Take Back your Time this Holiday Season

Please pardon this emergency interruption of your regularly scheduled blog reading… but have you realized what time of year it is?!?

That’s right. For the bajillions of people around the word (rough estimate) who celebrate the “Holiday Season,” it’s here. It’s Holiday time.  You probably noticed the inflatable snowmen, wreathes, and gingerbread house kits that have been showing up on store shelves for about 3 weeks now. Or maybe you’ve noticed all the Turkey themed projects and toilet paper roll pilgrims on your Facebook news feed (or maybe that’s just me?).  Or perhaps you’ve noticed that there is more candy and junk food in the break room at work.  It was innocent at first… people were bringing their leftover Halloween candy. But now new things are showing up… like pies and doughnuts… you know those weren’t being handed out to trick-or-treaters!

So what’s your self-care plan? Back up.  Do you HAVE a plan?

Chances are if you’re reading this you’re one of my people. Call us a tribe, a community, or focused human awesomeness if there’s one thing I know about my people it’s the fact that we are all working on living the best life possible.  And to do that, we are continuously working on improving ourselves in one way or another. Be it in fitness, nutrition, relationships, business, or overall health and well being, we are committed to growing.  Sometimes more slowly than we like, other times so fast we can hardly keep up ourselves.  But just like the tortoise from The Tortoise and the Hare we continuously put one foot in front of the other.

Ten months out of the year, it’s not that bad. Sure, there can be rough spots and seasons that we move through, but overall we keep moving. And then it happens.  THEY happen. The Holidays.

Our perfectionist selves go into overdrive making sure the house and food are “just-so” and we are Pinterest worthy hosts.  As guests, we meticulously go over the dish we are bringing… making sure it includes no potential allergens or unsightly drips… Instagram ready.  We have school plays and concerts to attend, end of the season sports events, and a calendar at Church and other organizations that would make anyone’s head spin.

And with all of these things going on, we tend to do one of two things:

1.      Forget about taking care of ourselves completely.  It’s just not going to happen again until January, and we are just going to have to deal with that.  We eat the office food, we stop working out entirely, and we pull all-nighters to make 12 dozen batches of cookies for the cookie swap. We’ll deal with the emotional and physical baggage of the added stress and weight in January.

2.      We try to keep our fitness and self-care routine exactly the same as it has been the rest of the year with no wiggle room… and we begin to resent something in the process. Maybe it’s the PiYo class that we love… but is nearly impossible to squeeze in between Suzy’s orchestra concert and Billy’s youth group volunteer event.  Or maybe it’s our children and/or loved ones events. Or maybe it’s the ladies in your community group who are still managing to always show up put together, with Pinterest perfect dishes… five minutes early (when for you, five minutes late is a miracle right now).

You may fall in one of those categories… or maybe even a little of both. Heck, you may fall into a category of your own.  Either way, you don’t HAVE to be that person this year.  You get to choose how your holiday season goes, no one else.

First things first- you are allowed to say no.

Yup, that is SO important, I’m going to repeat it again.  You are ALLOWED to say no.

In fact, I’m even going to go so far to say that you should always say no at first, or rather, I’ll think about it.  Instead of immediately answering “yes” to all of the activities and requests that are made of you, let the person asking know that you need to check your schedule first. I know this isn’t always easy, and it may even be something you’ve never done before.  In that case, here’s a script you can use:

“Thank you so much for thinking of me! I need to check my schedule because if I commit to [insert requested item here], I want to make sure I can do it to the best of my ability. When do you need a commitment?”

Memorize that if you need to.  Seriously.  Not only are you valuing your time and sanity, but you are valuing the asker as well by finding out when she needs an answer.  That being said, if she needs an answer immediately- it’s okay to say no.  Most requests and activities do not need an immediate answer. If they do, it’s generally because the requester has waited too long to do the requesting.  You’ve probably heard it before, but remember the saying:

Next week we’re going to talk about creating specific health and fitness goals over the holidays, and why it’s important to create goals specifically for this time of year.

What do you need to start saying “no” or “I’ll check my schedule” to before you commit?