There's always going to be something new to recover from. There's always going to be something new in your life that's going to be challenging to work through. Let’s talk about it.

I received a beautiful message from one of the podcast listeners who had listened to an episode I recorded in the summer on Recovery mindset. His words and takeaways moved me to revisit this concept of developing a recovery mindset.

I love it when y’all message me :)

I had recorded an episode on authenticity that was planned to release this week, written a blog and somehow forgot to schedule it. I feel like that was a sign that we needed to talk about recovery again. 

Then the Universe wanted to make sure I was listening, and when I sat down with my mindset coach yesterday, guess what our topic of discussion was? The blend of the high-performance mindset with the recovery mindset.

I’ve been brought up to do my best, push my hardest, don’t back down. As a young adult and even into my 40’s it’s a delicate dance between hustle, doing everything I can culture, and fitting in my self care. As I described in my book Be Weightless, I didn’t really know all the things about self care. To do the things that let my body know I liked it. I’m working with it and giving it what it needs to continue to unconditionally give me what I’m asking from it.

That includes a recovery mindset. In fact, it’s the recovery mindset that has carried me through my darkest times and my biggest wins.

As I record this, it’s January 2022, and wherever you are in the world, you are recovering from something right now. We all are. Emotionally, financially, physically, it’s all the same. They all have an impact on overall wellness.

How can you adopt a recovery mindset when the world seems to want you to have only a high-performance mindset? The truth is, you must have the recovery mindset to be able to be the long-term high achiever. It’s not one or the other. They go hand in hand.

It's something that I've gone through many times in my life. Recovery. Sometimes things have hit me so hard, the length of time I’m in recovery seems to never end. 

Adopting the recovery mindset starts with 

Facing the truth

You have to see it. You must face that ugly truth. Embrace it with two hands and say, this is where I am and this is my reality right now. It does no one any good if I'm miserable about it, it does nobody any good if I'm not taking ownership and just sitting in the corner feeling sorry for myself. Okay, you can sit there for a minute. It’s okay to feel like crap. But you have to get up.

See it as it is and take it for what it is. No matter what you're recovering from facing that reality, embracing the ugly is what I referred to it as because it's usually painful. In some cases, you may have let yourself or someone else down, and you may have to pull back from a promise you made, or you may have to just take a good long stare in the mirror and realize you did this to yourself.

Recovery is usually painful. You're embracing what you're about to move into, which is going to be a lot of hard work, whether it's physical or mental or both, it's going to be hard work. 

Protect your pulse

The second thing is to protect your pulse. When I  talk about pulse, it's in relation to body and boundaries.

Put yourself in the situations and the mindset and the environment of the people that are going to feed you good energy. People that are in the same headspace of where you want to be.  It also means protecting your calendar. No matter if this is a physical thing or a mental thing, there's going to be homework. You're going to have to schedule that in.

Whenever something new is scheduled in, something else has to fall off your plate. So you Sometimes things that need to be cut out. Like, do I need to be scrolling social media or do I need to take on that extra client right now? Or that extra load?

Sometimes things need to be postponed even if you know you are letting someone else down. The homework you need to do to move through this time is going to give you more capacity in the long run. If you are feeling broken now, it will only get worse if you continue serving the things that don’t matter the most to your recovery.

When I know I'm going to have more hours and more of my mental and physical capacity being a caregiver, maybe it's not the time to train for a marathon. Maybe it's time to cut back a little. My body won’t fall apart if I focus on lighter intensity training to allow space for recovery.

Protecting your pulse is protecting everything that you're going to need to do. Maybe it's internal work and when you're doing internal work, you're going to need that time to absorb what is transforming for you at that moment?

Recovery is hard. It's hard work. Protect your pulse, protect your energies, and protect your calendar. 

Practice 

You have to show up for it every single day. Some days you might have to scale back a little bit on time but you still need to show up.

That's where the results come. If you show up every day, you're going to get a win. It might be a small win, but you're going to get a win. The bottom line is recovery is not one and done. 

Recovery is an ongoing process because once you've been somewhere that you need to have recovery, It's going to continue to be a part of your life, whether you want it to or not.

In the last 2 years, I’ve become more in tune with recovery than ever before out of necessity to keep my perimenopausal symptoms at bay. It works, but it works even better when self care is used as a continuum instead of using it as a quick fix. 

Adopting a recovery mindset is preventative medicine for the mind, body & soul.

How do you know if you need to prioritize recovery?

Symptoms can show up as fear, anxiety and depression. Other times it can show up as pain, physical pain, and of course, it can show up as injury.

If we take that and transform that into mental health or some other different type of recovery, maybe it's recovery, it's the same thing. You're going to pull up that external work.

If you do the work you will find connections to the trigger points. The path forward reveals itself.

No matter what you're recovering from, there is help all around you. It’s up to you to accept it.