Week 6 of the #StayAtHomeChallenge: Blending Leadership with Self-Compassion

It’s been six weeks of living in quarantine, and as much as I’d love to be getting back to normal, I understand that we are still a ways off until we can all start going out and getting together again. But, like everyone we are making the best of a weird situation.

Part of what I am trying to do during this time is to remain mindful of my experience. Blogging about life at this time has really helped me process the situation, as has a daily journaling practice.

It seems each week I am introduced to little life lessons that become the theme for that week. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed in the past, when I’ve taken the time to notice it.

This week’s life lessons seemed contradictory at first. However, the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they are actually pretty complementary.

The first lesson this week came through the #Next90Challenge that I’m sticking with through this season of quarantine. And the second, was one planted by my therapist.

Leadership

The #Next90Challenge is a Rachel Hollis course (still free, by the way, and still available for folks to sign up here) that I’m taking. Given that she’s an entrepreneur and coaches people who are starting their own businesses, I was a little leery about her focus on leadership this week.

I mean, I have this blog, but it’s in no way a business. I like having an outlet to share my thoughts and inspirations, but I don’t see it as a side-hustle or anything. Besides, I have my day job, my part-time job, and my mom job. That’s a lot of jobs.

Almost as if to put me at ease, Ms. Hollis divided the lecture into two videos. The second was on business leadership, but the first was about leadership generally. And, for many women, that personal leadership plays out in the home.

As someone who supervises student volunteers at my office, I have done a little research on management and leadership. There are many different models, and you could fill a library with the books that cover the different styles.

However, one model has always resonated with me- that of servant leadership, which focuses on the leader’s serving the needs of others rather than focusing on gaining and exerting power. It resonates with me because I believe that people are more likely to respect and follow someone who leads by example and works to ensure the success of each member of the team.

I checked Wikipedia, link here, and it seems that servant leadership is not a modern concept. There have been leaders who, throughout the centuries, have acted as the servants first, despite their leadership titles.

As a mom, I think I take the concept of servant leadership quite literally sometimes. In fact, I may go from servant leader to just plain servant, which defeats the purpose entirely, but that is for another post.

So, when I saw that Leadership with this week’s challenge topic, I thought, I’d better steel myself for the tough love Rachel Hollis is about to rain down on me. Time to deprive myself and put myself last in everything so I can make sure my family has what they need during this crazy time.

But, I was pleasantly surprised to I learn from Ms. Hollis that any type of leadership begins with self-care. Her first recommendations in being a good leader is to care for your body by eating nutritious foods, hydrating, getting adequate sleep, and strengthening your body.

Her next recommendations focused on mindset. She suggested getting off of technology (which is more likely to expose you to information that will either scare or anger you), getting dressed each day (basically preparing for the day you did before quarantine), and keeping a positive attitude.

It’s like putting your oxygen mask on first

I know it’s cliché, but the airplane safety rule of making sure your oxygen mask is on first before helping others with theirs really does apply to all aspects of your life. And, it is just as important in leadership as it is on a plane.

The lesson reminded me that I am only going to have as much energy and stamina as my habits allow me to have. If I’m eating poorly, dehydrating myself, and not resting, I will not be able to motivate my team – or family—to do what they need to get done.

My habits and routines are more important now than they were before, and that is because self-care keeps me calm and positive. Once I ignore my own needs, I lose sight of what I need to do for others. And that, in turn, gives them permission to blow off their own needs.

During this quarantine, I have found that when I am not at my best, the rest of the family follows me down the path of whatever less than stellar behavior I’m demonstrating: procrastination, whining, wallowing- you know what I’m talking about.

So, it was a relief to know that a lot of what I’ve been doing these past few weeks by keeping up my habits and routines, are actually a way to demonstrate leadership within my home. This led me to incorporate my second theme of the week: self-compassion.

Self-Compassion

After I last spoke with my therapist, she said I have been doing a lot of really positive things in the self-care arena. I have a morning routine where I wake up in the morning and do a quick meditation before reading some devotionals and doing some yoga. In my morning journal, I write out my gratitude and focus on my goals.

I also have an evening routine. I unpack the day by journaling some more, write out another gratitude list, pray, and read a good book. I even listen to motivational podcasts throughout the week to keep me inspired.

My therapist agreed that I have a lot of really helpful and positive habits that make up a solid self-care routine. But, I felt like I’ve needed to take it a step further.

So, asked if there was anything else I could be doing during this stressful time. Her response was to look into self-compassion.

I have not made much time to research this term. For the longest time, I kind of thought self-compassion was another way of saying self-care. After looking it up, I learned that wasn’t quite right.

While self-care describes activities and habits that you do to take care of yourself, self-compassion goes much further. Self-compassion is when you make an effort to treat yourself kindly.

You would think that someone as focused on self-care as I am would have an easy time practicing self-compassion, but it’s not as simple as that. As much as I make sure to do things that are nice for me, I don’t always speak to or treat myself that nicely.

Self-compassion requires that you are as kind and generous with yourself as you would be with a someone you care about. That means acknowledging your struggles and suffering, and well as telling yourself that you are a good person who deserves to be loved.

Our society doesn’t really promote that kind of loving self-talk. We see it as weak or selfish or promoting wallowing in our own self-pity.

That said, self-compassion can be a really positive practice. It goes hand-in-hand with my word of the year, “grace.” Being gracious with yourself necessarily means that you are showing yourself compassion, especially during times that you are struggling or have made mistakes.

I’m going to be exploring self-compassion over the next few weeks, to see where it leads me and how I feel. For now, I am focusing on telling myself that I am enough and worthy of good things. I do not have to be perfect and making mistakes is okay.

What pleases me the most about embarking on this new way of thinking is that I feel like I am being a better leader for my family. As a mom, whether I like it or not, I’m a teacher. My kids are watching what I do and say, and more importantly, how I treat myself and others. I think modeling self-compassion will go a long way towards helping my kids grow into happier adults.

As always, here’s how the week looked:

Saturday. I’ll be honest. I had every intention of working on a painting I’ve had in mind, but I wasn’t feeling inspired. Instead, I decided to do some shopping and spent time choosing items for a fun Erin Condren haul. It wasn’t the most productive way to spend my time, but I remember hearing this last month: it’s a pandemic, not a productivity challenge. So, I decided to just be okay with some online retail therapy as my Saturday night fun.

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Sunday. We have definitely reclaimed our Sunday routine. We started with a nice breakfast and attended both online Sunday School and virtual church. This week, my daughter decided to bring some of her friends to the service. Her favorite toys attended, which made for a crowded congregation in the bedroom where we watch our video services. After that, it was marathon cooking time.

Monday. It was back to school and work for all of us. My husband was back to commuting to work while I held down the fort and worked from home. I was glad that I prepped ingredients ahead of time for an instant pot soup, as my book club decided to try a Zoom meeting. It was really nice to see my friends, even though we could not all be together. We decided to chat about the book we were set to discuss at our March meeting (cancelled due to the quarantine), Normal People by Sally Rooney. (Not a group favorite, but we are looking forward to trying meetings with our next books on the list).

Tuesday. I worked a full day, but made sure to leave time to prep for Wednesday. In addition to being Earth Day, April 22^nd is my husband’s birthday and it happened to be Administrative Professionals’ Day this year. I made sure to get a virtual gift for my legal assistant and spent the evening baking a lemon poppyseed Bundt cake for my husband. The cake is throwback to a recipe I used to make when we were first married. Of course, back then I made it with regular ingredients, but I found a Cake Doctor recipe that converted the recipe to gluten free.

Wednesday. Early that morning, I sent off my Administrative Professionals’ Day greetings and got to work. I’ve been working on a couple of projects along with supervising the one student who is still externing at our office. I ended the workday a little early to attend a parent meeting for my daughter’s school. After that, it was time to wrap my husband’s gift (I was lucky that Amazon delivered one of the two gifts we ordered for my husband given that neither are essential items) and write out cards. The kids made their own card, and I had one store-bought card leftover from the Simplified Challenge I did in December (I described it here). After dinner, we dimmed the lights and lit candles on his cake. It was small, but we managed to keep this little home-birthday tradition of ours.

Thursday. I worked a full day on my projects and made sure the kids kept up with their school work. Since Fridays have become catch-up days for the kids’ schoolwork, I encouraged them to get everything done so they could free up their Friday. With nothing going on after work, I was able to start grading papers for my class.

Friday. Sadly, I ended the week on a low note for two reasons. First, although we saw it coming, we were admittedly disappointed that school was cancelled for the rest of the year. Of course, the tween girl took it harder than the teen boy. Second, I’m not sure if it was something that I ate the night before, but I woke up with a stomachache and a double-whammy headache that morning- both migraine and tension. I wound up working as much as I could and taking sick leave for the rest of the day. By the evening I felt a little better, especially after my husband picked up some clean eats (a poke bowl from a favorite downtown restaurant). I ended the day in bed, playing a game of UNO with the kids before watching the new Netflix animated movie, the Willoughbys, with my daughter.

Lessons learned from this week:

Use the room you have. I can be so rigid about my routines, and that includes where I choose to set myself up to work in my house. For the past few weeks, I have been working at the dining room table with the kids. When they switched to online learning last week, I saw that they were perfectly comfortable leaving the table to do their virtual meetings in a more private space. At first, this annoyed me: we have a place where we work- why is everyone leaving? But soon it occurred to me that I might be more productive by doing things in different parts of the house too. So, I’m now doing Zoom calls in the quiet guest bedroom, planning my day at the kitchen table (with no computer and inbox to distract me), and I’m doing my written work at the dining room table. We are blessed to have this space, and I’m going to be using more of it from now on.

My husband’s refusal to give us gift ideas doesn’t have to be a bad thing. So, I’m married to a guy who loves to give gifts. He not only will get everything on my Amazon wish list, he’ll go to stores where at some point I’ve mentioned I’ve liked something and pick it up for me. And then, he gets the kids involved. In all fairness, I’m pretty easy to shop for. I love stationary, art and planner supplies, movies, and cute cartoon characters. But, he’s a bit more difficult to buy for, which is made worse by his inability to come up with a wish list for himself. This usually annoys me since he isn’t as easy to shop for, and now I’m stuck doing it from home. That said, I paid attention to him these past few weeks (what else do I have to do?) and noticed that his back has been hurting. So, I checked products and reviews on Amazon and found something that actually turned out to be a really great gift for him: a heated neck massage pillow! He really likes it (the massager actually works well- it heats up and the rotating orbs find and work the knots out), and it provided us some giggles as we each took a turn.

If you’re interested in getting the neck massager, we highly recommend it. Here’s the one we bought him for his birthday:

Virtual playdates need to have their limits. The first couple of weeks into the quarantine, I did a terrible job at encouraging my kids to socialize with their friends, especially my daughter who doesn’t have her own phone yet (yes- I’m old-fashioned. No cell phones until middle school). I made up for it by allowing her friends to contact her via FaceTime. It was fine the week we were on spring break. The kids had less to do, and I found it helpful to have a little time on my own while they virtually hung out with friends. But, by this week, I realized that we were allowing social time at a level we never have in the past. I had to remember that just like I’m not allowing myself to use this time to lay around in PJs all day and do nothing, I can’t let my kids spend the entire day socializing (or playing on gadgets). We set some boundaries and I’m now seeing them do things like sit and read books!

Just because you put out a hummingbird feeder, doesn’t mean they’ll eat from it. (This is a random lesson, but one we learned, so here goes). After seeing a hummingbird approach our kitchen window last weekend, we decided to hang a hummingbird feeder off of the railing of our deck near that window. We figured if the little bird was showing up without any food to tempt it, imagine how thrilled she’ll be when she sees there is food specifically for her! Well, we saw her again, but she only ate from the feeder once. She still comes by the window occasionally, but for some reason the nectar we bought at the store just isn’t attractive to her. So, we are starting over this week with a homemade sugar syrup (no worries, we looked up the recipe, so it’s safe) and are hoping that might be more to her liking. At our old house, hummingbirds used to fly in by droves, so it would be really nice to have them in our backyard again. (Also, we in no way took the photo of the hummingbird in the graphic for this blog. That was a Pixabay find- below is the quality of the photography we are able to pull off).

As always, I’m hoping everyone is doing well as we are halfway through our second month of sheltering in place. How are you doing? Are you struggling with being a positive leader in your home? Any suggestions for us moms who are making their way through uncharted waters each day? Leave a comment below.

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**Image credits- Hummingbird, “Be a boss,” and “Love yourself” images found on Pixabay.

*** Airplane safety manual photo by Calle Macarone on Unsplash