May 6, 2023 • 15 mins
We often hear that we need to prioritise ourselves and put our needs first if we want to achieve mental wellness. But is that really the answer?
Today, we're speaking with psychologist Chris Cheers about the often-forgotten role that caring for others plays when it comes to our overall happiness and fulfilment.
Chris is here to explore the benefits of shifting our focus from ourselves to others and the baby steps we can take each day to actually feel better.
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Fill My Cup is a podcast by Mamamia. Listen to more Mamamia podcasts here.
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Host: Allira Potter
Guest: Chris Cheers
Producer: Cassie Merritt
Audio Producer: Rhiannon Mooney
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
filling your cup. It's a phrase that me and, well,
a lot of wellness people use all the time. But
have you ever heard someone say you can't pour from
an empty cup? This same kind of suggests that every
day our cup gets drained, you know, through work or
social gatherings or through family commitments. But what if your
(00:43):
cup keeps emptying because it's broken?
Maybe it's got a little hole right in the bottom.
So if you put all your time and energy into
filling your cup, you might actually be missing the point.
You might need to find the leak and mend it yourself.
I'm Ara Potter, and funnily enough, this is Fill my Cup,
Mamma Mia's podcast that makes you feel better. And all
(01:06):
that stuff about cup filling wasn't written by me. I know.
I wish it was. It was written by Chris Cheers, psychologist,
educator and author of the new release The New Rule
Book notes from a psychologist to help redefine the way
you live.
Chris is here to literally help us redefine how we
(01:26):
fill our cups. Chris, I'm so excited that we have
you back to talk about Self-care today. Thank you so
much for joining us on. Fill my cup. Thank you.
Thank you for having me back. I want to ask
the question. How do you define self-care? I
Speaker 2 (01:43):
talk a lot about yeah, redefining self-care because I think
when I think about defining, I think about how it
has been defined and where it comes from.
Historically, when it was first used in the seventies with
queer and especially P O C activists at that time,
self-care was the ability to look after yourself so you
could care for your community or so you could rise
(02:04):
up against, you know, the political structures or the system
that might be oppressing you. I like to think of
self-care like that. Self-care is actually yes, the ability to
put yourself first and to look after yourself. But the
second part is, but that's so you can be there
for your people, be there for your community. And also,
I think, act up against those structures that might be
(02:25):
keeping down. You know, other people in your world.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
I feel like you are the first person that has
ever described it so well in terms of self-care because
me being a First Nations. Queer Woman. I grew up
making sure that I was self caring, grounding and looking
after myself in order to number one care for community,
but also to care for elders. It's a very cultural
thing for me,
Speaker 2 (02:48):
and it should be, I think, self-care In many ways,
I think it's become too focused on self. You know,
this idea that you're meant to just focus on self,
and if you've got a mental health problem like you
should fix it and you should just do enough self-care.
So you feel better, and I think that becomes a problem.
If we're starting to kind of self-care our way to
(03:09):
be in a relationship that's not working for us, or
we're just trying to self-care enough in order to do
a job that isn't meaningful enough to us,
that isn't useful. Self-care. I really,
Speaker 1 (03:20):
really like this because I think with that power of
social media and that online presence that people have, do
you think we've deterred away from that original meaning of
self-care because it can almost be a little bit of
a buzzword on social media?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, we've sort of become this kind of hashtag selfcare
this space where Self-care has become almost a commodity like
it's sort of been taken over. I think, by capitalism,
in some ways
that self-care starts to become this thing that you feel
like you have to buy. You know Self-care is not
and should never be about purchasing things. To make yourself
feel better. Self-care is about making difficult decisions and about
(03:59):
difficult conversations about self.
No, about setting boundaries. You know, Self-care should much more
be about the behaviours, the things you can do yourself
to live, the life that you wanna live rather than
feeling like Self-care has to be. This thing that you
have to buy or you have to perform on social
media
Speaker 1 (04:16):
so true. Why do you think self-care can be a distraction?
I think
Speaker 2 (04:22):
it can be a distraction if you are thinking that
Self-care is the thing that you can do to make
yourself feel better.
You know, just generally in your day to day, because
sometimes our emotions or our stresses our anxiety, our sadness,
our guilt. I think we need to be actually listening
(04:42):
to those emotions to actually thinking about what is this
telling me about my life and specifically. Maybe those emotions
aren't something that I should try and self-care my way
out of.
Maybe those emotions are telling me that I need to
make bigger change. And this is where I think self-care
becomes a distraction because self-care should never be the thing
you're doing instead of making big, significant change to your
(05:05):
life that that you think you need to do whether
that be, you know, doing something for your family, whether
that be quitting your job, whether that be ending a
relationship
or maybe self-care is a distraction against some of these
systems and, you know, systemic inequalities that we need to
work together to rise up against. So if Self-care is
becoming a distraction from rising up against those systems or
(05:27):
making big change to your life and your community, then
I think that's when it can become a problem.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
We love the cup metaphor in your book. Can you
explain a little bit about that?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, Well, people, you know, like your podcast people would
be familiar with this idea of that. Self care is
about filling your cup. You know this idea that when
you do things every day, they sort of take stuff
out of your cup, so you need to fill up
your cup and to make sure that you're not running
yourself empty. What I like to say is, sometimes our
cup has a leak. Maybe sometimes our cup is broken.
Maybe sometimes we need
(05:58):
a whole new cup. So if you're just trying to
fill it up all the time, you might be missing
that point that no matter how much you fill up,
it's gonna keep leaking because you need a new cup. Or,
to put that another way, maybe there are bigger things
or bigger changes you need to be making in your
life rather than just be focusing on, you know, maybe
little bits of self-care or little bits of meditation. While
they helpful, there might be bigger changes that even though
(06:21):
that are really difficult, those bigger changes might be where
you need to start thinking
Speaker 1 (06:32):
at the moment. My cup feels a little bit broken,
and I'm curious to know how we go about looking
at our lives and determining if we do need to create,
you know, big change.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I think the first step is actually stepping back and
noticing all the expectations you might be feeling
about the kind of life you have to live. Write
down all the things that you feel like a must
in your life. This sense of I must do this
or I must live a life like this. Think about
where you learn those expectations. These these things that we
(07:05):
feel like are just normal. Sometimes the normal isn't what's
good for us. Sometimes the normal is
just the popular thing or the thing that we're expected
to do. I think before you can get down the
path of actually thinking, what does an authentic, meaningful life
look like for you? I think we've got to unlearn
all those expectations that are telling us that our life
(07:25):
or our relationship or our work has to look a
particular way and then start small. You know it. I'm
all about big dreams
and big change. But the part to get there is
always about thinking about not what is a big change
I need to make. But what is the little thing
I can do in the next 24 hours that starts
looking like that meaningful life? And then once you start
(07:47):
doing that, little thing that will then snowball into other
little things. And you know eventually that meaningful life will
start to take shape.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And I'm curious, though, because when you were saying like,
Sit down, ask yourself those questions. I think for me
at the moment, sitting down and writing down what is
a meaningful life is pretty fucking overwhelming. To be honest,
I would have just been like, No, I don't want
to do that because
Number one I don't want to be vulnerable and that
scares me. I'm curious to know if you have any
(08:15):
other examples of questions that we could pop down that
we could ask ourselves that aren't so, I guess. Maybe overwhelming. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (08:24):
and they are overwhelming. You know, we're talking about living
a meaningful life. This is big work. And Susan David,
who wrote a book called Emotional Agility, says that discomfort
is the price for admission for a meaningful life.
So whilst I join you in that idea that sometimes
we don't have the capacity to answer these questions and
to sit down with these questions, so on those days
(08:45):
we wouldn't be going near this kind of work. But
what I would also invite us to remember is that
this work is always gonna come with some level of
uncomfortable emotions, some level of discomfort,
and that doesn't necessarily mean we have to avoid it.
The other way to view it is to think, How
can I learn to make space for these emotions? How
can I learn to manage these emotions? How can I
(09:08):
learn a new relationship with these emotions so that I
can start to view these emotions as a normal part
of this
process of defining a meaningful life rather than this idea
that we therefore have to avoid it? The really difficult,
challenging work, always with this sort of stuff, is that
idea that sometimes we see our emotions in the uncomfortable
ones as telling us that we should stop that we're
(09:31):
doing the wrong thing. We can't do this.
The reframe of that is sometimes our most difficult emotions
are actually a signal that we're doing the right work,
the meaningful work. I think looking after yourself at the baseline,
whatever that looks like for you today, you know whether
that be looking at nourishment, pleasure movement, stretching, rest, and
(09:52):
then when you're starting to fill up for it. Think
you know, Maybe I'm ready to to make space for
some of these difficult emotions today.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
It is healing work. It is like inner work, and
it is a lot, and it's overwhelming, and it's kind
of scary as well, too. So I mean, I guess
if I'm sitting there and I'm asking myself these questions
and I want to go and make the change you
mentioned before about just small little steps in order to
make way for that big change, can you sort of
(10:21):
talk more to that about how we can do it
in not such an overwhelming way? Yeah, and
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I talk about this a lot in the book, the
idea that I think we need to stop setting goals
and which might sound like a weird thing for a
just to say, but I think when we go about
the idea of thinking about a meaningful life or you know,
these big, daunting questions that we're talking about, I think
the problem is that we then turn them into a
goal and some sort of long-term goal. And as soon
(10:48):
as something becomes a long-term goal, we immediately set us
up in this like deficit, like we're not gonna feel
good until we achieve that.
And the other thing with Long-term goals is we sometimes
think that we have a whole lot more control over
getting to that long-term goal than we actually do. And
this goes back to what I was talking about before
in terms of thinking about the society, the structures that
(11:09):
exist around you,
that may actually be impacting your ability to get to
that long-term goal rather than just blaming it on yourself
all the time because, you know, we might tell ourselves,
you know, we've got this, but that same part of
you that says we've got this is also the part
of you that's going to say, Oh, it was our
fault when it didn't happen.
It's not just you. There is a world around you
that either encourages or doesn't encourage your ability to get
(11:33):
to these goals. When I say a meaningful life, I'm
talking about what are your values? What do you care about,
like minor authenticity, connection, community, honesty. That's what a meaningful
life looks like for me. It's not achieving anything, it's
living by those values. So for me,
my actions are, What can I do in the next
(11:53):
24 hours? That is something aligned with connection or something
aligned with authenticity, and that starts to feel it more
achievable when we can just think, no matter my circumstance.
How can I live by my values over the next
24 hours?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
This is all OK to like Ask these questions and
it's like a safe space for you to do this.
So I appreciate this. My last question is, how can
we redefine self-care so that it works better for us?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I think that last part of that question for us
is in a is is what I like to focus
on because I'd like to call it us care, actually,
instead of self-care in many ways because I think
what as I was talking about before, in terms of
when we're focusing too much on ourselves, I think we
can start to separate life into sort of like there's
things you can do for yourself and then there's things
(12:43):
you can do for other people, and when you're doing
things for other people, it means you're you know you're
getting
out of your cup and so you need to fill
your cup up with stuff you can do for yourself
and that life becomes this kind of duality of those
two things. Why I use the term US care is
I always want us to remember that there are things
we can do for ourselves that are also things we
can do for our community.
(13:04):
Cultures around the world for thousands and thousands of years
have been community led rather than the individualistic focus that
self-care maybe feeds into in Western culture. So us care
is my way of sort of continuing this idea that
think about what is something you can do that is
for your community. That's for your us, for your friends,
(13:25):
for your family, whoever your US is,
because when we do things for us, not only do
they fill up our cup, but they also have this
added benefit of We're noticing the impact they have on
each other, and they also make us feel more connected.
And in the end, in most studies that you read
of the long what leads to Long-term. Happiness is good relationships.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Oh my gosh, Chris, this has been such an amazing
chat and an eye opener for me. Is there anything
else that you'd like to add?
Speaker 2 (13:58):
I would just add the idea that these are my ideas.
And sometimes we can get a bit lost into looking
outwards for directions of how to do self-care or how
to look after ourselves. And that can start this bit
of a a process. Sometimes where we start to feel
guilty or shame because we're not
doing the self-care that we're meant to do in the
(14:18):
book or we're we're not doing the thing we're meant
to do to look after ourselves. And obviously, shame has
never motivated anyone to to do anything. So what I
would say is, if you're listening to this, always return
to you to your body and think, What do I
need right now and be led by that?
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Thank you so much, Chris, for coming on. Fill my cup.
This has been an absolute treat. Thank you. I just
I can't stop saying thank you, but I appreciate your
time and energy.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Well, I will say it. Thank you. I'm so grateful
for this for this space and and for what you
created so great to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
I absolutely loved that chat with Chris. I think for
me personally, I've got some key notes and key takeaways,
and it's always a pleasure having him on the podcast.
If you want to hear more from Chris, we've left
a link to his new book, The New Rule book
In the show notes. If you love the podcast, why
not follow us in your favourite podcast app?
(15:17):
This episode was produced by Cassie Merritt. Our audio producer
is Rhiannon Mooney. Mum and Mia's purpose is to make
the world a better place for women and girls. We
do that by creating podcasts, stories, videos and events that
share unique women's voices. You won't hear anywhere else subscribe
here to help Mum and Mia to continue living out
(15:38):
our purpose. I'll be back again on Wednesday with more
ways to fill your cup. See you later
filling your cup. It's a phrase that me and, well,
a lot of wellness people use all the time. But
have you ever heard someone say you can't pour from
an empty cup? This same kind of suggests that every
day our cup gets drained, you know, through work or
social gatherings or through family commitments. But what if your
(00:43):
cup keeps emptying because it's broken?
Maybe it's got a little hole right in the bottom.
So if you put all your time and energy into
filling your cup, you might actually be missing the point.
You might need to find the leak and mend it yourself.
I'm Ara Potter, and funnily enough, this is Fill my Cup,
Mamma Mia's podcast that makes you feel better. And all
(01:06):
that stuff about cup filling wasn't written by me. I know.
I wish it was. It was written by Chris Cheers, psychologist,
educator and author of the new release The New Rule
Book notes from a psychologist to help redefine the way
you live.
Chris is here to literally help us redefine how we
(01:26):
fill our cups. Chris, I'm so excited that we have
you back to talk about Self-care today. Thank you so
much for joining us on. Fill my cup. Thank you.
Thank you for having me back. I want to ask
the question. How do you define self-care? I
Speaker 2 (01:43):
talk a lot about yeah, redefining self-care because I think
when I think about defining, I think about how it
has been defined and where it comes from.
Historically, when it was first used in the seventies with
queer and especially P O C activists at that time,
self-care was the ability to look after yourself so you
could care for your community or so you could rise
(02:04):
up against, you know, the political structures or the system
that might be oppressing you. I like to think of
self-care like that. Self-care is actually yes, the ability to
put yourself first and to look after yourself. But the
second part is, but that's so you can be there
for your people, be there for your community. And also,
I think, act up against those structures that might be
(02:25):
keeping down. You know, other people in your world.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
I feel like you are the first person that has
ever described it so well in terms of self-care because
me being a First Nations. Queer Woman. I grew up
making sure that I was self caring, grounding and looking
after myself in order to number one care for community,
but also to care for elders. It's a very cultural
thing for me,
Speaker 2 (02:48):
and it should be, I think, self-care In many ways,
I think it's become too focused on self. You know,
this idea that you're meant to just focus on self,
and if you've got a mental health problem like you
should fix it and you should just do enough self-care.
So you feel better, and I think that becomes a problem.
If we're starting to kind of self-care our way to
(03:09):
be in a relationship that's not working for us, or
we're just trying to self-care enough in order to do
a job that isn't meaningful enough to us,
that isn't useful. Self-care. I really,
Speaker 1 (03:20):
really like this because I think with that power of
social media and that online presence that people have, do
you think we've deterred away from that original meaning of
self-care because it can almost be a little bit of
a buzzword on social media?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, we've sort of become this kind of hashtag selfcare
this space where Self-care has become almost a commodity like
it's sort of been taken over. I think, by capitalism,
in some ways
that self-care starts to become this thing that you feel
like you have to buy. You know Self-care is not
and should never be about purchasing things. To make yourself
feel better. Self-care is about making difficult decisions and about
(03:59):
difficult conversations about self.
No, about setting boundaries. You know, Self-care should much more
be about the behaviours, the things you can do yourself
to live, the life that you wanna live rather than
feeling like Self-care has to be. This thing that you
have to buy or you have to perform on social
media
Speaker 1 (04:16):
so true. Why do you think self-care can be a distraction?
I think
Speaker 2 (04:22):
it can be a distraction if you are thinking that
Self-care is the thing that you can do to make
yourself feel better.
You know, just generally in your day to day, because
sometimes our emotions or our stresses our anxiety, our sadness,
our guilt. I think we need to be actually listening
(04:42):
to those emotions to actually thinking about what is this
telling me about my life and specifically. Maybe those emotions
aren't something that I should try and self-care my way
out of.
Maybe those emotions are telling me that I need to
make bigger change. And this is where I think self-care
becomes a distraction because self-care should never be the thing
you're doing instead of making big, significant change to your
(05:05):
life that that you think you need to do whether
that be, you know, doing something for your family, whether
that be quitting your job, whether that be ending a
relationship
or maybe self-care is a distraction against some of these
systems and, you know, systemic inequalities that we need to
work together to rise up against. So if Self-care is
becoming a distraction from rising up against those systems or
(05:27):
making big change to your life and your community, then
I think that's when it can become a problem.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
We love the cup metaphor in your book. Can you
explain a little bit about that?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, Well, people, you know, like your podcast people would
be familiar with this idea of that. Self care is
about filling your cup. You know this idea that when
you do things every day, they sort of take stuff
out of your cup, so you need to fill up
your cup and to make sure that you're not running
yourself empty. What I like to say is, sometimes our
cup has a leak. Maybe sometimes our cup is broken.
Maybe sometimes we need
(05:58):
a whole new cup. So if you're just trying to
fill it up all the time, you might be missing
that point that no matter how much you fill up,
it's gonna keep leaking because you need a new cup. Or,
to put that another way, maybe there are bigger things
or bigger changes you need to be making in your
life rather than just be focusing on, you know, maybe
little bits of self-care or little bits of meditation. While
they helpful, there might be bigger changes that even though
(06:21):
that are really difficult, those bigger changes might be where
you need to start thinking
Speaker 1 (06:32):
at the moment. My cup feels a little bit broken,
and I'm curious to know how we go about looking
at our lives and determining if we do need to create,
you know, big change.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I think the first step is actually stepping back and
noticing all the expectations you might be feeling
about the kind of life you have to live. Write
down all the things that you feel like a must
in your life. This sense of I must do this
or I must live a life like this. Think about
where you learn those expectations. These these things that we
(07:05):
feel like are just normal. Sometimes the normal isn't what's
good for us. Sometimes the normal is
just the popular thing or the thing that we're expected
to do. I think before you can get down the
path of actually thinking, what does an authentic, meaningful life
look like for you? I think we've got to unlearn
all those expectations that are telling us that our life
(07:25):
or our relationship or our work has to look a
particular way and then start small. You know it. I'm
all about big dreams
and big change. But the part to get there is
always about thinking about not what is a big change
I need to make. But what is the little thing
I can do in the next 24 hours that starts
looking like that meaningful life? And then once you start
(07:47):
doing that, little thing that will then snowball into other
little things. And you know eventually that meaningful life will
start to take shape.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And I'm curious, though, because when you were saying like,
Sit down, ask yourself those questions. I think for me
at the moment, sitting down and writing down what is
a meaningful life is pretty fucking overwhelming. To be honest,
I would have just been like, No, I don't want
to do that because
Number one I don't want to be vulnerable and that
scares me. I'm curious to know if you have any
(08:15):
other examples of questions that we could pop down that
we could ask ourselves that aren't so, I guess. Maybe overwhelming. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (08:24):
and they are overwhelming. You know, we're talking about living
a meaningful life. This is big work. And Susan David,
who wrote a book called Emotional Agility, says that discomfort
is the price for admission for a meaningful life.
So whilst I join you in that idea that sometimes
we don't have the capacity to answer these questions and
to sit down with these questions, so on those days
(08:45):
we wouldn't be going near this kind of work. But
what I would also invite us to remember is that
this work is always gonna come with some level of
uncomfortable emotions, some level of discomfort,
and that doesn't necessarily mean we have to avoid it.
The other way to view it is to think, How
can I learn to make space for these emotions? How
can I learn to manage these emotions? How can I
(09:08):
learn a new relationship with these emotions so that I
can start to view these emotions as a normal part
of this
process of defining a meaningful life rather than this idea
that we therefore have to avoid it? The really difficult,
challenging work, always with this sort of stuff, is that
idea that sometimes we see our emotions in the uncomfortable
ones as telling us that we should stop that we're
(09:31):
doing the wrong thing. We can't do this.
The reframe of that is sometimes our most difficult emotions
are actually a signal that we're doing the right work,
the meaningful work. I think looking after yourself at the baseline,
whatever that looks like for you today, you know whether
that be looking at nourishment, pleasure movement, stretching, rest, and
(09:52):
then when you're starting to fill up for it. Think
you know, Maybe I'm ready to to make space for
some of these difficult emotions today.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
It is healing work. It is like inner work, and
it is a lot, and it's overwhelming, and it's kind
of scary as well, too. So I mean, I guess
if I'm sitting there and I'm asking myself these questions
and I want to go and make the change you
mentioned before about just small little steps in order to
make way for that big change, can you sort of
(10:21):
talk more to that about how we can do it
in not such an overwhelming way? Yeah, and
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I talk about this a lot in the book, the
idea that I think we need to stop setting goals
and which might sound like a weird thing for a
just to say, but I think when we go about
the idea of thinking about a meaningful life or you know,
these big, daunting questions that we're talking about, I think
the problem is that we then turn them into a
goal and some sort of long-term goal. And as soon
(10:48):
as something becomes a long-term goal, we immediately set us
up in this like deficit, like we're not gonna feel
good until we achieve that.
And the other thing with Long-term goals is we sometimes
think that we have a whole lot more control over
getting to that long-term goal than we actually do. And
this goes back to what I was talking about before
in terms of thinking about the society, the structures that
(11:09):
exist around you,
that may actually be impacting your ability to get to
that long-term goal rather than just blaming it on yourself
all the time because, you know, we might tell ourselves,
you know, we've got this, but that same part of
you that says we've got this is also the part
of you that's going to say, Oh, it was our
fault when it didn't happen.
It's not just you. There is a world around you
that either encourages or doesn't encourage your ability to get
(11:33):
to these goals. When I say a meaningful life, I'm
talking about what are your values? What do you care about,
like minor authenticity, connection, community, honesty. That's what a meaningful
life looks like for me. It's not achieving anything, it's
living by those values. So for me,
my actions are, What can I do in the next
(11:53):
24 hours? That is something aligned with connection or something
aligned with authenticity, and that starts to feel it more
achievable when we can just think, no matter my circumstance.
How can I live by my values over the next
24 hours?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
This is all OK to like Ask these questions and
it's like a safe space for you to do this.
So I appreciate this. My last question is, how can
we redefine self-care so that it works better for us?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I think that last part of that question for us
is in a is is what I like to focus
on because I'd like to call it us care, actually,
instead of self-care in many ways because I think
what as I was talking about before, in terms of
when we're focusing too much on ourselves, I think we
can start to separate life into sort of like there's
things you can do for yourself and then there's things
(12:43):
you can do for other people, and when you're doing
things for other people, it means you're you know you're
getting
out of your cup and so you need to fill
your cup up with stuff you can do for yourself
and that life becomes this kind of duality of those
two things. Why I use the term US care is
I always want us to remember that there are things
we can do for ourselves that are also things we
can do for our community.
(13:04):
Cultures around the world for thousands and thousands of years
have been community led rather than the individualistic focus that
self-care maybe feeds into in Western culture. So us care
is my way of sort of continuing this idea that
think about what is something you can do that is
for your community. That's for your us, for your friends,
(13:25):
for your family, whoever your US is,
because when we do things for us, not only do
they fill up our cup, but they also have this
added benefit of We're noticing the impact they have on
each other, and they also make us feel more connected.
And in the end, in most studies that you read
of the long what leads to Long-term. Happiness is good relationships.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Oh my gosh, Chris, this has been such an amazing
chat and an eye opener for me. Is there anything
else that you'd like to add?
Speaker 2 (13:58):
I would just add the idea that these are my ideas.
And sometimes we can get a bit lost into looking
outwards for directions of how to do self-care or how
to look after ourselves. And that can start this bit
of a a process. Sometimes where we start to feel
guilty or shame because we're not
doing the self-care that we're meant to do in the
(14:18):
book or we're we're not doing the thing we're meant
to do to look after ourselves. And obviously, shame has
never motivated anyone to to do anything. So what I
would say is, if you're listening to this, always return
to you to your body and think, What do I
need right now and be led by that?
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Thank you so much, Chris, for coming on. Fill my cup.
This has been an absolute treat. Thank you. I just
I can't stop saying thank you, but I appreciate your
time and energy.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Well, I will say it. Thank you. I'm so grateful
for this for this space and and for what you
created so great to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
I absolutely loved that chat with Chris. I think for
me personally, I've got some key notes and key takeaways,
and it's always a pleasure having him on the podcast.
If you want to hear more from Chris, we've left
a link to his new book, The New Rule book
In the show notes. If you love the podcast, why
not follow us in your favourite podcast app?
(15:17):
This episode was produced by Cassie Merritt. Our audio producer
is Rhiannon Mooney. Mum and Mia's purpose is to make
the world a better place for women and girls. We
do that by creating podcasts, stories, videos and events that
share unique women's voices. You won't hear anywhere else subscribe
here to help Mum and Mia to continue living out
(15:38):
our purpose. I'll be back again on Wednesday with more
ways to fill your cup. See you later
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