These techniques can increase your self-love, help balance work/life and increase health and happiness…

Donna Elliott and Cheryl Lee are Mindset & Leadership Experts and Founders of 'Now is Your Time'  - they are two powerhouse business women who’ve worked together for 10 years, having cut their teeth working in high level corporate leadership roles.

Donna and Cheryl are not only colleagues but best friends and ‘soul sisters’ the duo believe that through sharing their life lessons with the world and being brave enough to be their authentic selves, alongside sharing their knowledge gained from their leadership roles, they will empower other successful career women to feel inspired enough to do the same as they grow their mission of supporting over 1 million women globally by the end of 2022, who may have been faced with dark, difficult and challenging times to help more to see that ‘Now Is Your Time’.

Respected and in demand from clients such as BBC, Adobe, Sage, and Amex as Mindset and Leadership Experts Cheryl and Donna are spreading their knowledge and expertise across organisations who are committed to evolving people development through the power of mindset mastery and wellbeing and they are seizing the opportunities presented to empower individuals to become the best version of themselves. They are also working with best selling authors, heads of £multi-million fashion labels and mumtrepreneurs globally.

Here they share 4 powerful self-love techniques with The Capsule 

These techniques can help manage life, workload, stress, challenging times, life, home… these techniques and approaches can increase your self-love, help balance work/life and increase health and happiness…

1. Create Internal Boundaries - Self-care teaches us how to respect ourselves and helps us to create strong internal boundaries - with these in place, it becomes easier for us to create and stand by external boundaries (the boundaries that we put in place for others as a framework on how we expect to be treated). These are crucial for having healthy and happy relationships, whether that be in our personal lives or in the workplace.  When you have enough respect for yourself to look after yourself - it makes it much easier to expect and demand those same high standards from others. 

1. Imagine your are like a Pressure Valve - Many people these days feel their life is stressful. Imagine that you are like a valve where this pressure is building up. When you have regular, powerful self-care practices, you will already have some ways of releasing stress - for most of us, our self-care routines will support the reduction of the pressure in the valve. Whether that’s through meditating, having a massage or going for a run…you’re giving your mind, body and emotions an outlet for the build up of pressure, letting some of the steam that builds up in the system out in a safe and productive way.  Activities such as this have a double whammy effect as they also help us to replace spent energy, therefore filling out tanks back up to deal with whatever comes our way - essential as our jobs and lives become ever more demanding.

1. Home vs Work - The lines between work and home have become increasingly blurred as we take work home on our phones and we have less defined boundaries between work and personal time, with an ‘on call’ or ‘contact me any time’ culture.  As our personal time becomes more squeezed and our jobs more demanding, the stress can often take it’s toll in our personal lives. Let’s face it, if anyone is going to get both barrels because you’ve had a bad day, it’s more likely to be your partner, housemate, loved ones… than your boss! At home we worry less about how we are being perceived so we often let off the build up of steam here, which of course then impacts on our familial relationships and the leads to a spiral of guilt that we aren’t showing up as the partner, parent or family member that we want to be. Adding to the stress we already feel. We then feel even more guilty taking extra time away from our families to do some self-care. We need to change how we see this and understand that spending time doing what makes us feel good (with or without our family) is a positive investment in our health and wellbeing. We will have more to give from doing this so it’s really essential not a ‘nice-to-have’.

1. Be Real – Donna said; “I felt all of these pressures in my successful corporate career when I had to balance weekly travel, leadership responsibilities for a huge team and Company KPI’s, with being Mammy to a small child, a wife etc. The constant pull of the needs of others alongside the demanding roles I juggled and being on call 24/7 took it’s toll with me gaining weight, drinking wine to relax and working more and more hours to try to ‘get on top’ of things.  When I realised that all I was doing was running myself into the ground and I took back control of myself, recognising that the job was always going to be challenging and feeling guilty about not being at home wasn’t going to change things. So I started taking time every morning to meditate, run or work with weights and making sure that when I was home I did something for myself - getting my nails done or going for a walk or seeing friends…and parking the guilt. From there, even though the job remained demanding, I was in a far better place to be able to deal with it and my family have a lot more fun with me because I felt so much better in myself. And my health improved massively.”

To find out more about Donna and Cheryl, please visit https://www.nowisyourtimeto.com/ or connect via Facebook https://www.facebook.com/nowisyourtimeto/