Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Legitimate self-care is NOT working less and expecting more. Legitimate self-care is also NOT putting your priorities over your responsibilities while expecting no consequences. This is just being selfish.

Indeed, legitimate self-care is a process that helps you get better both mentally and physically as you continue to pursue your goals.  Sleeping more, working less, going to the spa, and taking vacations may be a small part of this process, but legitimate self-care is much more. While those activities may be useful for mental health, those activities alone won’t make you mentally healthy.

Legitimate self-care is dealing with the consequences of your priorities, not prioritizing avoiding consequences. Legitimate self-care requires facing fears, not running from fear. Above all, legitimate self-care is working to get better at the game of life, not working to make the game easier.

10 Steps to Get Better through Self-Care

Whether it’s getting help from a licensed therapist or a professional coach, committing to a process of getting better is a must for self-care. Anything less than putting in the work to get better is not legitimate self-care. It’s self-sabotage. The key word in that last sentence is W.O.R.K.

This work includes the process of learning new mental skills. Mental skills you can’t learn by sleeping late, going to the spa, and taking vacations. Therefore, a legitimate self-care process must include taking steps to get better at the following 10 mental skills:

1. Improving mental toughness by reframing emotions that have a negative impact.
2. Conditioning your thoughts to instinctively have positive/neutral thoughts and emotions instead of negative thoughts and emotions.
3. Building confidence by eliminating worries about unrealistic expectations as well as things out of your control and focusing instead on those things within your control.
4. Managing intensity and anxiety.
5. Having a meaningful “why” for everything you do.
6. Strategically using feedback to improve how your respond to failure.
7. Exhibiting self-awareness of your strengths and weaknesses and then utilizing your strengths to overcome your weaknesses.
8. Establishing a source of self-worth and self-esteem that is task oriented and not ego oriented.
9. Consistent use of routines and healthy habits.
10. Clarifying goals to direct your focus to the most important things and avoid distractions.

Simply stated, if you are calling something self-care and it doesn’t include multiple items in the list above, then you are lying to yourself.