3 Steps to Incorporating Self Care Even on You Most Hectic Days With Theresa Tirk

3 Steps to Incorporating Self Care Even on You Most Hectic Days With Theresa Tirk

On today’s episode of The Determined Mom Show, we have Theresa Tirk. She is a life coach. Her business is called Live Your Purpose Abundantly. So she is an amazing guest and she is going to help us with self-care. So she’s going to teach us three steps to incorporate a self-care routine on our most hectic day.

Thank you so much for having me. Super excited to be with you guys today and talk all about self-care for moms, we don’t take care of ourselves.

Need to be done properly anyway. No, not usually. We were not much of a priority most days. That is so true. Tell me a little bit, or tell us the audience, a little bit about how you got started in coaching and also how you started working.

So it’s been a journey. I’ve been a mom for 22 years. I was a stay-at-home mom for almost 10 of those years.  So didn’t do much when I reentered the workforce. I returned to the normal nine-to-five, but I was lucky enough to work from home at my regular job.

I took a little leave of absence and did some work on myself. I got all of the proper medical assistance needed to battle that. But then I kind of started my own. Self-discovery journey after, after that. And it led me to aromatherapy and essential oils. And I became certified in that.

And it ended up being like a rabbit hole. Like you, you start a journey of one thing, and then you start discovering all these different things. I was the self-help junkie. I was listening to the podcast, reading books, and doing everything that led me to.

You can gain an undiscovered world of online coaches and personal development through the online space. And honestly, I never knew it existed. So, that was interesting to me. I got my own coach and started working with them and I was like, this is amazing, and I want to do this; I want to help.

There’s so much, so much to know, and so much to learn. And as I said, when you don’t even realize it’s out there, it’s incredible when you discover it. So it was. It was quite a journey, but it was a bit of a rabbit hole that I fell in when trying to get my life together and figure out who I was and what I wanted to do.

And through all that, I decided I wanted to help other women and mothers going through the same scenario. And that’s what led. So through all that, how old were your children? So my children are now 22 and 17. What, like 20 and 15, 14, 15 roughly when it all started?

I’m going through something similar right now and my kids are tiny, so it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter the age.

No matter what season we’re in as mothers, even though everybody’s journey is different, there’s so much similarity between us and what you can go through. Just gearing everything towards moms because I think it’s just remarkable. The special club. It is quite a community of incredible.

Tell us how you help women and then get to the good stuff of how in the heck can we have a relaxing and hectic day all at once? I know it sounds impossible. So what I discovered through my journey was that, well, I hit, like my season was hitting the empty Nest syndrome sort of scenario. 

Teacher meetings and hockey games and, it was, it smacked me in the face, like, what do you know, what do I do now? So, that can happen at any stage. Like you can kind of lose your sense of self as a new mom. As a mom of toddlers and teens, like, it doesn’t matter.

I think it happened; it just smacked me in the face. It. Season of empty nesting. Because of everything else, I was going through with mental health. For me, that’s when I was like, oh my Lord. I wanted to help other women who have lost that—sense of self. I call myself an identity coach, a mom coach who helps and enables you to restore your sense of self.

Give yourself some self-love and worth and perspective. Still being that awesome, awesome mom that you are. That sounds amazing if you all need that, like every single day. Especially when you have little ones like you who are just not a priority. You don’t shower for days, or you don’t; you’ve been in the same sweats and your hair; you’re just back burner. And as much, it’s just the way it is, and you can really lose yourself. In that?

And it’s funny that you say that because yesterday I was cooking dinner and my two-year-old is trying to cook with me because she loves it.

I was cooking and doing things with myself. And then I was like, okay, I’ll be right back. I have to go to the bathroom. And she comes screaming through the house behind me, and my husband’s like, what are you doing? Like, leave her alone for five seconds. And so then he had to pick her up and distract her so I could go to the bathroom alone.

And then that I had another one and then, yeah, there you go. I said to my husband the other day that he looked at me like I had eight heads, but I looked at him the other day and I was like, maybe we should like to adopt.

 Adoption is great, but what prompted it was a commercial came on for, like all the foster kids and stuff out there that need help. And then he’s like; then you need to look forward to grandchildren. He’s like, no, we’re good, which is typical. They don’t have that. I don’t know. There’s just something in us that wants more. That’s hilarious. But, alright, are we ready to get into this? 

All right. And talk about the three steps you will give us to incorporate self-care on our most hectic days. Be easy on yourself. So as moms, I know we can tend to make a plan, and if we don’t stick with it, we like beat ourselves up about it.

So if you have a plan in place or you have an idea that you want to start incorporating, some self-care for yourself, and you don’t get around. It is not like the end, like don’t turn, don’t turn it into something that will make your day worse. By being like, oh my gosh, I was supposed to do that, and I didn’t.

And so give yourself grace when it comes to this self-care routine because. You will have days when it falls by the wayside and it’s okay like that. That is a self-care tip I always give anyway; even if you don’t do anything for yourself, just not beating yourself up throughout the day is a form of self-care.

A lot of us don’t remember that. Like we all have this. Most of us, I think, as moms, have that perfectionist gene in us that we want everything to be perfect throughout the day and when it’s not. At least for me, I know that my head would go a mile a minute, and I would breathe.

Play everything wrong, and what I should have could have, would, could have, would have. So that is the simplest form of self-care we can give ourselves, providing ourselves the same grace and compassion that we give our families. And those around us, that’s a really good one.

I am a time blocker, so I get a little when my time blocks get out of whack and feel like I didn’t do exactly what I was supposed to do during that time block. Agitated, I think.

And we have that mean girl in our head that can be nasty to us. So that’s me, that’s the biggest one. Being nice to ourselves is the best form of self-care we can provide daily. That’s powerful, and I will try to do that from now on. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ll be anxious to hear. It takes work. I know it’s not easy, but it, it really, it’s, it’s the most important one.

You can, that we can share. And then the second thing that I always recommend is, too, to my clients or anybody that I’m working with or in my group, I tell everybody to make lists. I’m a list maker. Could you make a list when you have a moment?

It could be as simple as sitting in the doctor’s office and having five minutes of free time, but grab your phone, grab a pen and paper, kind of whatever floats your boat there. I’m old school, so I am a pen-and-paper kind of girl. But make a list of things that you could do for yourself that take under five minutes.

So I will listen to a podcast or read a book for five or 10 minutes. It can be as simple as playing your favorite song and dancing around the house like a crazy person. And that is even something you can involve your kids.  That is so much fun for them.

You want to come up with this list of things that you enjoy that can take small amounts of time. And the reason why I say to make a list is that whenever you are in your day and it’s crazy and it’s hectic, and you find that small little space for yourself, you don’t want to spend the time thinking, okay, what should I do?

I have 15 minutes, and then you’re going to spend seven and a half of it trying to figure out what to do, what to do with that free time, right?  So if you have that list, and I know in this day and age, everybody’s, like, keeps everything on their phones and stuff. So you could even open the notepad, make that list, and then they’re active for you to keep adding to it as you think of things.

But grab it, pick it up. Pick one thing off the list. Spend five to ten minutes. At some point in your day doing that, do your nails. It doesn’t have to be anything humongous. It doesn’t have to be all bubble baths going out, and getting a manicure on this big day.

You need these small little moments. Take five minutes and meditate. Grab one, and download one of those apps. They do the quick five-minute meditation and guide you through it or grab a notebook or journal and go on Pinterest or my site and download journal prompts.

I mean, just something for you. To get you out of your head, to bring you back into you outside of your mother. Hood roll and spend 5, 10, or 15 minutes within that day doing something just for you. It’s not about anybody else; it’s just about you. And it doesn’t have to be big and elaborate. But I love the list.

I think it’s, so it just provides that level of convenience. That we need when you already have it established, and you can pick it up, grab something off it and be like, yep, this is what I’m going to do. And then take next, five, ten minutes. 

What am I in the mood for when you go to a restaurant? I love that way of looking at it. That’s awesome. It’s like that.

We should all have one of those lists on our phones. And if you don’t, you should stop listening to this podcast and create one. And a little extra tip on that is to make a secondary list for big ones. Like big self-care ideas. So if you get that rare occasion to spend more time on yourself and want that bubble bath, or you want to go out and do the trendy self-care things of the mani-pedi or the bubble bath, make a secondary.

For when you have that more long-term time available to you. What is the third thing? The Well, the third I included, is to keep it simple.

You don’t want anything. You don’t want to stress yourself out even more when trying to provide yourself some peace, calm, and happiness inward by thinking that you need to do something. So elaborate. So it is 100% just keeping it simple, picking something off your list, and not needing it to be perfect.

So if you pick something off your list and you’re five minutes into reading your book, you expect it to be 10 minutes, and something goes wrong. Well, that five minutes that you spent is not. It’s not lost, and it’s not ruined, so own what you can accomplish in your window of time.

Embrace it, love it, and don’t. Don’t be negative if it isn’t all you thought it would be or if you build it up to be in your mind.