Devote yourself to daily self-care. Essentially, you get on an airplane, one of the first things you’re going to hear from the flight attendant is in the event of an emergency, oxygen masks will come down from the ceiling. Put the oxygen mask on your mouth before you try to help anyone else, even your children. The point of wisdom’s pretty clear. If you can’t breathe, you can’t help anyone else. If you don’t have any oxygen, you can’t be of service to anyone around you. And yet so many people have forgotten that big idea. They say things like, “Well, if I took time for myself and I cared for myself and I renewed myself I did things that made me feel good, wouldn’t that be selfish?” Well, I believe taking care of yourself is a selfless act. Taking care of yourself allows you to be more for others. And then another thing I often hear is, well, Robin, I know I should spend time in self-care and personal renewal and tending to what I call four awakenings, your mind, your body, your emotions, and your spirit. So they say, “I know I should be caring for those four elements or these four awakenings, but Robin, I just don’t have time.” And to me saying that you don’t have time for self-care is a lot like saying you’re, too busy driving to stop for gas. Eventually it’ll catch up with you. And sadly, what I’ve observed working with so many different people is that too many people need a crisis in their lives for them to wake up to what’s truly important and to begin to care for themselves and focus on their inner work. I’ll tell you a number of my clients, when they first came to me, they wanted my ideas on how to grow their businesses to world-class and how to develop their employees and how to be an elite performer. Again, that’s the performance side of the platinum equation. And they neglected the pleasure side. And in this particular instance, a crisis occurred in their lives. It might’ve been the circumstance where they got back to the office, they picked up a voicemail and it was their doctor. And the message sounded something like this. “We just got the test results back from your recent physical. I’d like you to book an appointment to come into the office because there’s some things we need to talk about.” And they learned from that appointment that they were suffering from some kind of an illness. And that illness came about because they were so focused on performance and getting to their goals and being, quote-unquote, successful in the world that they forgot about the importance of pleasure. And in this case, again, what I’m talking about here with respect to pleasure is the importance of nurturing yourself and caring for your inner world. So devoting yourself to self-care is not soft stuff. As a matter of fact, soft is hard. And why wait for a tragedy to strike in your life before you take really good care of yourself? And here’s the paradox of it all, taking care of yourself will actually make you a better performer. It’ll actually make you more successful. It’ll actually make you more money. It’ll actually grow your career and grow your organization and get you closer to the mountaintop, just like that climber in the metaphor I shared with you. If she’s healthy, if she’s energetic, if she’s feeling good, if she’s feeling alive, she’s going to perform so much better as she gets to that mountaintop. And from time to time we all fall into this trap because it is so easy to forget that we play at our peak when we are fit, when we’re relaxed and when we’re fully engaged in life. Perhaps the most powerful way I can bring home the idea to you on self-care is with a simple line, you can’t do good if you don’t feel good. Or to put it another way, you can’t be a positive source of energy at work if you have no energy. So self-management is mission-critical. Doing what it takes to care for yourself so your highest and your best potential can shine when you go into work is simply non-negotiable. It’s one of those things that if you really want to get to greatness, you have to do. Not, maybe you should do it, not perhaps you should do it. If you want to play full out on the performance side and you really want to get to that mountaintop self-care is the way to get there.
