Welcome to the Own Your Health Podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
So we're coming up on the holidays here,
coming up on Christmas, and I'm sure everyone
is busy with plans and shopping and gifts
and menus and all of those fabulous things.
And so I wanted to talk today about the
best gift you can give yourself this holiday season.
And if you're like me, you've occasionally been known
to find something that you absolutely have to have
while you're shopping for someone else that kind of
just finds it into your online shopping cart or
maybe into your packages coming out of the shops.
But this gift today that I want to talk about
is an intangible, and it's absolutely free, so it will
not add to the burden of the holiday season.
All kidding aside, one of the best gifts that
I've ever given myself is the gift of grace.
And when I first started hearing about this years and
years ago, I would hear a couple of different messages,
and one was a very somber, very heavily spiritual sense
of, you have to give yourself grace.
And it sounded very, a little ominous, certainly difficult,
certainly beyond what I could do for myself.
And the other way that I heard the
term used was just give yourself grace.
And in that perspective or in
that use, it sounded almost flippant.
And that's what I heard the most often.
And so the phrase give yourself grace, to me
became this, almost this excuse for letting yourself off
the hook, for not doing something you were supposed
to do or for not keeping up.
Now, since then, that definition has
evolved very much for me.
But I share that because it's one that you
may think of or you may relate to.
That might be what comes to mind when I say that the
best gift you can give yourself is the gift of grace.
And so I want to share today how my definition of
that has evolved from something that just means simply letting yourself
off the hook for not doing what you were supposed to
be doing to a true understanding that giving yourself grace is
a deep understanding that you are, in any moment, doing the
best you can with what you have.
You're doing the best you can with
the time that you have to give.
You're doing the best you can with the
energy that you have in the moment.
And often you're doing the best you can with the
money that you have to put into any particular endeavor.
And that may seem a little bit less glamorous or spiritual
to talk about, but we often feel like we're coming up
short when it comes to time, energy and money.
And what we should be doing should be giving.
There's that word that should-ing all
over yourself that I highly discourage.
But we all do it, especially this time of year.
And this time of year especially, we tend to
encounter, and I'm going to talk more about this,
the stories that we carry with us.
But for today, we tend to have
memories, we tend to have sometimes regrets.
We tend to have wishes that we could
do over of holiday seasons and celebrations and
interaction with family and friends from the past.
And I should have really done more.
I should have really visited so and so more,
or I should really travel to see these relatives.
I should really be cooking from scratch.
I should really host.
I should really be giving back.
I should really be giving more.
And all of this should-ing all over yourself is
really kind of the opposite of giving yourself grace.
And so I encourage you to think about giving yourself
grace when you acknowledge that right now, in this moment,
you're doing the best you can with what you have.
Okay, so let's get practical.
What does this look like in doing the best
you can with what you have with your time?
It means only committing to those things that you really
want to do, and you actually have time to do,
because frankly, you're not going to be a whole lot
of use to anyone, including yourself, if you come out
of the holidays sick and tired and sometimes maybe even
crabby if you're like me.
So only doing, only committing your time to
what you can truly do with integrity.
And that adds a little edge to that.
That adds a little bit of counterweight to the urge
that we sometimes have to have so many commitments.
I can do this.
I can just stop in for a little while.
I can just run in and do this really quick.
So whether it's stacks of errands, whether it's trying
to fit in numbers of visits during the holiday
season with relatives or with friends, ask yourself this,
what can I do with integrity?
And commit to only those things that really are doing the best
you can with what you have. The best you can with the
time, energy and money you have to put in it.
And very often, giving yourself grace does look a
lot like staying in integrity or doing with integrity.
So that when you think about can I really
fit in three visits with three different family members
on a Tuesday evening, well, none of you are
going to spend any valuable time.
You probably can't.
You can't remain in integrity with the attention that
you would want to give to the conversation, with
the time that you would want to spend with
an individual if you need to be thinking about
getting up and rushing off to the next place.
And by the time you get to the third stop,
are you really carrying the Christmas spirit with you anyways?
No, you're simply checking off boxes.
And that really probably isn't remaining within integrity on
how you want to interact with these people.
So the antidote to that is giving yourself the grace
to choose something else, to choose fewer visits, to spread
the visits out, to visit someone in January, to send
a card explaining the time that you'll spend with them,
promising an activity at a later date so that you
can give yourself the grace to do what you can
really do well to the best of your ability and
still remain in integrity.
So what does this look like
for over commitment of money?
I think that's one that a lot
of people can really relate to.
We don't want to give ourselves grace
and acknowledge that maybe our budget is
tighter than other times this year. Maybe it's not.
Maybe we have a bigger budget for gifts this year.
Giving yourself grace means that you don't go back and
try to make up for not having the money to
spend last year, but you rather you spend with integrity,
and you give yourself grace to know that you're doing the
best you can with your money at this moment in time.
So it may be giving gifts to individuals. It
may be making donations to charities. It may be
just giving to collection boxes on the street.
But by giving yourself grace to really make that
decision, deciding how you want to spend in the
very best way with what you have right now,
is truly a gift that you give yourself.
So, time, very easy to measure money, very easy
to measure, energy - that's a little bit trickier.
And I think this is the one that took me
the longest to really give myself grace because very often
I would have technically have time on my calendar or
have money in my checking account, but I just didn't
have the energy to do what was either being asked
of me or what I was asking of myself.
And, and the biggest way that giving myself grace and
that adopting or evolving into this definition of this fabulous
concept was when I actually learned to say, no, I
don't have the energy today to attend, or I don't
have the energy today to participate.
And I look forward to it at some time in the future.
But right now, tonight, I need to take care of myself.
And that was kind of my learning
to give myself grace after I adopted
or maybe the first step was adopting
a better definition of what that meant.
And the integrity piece really helped with that.
Then giving myself grace with my time and then
with my money came probably a little bit easier.
And giving myself grace with my energy has been
the biggest challenge, but also the most rewarding and
the most impactful on my personal health.
So I'd love to encourage you to consider your
definition of giving yourself grace, to maybe entertain the
way that you can give yourself grace with your
time, with your money, and with your energy.
And maybe yours will come much easier with energy.
I'd love to hear how this process works for you.
In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you
next week, and let's go out and own it.
