most of every minute, fixing yourself, working on healing, but in a very strict and restrictive way. What if this summer we healed through rediscovering our playful spirit? I think I already mentioned it, but I'm teaching a creative writing workshop this summer, and it's just like the alignment there, it was not a coincidence because as I thought about, well, what do I really love about summer? It's exactly what I just said. That sense of playfulness, of exploration, of you know, going on vacation, of reconnecting with certain people, being outside more. The weather is great. Um, you're in the water, which I just love the water, right? Those are the things that really just bring me joy. And that's what summer is full of. And as adults and as we get older, we have less and less of that playfulness, that playful spirit, that creativity, that those moments where we get into flow. And I want to make sure that for me, this summer is just full of those moments where I'm in the moment, I'm not in my head, and I'm just doing things that bring me joy. And I want to offer that up to you as an idea of how to approach this summer. So we'll shift that mindset from self-improvement mode into what can actually bring us joy? What can we take action on? And a lot of that will be how can we connect back to ourselves, back to what brings us happiness and fulfillment, but also connect to others and find belonging. So, so, like I said, for me, this opportunity to teach a creative writing workshop brings together something I am so joyful about, something that I'm good at teaching and writing and guiding people and coaching people. It's just like everything, or a lot of the things I love in one. And it's going to connect me to people. It's going to lead people to connect with each other, connect back to the work that they love doing, just writing. So I am so excited that this fell in the summer season. This is an example of how I am bringing joy to my summer. This is going to be a healing experience for me. I already know. And it's not something that I set out to do because I thought I needed to be fixed, right? It's not something that I thought, oh, something's wrong with me. I need to find something to fix it. It's me pursuing playfulness and joy, like I said, and something that I'm good at and I actually want to do. And so as you're listening to this episode, think about what that can be for you. It doesn't have to be as big as teaching a workshop or running an event or doing anything like that. Don't worry. It can be so, so tiny. But the intention is really what matters behind this. So you just need to realize that you don't need to be fixed. This summer is not a summer where you need to check off certain boxes or, you know, if you have goals, that's great. But let's also work on the part of you need to be happy through it, right? You need to enjoy it. Life is made to be enjoyed, and summer is a season that really reminds us of that. Um, I do want to talk about briefly like why we default to self-fixing and why that's such a narrative in the self-help, healing, and coaching world. There are so many cultural pressures that push women into constantly and constantly and constantly improving themselves and holding themselves to the standards and and really having goals even that they they can't achieve because they keep moving the bar, right? They're constantly in the state of not being enough and not doing enough. And I want to counteract that today. Um, I want to invite you to find joy and connection, find joy in your hobbies, find joy, just find joy in the small, tangible ways. I promise it sounds silly, but it will make such an impact on your summer and on your life, and you will find yourself carrying this into the following seasons of your life. A few ways that you can shift the intention of your summer from fixing yourself to actually embracing connection, playfulness, and joy is to identify just one thing. For me, like I said, it's teaching that workshop. What is that one thing, that one hobby, that one passion, that one thing that you maybe used to do when you were younger, maybe in high school, in your early 20s, or even in grade school that you've put to the wayside. For me, a lot of the things that I loved when I was little, I'm going back to all of those things because I realized there was a reason for it, right? And so now I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm connecting with people. I'm intentionally doing those things because I know that the return on those investments are huge and just as important as a therapy session or a session with my business coach or, you know, um sitting here and recording this podcast, right? They're just as important to my healing journey, to my story, to who I am becoming. So identify that one thing and find a way to just weave it into your weeks, your days. Um, if you need to add it to your calendar. If that feels restrictive, then then don't. But find a way, if it's an accountability buddy, if you're signing up for a class that will keep you on track, right? That's um recurring, if it's a walking club or a reading club or a writing club, or if you're deciding, like, hey, this summer, like I want to start a coaching program to really address the things that I want to address, whatever it is, right, that will keep you on track, but also that feels aligned. I hope that you got something out of this episode. I don't want to make this um heavy or complicated. I just want to help you set that intention for this summer. And as a bonus, if you would like to message me on Instagram and tell me that one thing that you're gonna set your intentions around this summer to incorporate into your life that is going to bring you joy, message me on Instagram at Heal Thrive Prosper. And I have a fun little healing girl bingo that I will send you if you message me. And this bingo will not be performance-based or you know, metrics-based or how many things you can get done. It will be more along the lines of, like I said a million times already, things that bring you joy, uh, making time for a connection, spending time with people, spending time outside, and really just reconnecting back to those things that resonate with you. So make sure you message me to get that bingo card and make this summer, not the summer of fixing yourself, but the summer of finding yourself and finding the things that will light you up again. Thank you for listening.