7 Ways To Manage Self-Care For Professionals

​Recent studies have highlighted the critical role of self-care in enhancing women’s overall well-being. Consistent self-care practices have been shown to reduce stress, diminish depression and anxiety, and increase energy and happiness. Additionally, self-care can positively affect physical health by decreasing the risk of stroke, cancer, and heart disease.

Cassandra Juniphant, founder of self-care company Ori Ara, has had an extremely diverse career, with more than 20 years working in Human Resources. She was also a competitive bodybuilder for five years and became a certified personal trainer, which is where she started adding self-care practices and spiritual habits into her personal life.

Taking these experiences, she has worked to build her own business to help women connect and discover the same self-care habits within themselves. She believes that your health and self-investment are the keys to success.

Her Agenda sat down with Cassandra to discuss how to prioritize self-care.

Within her work today, Cassandra champions individuals looking to integrate self-care into their daily and corporate lives. Cassandra stresses that in order to be an effective corporate leader, one should start from a place of self-care and avoid making sacrifices in the process.

“How can you lead a team, an organization, an industry if you’re not first leading yourself?” she said. “That’s what self-care is, it’s starting with self.”

Cassandra said good leadership does not involve setting unrealistic expectations and deadlines at the expense of the health and wellbeing of your team.

“As a leader, if you can’t get the job done without you or your team [working extra long hours, being stressed and not engaging in outside of work life], then we’ve missed the point of leadership,” she said. ” If you can’t teach somebody to be successful without it hurting their mental or emotional health, then we all need a new lesson. That’s not leadership. So I want to drive home that women in corporate, women who feel like they’re a boss, if you’re doing so at the expense of your health, you’re a martyr and there’s a difference there.”

Here is some advice that she suggests to create a multifaceted approach to self-care as a professional. 

“It’s not a matter of creating space and finding more time and having to put more things on your calendar or adding more to your to-do list,” she said. “It really is just being intentional with what we do already.”

Cassandra said more intention needs to be added to activities that women may not pay as much attention to. Basic needs such sleeping or eating should have a sense of awareness and intention around them, to extract the maximum benefits. Without applying intention, people fall into the trap of not allowing themselves to rest and to eat as forms of nourishment, but rather keep stress embedded within them, she said.

“Go to bed with intention so that you are allowing yourself to rest and you’re not simply passing out in order to wake up the next day stressed out,” she said. “One of the easiest things a woman can do to feel better is [ensuring] the meals that she eats are ones that are energizing and restorative to her. Not just to make her headache go away or her stomach stop growling. We’re very dismissive of our meals, but those meals, when we apply intention to them, are really restorative acts of self-care if we allow them to be.”

Cassandra recommends starting each day with stillness to create a baseline for your mental state. Whether this means stillness as a means of slowing down and sitting with your thoughts, or taking time for a meditation practice or yoga which Cassandra works with herself. This helps to provide you with a base energy to return to.

“Start your day with a baseline of stillness and connection and intention and deciding who you want to be that day, when someone tries to move you from that, you know where to go back to,” she said. “Without ever having established that baseline, it’s easy just to keep going, and then next thing you know, you’re burnt out or screaming in a boardroom. So starting your day with that stillness and that connection to yourself and to that divinity.”

Cassandra said it is important to take care of yourself in order to be able to give to others. Filling your own cup with energy and abundance, and allowing the energy from your personal overflow to be a gift to those around you, will help you support them.

“If you aren’t taking care of yourself, but you’re giving to others, it’s not because you’re such a giver,” she said. “You’re looking for acceptance. If you have not first taken care of yourself, what are you giving from? You’re giving from nothing. It’s the same thing in a work environment. ‘I will die to do this’ but no one’s asking for that. Are you willing to do it in a healthy way? Because taking care of you has to come first.”

Cassandra said it is important to start with self-worth as a way to navigate self-care and stop the abusive way in which women tend to talk to themselves negatively. 

“I have in my business the nine pillars of wellness; the very first is worthiness or self worth,” she said. “So many women don’t recognize that we are worth that investment. Why is that external person’s validation or acceptance of me more important than giving to myself?”

According to Cassandra, it is important to set standards in order to hold yourself accountable and command respect within a corporate environment. Starting inwards helps to communicate this silently in external settings, and allows you to invest I’m your own presence. She suggests communicating these through your aura, energy and the way you “show up.”

“When you have these standards for yourself, you never have to mention them,” she said. “They’re known. They’re seen. These goals and these standards are for how you treat yourself, not how other people treat you. They’re going to respect what they see you do with and for yourself. We’re afraid to set standards for ourselves. We’ll set standards for other people.”

Sometimes we create more negative thought patterns by being overly rational instead of allowing our ultimate desires to grow, which can stop one from finding the ability to align with it. These desires may be personal or professional goals, or ways that you see yourself. Allowing yourself the chance to extend your thoughts beyond the constrains of practical thinking, can be very empowering.

“Anytime we’re like, ‘I would love this,’ it’s immediately combated by rational thinking,” she said. “Put all of that aside. Let that heart start pumping and let it grow and let that desire begin to live, because then, once you allow the desire, then you can align to it. We’ve been taught to be so practical, responsible, and logical, God never asked that of us. It takes a lot of undoing.”

Noting trust within yourself as her second pillar of wellness, Cassandra said trusting that good things will happen and trusting in your abilities are key to building a sense of self that will help you thrive.

”It’s all internal work,” she said. “It’s all those quiet moments that we’re alone with ourselves when we’re not commanding a room or leading a team meeting. Outside of those moments when we’re doing for everybody else, it’s in these quiet moments with ourselves that we have to work on our worthiness and our trust in ourselves.”