Hello and welcome to Otus Counselling’s first ever blog post!
This month is ‘Self-care Awareness Month’ or ‘Self-care September’.
If you are the type of person who finds self-care easy then you may be surprised to learn that many people find it unnatural and difficult. There are a few different reasons for this but I wanted to share one in particular with you.
Some people mistakenly believe that practising self-care involves the following: lowering your standards; settling for less than you are capable of; allowing yourself to become lazy and self-indulgent etc. Let me assure you that this is not what good self-care is all about!
When I talk about “being kind and compassionate to yourself”, I mean that we are only human and we all need activities that replenish us so that we can be the best versions of ourselves. I don’t for one minute mean that we should stop working hard and instead aim for bang average!
One way we can be kind to ourselves is to endeavour to only be constructively self-critical and avoid being destructively self-critical. We’ll explore the difference between these two in the next blog post.