Who Wants Self-care Anyway?

As a part of our Thursday morning routine we have a scheduled meeting Team Activity: Self Care Activity & Appreciations. Initially this started off with Joyce leading Breath & Movement exercises with the occasional guest host. It’s a lot of responsibility to show up and lead your team through self-care exercises. In order to share the load when most of the team has no training in leading activities of this type we’ve gotten a little creative.

In order to fill the need we’ve reached for the following solutions:

1. Other team members’ interpretation of breath and movement.
   
   While some of us lead very deliberate and intentional sessions of breath and thought others improvise a bit more. I lament I missed the initial incarnation of Cody’s Yoga as a budding tree. Other times folks were inspired by their pets leading to big stretches and ear itches.
2. Searching for self-care videos
   
   There’s a plethora of content available on YouTube and elsewhere to teach you how to be more mindful and to speed up or slow down your body and mind depending on what you’re looking for on a particular day. We have a window of about 5-20 minutes of activity time before we need to be wrapped and move on to appreciations.
3. Self-care B-I-N-G-O!
   
   There are dozens of bingo card creators online. Using a list of activities sourced from the web or your team you can customize the cards and/or the call sheet. Our cards included items like “Can you hear me now?”, Remembered to brush my teeth today, and Did chair yoga. We’ve just used a randomized call sheet rather than use the honor system to avoid calling people out on their dental habits.
4. ChatGPT Tell me how to relax …
   
   I know the all-knowing never-tiring tech is all the rage these days. You can get some quick ideas for activities as a starting point. Make certain that you read through them and adjust them as appropriate for your team. This is a good option to create the activity or word list for Self-care BINGO.
5. Zoom Game Show
   
   We played some self-care trivia in the style of a buzz-in game show played over Zoom. We sourced 9 questions about self-care and their answers from AARP. The host asked questions and then contestants, the rest of the team, buzzed-in by clicking the Raise Hand button in Zoom. That mechanic highlights the player and settles any buzz-in order disputes. The host made a note of correct and incorrect answers and asked each player to count out their correct answers on their fingers. The person with the most fingers wins!
   
   Protip: To avoid revolt when it comes time to tally the scores you may want to consider whether people lose their turn or lose their points, Jeopardy-style, when they get a question wrong.

Does it matter who leads the best movement or the most consistent breath session or who gets the most points? Not in the least. But it does give us an opportunity to remind ourselves about these topics and introduce one another to different techniques. In addition to caring for ourselves we get to share that care with each other and that kindness being given to people around us studies have shown leaves us all better off.

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.