Week 26 - Prioritizing You

I’m sticking with the theme of ✨prioritizing yourself✨ this week.

I had an AHA moment this week.

I think a universal longing is wanting freedom - meaning doing whatever you want, whenever you want. I don’t know about you but I feel like everywhere I look I see people talking about how they are chasing money so that they can have freedom. But here comes the AHA.

Almost every day I write that I’m grateful for ‘my health’ in my gratitude journal. This week I decided to go one level deeper and ask myself why am I grateful for my health. And really it comes down to the fact that being 100% healthy means that I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want. I can run, walk, cycle, hike, swim, etc. I’m physically capable of all of it and that feels amazing. It makes me feel free.

So why does it seem like everyone only talks about money and if they do talk about health it’s usually about losing weight so that you have a nice body. What’s the deal with that??

“A healthy person has a million dreams, a sick person has one, to be healthy”

It’s so easy to overlook our health when we have it. I see it happen all the time because I coach predominately high-achievers. They tend to prioritize performance and achievement over everything because that’s what makes them feel good, especially about themselves. They get their self-worth from achievement. And that strategy works for awhile until it doesn’t. Until you get to the point where you’ve achieved so much and STILL don’t feel fulfilled, even though your strategy was that if you just got that promotion/new job/more money/better title that you’d be happy. And yet…you’re not.

That was my story for my whole career until I realized that I was on a hamster wheel and doing what I’d always done wasn’t going to get me to fulfillment. So I made a commitment to myself to prioritize myself over my job. One way I did that was working out at lunch every day. No matter what was going on. Month end. Year end. Didn’t matter. I made it a priority to be healthy. I actually started this when I became a leader at Salesforce.  Which is typically the point in most people’s journey where they really put their needs to the side so that they can be there for their team whenever they need. Classic new manager move/mistake.

Whenever I had a new rep or took over a team, I made an upfront contract with them that I go to the gym at lunch so lunch time is absolutely off limits to book me for calls. Any time, but not lunch. And literally, never, not once, did it create an issue. Frankly, it also set the tone that everyone on my team should also prioritize themselves and their health.

Having energy and feeling good promotes better performance. Also, doing hard things regularly promotes resilience and stamina. All necessary when you work in a high-paced culture.

Prioritizing my health makes me feel good on so many levels. Obviously, physically. But it promotes my mental health and it’s a piece of evidence every single day that I value myself deeply. That I am worth prioritizing. And that collection of evidence day after day has now created my identity. The identity of someone whose health is always a priority. And so my decision making follows suit. If that’s my identity, it becomes easier to make healthy decisions.

What we repeatedly do is who we become. It creates our identity. We get to create any identity we want.

Does your current identity promote a life that you love and makes you feel amazing?

Does yours need an update so that you can create the life you really want?

Some food for thought this week ☕️

Have a beautiful week!