Episode 181 Challenge #7 – Pick ONE Thing for You.

Episode 181 Challenge #7 Pick ONE Thing for You Elenor Brown said, “Self care is any action you purposefully take to improve your physical, emotional or spiritual well being.” Today’s episode is part of a series that explores the challenges in the book: LIFE - Living Intentional and Fearless Every day - the 21 LIFE Connection Challenges. THIS is a PERMISSION episode. Today we are on challenge #7 - to pick one thing you’ve been wanting to do or buy for yourself and just do it. I don’t know about you, but I often put off splurging on something I really want because I can’t justify the expense in my own head.  Tune in for today’s quickie episode about how and why this challenge is a beautiful one to embrace. And after you listen, I hope you’ll take the challenge. Because YOU matter.    I was talking with a friend the other day about the nature of the 21 challenges and she begged me to add it into the explanation. So, here it is -  I have a tendency in life to pick and choose what I want to do. I suspect we all probably do. We have to make all kinds of choices everyday where to spend our time. But when I was doing my emotional intelligence training we quickly learned that we did not have that option. It made everyone severely uncomfortable, but we came to understand that if it was part of the program we HAD to do it or leave the program. Boy did we all push through some blocks and every time we learned from it. We found gems of insight and growth that getting OUT of one’s comfort zone brings. Well, that to is the nature of the 21 challenges. If you start the challenges and then just pick the ones that feel comfortable to you, you don’t stretch, you don’t learn, you don’t get out of the program what it holds for you. So, just a reminder - when you start the 21 challenges - commit, in your own head and heart, to push past your resistance and do EVERY challenge.  This series of episodes where I go over the challenges in detail with everyone who is listening, allows you to follow along in doing the challenges, but even better, to understand why the challenges are in the program in the first place. This set of explanatory episodes started in episode 12 and then again in 89  were we who were doing Random Acts of Kindness together, talked about the experiences. These were episodes exploring Challenge # 1 -Do a Random Act of Kindness. In episode 163 I spoke with Ashley Stuart, a de-clutter expert, and we talked about why challenge #2 - to get rid of one thing you no longer need - is so much more important than this simple act seems on the surface. In episode 169 I tackled an in-depth on challenge #3  - this is where we looked at what it really means and looks like to find the lesson in something that doesn’t go your way. Great stuff with expert Leslie Householder on finding the gratitude and lesson in our trials or disappointments. In episode 171 we got into detail about why Challenge #4 - a life hack I call “Success-file” is so important to living happy. Challenge #5  was episode 174 where we got real about giving people the benefit of the doubt and why it’s a relationship saver. And Challenge #6 - the Love Bomb in episode 176.  PLEASE catch up on those episodes if you missed them and take each challenge for yourself. They are included for very important reasons - as you’ll hear as you listen to those episodes.  But today let’s talk about challenge #7. This is the first challenge in the book that directly addresses self-care. The other challenges are about looking outward and doing for others and cleaning up