We hear a lot about the importance of self-love, especially when juggling the demands of PhD life and real life, but have you ever thought of self-love as a revolutionary success strategy?
You maybe thinking, ‘Of course, well isn’t this the season of love?’
So it’s February (at the time of writing this)…
And I know that when people think of February, with all the Valentine’s Day celebrations, they think of love. For many, it’s the love season, right?
By the way, if you’d rather listen to this post as a podcast, please use the player below:
So, what is love?
For me personally, love is an everyday decision, not a holiday once a year. I refuse to wait for Valentine’s Day to demonstrate the love I have for my husband, celebrate our beautiful marriage or to be grateful for all that we share or even show myself some love.
I know it sounds cliche, but for us, that’s a daily thing. It’s part of our lifestyle.
For us, it’s choosing each other day after day through the ups and the downs of love, of life, or marriage, and everything that we get to share together.
I think that this idea of just waiting for this holiday to celebrate that, to embrace that or to raise that up into your awareness is quite dangerous for your relationships. Making sure that you are daily reminding yourself and expressing gratitude for the blessing of love in your life, is the secret for a happy relationship.
So let’s go back to this idea of Valentine’s Day and the season of love. If you’re big on wining and dining for Valentine’s Day and going all out on romance for the day, then don’t let me stop you Mama, do you! No judgment here because that’s not the aim of this blog post.
If you want to know more about how you can thrive in your marriage/relationship, then you can check out this other post my husband and I wrote together.
But I digress…
I just mentioned Valentine’s Day and this idea of a season of love to bring some context to this post.
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. This means I will earn a small commission if you purchase any items after clicking on the links included in this post at no extra cost to you. Read the full disclosure.
Self-love helps you achieve purposeful success
So as I thought more about this, my mind wandered over to this idea, which I got from Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism, of ‘protecting the asset’ and how important it is to fill your own cup as a Mama on a PhD/doctoral journey.
And this is not just so you can pour into the cups of others, although that is part of it as a Mama wearing many hats. But really, that self-love is a key strategic move if you want to be successful on your journey of PhD motherhood.
I refer to this as achieving purposeful success.
You see, all success is not created equal. I personally believe in the power of pursuing purposeful success. Purposeful success is success on your terms. It’s success defined by you with intention, and success that aligns with your values as a Mama. Purposeful success is success without sacrificing what truly matters to you.
If you’ve watched my ‘PhD with Purpose Mamanar’, you would have heard me talk about this and the importance of filling your own cup so you aren’t left depleted and fast-tracked to the valley of disillusionment and overwhelm. This is also where I break down the 4 simple steps to achieving purposeful success.
Self-love is absolutely central to that.
Why is it so hard for Scholarly Mamas to prioritise self-love?
Often we don’t think of self-love as a strategy for success. It feels self-indulgent and intemperate. But for me, self-love is a gift. It’s a mindset and a revolutionary strategy for success.
So, if you don’t take anything else away from this post, I want you to know that self-love is one of the most underestimated strategies for achieving purposeful success.
Now, this is not the only strategy we teach inside our Scholarly Mamas collective. There are of course others, but self-love is absolutely one of them.
I didn’t always have this perspective though. Over the years of my own Scholarly Mama life, I have grown so much in this area, especially in the last couple of years. With intention and focus, I’ve prioritised my personal development and growth. And crucially, I realised that there was no way I could talk about personal development and growth without starting with ‘me’.
However, as I said, this wasn’t always my focus as a Scholarly Mama. But I knew I had to find a way of navigating the juggle-struggle without sacrificing what truly mattered to me. I found a way to do my PhD well without sacrificing the important stuff.
And that included myself. That included me.
Your PhD is you but you are not your PhD
Here’s the thing, Mama. Your PhD is you but you are not your PhD. There is a clear difference in those two statements. You are not your PhD because you are more than your PhD. You wear many hats, you have a purpose in this world beyond academic titles and accolades. When you’re a Scholarly Mama, your PhD can’t be your entire life.
But, your PhD is you.
Your PhD won’t exist without you in the centre of that story. You are not following a defined, pre-set curriculum. You are the driver of this journey. You’ve got supervisors and/or advisors to guide you along the way, but you are the driver of this journey.
You are the innovator.
The creator.
You are the brains and brawn behind everything that you are doing on this journey. You’re learning, growing, and contributing to the body of knowledge in your particular field. You Mama, are in the driver’s seat.
Your PhD is you.
And because of that, you cannot show up for your PhD (or even as a Mama, wife/partner, or in your professional role) if you don’t first love yourself. If you don’t prioritise you and practice self-love, how can you do your PhD well? How can you pour into your other cups if you don’t focus on first filling yours?
Self-love helps us, as Scholarly Mamas, to ‘protect the asset’
As I said, I talk about this more on the ‘PhD with Purpose Mamanar’, which you can check out if you join us inside Scholarly Mamas EXPLORE. But this idea that we can just pour from cups that are literally becoming emptier and emptier by the day without filling our own and ‘protecting the asset’ is completely misguided and false.
You must recognise that you are the asset in all of this. The PhD opportunity is not the asset, right? All the benefits of your career are great, but they don’t mean anything without you. You are the asset, Mama. And so, that’s why I want to remind you that on this journey as a Scholarly Mama, self-love is one of your secret weapons here.
Self-love is your revolutionary strategy for success.
What self-love looks like in practice for a Scholarly Mama
So you might be wondering well what does self-love look like in practice for a Scholarly Mama?
For me, self-love as a Scholarly Mama looks like this:
- Letting go of perfectionism. It’s not serving us Mama, we need to let it go.
- Embracing and accepting all of who you are. You are a whole person Mama, embrace and accept that.
- Practicing self-discipline because you know what matters to you and you are committed to preserving those things while pursuing your goals.
- Recognising that you are worthy of success just like everyone else, even if you are a mother, even if you wear other hats, even if you’re doing other things in your life. You are still worthy of success on this journey. And I’m going to be honest with you, there are times where I questioned whether I deserved that success because I felt like I wasn’t able to work at the same pace as my childfree colleagues. I had other commitments and I valued those other dimensions of my life. But I felt this guilt of not being able to always pour my all into my PhD cup.
- Investing in myself. It’s shocking how many Scholarly Mamas are willing to invest in their educational or professional development or on material things that will wither away eventually, but when they are presented with opportunities to invest in their own personal growth or things that will help them to realise their own dreams, goals and ambitions, they are full of excuses! What does that say about how much we value ourselves?
Self-love isn’t selfish, it’s a sensible investment!
When we think about investing in ourselves, there’s so much resistance there. Yet thousands of pounds or dollars on this PhD.
Whether that’s by you yourself or whether it’s a scholarship, fellowship or work that’s supporting you. Either way, doing a PhD is a huge financial investment and a huge time investment too!
And we know that time is infinitely more valuable than money.
So with all of this investment going on, doesn’t it make sense to also invest in the person who is being investing in that PhD?
Doesn’t it make sense for that person to finish that PhD well?
Because whether it’s you investing in yourself or somebody else investing in you, you want to make sure that you do it justice and do it as well as you possibly can.
But, because you’re a Mama, you also don’t want to do that at the expense of the things that matter because you’ll never get those year back. You’ll never get those moments back. Those moments, are opportunities to build memories with your family, with your loved ones, with yourself even!
So I think it’s important that we consider a PhD, not just a financial or educational investment, but also an investment of our time and energy and to make sure that we spend those resources well. So that, when it’s all said and done, we finish well. We finish well and are able to fully enjoy and experience what it means to have scholarly joy and purposeful success.
And I think that that is such an incentive, if anything, for self-love on this journey, recognising that this is a revolutionary strategy for success.
Your PhD doesn’t have to take over your life when you practice self-love
I think I mentioned this in a very early post, about when I was doing my MRes. So I’d attended a seminar which was designed to give us some early insight into PhD life because, at that stage, the attendees (myself included) were trying to decide whether or not we wanted to do a PhD. The presenter had finished their PhD (or was about to finish, can’t recall exactly now) and came back to talk to us about their PhD experience.
And I just remember hearing the words, ‘Your PhD is going to completely take over your life, it is going to be your breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s going to completely consume all of your energy’.
When I heard that, I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well that’s not going to work for me because I have other things in my life that matter to me. I just can’t pour everything into my PhD.’
Of course, I wanted to do it well. Yes, I wanted to do it justice. I wanted to contribute to my research area at the highest possible level, but I was not willing to do that at the expense of myself or the people that I love. I was not willing to do that. And so I had to come to that place of acceptance.
I think that day, I promised myself that if I did decide to embark on a PhD journey, knowing that I would be doing it as a Mama, that I would not do it at the expense of the things that truly mattered to me.
You are worthy of success
Believe me, there were times in my PhD journey that I slipped into the overachiever mindset of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do more, work harder, push myself to keep up with everyone else. I felt that pressure. And I had to remind myself, no, Michelle, you are enough. You are doing this thing the purposeful way. You are doing your best and you are worthy of the same success that everybody else has access to, even if you are a mother, even if you are a wife, and, even if you are not pouring all of your soul into your PhD. Even if those things are true, you still deserve the success. You still are worthy of success.
And that had to come from a place of valuing myself, loving myself, and believing in myself. It had to come from a place of self-love. I had to get rid of all of these unrealistic expectations that told me that I had to do the most to even be deserving of success. The lies that I had to do more than was within my capacity to actually achieve the success that I wanted.
Lower your expectations and achieve success
I had to get rid of those expectations. Those false beliefs had to go! I lowered my expectations so I did not constantly feel guilty, or like I wasn’t keeping up or doing enough.
I lowered my expectations.
And actually what ended up happening was, I exceeded those. I exceeded those expectations. But I exceeded them because they were low in the first place. There weren’t ridiculously unachievable expectations and they were certainly not the expectations of other people.
I set my own goals, my own standards for what I wanted to achieve and I made sure that they were achievable and they were not ridiculous. And guess what? That allowed me to exceed them.
Embracing your own evolution through self-love
The other thing I wanted to mention in relation to self-love being a revolutionary success strategy is this idea of embracing our own evolution.
So, the growth that we experience on this journey. We seem to think that the person we were at the beginning of this PhD motherhood journey, that we should be the same person throughout or by the end of it.
This thinking is not only unrealistic, but it leads us to navigate the juggle-struggle with a fixed mindset. It does not take account of the fact that you’re a human being, that you’re growing, having experiences, learning, developing, evolving and healing.
So why would you expect that you should be the same person you were at the beginning? It makes no sense.
Why not give yourself the grace to grow, to develop, and become the best version of yourself?
Give yourself the gift of self-love!
So how can we use self-love as a revolutionary success strategy as Scholarly Mamas?
3 things to help you practice more self-love
Here are a 3 things you can do to deepen your self-love:
1. Deepen your connection with yourself
The first is to begin to foster a deeper connection with yourself. There are many ways to do this but I’ve always found reflection to be a good space to start. I am no expert in this but as a natural reflector, I believe this is definitely a secret tool for connecting more deeply with ourselves.
Unlike other working Mamas who may be too busy to think, as Scholarly Mamas we spend a lot of time thinking. I was saying to someone recently that I am literally paid to think. As researchers, that’s what we do! We spend a lot of time thinking. We spend hours buried in the literature, conceptualising and seeking an understanding of complex ideas and findings. The goal is thought leadership, original contributions to your field and becoming an independent scholar. So we are not strangers to thinking time. But often, we don’t think much about self-love or spend time in reflection about who we are and who we want to become. We therefore overlook the importance of becoming aware of our habits and our defaults to help us see where changes are needed.
Self-love through journaling
One way to begin your journey of self-love through reflection is through journaling. Inside our Scholarly Mamas collective we will be embarking on our self-love journeys together with the help of Melissa from The Wellthy Mama Co who will be teaching us all about self-love through journaling. After receiving a cancer diagnosis as a wife and Mama of 2, Melissa has been on a mission to help other busy Mamas connect with themselves and become rich in what matters most. She will be delivering one of our guest ‘Mamaclasses’ inside our Scholarly Mamas collective! We can’t wait to elevate our self-love journeys together in 2024.
Melissa has also written the most beautiful, amazing guided self-love journal which we will go into more depth inside of our Scholarly Mamas collective. So if you are a member of our collective you will be able to take this ‘Mamaclass’ very soon. Can’t wait!
2. Be kind to yourself when no one is looking, positive self-talk isn’t just for the kids
The second is to be kind to ourselves when no one is looking. So not the elaborate spa days and girls’ trips! By this, I mean when you’re in your own head, which is where we spend a lot of time as Scholarly Mamas. When we are in the stillness of our own thoughts, how are we talking to ourselves?
What kind of self-talk are we practicing?
You know as Mamas, we often remind our kids of the importance of positive self-talk but how are we talking to ourselves when no one is watching?
Are we consistently building ourselves up or are we constantly tearing ourselves down?
Do we truly believe that we deserve success?
Do we believe that we belong in the spaces we occupy?
Are we telling ourselves that we can do this and that we can do it well?
This too is self-love.
By practising self-compassion in your thinking, you set yourself up for success because you are more likely to approach the challenges on this Scholarly Mama journey with grace and confidence. You will see them as conquerable. And on top of that, you will begin to see the possibilities rather than the barriers when you encounter roadblocks. You will gracefully let go of perfectionism, reframe failure and go on to achieve purposeful success. Celebrating your wins (no matter how small) and affirming yourself will become your daily practice. This is how you use self-love as a revolutionary success strategy!
3. Embrace your growth and evolution
The third thing you can do to begin practising self-love to achieve the success you desire is to embrace your personal growth. You don’t have to take a rigid, inflexible approach to your Scholarly Mama journey. Let go of the false notion that you have to remain the same person. Mama, this thinking is stunting your growth! Let the tensions you experience between who you were and who you want to be, fuel your personal development.
Let it be a catalyst for change.
You can’t become what you want to be if you are not willing to embrace change, new perspectives and growth. A PhD journey is a long one and a motherhood journey is for a lifetime, so how can we possibly remain the same person through all of that? It’s not going to happen.
You are allowed to evolve.
Yes Mama, you are allowed to grow.
You are allowed to become the purposeful Scholarly Mama that you desire to be.
So embrace that.
One of the things that helped me with this was reframing ‘quit encounters’ into ‘choice experiences’. Sometimes we have to quit things that are no longer for us. This is part of growth and also taking risks because growth does not happen inside your comfort zone!
I won’t get into all of this here as I talk about it in my ‘PhD with Purpose Mamanar’ but I remember feeling so guilty about the thought of walking away from certain paths. And now, when I reflect on those, I realise that they were actually life-defining moments that have shaped my path in such beautiful and purposeful ways. So don’t be afraid of embracing change and making the choices you need to make for yourself.
Think differently about self-love
Well that’s it Mama. I hope this post has encouraged you to think differently about self-love as a revolutionary strategy for success. Especially if you’re a Mama doing a PhD!
Remember Mama, these are our journeys of becoming!
Sending lots of love and gratitude your way 🙂
Until next time,
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