I was all set to take my first vacation in nearly a year – a trip to South America that had been planned for months. Then I got Covid (again).

With the trip canceled, I spent the next two days under the duvet watching two seasons of the
toxic masculinity that is Succession. As I emerged from the fog of Covid (and that show), I decided to create the restoration I needed with the rest of my time. Even if it was from home.

And it got me thinking about the importance of staycations. We would do well to carve out some time each week (frankly, each day) where we engage in restorative activities. Here are the ones I found the most helpful and why.

1. Do Nothing

I cozied up on my outdoor porch with my dogs, pillows, and blankets and did nothing. By the way, the dogs are not incidental and there is a reason beyond airline travel that so many people call their pets emotional support animals. Cuddling with something furry helps you ease back into your parasympathetic nervous system, release love hormones, and feel calmer.

I centered my body. I focused on my breathing and my senses, which was made more difficult by Covid, since both my lungs and sense of smell were affected by the virus. But I embraced the challenge because it meant that I really had to focus.

I also paid attention to what I could hear (children playing in the park behind my house) and feel (warm sun, cool early spring breeze). Somatic awareness matters. When we are feeling fear or pain, or we are in a reactive state, focusing on our body, breath, and physical sensations, are quick and easy ways to return us to a calmer state. Practicing this when we are not experiencing heightened emotions improves our ability to use this technique when we are in a state of stress.

Most importantly, because I had blocked the time in my diary to be away and had no work planned, I didn’t use the time to “catch up” on emails or other work. We live our lives in a constant state of needing to get things done. And even our holiday, had we taken it, was a fully scheduled itinerary of events. I had no idea how much I needed to do nothing.

2. Read Fiction

I am an avid reader of non-fiction, often devouring what I’ve come to refer to as “Heathrow Business Books” – those that you pick up in the airport and finish in flight. I read with pen in hand and make notes of what I can use in my teaching or what I can share with my coaching clients. The time is productive and enjoyable. But I hadn’t read a work of fiction in months. I’m noticing that my attention span is taking a beating from all the scrolling and clicking. To sit with a book in solitude was challenging at first. But by the fourth day, I noticed that I couldn’t wait to pick up the book and slip back into another world. It’s hard at first, like hitting the gym after a month off. But, oh, so worth it.

3. Indoor Gardening

I spent one day tending to all my plants, cutting away the dead leaves, giving them plant food, moving them outside for a couple of hours of straight sunshine, adding dirt to a few, and cleaning the leaves of others. This only whet my appetite for outdoor gardening, which will also start soon. Watching something grow is rewarding and healing. Keeping plants inside works wonders, and you can add an even heftier dose of calm if you’re fortunate enough to have some land outdoors that you can tend to. Even the Mayo Clinic in the US has researched the benefits of working with plants, including lightening mood, lowering stress and anxiety and creating a soothing rhythm.

4. Reflecting on What I Do and Why it Matters

As I said before, I intentionally did not use my staycation to catch up on emails or other work because that wouldn’t be a break. But I did take some time to reflect on what I do and why I do it. I thought deeply about it and considered it from a different perspective. If I am successful at what I do, how will I know?

• The women I coach will know what they want to do and why
• The women I coach will be in leadership positions where they work.
• The women I coach will receive raises and promotions.
• The women I coach will believe in themselves and advocate for themselves.
• The women I coach will feel equipped to challenge workplace bias.
• The women I coach will be able to name their mentors and their sponsors.
• The women I coach will help other women.
• The women I coach will believe in themselves and their worth.

There is not a day that goes by that I am not having at least one of these conversations with a woman. These conversations energize me, give me hope, inspire me, and keep me focused on improving the quality of my coaching and helping my clients achieve these things.

When you put the people that you serve first, the rewards are endless.

How can you create restorative practices and incorporate them into your life to help you maintain a sense of calm and cultivate resilience?

It’s that time of year again where many of us engage in some reflection, and we coaches have many exercises to choose from in helping us think about who we are and who we want to become. One I’ve been thinking about this week is reframing your story. Because as the novelist John Barth said, “the story of your life is not your life, it’s your story.”

In this exercise we think of a challenge or a challenging period in our lives that we survived. We consider what skills we relied upon and how they served us. We then think about how we are using those skills now – it’s a post-traumatic growth practice. And it can help us to reframe and reclaim our own narrative.

This year, I want to share my story with you in the hopes that it may resonate or help you in some way.

When I was very young, I felt the light inside me. In my memory (or my imagination though I’ve come to see those as having more in common than I once believed), the world was indeed light. And I experienced my own light as a source of personal joy and warmth.

My understanding of the world changed quickly when I was five, as so many children of divorce or people who have experienced trauma may also know. What really changed was my relationship to my light (though I couldn’t have named it back then). The light was still inside me and I still used it for warmth, but as a survival skill.

In dark moments, I noticed that when I shined my light on other people, they seemed somehow better. They smiled more in response to my smile, they laughed more in response to my laugh, and it seemed like they felt better. And that made me feel better.

I suppose this happened first in my immediate family. Some of them described me as being the one who brought the fun or the party, the one who delighted and entertained, or the one who always lit up the room. Like many things about which we are unconscious, it wasn’t a deliberate act to shine my light on other people. It’s just what I learned to do so that things didn’t seem so dark. One day though, one of my sisters told me, “It is so warm in your light, Ali, but when you turn your light away, it gets really cold.”

I didn’t understand what she meant back then, but I do now. I could only shine my light on one person at a time, and only for as long as it was making someone else feel good, which in turn made me feel better and like I knew who I was. I experienced relationships like this: if I shine my light on you, then you will show me the best part of you – something I will call your light. And somewhere in that overlap of my light and yours, I will find myself.

When the combination of the light stopped making me feel good or believing I was still on a path to get any closer to my true self, or when it went dark, I left. Turning my light elsewhere.

I hurt a lot of people this way.

My deepest friendships were affected by this and so were many, many unsuccessful relationships.

Of course, no relationship can survive if that is the foundation. The whole them needing my light and me needing their light to find myself only got me further away from knowing who I was. The real me sat minimized in the shadows.

In my late 40s, my marriage ended. In the beginning, our relationship took its usual course. I shined my light on him and in its warmth, he shined. And that made me feel better. 

But after a while, I needed to shine my light elsewhere. On friends. On work colleagues and clients. On my child. On my dying father. And each time, I saw another version of myself in the colliding light and I had to ask myself, who am I?  Who am I other than the person who shines light on others?

When my marriage ended, I left a grey British sky for the beaches of Southern California. Land of light. Because I already had one of the best coaches ever, I hired a therapist for my head and my body, a meditation teacher, and an energy healer. I taught my Brittany Spaniel who was a trained bird dog to sit on a paddle board while we soaked in the light in Newport Beach. I bathed in light for four years.

My teachers and healers showed me how to bring the light back inside of me, how to practice a loving-kindness meditation, and how to use my own light to heal me. I learned to find joy and warmth once again in my own light. And I learned to love and connect with my family and friends in genuine care, profound respect and unbridled laughter, with or without me doing my old job of shining the light.

Light brings me joy and keeps me warm. I can shine it all around all the time and I don’t lose myself. And I don’t do it because of how it makes others feel. I know my light helps others in their own journeys, and I have gratitude for that, but it is not why I shine light. 

I learned that I don’t need to be the light because I am light.

How do you take something you used as a survival skill to create a more empowered you?