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Self-Care Tip #240 – Be a student to yourself.
The PossAbilities Triathlon today was the best. It was the first triathlon for my young niece. Doing it with her made it so much more than just a triathlon. She is someone who works hard on what she loves.
Her father, who is my brother Vance, and I had more time to chat today, thanks to my niece’s excellent pacing. Vance is a natural teacher as well and he’s been practicing on me our whole lives together. The fact that we are old now doesn’t change the dynamics much and I think we are both just fine with that.
Today we talked about teaching directly. Vance said,
To teach well, first you have to understand what their fears are, and waylay them. Then you inspire, but you can’t inspire until the fears are examined at some level and trust grows.
Isn’t that lovely? So my question for us today, is how do we do this for ourselves? Sure, we want to be humble students as well as educators in the teams we work with involving others. However, reducing this to the basics of self-care, we finger the idea that this can start right here, where things start and end with “Me.”
Understand our fears and let them lose their power over us. Then spend our time and energy on what inspires us. This is how we can teach ourselves and learn from ourselves! What a delight.
Questions: What do you think about the idea of being a good teacher to yourself? Is it ridiculous? Arrogant? Possible or not? How do you teach yourself? Is it the same as a “doctor-heal-thyself” trap, or as described in this bl0g-post, “teacher teach thyself?” Is there still self-care potential in this, despite its obvious limitations? Please tell me your story.
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Do we teach ourselves? Or are we just available to learn from everything around us that can bring a lesson if we are listening?
what r your thoughts ASW (a skirt a week)? 🙂
well teach myself is that helping me i would probably question back becuase you can be a bad teacher and a good teacher since this blog is good i will follow the spirit there are lots of thingsthat you can teach yourself one of my latest is do a todo list everyday form in the morning to night to get up brush my teeth brush my hair and have a coffe in the morning and then work form the planing form the previos day they may sound really babyish to some people no i am not insulting anyones intelegence and i hope i dont affend anyone these things should be done i should do them including clean cloths etc but i never learnt this as a kid so at 29 its about time i learnt
a bit news on me i am changing my degree path to mental health at university might come as a bit of a supprise im not connecting to my corse and if i dont connect to something i get board very quickly i think this will be a very inresting turn in my life i have to learn on the past and something i dont know i will not do well at i dont actualy know if i will be able to but my corse that i would of fininshed by october is the track to going into something the barriers are going to be extremly large but i think this is much more challanging as well of with news to the job centre i now have an excemption so dont have to sign on and i can spend my time getting better but at the same time i am not on sick pay so that makes me feel better at theropy tomoro last session complete change of direction for me now but life is here to have fun in and if i work with my deapest fears i should be over come it
exciting kevin. i agree w u! thank u so much for keeping us in the loop. we will stand beside u. keep on!
some of us believe it or not, r not as fortunate as u in gaining your insights. keep on.
I never thought about it, but Vance is absolutely right. To see the expressions of relief on students faces when they realise what they were frightened they may ot be able to control, is eminently controllable – that’s a springboard to a wellspring of motivation. Fab post 🙂
i’m going to keep this between u and me kate. vance would only get more “brotherly” if he knew ;). j/k
Learning-teaching-training. I learned about how to take care of myself medically, physically, emotionally. I taught myself, though learning, the difference between the right and the wrong things I was doing in my self care. I’m now training myself to keep doing the right things and stop doing the wrong ones. Or was it the other way around? Is this a chicken and egg thing? It’s all good, I think, whatever it is.
baaackkk-buck-buck-buck-baaaack
Being your own teacher is both courageous and an enlightening act. It takes self evaluation to find your weaknesses and skill be able to work on them from a nonself objective
true suzicate. thank u so much for saying it this way. it brings up the position of privilege we r in if we have those things, and empathy into those of us who don’t have the brain-health to do those things. it highlights the assumption we often take that everyone can do this as well as alludes to the moral qualities we attribute to this exercise. love your mind. keep on.
I don’t believe it is arrogance at all. If we believe we understand the issue, it is only natural to want to help.
With the same token, I had advised ppl with similar situations as mine, yet I don’t follow my own advise.
LOL. LS
laughing LS. u would b super-human if u didn’t. keep on.
I learn from my successes and failures and must teach myself to avoid the traps, some imposed, some self originated. And I have to do homework which means vigilance and playing our mind’s tape forward to foresee consequences that we know will happen if we continue unproductive behavior.
thank u carl. u r the real thing.
I believe that to be any kind of good teacher, one must always be willing to be an eternal student. There must be an innate willingness to learn, before one can begin to think about teaching others (or, in this case, the self).
say it sarah. u r one of the best of both kinds. thank u so much for being w us. keep on.
We have to be good teachers to ourselves. Ourselves don’t always listen though.