Stretch Yourself

By: Eithne Egan
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:41:50
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For me, the beginning of Fall is a great time to re-examine my goals and spend a little time on myself. With my son heading back at school, I am looking forward to having an opportunity to stretch myself a little beyond my comfort zone and try to accomplish something new. I’m sure this will resonate for many moms. Mothering can sometimes get us stuck in a rut and it’s nice have some aspirations that can be met with just a little bit of effort and creativity. This can go a long way towards boosting our self-esteem and creating a bit more balance in our lives.

Often our kids are our best teachers here. They fearlessly approach new milestones, never worrying about failure. My son recently learned to dress himself at the grand old age of three and half (delays in self-care skills are common in kids with autism). Now he is having great fun dragging clothes out of the laundry basket and putting the most outlandish outfits together. This is something quite simple that has brought him a lot of joy (and me too!) and has given him a new sense of confidence and empowerment. So if a three-year old can do it, why not you?

I’ll give you a personal story of something I recently experienced and how I went about setting myself some new goals to stretch myself a bit. For background, I am a single mom with a child with special needs. I had been spending a lot of time with my son and had started to feel exhausted and stuck in a rut. I felt she was doing things the same way I had always done them, and somehow it just wasn’t working anymore. So I decided to try a few things to test my courage and see what happened. I made a list of a few goals that I could accomplish quickly:

1. Accept an offer of babysitting from my child’s teacher

2. Arrange to meet a woman I had recently connected with (but didn’t know very well) at my son’s therapy group

3. Tell someone I loved how I was really feeling

These goals were actually not as small as they might seem from the outside. I deliberately chose these things because they required me to do something I would not ordinarily do – ask for help. Sound familiar, anyone? These seemingly simple actions actually helped me achieve a number of important things. By reaching out and accepting help I was taking small but significant steps towards improving my support system, making some time for fun, and testing my confidence. I accomplished all three goals and having done so, realized something significant. I realized that I had a very strong belief that was really holding me back: “I can do it on my own.” This belief had served me very well during my divorce. The prospect of raising a special needs child alone was daunting, and I needed to believe that I could handle the demands ahead of me on my own, as a single parent. It gave me the courage I needed to move forward, and move forward I did. But now this belief was holding me back and preventing me from creating more joy in my life. This realization gave me the awareness and power I needed to experience something different in my life, and it came simply from the desire to stretch myself a little.

You can see how a very simple exercise can bring you invaluable insights that can be an essential part of your self-care. It’s also a helpful way to identify old limiting beliefs that may be holding you back. I hope you’ll try this, and I’d love to find out what you learned.

The Essence Exercise

1. Identify an area in your life where you are feeling bored or unhappy.

2. Set yourself at least one simple goal that you think might help you move beyond the current state of affairs. Remember, it can be something very simple, but it should be something that requires you to stretch a little beyond your comfort zone. For example, I reached out for help at a time when I was feeling stressed and overwhelmed – a relatively easy task – but not easy for me because of my closely-held belief that I needed to be able to cope on my own.

3. Once you’ve completed your task, spend some time contemplating what you’ve learned. How did you feel? What opportunities have opened up as a result? Can you identify any limiting beliefs that you could work on letting go of because of this activity?

4. Repeat, repeat, repeat… It’s really important that we constantly challenge ourselves in small ways. You don’t have to go bungee-jumping or run a marathon (unless you want to, and then by all means, go ahead!), but it can be really helpful to continue to test our boundaries in small ways on a regular basis. By doing this, you’re inviting new energy and possibility into your life. For moms, this is really essential as we can often become so absorbed with our kids that we can easily forget to pay a little attention to our own personal growth as women.

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