How To Create Your Own Self Nurture Menu

Melanie Knights (00:08):

Outlaws hustling actually isn't in our DNA, it is nurtured. It has been nurtured. And collectively we have got to rethink and reframe self nurturing. We know that self-care is important. We know that it's not always a bubble bath and Netflix self-care can be tough. It can be heavy and involve hard conversations with ourselves. And with others self-care can look like creating boundaries and then actually having to honor them, it can look like saying no ending relationships and it can even hurt us in the moment. Self-Care requires us to self nurture, take care of our needs in micro ways on a daily basis, and allows us to take care of ourselves in the long term.

Melanie Knights (01:21):

Hey Outlaws. Yes. Today we are going to be looking at how to create your own daily self nurture menu. I'm so excited to dig into this with you today, because as I said in that kind of intro, we know that taking care of ourselves is important, but if you're anything like me, sometimes we don't do it. Sometimes we neglect ourselves. And as we came towards the end of the summer, I realized that I was not taking care of myself in the best ways. And this has been a recurring theme basically since the pandemic started especially staying at play and really not getting as much rest as I need. And then feeling tired and feeling grumpy with myself because I'm not achieving all that. I feel that I should be. So one of the ways in which I can get back into taking care of myself and really focus on how I can look after myself in the micro ways on a daily basis is by looking at how nurtured I feel and how I'm doing that for myself.

Melanie Knights (02:36):

So I want to make that really clear. We're talking about self nurturing. We're talking about looking after ourselves the ways in which we can nurture ourselves what this looks like for us on a daily basis, because we know that collectively, if we are taking care of ourselves on a daily basis, it is much easier to recognize when things are not working on a bigger scale or in the long term. So one of the questions that I got early on when I started talking about the nurture tracker and talking about how to really self nurture was, I don't even know what that looks like. And that is why today we are gonna look at creating a self nurture menu. Now, the reason we're creating a menu rather than like a routine or a ritual is because again, I also know that when we start to lay out routines and rituals for ourselves, we can, it can kind of have the wrong, it can have the opposite effect.

Melanie Knights (03:37):

It can have the opposite effect because we start to feel if we, if we miss a day or we don't do what we were gonna do, maybe we just don't actually feel like it. We end up kind of shaming ourselves for that. It has the opposite effect. It's the same as tracking habits. I'm not a fan of habit tracking because if I start to track a habit and then I miss a day, all of the negative self talk will start. And that's one of the reasons why I don't track habits. I don't, I mean, bullet journaling is I've decided just not really, for me, it's far much pressure, but I do like to track how nurtured I feel. And that really aligns with tracking my cycles, tracking the new and full moon. And I am making some updates to my planner, planning by the moon.

Melanie Knights (04:28):

And that's where you find the full nature tracker inside of that planner. And so I'm making updates to that and changing the way that we track our nurturing. And that's all coming soon. And I will let you know more when it's ready, but today we're gonna look at this self nurture menu. So the idea of the menu is that you have choice. I am a big fan of choice. I'm a big fan of allowing myself to choose what I want to do on that day. This really comes back to something we've already talked about this season, which is that self trust piece. I know that in online business and in marketing, we are not supposed to give people choice. We are told to give you one thing we're told that you should give your clients, your customers, whoever your audience, one option, because if you give them too many options, they can't make a decision.

Melanie Knights (05:16):

Now that can be true. I think if we give you a hundred options, then that's really hard and it can be overwhelming. Especially if those 100 options were very similar. For example, I remember, and I've used this example before few years ago, I went to Florida and I went to like a super Walmart, or I think it was a super Walmart and it was huge. I have never seen a grocery store like it. And I wanted to buy a, some peanut butter. And I was like, right, found the aisle. I've never seen so many choices of peanut butter in one place. And initially it was exciting. It was like, oh, look, all these different choices. And then I just got a bit overwhelmed. I didn't know which peanut butter I wanted. I was like, I, I, I kind of could whittle it down, but there was still so many choices.

Melanie Knights (06:03):

And I think that's where it can start to get a little bit murky unless you have a favorite or you're going in for one particular thing, you can then get a little bit overwhelmed because there's too much choice. And perhaps you don't really know what you need. So in this case, we are gonna give you choice, right? The idea is to create some choice so that when you get to that day where you don't feel like doing those things that you normally do, you have choices. You can decide to do one or all of the things on your menu. You can pick which one feels right for you that day. And this is such a wonderful way of creating that self nurturing on a daily basis, whether it's one thing or all the things, or you spend three times as much on the one it's really up to you.

Melanie Knights (06:51):

Because ultimately when we're talking about self nurturing, it's about meeting your own needs. And if we're meeting our needs, then giving ourselves a little bit of choice and flexibility is really, really crucial. So we're going to look at this today. You might want to grab a pen and paper. You might want to kind of listen along and then come back to this and have a think. And we will add the kind of process that I walk you through in the show notes as well. And you can find the show notes over@outlawcreatives.com slash podcast. So, as I said, at the beginning of this episode, we have got to reframe and rethink what self nurturing is, right? Again, something we've touched on already this season is how we tend to, self-impose more structure. And in business, we tend to tell ourselves that we need more strategy.

Melanie Knights (07:42):

We need to be more strategic, but actually I want to challenge you to think about honoring your own energy instead. So instead of applying a new strategy or more bells and whistles, more tactics to your business or your day, I want you to think about honoring your own energy. Perhaps it's actually about ebbing and flowing with yourself rather than with the trends. And I think this is incredibly important right now, because I know so many of your are going through this struggle with social media. Everyone wants to be like TikTok video is the hot new thing. I mean, it's been the hot thing for a while. We've known that, but it's really becoming hard. I think hard to market on Instagram, if you are not using video content and reels, and especially if you want to create less content as well. So it may be that it's about ebbing and flowing with yourself rather than with trends.

Melanie Knights (08:52):

But when we intentionally track and we journal about our needs and whether then whether or not they are being met on any given day, we are able to start recognizing symptoms. So these will be symptoms of creative fatigue, symptoms of creative burnout, writer's block, and even strategic burnout out that's right. We can get burnt out because we are trying to apply too much strategy to our business. We can get burnt out by over planning. I, my hand is raised here. I've talked about this before I, when I get frustrated, if something's not working, I go into planning mode and I will over plan to the point where I then don't wanna do anything. So when we become aware of all of these symptoms and what this kind of looks like in our business, what this feels like in our business, we are able to start slowing down because when we are aware of the symptoms, the best way to get out of this is to slow down, take a breath and self order.

Melanie Knights (09:52):

So we can objectively look at how we are nurturing ourselves. And this builds self trust. It builds an intuitive bond between ourselves, our businesses and our day to day lives. So what I want to really look at is how, you know, we apply this to our, our day and our week and how this can positively impact our business and our creative energy. This is something we've talked a lot about here on the show. I am a big advocate for giving ourselves breaks, from creating or giving ourselves creative rest so that again can look like creative, whatever your creative kind of medium and choices, the things that you love to do that creative of yourself. It's really important that we give ourself time to focus on these things. When they're not going to be strategic, when they're not going to be applied to business. I have a, again, another bad habit of focusing all of my creative energy, my artwork on creating stuff.

Melanie Knights (10:54):

That's going to be essentially sold in my shop or something that I want to monetize. And I've started to in the last few weeks, really take a step back from that. I am still recording what I'm doing and I will share it on TikTok. And, and that's been really fun, but I have to create for the sake of creating as well as creating for the business. It's so important that we take that time because running a business takes up. A lot of time takes up. A lot of energy takes up a lot of our resources and because good old society has teach has taught us to hustle, especially for women and those who identify as women. But as I said, hustling, isn't actually in our nature. This is not something we were born knowing how to do it has been taught to us. It is a learned behavior and the business coaching industry was set up by a bunch of white dudes who wanted to put profit fast.

Melanie Knights (11:55):

And so that is what they have taught us to do. And it's comes back to that old trope of coaches, coaching coaches, to coach coaches, to coach coaches. And it has gone through the years and decades now of business and marketing. You know, it's, it's really like infiltrated into the way we run our lives. And so often that this ends up looking like us, doing more spreading ourselves, super thin with all of our responsibilities and what happens. We burn out. Why do we burn out? Because we need different things. We have our own cycles, not just a menstruation cycle. There are so many cycles around us that greatly impact our energy focus and our can-do attitude. For example, you have a daily cycle, a weekly cycle, a monthly cycle, whether you menstruate or not, you are going to have different types of you're gonna have different types of cycles and different needs at different parts of the day.

Melanie Knights (13:00):

I need to be left alone. <Laugh> when I wake up in the morning, I do not want to get up and kind of get going and rush out the door. That is just sounds horrific for me. I like to get up. I like to have a coffee. I like to have some time to read and really allow myself to kind of wake up and have a think about what I'm gonna do in the day before I start my day. So I get up early for that because that's so important to me. And, you know, the later I get into the day, the more I wanna rest, I know that I'm more productive in the morning, but really for me, what that means is I'm more focused. It's not necessarily productive, but I'm able to focus on a task. I'm able to complete a task. I'm able to I'm able to be curious about what I'm working on rather than perhaps later in the day when the negative self-talk might show up, same for me in a week and in a month.

Melanie Knights (13:57):

So we also experience it throughout the seasons as well. And this is what I mean. We have cycles, we have our own cycles and then there are cycles around us. And so it's always really important that we check in with our own cycles and check in with our own energy, because that's where we're going to start to again, recognize what we need. Now. I know that burnout has become this path to righteousness in online business. It's like, we all kind of go through it. And it's this turning point in so many business owners, origin stories and mine too, right? But we don't deserve burnout. Burnout is not a metric for true success, especially not as an empath or a highly sensitive person or a spiritual person or someone who is connected to their creativity. I know that we all experience different variations of burnout. There is different types of burnout.

Melanie Knights (14:55):

We also experience burnout in different ways and it looks different for all of us. And I think, again, this is why it's so important to recognize that we as individuals have our own cycles, that we, our lives look different. Not only personally, but professionally, our goals are different things we want and need are different. And this is exactly the same as the way in which we self nurture, right? The self, the way in which we self nurture needs to be unique to ourselves. And we need to allow ourselves to have some choice so that we can make sure that we are not forcing ourselves into this kind of box or this process. And that's why I don't wanna call it a ritual routine. Instead, I want it to be a menu, something that you can choose from on that day, something that you can decide for yourself.

Melanie Knights (15:51):

So for those of you who are listening and are unsure, what self nurturing really looks like in your own life, if you are unsure really what you even need. I want you to think about all of the things that you are doing on a regular basis in your day, right? A list of everything that you do, that you would consider to be nurturing to yourself and also write a list, cuz this is really, really important. Write a list of all of the nurturing things that you do for other people. Other, it might be animals, right? If you've got some fur babies, I'm guaranteeing that you are nurturing their needs house plants, how well do most of us treat? If you were a house plant person, like I, yes, I've killed many. I've managed to kill like half a cactus. I'm not sure why, but even then we nurture our house plants.

Melanie Knights (16:46):

We nurture our, our fur babies. We nurture the certain people around us. You know, people, for example, in my case, I have an eight year old, I have to nurture him. That's something that we do. And this is something that I really want you to consider because we nurture other people. We nurture other, you know, friendships and relationships, house plans and fair babies. But sometimes we're not nurturing ourselves or we're not nurturing ourselves at the same level that we nurture others. So I want you to review that list, review these lists and think about how often you come up on them. How often are you nurturing yourself in comparison to everything else and everyone else in your life, even your business. We nurture things in our business. We nurture communities. We nurture social media communities and connections. We nurture these different areas, but we need to also consider ourselves in this.

Melanie Knights (17:47):

So after you've kind of looked at this big perspective and it might require you to do some journaling as well, to really just get clear on what this looks like for you. It's time to start thinking about some of the self nurturing habits that you would like to do and could do. And that's really important because there are things that I would love to do on a daily basis, but they may be things that I can't do on a daily basis. So think about it in terms of things that are, again, a little more practical things that you could do on a daily basis and that you actually want to do. And I want you to start really simple with just three things, right? Three things that three habits, three nurturing habits that you could do on a daily basis, three things that you would like to do on a daily basis to give you an example.

Melanie Knights (18:34):

Mine is journal of some sort. I don't limit myself. It could be writing. It could be creative, journaling, art journaling, but some form of journaling. I like to read on a daily basis and I like to practice guitar. Now, those three things. Let me tell you a little story last year. I decided actually, sorry, it was earlier this year. I picked up my bullet channel and I decided I was going to try out habit tracking and I was gonna try and follow the whole like bullet channel process. Well, disclaimer, it did not last very long and it <laugh>. I fell off the wagon very quickly. I have decided that bill journaling as kind of, we see it on TikTok and, and YouTube. I love watching those videos, but it's just not for me. But the point being that I started tracking these three habits.

Melanie Knights (19:28):

I wanted to see what it would be like to actually track them as habits. And not only did I miss a few days, I very quickly started shaming myself and telling myself that I wasn't doing all three of these things. And the moment I started putting pressure on myself to do all three every single day, it was really, really hard for me to focus on anything else. I started to feel guilty. I started to feel like I had to do them before everything else. I started to resent them the way in which I approached these three things that I love to do and would like to do on a daily basis, completely shifted. And that was when I realized that bullet. Journaling's not for me. And I need to give myself the flexibility because 90% of the time I do all three of them on a daily basis.

Melanie Knights (20:20):

But once I start to apply that pressure, my entire perspective of it changes and shifts. So I want you to identify three self nurturing habits, things that you could would like to do and could you on a daily basis, and you can just jot those down in your journal and they could be anything you want them to be right. Could be anything you want them to be. And then I want you to start tracking how you feel that day on a daily basis, right? Looking at your energy, looking at how you feel creatively, physically, emotionally, there are so many ways in which we can track how we are feeling on any given day. It doesn't have to always be I'm tired or I'm not tight. It can look like that, but it could also be in other ways. And so I want you to start just exploring different ways of tracking, how you feel on a daily basis.

Melanie Knights (21:17):

And I want you to look at these self nurturing habits. Is, are you able to, you know, do you feel like picking one of them each day? Are there any trends, are there any things that you are not doing and it's okay to change your mind as well? That's really important. And after doing this for a period of time, you'll be able to start to recognize, okay, these are the things I really love to do on a daily basis. And this is how I feel. You know, if you are having a really tough week, do you tend to gravitate towards your channel because that's the place where you can kind of unpack when you're feeling physically tired or emotionally tired, do you tend to gravitate towards a book or meditation or something else? You know, maybe it's just literally taking a nap and resting. Do you take, do you gravitate towards, towards certain nurturing habits when you are feeling a certain type of way?

Melanie Knights (22:11):

And this is just some of the ways in which we can start to use this nurturing process and self nurture menu to start to look at how we are approaching our business and how we are looking, how we are feeling on a daily basis within our businesses as well. Now you can go one step further. This is something I've seen other people do. You can go into like canvas or you could do it yourself. Like with markers and pens, you could physically create a nurture menu. Once you've identified what it is that you would like to do on a daily basis, you could create your own little menu, print it off, put it somewhere that you kind of go every day and you could then pick which three things you wanna do. Maybe you wanna stick in the front of a journal or something like that.

Melanie Knights (22:58):

So I really, really urge you to look at how you can do this self nurturing on a daily basis. Because as I said, when we self nurture on a daily basis, we are able to take care of ourselves and able to practice self care on a much bigger bigger scale. We're able to actually look after ourselves and have those heavy conversations. And those, unfortunately, sometimes those really hard conversations because we are able to recognize the symptoms and that's so, so important. And you know, it is time is time to prioritize your needs. And if you need that daily reminder to treat yourself like a sexy Mon Sarah some water, some daylight, some loving words, then go ahead and you can go to the show notes and download a copy of my free nurture track. As I said, the full nurture tracker is available inside of planning by the moon which is available to buy through my website and available on Amazon.

Melanie Knights (24:01):

But you can download a freebie. So it's just a PDF nurture tracker. It is very, very simple to follow and you can go ahead and start practicing this on a daily basis. And it's got everything inside that you need to feel supported on this journey and you'll feel like a sexy Monza in no time. As I said, I am currently making updates to planning by the moon. I'm really excited to make some updates to the planner itself. And I'm kind of taking a few things out. I'm really in this phase right now in my own business where I'm really trying to cut back and streamline. I like to have more than one thing going on in my business. It's just the way I am. I'm definitely a multi passionate I'm interested in more than one thing. But I also have been feeling quite overwhelmed for the past year or so.

Melanie Knights (24:54):

And I've really stepped back, you know, leaving Instagram, focusing on just one social media platform. I've started to make some changes to other things behind the scenes. We are really starting to streamline and kind of clear through things on my website. And it just feels really nice to be doing that because this is a great time of year in case you are, you know, you are feeling this as well. Autumn time is a great time of year to be kind of reviewing workflows and, you know, different parts of your business because as we kind of head towards winter where we're, you know, typically we see that symbolism of hibernation and kind of going inward. It's really nice to have done all of that now to almost like instead of a spring clean, it's like a harvest clean go through, organize those pieces of your business and then work on all those kind of systems and things in the off season.

Melanie Knights (25:46):

So that when you come back and feel kind of more I don't wanna say alive, but you know what I mean, in the spring, you are able to really start to you. You're able to go through that process. Almost like hitting the ground running because you already have all of the systems and things in place that you created back in the autumn. So yeah, I'm definitely in a deep process of kind of harvesting and streamlining behind the scenes, figuring out what I want to take with me as well. And I'm also really, I mean, you know, we've talked about this favorite time of year. I'm definitely focusing on taking care of my needs more making sure that I spend time outside of my office and outside of my house as the weather has got cooler and I can kind of cozy up and it's much more comfortable outside, I'm able to go and do all of those things I love to do.

Melanie Knights (26:38):

And of course I am sharing a lot of those trips and experiences and things over on TikTok. So make sure you come over there, if you are on TikTok and come and say hello we'll put the link to my TikTok account over in the show notes as well, but you can find me Melanie Knights, 87 over there. So that is it for this week's episode. Thank you so much for joining me next week. We have the wonderful, the wonderful Kate Carmen joining us. I am so excited for you to meet Kate if you don't already know her. So Kate and I, we connected of course on Instagram, which is where so many of my relationships started. So many of my friendships started, but what's really, really exciting about my and Kate's conversation is that we ended up talking about Outlaws quite a bit.

Melanie Knights (27:34):

Kate has a really cool tattoo which I'm not gonna talk about now, cause we get into it next week's episode. But it was one of the things that kind of brought us together and connected us. And she is a big outlaw country fan as well. So you, we, as you can probably guess we talked a lot about outlaw country, but we also connected it all back to business as usual. So I'm so excited for you to meet Kate next week on the podcast. If you don't already know her new episode will be out next Thursday. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. And I'm really looking forward because this month is our birthday month. We have just turned two or about to turn to at the time of recording this or airing this. And this month we are going to be releasing a really fun birthday episode as well. So stay tuned for that one. It will be coming soon. Okay. Until next time Outlaws.