Keeping it Simple

Top Ten from Sandy Davis

Here are 10 tips that will help you keep your self-care activities simple and effective:

(1) Because you cannot give what you do not have, make it a daily habit to pay yourself first. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be able to pay others generously, compassionately, and continuously.

(2) To ensure that you pay yourself first, you may need to invert your priorities. As much as possible, make your daily self-care your first priority, and then schedule everything else in your day around that sacrosanct priority.

(3) As much as possible, turn your ongoing self-care activities into consistent daily routines. Make them unfailing habits.

(4) Make sure you set up self-care structures for yourself that are ecological and that work well for you. If you find a particular structure to be causing you more stress than it is relieving, redesign that structure.

(5) Chunk down your daily practices until they are manageable ongoing commitments—and then do them without fail. It’s better to aim just high enough to hit the target right in the center, than to aim way too high and miss the target completely.

(6) Remember to embrace your failures with honesty and humility. If something is broken, fix it.

(7) Remember also to joyfully celebrate all your successes—big, small, and even miniscule. Small successes beget big ones.

(8) Keep your sense of humor about you. A little bit of laughter goes a long way.

(9) Dare to imagine outrageously wonderful adventures and successes, and then pursue them with abiding courage, patience, and faith.

(10) Practice, practice, and practice some more.

Sandy Davis | (207) 563-7263
Sandy@ResilienceWorks.com | http://www.ResilienceCircle.com

Wrongly Pathologizing Populations

Vanessa Pupavac's article "Pathologizing Populations and Colonizing Minds: International Psychosocial Programs in Kosovo" appeared in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 27, 2002.

It is worth a read: http://tr.im/BXxh

Pupavac correctly cautions against superimposing Western notions of how whole populations (e.g. refugees) get traumatized because it interferes with self-government potential (among other things).