It’s ok to look after yourself

“To live an empowered life so you can empower others, you must simultaneously find or make the time to take care of yourself.”
By Kari Fulmek

No matter how crazy your days and weeks get, you must find time to take care of yourself.

This isn’t a platitude or a suggestion, it is an essential component of your empowered life.

Taking days off can be hard to do in a culture that makes being busy an accepted fact of life. We are all supposed to be extremely creative, to maintain our awareness of new trends and ideas, grow our businesses, take care of those we love, and do all of this with as little rest as possible.

That is not empowered living! That is a race for which there are no winners, just a series of burned-out bodies trying to be in a predetermined place at a predetermined time.

If your purpose is to empower yourself so you can empower others, you can’t do it as a numbers game.

It took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t a crime to put myself first and look after all the people in my life and my business second.

It hit me one day when I was sitting in an airplane listening to the flight attendant go through the drill about securing your own oxygen mask first before reaching out to help another.

You have to help yourself first so you are able to help others.

You must nourish yourself first so you have the strength to feed others. You must take time to think and sift through ideas first so you can reach out to recognize the value in the ideas of others.

You need to exercise and dance and sleep and keep your physical body in shape so your well of energy is filled up to fuel your experiences with others.

We are conditioned to think that looking after ourselves is selfish. In modern crime dramas you see doctors and detectives alike forgoing sleep and food to save lives. They don’t show you how their cognitive skills have become impaired and they make bad decisions after tearing around for 24 hours straight. They don’t show you their arteries clogging from the sausages they grab from the street vendors.

We are getting an unrealistic image of what it means to live empowered.

You must help yourself first if you are to help others. It is a primary condition of empowerment. It is okay to stop for a cup of tea on your front porch in the middle of the afternoon. It is not a waste of time to eat a good breakfast before you head to the office. It is okay to say I have done enough on this day and will sleep now so I can do more tomorrow.

Kari Fulmek is the author of “Two Weeks to Empowerment” and the founder and owner of Equine Connection, The Academy of Equine Assisted Learning. She is a master instructor and senior facilitator in an International Horse Facilitator Certification Course that includes business training, the only program of its type in the world. From her base near Calgary, AB, in the foothills of Canada’s Rocky Mountains, she travels the globe to empower clients. To learn more about Kari, visit her website at: https://equineconnection.ca.