Self-Care Planning: Building Self Compassion Routine

Do you struggle with how to do self compassion? Today we're going to make a standard operating procedure, but with a twist. Our SOP will be all about doing self compassion.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

Hi, I'm Cassie Winter. Inside my signature productivity and self care program, the Action Navigator, I help neurodivergent and chronically ill individuals just like you master a toolset for genuine self care and a bias toward action so they can finally choose where to spend their precious time and energy to create the life they want.

Now it's your turn. First of all, what is a standard operating procedure or sop? This is terminology often used in the corporate world to imply processes and workflows. No matter who is in charge of a task, it is a standardized project, workflow, order of operations, yada yada yada. In one's personal life, an SOP tends to simply be a routine or a ritual. Recently I did another video on self compassion relating to how if you have executive dysfunction, being compassionate with yourself can be really difficult.

One of the solutions I offered for that was to create a standard operating procedure. So you always know what to do literally and in what order in those moments you want to work on being compassionate with yourself. A lot of people were like, yes, teach us how to do that in the comments. So here we are. The plan for today is threefold. First of all, we're going to define our purpose for a self compassion sop.

Then we're going to brainstorm and choose steps. And lastly, we're going to decide on our habit triggers. If you've been around a while and you've seen this video in particular, where I rebuilt my morning routine for myself, this process is going to sound really familiar. If you're in my program, the Action Navigator, this is a streamlined version of the routine builder cheat sheet. If you're in my program, I actually recommend using that cheat sheet instead to build your SOP because it goes into much greater detail on each step.

More granularity, if you will. First up, we need to define our purpose. It may seem like it's a given in this situation. Well, like the point is to be self compassionate, Cassie. Yes, but what does that mean to you? To help give you a jumping off point, I'll talk a little bit about what being self compassionate means to me. Being self compassionate means not judging or shaming myself.

And it also means making choices that support my mental, emotional and physical health. I could get even more specific than that if I wanted to. And I do recommend that you get as specific as possible so you really understand what self compassion means to you, and also not just what it means to you, but what you hope being self compassionate will result in. For example, when I hope to be self compassionate with myself, I hope that practicing that over time will make it less automatic for me to be judgmental and shameful towards myself.

I can already tell you because I've been doing this work for so long that's been working and it's one of the things that I help my clients with. So defining your purpose is about defining what self compassion means to you and what you hope being self compassionate will accomplish for you in your life or at this point in your life. If you want to learn my favorite journaling technique for exploring questions like that, go ahead and check out my previous video on Anytime Pages.

Once you've figured out your purpose for your self compassion SOP and you feel like sharing, please share in the comments below. Now that we understand our purpose, it's going to be easier to brainstorm what steps we can take to be self compassionate in the moment. Whatever brainstorming method works best for you and your brain right now. Whether that's a brain dump, a mind map, taking a long voice note, more Anytime Pages, whatever works for you.

Do that and you're going to ask yourself what are the actions I can take to demonstrate self compassion? And here are some examples. And if you have your own examples, please share them in the comments below. But here are some that I really love. Compassionate self talk. Uh, and that can be either out loud, verbally, or internal. Shifting away from that judgmental, shameful talk like oh, I did that wrong, I effed up, I'm a bad person.

We start describing things more factually. One of the easiest ways to find compassionate self talk is to think about if whatever stressful thing is happening to you, pretending it's happening to someone you love instead, and thinking about how you would talk to them in that instance. For example, you broke a glass in the kitchen. If you think about it being your best friend that broke a glass and you were there, what would you say to them?

It would be like, oh, it's okay, it was just an accident. It doesn't mean anything bad about you for having broken a glass. Whatever level of compassionate talk you need, that's, that's what you go for. Another step you can take is doing nervous system regulation, and depending on what state your nervous system is in in the moment you're trying to be compassionate with yourself will determine what kind of nervous system regulation activities you do.

So if you've seen my video on the polyvagal ladder, for example, how you treat dorsal vagal shutdown, freeze (playing dead as it were), is different than how you treat fight or flight. There are so many different ways to regulate your nervous system. Currently my personal favorite nervous system regulation tools are using my vibration plate, are doing butterfly hugs or butterfly tapping, and using my massage gun. So for me, nervous system regulation tends to entail a lot of somatic practices, very tactile and grounding, but that might not work for you.

Vagus nerve stimulation and vagus nerve therapies are really popular. There are so many different forms of nervous system regulation and if this is your first time hearing about that, I recommend if you have the capacity falling down that rabbit hole and learning more about it because there will be methods of nervous system regulation that help you. Another thing you can do are self soothing or more traditional self care activities that are about relaxation and pleasure.

So taking a bath, eating a comfort food. The reason why I'm distinguishing between nervous system regulation and soothing or more traditional self care activities is because more traditional self care activities won't necessarily regulate your nervous system. If you're in fight or flight and you go to take a bath, that might help. That does work for some people. But if that doesn't work for you, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.

It just means that there are going to be other methods for you to calm your nervous system and to engage in relaxation and pleasure. Having those two different categories might help you better understand why certain things work or don't work for you. Another step you can take is talking to someone you trust and you feel safe with. So a best friend, a partner, a family member you feel really safe with.

And it doesn't have to be an emotionally laborious thing. If that's what you need in the moment. Awesome. There's nothing wrong with that. But it can also be something as simple as like, hey, I'm having a rough time over here, could you send me a picture of your cat? But it doesn't necessarily have to be about the thing that you're struggling with. If you're anything like me, because of your intersecting identities and disabilities, the people you are closest with also tend to have the bingo card of identities and disabilities and therefore also have limited capacity for emotional labor.

So it's not necessarily something that I can do to like go to my best friend, be like, hey, I'm having a really rough day, can we talk about it? And sure, I ask for consent. But like with my people, the odds are I'm not going to get the consent and that has nothing to do with me. It doesn't mean I don't deserve it. It just means that they're also struggling.

What you can do is just talk about something you enjoy together. Like I've been binge watching "Agatha All Along" and if I'm having a rough day, it'd be fun to talk to a friend about that. Point I'm trying to make is seeking self compassion through relationship doesn't necessarily mean that your time with that other person or other people has to be explicitly focused on the thing that's stressing you out.

It can. It doesn't have to. So that's just a few examples of steps you can take in your self compassion routine. Like I said, I recommend using a brainstorming method to come up with as many ideas as possible and be very specific. So list out as many nervous system regulation and self care and soothing things as you can. That way in this next step you can then choose the ones that really stand out to you as powerful and helpful.

I segued a little too close to the sun because the next part is making those choices. So once you have your brainstorm done, you want to review it. For some people it's helpful to have some time away from the brainstorm and not immediately review it. Whatever works best for you. There aren't any rules against doing it right away. I just want you to be aware that maybe if you need a break cognitively, physically, emotionally, that's okay.

So when you are ready, you go back to your brainstorm and you want to circle the items that stick out to you as being the most helpful. If you want to go above and beyond for yourself, one of the things you can do is have a different list of activities based on your level of access or the level of effort needed in the moment to enact them. So for example, calling a friend might be high effort and might not therefore be as accessible to you on a daily basis.

So what you can do is create categories for yourself of those action items based on how much effort it will take from you to do. So compassionate self talk. That's going to be one of the lower effort ones because you don't need to be anywhere in particular. You don't need to be talking to anyone in particular. If you're just rotting in bed, and I have a positive view of rotting in bed, very important, you can still do that.

The only time you can't do this self compassionate talk is if you're unconscious or asleep Once your SOP is done, and it'll make more sense once we get to the end of this video, you will have it listed out literally on a piece of paper or in a note in your phone, or as a calendar appointment, if having a repeated calendar appointment would be helpful for you. That's essentially a checklist.

And what you can do is you can have more than one checklist depending on how much effort or capacity that you have in order to do that list. So if it's a high energy day, you'll have a high energy list for self compassion that you can choose from. If it's a lower energy day, you'll have a low energy list. If you are new to building routines or standard operating procedures, I recommend starting with just one list to start and just automatically make it low effort.

And we want to make sure that the items that we're choosing from our brainstorm are really impactful for the amount of effort put in. I love taking a bath, but the amount of effort that goes into that, it's very rare that I'm willing to spend that much for that amount of result, as it were. It's not as much bang for my buck. When we're trying to establish a habit of being compassionate with ourselves, it's important that we have as much result for as little input as possible.

So we want to keep it simple, we want to keep it streamlined, we don't want to overwhelm ourselves. Once you have decided which items from your brainstorm you're going to include, the next step is to decide what order they go in. And the way you make that decision. What order they go in is referring to your purpose. Why are you trying to be self compassionate? What result are you trying to accomplish with being self compassionate?

And what does self compassionate look like to you? You want to gauge all of your options against that question or those questions, because there was more than one, I can count. And that will help inform what order you go in. And then the other thing to consider, because this is a more conceptual routine that we're building, it's not like a workflow for creating a social media post for a brand.

You don't have to do every single step in the exact order every time. It's more of a Pirates of the Caribbean guidelines situation for a self compassion sop. So if in the moment that you're wanting to be self compassionate and you're referring to this SOP you're building, it's a little bit more like a helpful menu arranged with appetizers first, then entrees, then desserts, then beverages. Like it's in the order that makes sense to you that will help reduce decision fatigue.

That's. That's like one of the big things about an SOP. We're trying to reduce decision fatigue so that way you can get straight to the things that are actually gonna help you in the moment. And so having them laid out in a way that helps you make decisions in the moment, that's what we're going for. So you know your brain better than I do. Although some of you in the Action Navigator feel like I know you pretty well now and I love it because I adore you all so much.

Quick recap before we move on to the next step. So we've defined our purpose, we have brainstormed our steps, and we have chosen which steps we're gonna do, and we put them in the order that is going to help us the most to meet our purpose and prevent decision fatigue. The next step is to decide your habit triggers. A habit trigger is essentially the thing that happens that we then want to be followed with our self compassion routine.

Let's say, for example, you work a desk job and you hate making phone calls, and I relate to you so much. Calling people is the worst. You're not increasing your tolerance for making phone calls. It's just getting worse and worse. Yeah. So you might find it helpful for one of your habit triggers to be either right before you make a call is you do your self compassion SOP and/or because you can do both, when you hang up from a phone call, you do your self compassion SOP. Because engaging in self compassion is likely something that you want to be able to do more often than not. I don't want you to overwhelm yourself with coming up with 5 million different triggers. Instead, similar to when we were picking our steps, when we're picking our habit triggers, we want to come up with the ones that will be easier to do to start out and also give us the most impact.

One of the places where I struggle with self compassion is transitioning from the end of my morning routine into my workday. Uh, because I have a lot of resistance to doing work these days. It's been an ongoing burnout, but that's one of the places where engaging in self compassion is really powerful for me. So how many you pick is up to you. If this is like one of your first times doing something like this.

I'd keep it to 1, 2, maybe 3 different habit triggers at most. You can always revise or add later. Once you've decided what your habit triggers are, what you do is you make sure your new SOP that you've built is available to you at those times, whether it's time based and or location based. We want to put your SOP in your face. If you struggle with brushing your teeth, for example. If you can get yourself to the bathroom, having the SOP on your mirror might be a great option. If you struggle with getting to the bathroom in the first place, you could have a recurring calendar appointment that creates a notification on your phone and inside the notes of that calendar appointment is your sop. So this is something you can put in all sorts of places, both digitally and physically in your living and workspaces.

It will remind you that that's there for you and it's something you want to be doing when those habit triggers occur. Quick recap of what we've done for our Self Compassion sop. So Step one Define our purpose. Step two Brainstorm and choose what steps we're going to take, what actually doing self compassion looks like for us, and in what order. And then lastly, we decided what habit triggers we want to use to trigger us into using our self Compassion SOP and setting ourselves up for success to actually literally have our SOP physically accessible to us, either on our phone, computer, whatever, or printed out in paper in the times and locations where those habit triggers take place naturally.

So today we've talked in a rather non specific way about how to create an sop, but hopefully I have given you the framework to build one yourself. Inside my program, the Action Navigator, this is what I do. I help people figure out their personalized systems, processes and routines, among other things. It's a lifetime access, productivity and self care program designed specifically for those who are neurodivergent, chronically ill and disabled.

It's packed with tools and techniques for mastering your time, getting organized, and offering yourself radical compassion. If that sounds like exactly what you've been looking for, use this link to learn more. Watch this video next if you've got too much to do right now and don't know where to start, this is one of my favorite videos I made this year. If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with one other person.

I'll be back soon with another video. See you then. Bye.