Many of us start off with a bang and a list of New Year's resolutions,  by the time February rolls around many of us are struggling to stick with the plan.  Habits take over, we go on autopilot and our good intentions get lost in the rush of everyday of life and business.  So what can we do? I recently read a great little book by M. J. Ryan titled Habit Changers., it's packed with a plethora of short, simple, easy to remember mantras to help us mindfully reach our goals.  We've all heard of using affirmations to help us reach our goals. in an interesting twist Ryan mentions adding gestures to make the mantra kinesthetic and copying and placing it where you can see it many times a day to make it visual. 

As a visual practitioner I believe if writing out the mantra is good then a drawing picture will surely be better, as the old axiom says a picture is worth a thousand words. The mantra I chose from the book is "Taking care of yourself is part of your job". As every woman and solopreneur knows it's much too easy to put the needs of others and the business ahead of our own self-care.  I wondered what kind of pictures could help me keep self-care higher on my to-do list.

First I needed a picture of where self-care could fall in a typical week. A pie chart is just the right picture when you want to see parts of a whole.

This was a great start but left me wondering what exactly did I mean by self-care? A few simple circles helped me focus on three aspects of self-care, physical, mental and spiritual and define what those would look like.

Once I had these three pictures it was an easy step to combine the circles to see where these aspects of self-care might overlap, to get more self-care bang for my buck. 

Things like doing walking meditation around our local lake, reading a book on the treadmill,  having a sketching session at the local botanical garden or listening to a sermon while practicing yoga.

These simple pictures have helped me make self-care something I look forward to and do on a regular basis.

What habit would you like to change and what pictures could you draw to help you achieve your goal?