Let Your Freak Flag Fly: Embracing Your Quirks as Superpowers

As I start to write this, I wonder how many of you know that the title, Let Your Freak Flag Fly, is a song from the Movie Shrek.

If you knew then you’re my type of person. If you didn’t, you’re still my type of person. 

This is something a lot of people don’t know about me that might be weird. The music I listen to. If you looked at all the songs inside of my Apple account, you might think it belongs to 10 different people. That's because it kind of started that way. I used to share this account with all three of my kids when they were kids, so the music is a cornucopia of every genre known to mankind.

From gangster rap to what I call screamer music, to musical theater. I have it all and I love it. The level that the music my kids listened to influenced me is huge and vice versa. I love all types of music and it all relates to different feelings and time periods in my life. I love this about music. 

I love the profound ...

Following Joy: How To Add Self Care into Your Daily Life w/ Ease

As you might have seen I just added a new series on the Soul Aligned Self Care Podcast

that will be released every Monday called, Your Weekly Self Care Practice (Listen Here).

Every week I’m going to be giving you a quick and easy self care practice that you can use right away to help improve your week!

Some of the benefits of practicing self-care daily are: 

• Reduced Stress: Regular self-care activities help to alleviate stress by providing moments of relaxation and rejuvenation, allowing you to better cope with life's challenges.
• Improved Physical Health: Self-care practices such as exercise, healthy eating, and adequate sleep contribute to better physical health, boosting immunity and energy levels.
• Enhanced Mental Well-being: Engaging in self-care activities promotes mental clarity, emotional stability, and resilience, leading to improved overall mental health and well-being.
• Increased Productivity: Tak...

Creating Your Personalized Self Care Tool Box

So, what is your Self Care Tool Box? That’s a pretty legit question because it can mean a lot of things. 

A self-care toolbox are solutions you create for yourself that help you work through difficult situations and emotions. It's about learning what helps you feel better and move through those tough emotions and situations and taking note of it in a notebook or journal and then being intentional to use those tools when you need them.

When we take the time to create a space in our journal or if you don’t have a journal, in a notebook where you keep track of what helps you feel better and also helps you move through those tough emotions, you can then respond to your life and not just continuously react.

So, I suppose the next question would be, what are tough emotions?

Well, some of the tough emotions for me would be sadness, stress, anxiety, anger, and frustration. Everyone is different though and so you would name the ones that you st...

Most of us have this negative reaction when we hear about failure. 

It’s viewed as this bad thing that we need to avoid. The dreaded F Word!

What a lot of us don’t realize or ignore is that failure is just a part of the process as your work your way to success. 

Most successful people will tell you. In order to succeed or reach a goal or dream you will have to fail forward. 

The more we can define this F-word as FEEDBACK instead of FAILURE the faster we can reach our goals. 

Think about it. We set a goal, or we have a dream. We then take the next step and that is we decide how we will move forward to reach this goal. (The first step) 

We then take the step. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time it's a little of both. 

What happens next is the most important part of being successful. 

• Do you say to yourself, well that didn’t work, guess I’m not cut out for this and then go back to whatever you’ve been doing before this goal. 

OR

• You say to yourse...

(Exercise Included in this post) Originally the topic of this post was, Eating Real Food, sounds so silly, right?

I have to tell you though, the next time you go to the grocery store tell me how much “real’ food is there. 

The answer is, not a lot

That is if you define real food as something that comes from the earth or a food that has 5 or less ingredients…real ingredients. 

For real, the next time you go, pay attention to everything around you. There is not a lot of real whole healthy food. 

When someone asks me the way to get healthy and lose weight, I just say, Eat Real Whole Food. I also eat plant-based but I leave that for another post. For now, I want you to just agree to focus on this for your health. 

Most people think it can’t be that simple. Well, putting any other serious health issues aside that some people might be struggling with, yes, it is that simple. 

It’s just not easy to do. The food industry makes it hard for us to figure out what we should and should not e...

This is the last step in the decluttering practice and if you haven't read the other two you can visit them here:

Deep Level Self Care Series: Decluttering The Mind

Deep Level Self Care Series: Creating Flow In Your Life with Decluttering

Inside the SASC Bootcamp I call this decluttering your processes. It’s about looking at the way you do everything in your life, your standard operating procedures, and finding all the places you find friction and discomfort and then trying to remove, reduce, and improve. 

The more we refine these things, the more we remove stress, anxiety, and overwhelm. We reduce our chance of burnout. 

As I said at the beginning of this series, there are 11 practices I share in the Bootcamp and when you put all of them together they create a powerhouse of support for you. When you make the decision to support yourself at this level you create a mindset shift for yourself to always have your own back and to put your health and wellness at the forefront of your m...

Last week I talked about how After I had a stroke at 39 from stress I had to learn how to care for myself at a deep level in order to survive. What I didn’t talk about is the 11 Deep-Level Self Care practices I used to get there but I’m not just surviving, I’m thriving! 

My biggest lesson and message I share is that when you learn that deep-level self-care is NOT selfish, putting yourself first is NOT selfish. It serves everyone. 

That statement might trigger a few people. I know it would have me triggered years ago because I based my worth on how I cared for others and how much I could do for others. 

Basing your worth on something outside of yourself is a recipe for disaster. Depending on another person or situation to make you feel good, happy, and fulfilled in life will always leave you feeling unsatisfied and puts unneeded pressure on all of your relationships. The only person that can do those things for yourself is you. 

By using these self-care practices my intention at the...

The Difference Between Surface & Deep Level Self Care & Why You Need Both

When I share what I do with the world I always share that I’m a Deep-Level Self-Care & Mindset Coach. When I say this I know that most people don’t know what I mean by that and think, “Why would I need a Self Care Coach?”.

Today I want to talk about the difference between surface-level self-care and deep-level self-care and why you need both of these infused into your daily life in order to put the best and healthiest version of yourself with the world. 

First, let’s define surface-level self-care. These are things like the bubble bath, getting your nails done, spending some time outside, and lunch with a friend. 

This type of self-care is important but will not have any lasting effect on your life if you're not taking care of yourself on a deeper level.

Deep-level self-care is working on yourself at a deeper level. For example, setting and maintaining boundaries in order to protect your time and energy. Lea...

I have given a lot of time to think about how cool it would be to go through your younger years of life with all the knowledge I have now as a woman in my mid-life era or what I like to call my Villan Era, oh how much fun it would be. I would be so powerful it would be dangerous. 

This is why when I see the younger generations of women stepping into their power so amazingly I am in the front row of their cheering section. I’ll do anything to champion these young girls and women and live through their experiences with the pride of a mother. I will also do everything to raise that generation up. 

That’s where the topic came from for this blog. If I could send my younger self all my knowledge from the life that I lived so far, what would it be? What would I say to that young, insecure girl with a full life ahead of her? 

Here are some of the things on my list:

Don’t care about what anyone else thinks or says.

Nobody out there cares what you're doing. I swear, NOBODY.  Everyone is foc...

I’m a dog person for sure. As in, my dogs are my second set of children. I’ve learned there are a couple of different levels of “dog person”. There's my crazy level. Then there are people who say they’re dog people but have to wash their hands after they touch one (Not from allergies) Now there is no hate coming from me. It’s just me noticing a difference. 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become closer with my dogs. You know through the pandemic and them being my most favorite companions ever.

There is a lot to say about the love and companionship we get from our pets or if you're like me, your furbabies, and today I want to share a few things I’ve learned just from watching and spending so much time with them.

These things I believe are life-changing, meaning they can change our health and our relationships for the better. How many times have you heard people say, “I like animals more than I like people” There is a reason for that and I believe we should all take a closer look ...