This episode talks with Ashley Leach about creating a mindfulness practice for working moms, the BEST self-care practice you can create for yourself and how to ensure that it actually makes it into your week – EVERY week. Find Ashley Leach HERE!
Mindfulness + Self-Care for Working Moms with Ashley Leach
Ashley Leach is a badass mom of 2 with baby number 3 on the way. She is an army wife and army veteran turned yoga teacher. She has a passion for sharing the tools of yoga and mindfulness with busy working moms who otherwise feel they have no time for themselves!
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BULLET POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE:
- What does hustle like a mother mean to you?
- Being able to not juggle everything, but being able to balance it in a way that doesn’t stress you out. And being able to give yourself grace when needed, because we cannot be perfect in every aspect of our lives.
- Tell me a little bit about your story!
- I spent 12 years in the army, but there was just a point in my life where I wasn’t being fulfilled in the way that I wanted to be. And I knew that something needed to change. I just didn’t know what it was. I started to find myself more stressed in just the work environment that I was in and it was really starting to take a toll on my overall mental health and my physical health.
- I realized that there was a way to balance some of that energy that I was feeling like anxiety and stress, and that was through yoga practice.
- Once my husband and I decided that I was getting out of the army, I was like, you know, I really like doing this yoga thing and I want to try teaching it. I really started to see a shift in my own life, just mentally and physically. And it was very life-changing for me. And I knew that that’s something I wanted to be able to bring to other moms.
- I particularly picked working moms because I know from my experience that oftentimes we don’t take time for ourselves and we’re just so stressed.
- What goes into creating a mindfulness practice for working moms and for the people you work with?
- It really starts with being productive and being able to plan out your day, your week, you know, kind of what’s going on and what that looks like for you.
- You have to be able to plan some of this time into your day – you might not have that downtime all the time or just randomly throughout the day. So you have to plan it in.
- I like to start with just finding ways to be more productive during the day so that you can add some of this mindfulness and self-care practice into your day.
- What are some of the benefits that you see after you work with working moms specifically? What are some of those benefits that you start seeing popping up after they’ve established a bit of a routine?
- They often find that they’re just less stressed – the stress, the anxiety, the overwhelm… that decreases.
- Once you start to add some of this mindfulness practice in, and once you decrease that stress, you’re able to deal with what’s going on around you with the family and work.
- When that stress level goes down, we often have more patience.
- What are some of the best self-care and mindfulness practices you can recommend for people just right off the bat – something they can do today and each day to just increase their mindfulness and to reduce their stress a little bit every day?
- For self-care and mindfulness practice, try a few things and find what fits. It’s not a one-size-fits-all model.
- I like to start with short breathing exercises. It could be a five-minute exercise of just focusing on your breath, sitting somewhere quietly, and just focusing on how your breath is moving in and out of your body.
- For mindfulness: when we are in those stressful situations or those moments where, you know, you might snap at someone or you just don’t have that patience, that’s when you take that step back and focus on your breath for a few seconds so that you can assess what’s going on and be able to make a good choice in your reaction.
- For self-care: that is really whatever lights you up. What do you need? What fills your soul – what fills your emotional and physical cup? You can’t pour from an empty cup.
