“Honoring yourself is not selfish, it’s vital.” ~Elaina Marie
When is the last time you paused to check in with what you need? I bet if I asked you what the people around you need you could answer easily. Many of us spend most of our lives assessing what others need from us to support them but have difficulty identifying our own needs.
Setting healthy boundaries
When we focus our attention on other people’s needs and neglect our own, we lose touch with ourselves, our feelings, and our needs. When we aren’t clear about what we feel and what we need it is almost impossible for us to set healthy boundaries in our lives critical for our health and well-being. Often our habit of self-neglect leaves us feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and completing unable to honor our needs creating more challenges in our lives requiring more boundaries we have difficulty setting. Overtime not honoring our needs leads to major physical and mental health challenges.
So why is it so difficult to honor our needs when there are so many consequences of not doing so?
The fact is it takes courage to prioritize honoring your needs when you have been raised to believe that you must care for everyone in your life except yourself. This limiting belief fuels our desire to people please and contributes to our not feeling good enough when we are unable to make everyone happy. Over time we develop higher and higher expectations of ourselves in pursuit of meeting everyone’s needs and end up feeling frustrated, disempowered, and unworthy. Ultimately believing that we must meet everyone else’s needs makes our needs seem invisible. Over time we learn not to pay attention to our needs as our time and energy are spent attending to everyone else’s needs. And the worst part is we think there is something wrong with us when we end up feeling unhappy and unfulfilled.
Filling your own cup first.
The good news is when we realize that giving from an empty cup does not truly support anyone and feeds our resentment and burnout, we can begin to reclaim the truth of who we are by honoring our needs. Thich Nhat Hanh’s wisdom can inspire this critical mindset shift, “Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generating that kind of energy toward yourself — if you are not capable of taking care of yourself, of nourishing yourself, of protecting yourself — it is very difficult to take care of another person.”
What would your life look like if you chose to love, protect, and nourish yourself?
One of the most empowering ways to love, protect, and nourish yourself and honor your needs is to set healthy boundaries. Boundaries are statements that reflect our needs and limits. They establish guidelines for how we want to be with others in our environment, are flexible, and evolve and change over time as we do. Ultimately healthy boundaries are rooted in honoring our needs. When we practice nurturing a relationship with ourselves, we are able to identify how we feel and what we need consistently. Knowing ourselves and honoring what we need is essential to setting boundaries with others, which makes boundary setting a deeply self-nurturing practice.
Brené Brown wrote, “Daring to set boundaries is loving yourself enough to risk disappointing others.” I have had that quote written on a Post-It® note for years on my desk reminding me that every healthy boundary I set is a reflection of my love for myself and the courage that was required to set the boundary while risking disappointing others. I love that like self-nurturing, boundary setting is a beautiful self-sustaining practice as each boundary deepens your self-awareness, strengthens your courage, and reinforces your commitment to honor your own needs.
Additionally, the knowledge that “clarity is kindness,” another transformative piece of wisdom from Brené Brown, has strengthened my courage and helped me understand that setting healthy boundaries is an act of love and kindness both for myself and the other person. By choosing to honor our needs through the practice of healthy boundaries, we can improve our relationships with others and ourselves.
Honoring Our Needs.
As we begin to honor our needs by setting more boundaries, we may experience the stress of risking disappointing others. If we have neglected sharing how we feel and what we need with others in the past they may be confused when we set new boundaries. Do not be discouraged. This is part of the process of honoring your needs. Not everyone is going to cheer you on, but you will start to notice that disappointing yourself by not honoring your needs is much worse than disappointing others. You see when we do not set healthy boundaries, we often become resentful and frustrated both with ourselves and the other person. Yet when we do set healthy boundaries, we end up feeling empowered and our belief in ourselves and our self-worth grows and blossoms.
Listening to Ourselves.
Setting boundaries is also critical for nurturing ourselves as the process reinforces the importance of listening to our feelings, acknowledging what we need, and prioritizing what is important to us. Developing a practice of listening to ourselves by pausing throughout the day and checking in with how we are feeling and what we need can support our commitment to honor our needs. You can develop a practice of taking mindful pauses throughout the day to tune into what you need before you answer a text, eat a meal, use the bathroom, etc. This practice will help you build your confidence, trust in yourself, and courage to honor your needs and set any boundaries in your life. Regularly practicing mindfulness will support you in deepening your awareness of your feelings and needs and empower you to consistently honor them.
Prioritizing Our Needs & Feelings.
Learning to prioritize our needs and feelings is critical to nurturing ourselves. Setting boundaries is an empowering way to demonstrate that we value and respect ourselves and an essential way we let people know how we want to be treated. Every time you set a healthy boundary, you give other people permission to do the same creating healthier relationships, families, and communities. Committing to healthy boundaries is another way to become the artist of your own beautiful life and create powerful ripple effects of health, wellbeing, and healing in the world. Setting boundaries will allow you to honor, express, and protect yourself and become a foundation of your self-nurturing practice.
So, let’s end where we began tuning into to what you need. I invite you to pause, take a deep breath in, let it out, and check in with what you need right now in this moment. Now commit to honoring your need, big or small, as you embrace the art of self-nurturing and nurture peace in the world from the inside out!
Sending you peace, love and gratitude, Kelley
