Welcome to lesson two why putting yourself first is so hard. So in the last lesson, we went over the risks of neglecting your self care and the benefits of making self care a regular part of your life. In this lesson, we're going to talk a bit more about the excuses that prevent you from making self care priority. So just a reminder from the module three overview, here are our three goals for this lesson. First, we're going to review a list of the most common reasons why working parents generally put self care last. Some of these reasons will be legitimate obstacles that require some creative strategies to overcome.

Other reasons on this list, deal more with false beliefs that you're holding on to and will require a mindset shift overcome. Next, you're going to go through an exercise to identify all of the excuses that have held you back from integrating self care into your life. This is a checklist again, so you can go through that checklist and check off any excuses that apply to you in your life. Be honest about this as much as you possibly Can because the more you can bring those excuses out into the light, the better equipped you're going to be to overcome them. And then finally, once you have that list of excuses down, we're gonna bust those excuses. So let's start with all of the reasons why it can be so hard to take care of yourself.

It's probably a much longer list than this. Of course, everybody's life is a little different. But these are the reasons that I see coming up most commonly for working parents. So we're going to start here. If Of course if you have any other reasons, I invite you to share those and start a conversation with the Facebook community. Everyone's situation is so different, and I think that we can learn a lot from each other.

So here are the six most common reasons why I see working parents having such a hard time prioritizing self care. Number one, internal messages to parenting instincts, three pressure from your spouse, for pressure from work, five, feeling overwhelmed and just being on autopilot, and six comparison. So we're going to talk about it Each one of these and a little more depth. So the first reason why I think working parents have such a hard time implementing self care in their life is internal messages. So internal messages can be both conscious and unconscious. And so they're extremely powerful.

They can also be both positive or negative, you have much more control over your internal beliefs than you think. Once you become aware of your limiting beliefs, there's a lot you can do to retrain your brain. So if you recognize any of the following internal messages, and you've discovered that they're holding you back from focusing on your own self care, go ahead and start repeating new, healthier messages for yourself. So let's go through a few of the main internal messages that I've come across. Number one is guilt. So you might be thinking to yourself if you feel guilt, quote, I'm away from my kids all week.

I can't even take I can't take even more time away from them for myself when I haven't had the chance to be with them at all this week. This is probably the most common internal message I hear from working parents. So if this is coming up for you, just be aware enough next one has to do with self worth. So this is really about the value that you perceive you have. The biggest internal belief that I hear coming up for this one is I don't deserve to be happy. This is usually a really unconscious belief that takes hold early on in your life.

So if you think this is something that you're struggling with, or that might be holding you back, I really want you to make it a priority to figure out a way to overcome it, either through therapy or through coaching, or even just reading as much as you can about it. Or maybe reaching out to our Facebook community or a different community that you're already a part of talking to your friends or your family members about it. But if this is something that's holding you back, it's really important for you to start to address it because until you feel that sense of self worth, it's going to be really hard for you to really make any positive changes in your life where you're putting yourself first. The next internal belief that I wanted to talk about is prioritization. And this is really just all about, you know, kind of the order in which you do things.

So this I hear coming up a lot when people say I can take care of myself after I quote, fill in the blank. So as you probably know, you, you have a huge, long to do list. And often the things that you do for yourself come at the very end of that to do list. And for some reason or another, you never check off every item on your list every day. And so you'd never get to that self care. So for this one, I want you to give yourself permission to take care of yourself.

This is one of those big, big internal beliefs that we're going to work on changing in this particular program. The next one is just a false belief. Yes, false beliefs do exist, and they do hold us back. So one of the biggest false beliefs I hear here is I don't have enough time, which we've talked about a lot in this program already. So this is a false belief. You will have 24 hours every day just like everyone else.

You have 168 hours in the workweek In the entire week, so when you say I don't have enough time, what you really mean is, I really don't like the way I'm spending my time, which is something that you can change, as you can tell from the strategies that we've gone over in this program already. So modeling is another internal belief. And this is something that's usually really unconscious. So modeling is a psychological term that's used to describe imitation of behavior based on what you've seen in your life. So this mode, this most commonly comes up when you're a child, you usually see your parents engaging in certain behaviors, and then you unconsciously adopt those same behaviors, both as a child and then as you get older, they persist. So if you've had a parent who has a hard time prioritizing their own self care, just be aware that you might have some of those same difficulties because you're modeling your parent.

You almost don't even realize that there's another way to do it because that's just all you saw. And the last one is value beliefs. So a good one a good example of This is, you know, when people say good people put other people's for other people first, this is another one of those internal messages that is probably passed along from in your childhood. And so it might be so familiar that you're not even aware of it. So just be aware that you might have this internal belief. And if it's holding you back, I want you to just challenge it and question it and see if it's something that's serving you in your life.

So if you can relate to any or all of these internal messages, I want you to repeat this phrase to yourself, it is important to take care of myself. And I'm a much better mom, dad, husband, wife, employee, boss, friend, sister, brother, parents, whatever, when I get the chance to fill up my own cup first. So try to become as aware of these messages as you can. And also be aware of when they come up come up for you, so that you can start to interrupt them with your own new messages. You can retrain your brain but you do have to be aware of when they're coming up so that you can change them. So pay attention.

Another reason that you might be putting yourself last is because it's actually instinctual. So Caring for Our Children is inherently compulsive. We're actually pre programmed to continue our legacy through our kids. So we're hardwired to do everything we can to protect and nurture and help them grow in a healthy way. It's also really hard to adjust from those initial days of parenthood, I've noticed. So as you all know, when you're brand new parent, you bring an infant home from the hospital.

And those first, the first time you do that everything changes in your life. Immediately, every moment of your day revolves around keeping your child alive, your needs are absolutely put on the back burner in favor of your little bundle of joy. And so you move into this state of hyper vigilance. And as you've probably experienced, that can go on for years, maybe your kids entire lifetime. But over time, your kids become more and more independent, or at least they're capable of being more and more independent. But it's hard as parents to adjust from those early patterns where you're taking care of everything else.

Around you. You might also feel like you can't trust other people to take care of your kids the way that you do. I know from experience, it can be hard to hand off child raising responsibilities to other people. If you're lucky enough to have trusted family members or friends or caregivers around to help, then count your blessings. But I know that there are a lot of you out there who have a hard time trusting others to take on many of the responsibilities that you handle right now. So just keep on doing what you need to do, which takes a lot of time.

It takes a lot of your time. But just be aware that if your needs are going on met, you're gonna maybe need to make some changes. Finally, I know that your children want you more than anyone else in the world. And so it's really hard to deny or resist, they're pleased for you. Those kids can be really needy. They want your attention all the time, which is absolutely natural.

But it can be really hard to resist their desires and spend every waking up to we'll spend every waking moment with you. But in the end if you're not Taking care of yourself, you really just see this heading towards burnout and overwhelm. So here's the thing about being a dual income home with kids, your spouse is probably just as busy as you. And even if they aren't, they're probably feeling as though they are. They're also probably used to depending on you for certain things. And if your spouse didn't have didn't have a direct conversation with you about how things would change when you had kids, you're probably still handling everything the way you did before you had kids, as well as a million other new things that come up once you become a parent.

And that can become overwhelming and your spouse, you know, you and your spouse might just not have had that conversation to figure out how you're going to divide up the labor. So whether it's intentional or not, you're probably getting at least some pressure from your partner to continue doing a lot of different things. Also, if you're feeling pressured to take care of everyone around you at work, it might not be your company's fault. And your company is used to depending on you If you're anything like me, you spent most of your life working really hard and building a stellar reputation. People are used to depending on you, you've trained them over the years to look to you when they need something to be done. And let's be honest, you've probably prided yourself on being the go to person at work.

Your colleagues probably also don't seem to care that you have a second shift now that you're new parent. And another thing that might be going on is that you also haven't reset expectations around your work schedule since you've had a baby. So this will apply to you whether you're in the corporate world or whether you work for yourself. At some point, you're probably going to have to reset expectations with the people you work with if you ever want to stop feeling that overwhelming pressure at work. So another reason why it can be really hard to implement self care is overwhelming autopilot. So life gets really busy when you're a working parent.

It's really easy to get lost and everything that you have to do each day and thinking about taking care of your own needs. just naturally gets put on the back burner, it's really hard to figure out how you fit all the pieces of your life together after you have a baby. So you might have gotten caught up in this trap of just responding to fire drills all day long, just because you haven't found a new way to do it yet. And I've been till now you probably didn't even realize that you had the power to control your reality. But now you know the truth. It's up to you to slow down and reclaim control of your busy life, no one else is going to do it for you.

The last thing I see preventing working parents from slowing down and creating a more balanced life is comparison. So we have a lot of information now about what everyone else's life looks like than we ever had before in history. And it's so easy to get caught up in comparing our imperfect life with what we think everyone else's life looks like. We tend to think that everyone has it all together and that we need to have it all together too. And it becomes really easy to think that you need to make it look like you have it all together. This prevents a lot of people from reaching out and asking for the help that They really need.

So what should you do with all this information? Well, first, I want you to consider which of these things might apply to you. And if so why they apply to you. Then I want you to start to really question these underlying beliefs that guide how you make decisions about your time. And also question any beliefs that might be preventing you from focusing on your self care. This module has a lot to do with your underlying beliefs and self worth and confidence.

If you believe you don't deserve to take care of yourself, it's going to be much harder for you to create that balance in your life that you crave. So if you're struggling, I want you to look a little bit deeper. Identify why you might believe you don't deserve to have your needs met. Ask yourself why you think everyone else should come before you. This is one of those exercises that would really be helpful to do with someone else, like a close friend or a trusted advisor, or maybe your spouse or someone in your tribe or therapist or a coach. Find someone that you can be vulnerable with and open up to them about what holds you back.

The more you can process this stuff in bringing out into the light, the less it's going to hold power over you in the future. So let's talk about some of the potential pitfalls that you want to keep an eye out for here. So the first one is self judgment. Self judgment really is one of the most toxic habits we have as humans, this can be a difficult lesson for some people. So just know that you're not alone. We all get down on ourselves from time to time.

But we'll all make mistakes, and it's time to start moving on from that self judgment. It's not helping you and at this point, it really could be holding you back from creating a better life. We're all doing the best that we can and the resources we have available to with the resources that we have available to us. I absolutely believe that. And when we know better, we do better. So don't make any judgments about what you've done in the past.

Forgive yourself, move on and do your best with what you have right now. Another pitfall that I see a lot is denial. So our perception of ourselves can be really important to us. So in stead of getting down on yourself, you might be the type of person who actually goes into denial mode when you're confronted with negative perceptions of yourself. Denial can be an important coping skill, it means that you're just not ready to deal with something, emotionally or otherwise. So if that's where you're at, that's okay.

But if you're able to see things clearly, to see reality for what it really is, the more you'll be able to make important changes in your life moving forward. So avoid the tendency to delude yourself into thinking that you are taking care of yourself, even though that you really aren't. So the first book I want to recommend for this lesson is the disease to please tearing the people pleasing syndrome by Harriet breaker. This is such a great book for anyone who identifies themselves as someone who can't say no to other people. I won't go into too much detail here because I think that the title actually pretty much explains itself, but I do think that it's an incredibly valuable book if you feel overwhelmed and find that you have a hard time discipline. Other people.

The other book that I wanted to recommend is you're not crazy, or you're codependent by Jeanette Elizabeth mentor. codependency has a really heavy stigma associated with it. If you're if you feel like you're surrounded by needy people and demanding people, and you feel like you'll never regain control of your life because that I highly recommend looking into codependency. So you might be surprised to find out what it's really about. And you might even be more surprised to find that understanding codependency could offer you some real long term relief, especially if you've identified yourself as someone who suffers from it. So anyway, go ahead and check out some of those books if you want to know more.

And that's it for this for lesson two. So the next step is to download the self care excuses checklist as well as the bus those excuses exercise. And so we're going to work with both of these exercises in tandem to implement what you learn in this lesson. And that's it for now. So go ahead and download it. download those exercises and I'll see you in the next lesson.