What if the key to building meaningful relationships with others started with transforming your connection with yourself? In our latest episode, we uncover the profound journey of self-connection and how it serves as the cornerstone of all other relationships. Reflecting on personal experiences, especially after my children grew older, I share how rekindling my passions, like weightlifting, ushered in a stronger sense of self. Discover the importance of slowing down, understanding what truly brings joy, and prioritizing intentional self-care to become the best version of yourself. Today, you'll learn how to...
Structure your daily routines for optimal mental and physical performance
Incorporate my "smart" training practices
Practice the importance of reflection, gratitude, and laughter, with anecdotes featuring my playful dogs Boy and Mickey
As you head into the weekend, be sure to schedule a special moment for yourself, to reinforce that nurturing your well-being is essential for fostering positive relationships with others.
What if the key to building meaningful relationships with others started with transforming your connection with yourself? In our latest episode, we uncover the profound journey of self-connection and how it serves as the cornerstone of all other relationships. Reflecting on personal experiences, especially after my children grew older, I share how rekindling my passions, like weightlifting, ushered in a stronger sense of self. Discover the importance of slowing down, understanding what truly brings joy, and prioritizing intentional self-care to become the best version of yourself. Today, you'll learn how to...
Structure your daily routines for optimal mental and physical performance
Incorporate my "smart" training practices
Practice the importance of reflection, gratitude, and laughter, with anecdotes featuring my playful dogs Boy and Mickey
As you head into the weekend, be sure to schedule a special moment for yourself, to reinforce that nurturing your well-being is essential for fostering positive relationships with others.
Welcome to Uplift you, creating strong bodies and mind. Get ready to power up your day with practical strength training tools, inspiring stories and build resilience of body and mind. It's time to Uplift you, together with your host, leanne Knox. Welcome back to Uplift you. The other day, as I was walking, I was reflecting on the amount of connections that I've made throughout my 51 years of life and I thought that would be a really cool series to do so. I'm going to bring you, over the next three episodes, the ABCs of connection. If we break that acronym down into a three-part series on how to create powerful and meaningful connections, we can start with the concept of A being an opportunity to B build relationships and C to create connections. In this first episode, I'm going to help you build that foundation of creating meaningful connections by starting with the one person whose connection matters the most. That's right, it's yourself.
Speaker 1:
Before you even consider how to build better relationships with others, consider the foundation of what you are building those from. Ask yourself how do we build a relationship with ourselves? Isn't that just something that happens naturally? I can hear you say Well, that is certainly not always the case If you really think about it. How many times have you seen people or even noticed yourself making sure everyone around you is happy, healthy and safe? If you're a parent, do you spend tons of your time taking your kids to sports, preparing them healthy meals, making sure they've got those healthy snacks While you turn up for work, grabbing a McDonald's on the way, working hard all day, running into the house at night, cooking dinner for everyone around you and then collapsing on the couch at night watching TV and going to sleep? Now, if you think of this as a pattern, wash, rinse and repeat, you can see how your relationship with yourself here is certainly not the focus like it should be or it could be. Could I say so?
Speaker 1:
When I look back at the way that I have built a relationship with myself, especially over the last 12 years since my children have been a little older because I will admit, it is very hard when you have young children to find time for yourself and even looking at my life, I look back at when I had my children, and there were many, many, many years where the focus of my life really was looking after other people. Since then, however, as I've delved into the importance of really looking after yourself, I've learned a few things along the way. Now the number one piece of advice, if I could give this to my 20-year-old self would have been slow down and take the time to understand what you really enjoy in life. What are your passions? What do you love doing? What do you love doing that is going to build you up as a person? So, of course, I'm not talking about man. I love eating donuts and drinking copious amounts of coffee and laying on the couch and watching Netflix, because when we look at those behaviors, I wouldn't hesitate to say it's okay to do those every now and then. But if that is how you relax and if that is your version of looking after yourself, then is that really building you up? Is that making you into a stronger, better version of yourself?
Speaker 1:
Wasn't until I was about 40 that I stopped and really took notice of what my everyday life looked like, and it was at that time that I realized that it wasn't really healthy to be sitting inside the house every single day isolating myself because I had so many children, thinking I wasn't a worthy friend or a worthy partner or a worthy family member, even because I had so many responsibilities at home with so many children. And then who the hell would want to hang around someone who had that many responsibilities and that, honestly, that much chaos. So when I turned 40, I thought what really interests me? Think back to when I was younger. What did I really love doing? And I came to the conclusion that what I really got a lot of joy out of as a young person was sport. So that's when I returned to the gym and found my way into the sport of weightlifting, and in doing that I realized that it wasn't just the physicality of my life that was lacking. It was also the ability to stop and have a look at my nervous system, for example, like, how was I down-regulating? How was I taking time out each and every day to down-regulate and allow my nervous system time to relax?
Speaker 1:
In essence, and when I had a really good look at it, I could see that I was jumping from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing each and every day. So I'd wake up in the morning, I would straight away get into feeding the kids, doing the housework. If I had to go out, I'd go out and do the shopping, I'd do all of the stuff in town. Then I'd come home and I'd continue to do housework and I'd look after the kids. Or, if the kids were at school, the kids would come home and then I'd be in the car driving them to football, driving them to netball, driving them to ballet practice and piano practice, and it was one task after the other. And, yeah, you guessed it, it was one task after the next looking after other people. So my relationship with myself was virtually non-existent.
Speaker 1:
So when I did take time to step into something that I knew that I really enjoyed, which was physical exercise, I then started to look at the other parts of my life and I realized that my brain also needed time to have space to relax and to stop and, honestly, to smell the roses. And I realized also that it's something to have a good relationship with yourself, that it's something to have a good relationship with yourself. It needs to be an intentional practice. It needs to be something that, honestly, you put in your diary. If that's what you need to start the process of creating a great relationship with yourself, what I want you to do right now is get out your diary and I want you to start putting in your diary the things that you're going to do for yourself. So, for example, the things that I became very intentional about once I'd taken that step into the physical exercise world were number one sleep, were number one sleep.
Speaker 1:
Even though I'd always not always, but often prioritized my sleep, my sleep was still around other people. So as my children got older and I had the opportunity to make sleep a priority because that is the best way to recover If you are rested and you get great sleep each night, then the stresses of everyday life are so much easier to deal with because you are well rested. So my sleep was something that became non-negotiable. And in that process of putting myself first, it's amazing how many people you alienate in some senses. So no longer are you willing to stay out until 10 o'clock at night, because you know that to get enough sleep and to get good quality sleep, you need to be in bed by 8.30, because you're an early riser, like me, for example. You're an early riser, like me, for example.
Speaker 1:
So the first thing that I really looked at and dialed in was my sleep, and that in itself was a journey, because in order to get a good sleep, the need to put in place really good sleep hygiene was a must. So I started looking at things like music, meditation, making sure that you had that half an hour or one hour of downtime before you actually went to bed, so that your nervous system was downregulated and you were ready for rest. One really good way I found to do this was to use an app, a mindfulness app, to begin this process, because I was new to meditation and I found that if it was a guided meditation, then that actually allowed me to get into the meditation so much easier because someone was guiding me through it, just like having a coach in weightlifting. And so I turned to the app called Calm, and Calm, when you look into it, is a wonderful app. It not only doesn't have guided meditation, but it divides it into so many different areas. So there's sleep, there's anxiety, there's guided meditations for walking, there's guided meditations for walking, there's guided meditations for relationships. So I made calm a daily practice. I used to do 10 minutes during the day and then I used to also do 10 or 15 minutes at night to get that down regulation.
Speaker 1:
The other thing that I found really really good for sleep was a nightly stretching routine, because when you stretch at night, that actually helps relax your brain as well. That puts you into the rest and digest state. So it takes you out of that fight and flight and puts you into the rest, recover and digest. So I used to do a lot of thoracic rotations because they are especially good at putting you into this state, and I found once I started doing that regularly at night, not only did that help me sleep, it also helped my performance the next day or every other day after that, even because my shoulders were more mobile, my thoracic spine was more mobile and even my hip flexors. So sleep was my number one focus when I started thinking how can I help create a better relationship with myself so that I can be a better person and create better relationships with other people?
Speaker 1:
My second one was nutrition, and when I looked at my nutrition, the very first thing that I really did dial in was my protein. So I actually went to a dietician and I started educating myself and learning what is the best nutrition for what I was doing in my daily life, because, of course, everyone has different needs when it comes to nutrition. So learning to understand yourself and nutrition is very powerful, and I found that I was only eating half of the protein, for example, that I should have been eating in order to help me repair the muscle damage that I was doing through my strength training. Also, hydration is a very important part of that, because hydration allows your brain to function properly, it helps your body, it helps you recover from exercise. It actually helps you exercise better, because when you are dehydrated, that can take 10% or more out of your performance. So hydration and nutrition went hand in hand.
Speaker 1:
Third, of course, I looked at my training and I started structuring my training just a little bit more, what I would call smart. So instead of working hard, I started thinking how can I work smart? And what I looked at then was how was my recovery? So how much load was I lifting? How many days or how many hours did I have in between each session? And for a while I even broke up my sessions so that I did my technical training in the morning, because your technical training really does need a lot more what I call brain power, because it's highly technical in the movement patterns, and then I'd use the afternoon to do my strength training, which didn't require quite as much brain power.
Speaker 1:
And here's a really big thing that I introduced and it is one of what I believe, one of the best things that I have done to create a better relationship with myself, for myself and that is a daily walk. And it doesn't need to be a 45-minute walk or an hour's walk, you don't need to go on a trek, but getting outside, breathing in fresh air, looking up at the trees, looking at the birds, listening to the sounds, is one of the most powerful ways to connect to yourself and to give yourself that downtime, time to relax, time to reflect and time to get more clarity on everything that you're trying to achieve, seeing if you're on the right track and going on from there. And, of course, true to form, you can hear a dog, because in every, just about every single one of my podcasts, the dogs decide that they're going to chime in. So in case you didn't know the difference the really deep barking, that's Boy. He's a red cattle dog. The really deep barking, that's Boy, he's a red cattle dog. And if you go onto my Instagram, I'll even put a picture of Boy up on there. I'm going to give oh, and that small bark there, that's little Mickey. He is in the room with me. He likes to be part of my podcasts and I'm sure he's in here just to protect me from anyone that might come in, you know, during this podcasting experience, to come and get me.
Speaker 1:
So, moving right along, I took the time to look after my mind by walking, by meditating with calm, by listening to music and making that a daily practice, and also in these times that gave me time to relax and reflect and really think about some of the wins, some of the wins that I have been able to recognize moving through life. I can reflect and I can look back and go wow, you know, I've, I've had six kids. That's a win in itself and I'm still here to tell the tale. You know I've turned up for myself in training for 10 years and I've, you know, done my level two coaching. I did my four-year university degree with two children and still graduated with honours, even having my third child while I was at university and taking that baby to university with me for the last six months. So just thinking back about all the wonderful things that you've been able to do is a really powerful way to create that strong connection with yourself.
Speaker 1:
And lastly, taking the time to be grateful I can tell you right now I'm not so grateful for the three dogs that seem to enter into this podcast but being grateful for your body, your mind and your opportunity to live your version of your best life. Because, if you look around at the world, it is actually an opportunity and it's a privilege to be able to live your life freely, with freedom and authenticity. So taking the time to be grateful is a very, very, very powerful way to establish that really strong connection with yourself. So, in recapping this episode on taking the opportunity to connect to yourself first before you connect to others, I would just like to remind you that it's not something that is just going to happen. It's something that you get to be intentional about.
Speaker 1:
You get to create the connection with yourself by being intentional, putting yourself in your own diary before anyone else and taking the time to have a laugh when things don't go quite right.
Speaker 1:
You get cranky with yourself, you get annoyed, the dogs bark all throughout the podcast and you know laughter is, honestly what I believe one of the best medicines and, as Mark England from Unlifted Coaches would say, laugh at the devil and he will run away. So, looking forward to our next episode, which will be creating connection with others, I'd like you to right now grab out your diary guys. Grab it out and write something down in that diary that you really want to do for yourself. It can come from any of the areas that I talked about or something that you're passionate about, but I want you now just to get out your diary, put something in on a date and a time and even put reminders in leading up to that. Start to make that part of your everyday practice having something during the day for yourself, to create that beautiful relationship with yourself so that you can be the best, strongest version of you for other people. Until the next episode, stay strong and thanks for being here.
