Self-Care and the New Year. Interview with Jeanette Bronée.

The new year brings forth a renewed sense of commitment and the grand feeling of fresh starts. Right before the clock struck 12, you may have been preparing for 2023, writing out your goals and reflecting on the past year. But for many, with this surge of motivation comes an inevitable dose of uncertainty. Sometimes, the new year traps us in a seemingly endless cycle of setting resolutions and then falling short of them. What is the best way to go about working towards a better version of ourselves at home and at work, without submitting to the pressure of uncertainty?

Jeanette Bronée, keynote speaker, self-care expert, and author and founder of Path for Life, has the answers to becoming your best self at home and work. Bronée's mission is to help companies and people cultivate self-care since self-care directly affects how we perform in our everyday lives. It is easy to get lost in our busy lives and forget the significance of taking time for oneself. To overcome this common issue, Bronée developed the CARE framework to help us navigate uncertainty and harness growth, sharing the tools make positive growth.

In an interview with the Garden State Woman Education Foundation, Jeanette Bronée advised on how we can incorporate self-care into our lives and make the most out of the new year.

• How did you find your path of promoting self-care?
  

Bronée says that she has always been aware that her body and herself needed to function together as a team since she was a competitive gymnast as a kid. She knew that she needed to take care of her body, but it wasn't until certain life events made her realize the need to improve on this standpoint. When she burned out twice, lost both of her parents to cancer a year apart, and found out that it was only a matter of time before she too was diagnosed with cancer, she realized that she needed to learn to take care of herself and manage stress better than before. She realized that she needed to gain a greater understanding of how to live in a way that facilitated her lifestyle by creating a more regenerative relationship with how she thought of herself and self-care.

In 2004, she shifted from the fashion business to work as a health and well-being coach. For the past 6 years, she has been a keynote speaker on the topic of well-being in the workplace.

• What self-care goals should be made a priority for the new year?
  

Bronée began by saying that setting self-care goals needs to be a company-culture effort. Leaders need to get on board in terms of modeling healthy behaviors. "Companies, teams, and employees must work together to understand that we don't healthcare alone," says Bronée. It is time that we think of well-being and mental health as something we need to do all the time, not just when we are able to take time off of work. This must be a mindset that we have with us all the time. And using this mindset in a better way is one of the best self-care methods that we can do.

• How can we shift our mindset to a more positive one?
  

"That is what my whole book is about," says Bronée. The simple answer to this is that the questions we ask of ourselves are the answer we're going to find. "If we ask ourselves, 'Why are we not good enough? Why are we not doing enough?' then we are only going to find the answer to why something is not working," explains Bronée. If we want to try to solve a problem, then we need to learn to ask better questions.

• How can we overcome the pressure of falling short of our past goals?
  

"Falling short of our past goals is information to us," says Bronée. We can examine these failed goals to see what can be improved on. Maybe those goals were unrealistic, maybe we needed a different type of support to reach them, or maybe something happened in our environment that made it impossible for us to pursue our goals. "Goals are an intention, not a destination. They are an intention of which direction we are moving towards. But it's not 'I have to get to this particular goal.'" Bronée says that this idea is the same thing as when businesses say, for example, 'we need to surpass our sales goals.' If we set a goal without asking how, then we won't know why we didn't reach said goal. In the same way, as human beings, if we say that we have a certain goal and we're unable to reach that goal, we must look back at what we've done and ask, "What was I missing?" rather than asking "why wasn't I good enough?"

For more information on Jeanette Bronée visit jeanettebronee.com.

You can purchase her book, The Self-Care Mindset: Rethinking How We Change and Grow, Harness Well-Being, and Reclaim Work-Life Quality, on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Check out the Pause on This with Jeanette Bronée podcast here.