Episode 5: Take a Five-Minute Action

Description: This week on Self-Care for Educators, Tina invites you to commit to just five minutes a day for your wellness. Whether it’s a quick walk, stretching, filling your water bottle, or simply pausing to breathe, these small steps add up to meaningful progress.

Resources: Use the code Wellness20 to get 20% off Tina's book 180 Day of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators.

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Transcription:  Hi, and welcome to episode five of season six of Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren. Hi, I hope you had a really great week last week. I hope you took advantage of the promo code for 20% off of my book, 180 Days of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators, and if you didn't get to it last week, there is good news. This code is good through November 30th. Let me say that again. This code is good through November 30th, so if you go to solutiontree.com, this is specifically for the book, 180 Days of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators. If you use the code Wellness20. W-E-L-L-N-E-S-S two zero. At checkout, you will get 20% off of this book, and that code is good through November 30th, which makes me so happy.

So what I thought I would do this week is take a deeper dive. Into one of the chapters, which is one of the weeks so you could get a better idea of the book if you're kind of still on the fence. And it's going to provide us an invitation for this week. So what I'm going to start with is just week one. So let me read what week one says.

So week one is take a five minute action. This is straight out of the book. This week is all about the jumpstart. It's about putting your foot on the gas pedal, but gently. Often getting started is the hardest part. Typically, we know what we want to do, but doing that thing can feel impossible. So let's conquer that obstacle and hit start. It's go time. 

The progress principle states of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. There's no more meaningful work than your physical wellness, so let's put this research into action gently and quickly, five minutes at a time. 

This five minute action acts as your secret weapon. This week you are simply going to do something related to your physical wellness, which includes your food choices, hydration, movement, sleep, and rest, and you're only going to need five minutes of the day to do it. You are proving to yourself that you can do this. This small start is the first step in creating lasting change. And so this week's invitation, each day, this work week, take one five minute action related to your physical wellness. 

I've provided some examples to get you started, so perhaps you prepare fresh veggies so they're in the fridge and ready to eat. Establish an evening ritual that helps prime you for restful sleep. Breathe or meditate. Take a short walk first thing in the morning, at lunch, after school, or in the evening. Begin your day by drinking a cup of warm lemon water. Take your supplements and medications as prescribed. Fill up your water bottle, drink from it, and then keep doing that throughout the day. Workout for five minutes. Think pushups, tricep dips, squats. Something easy. Don't eat any equipment. Stretch. Use a foam roller, practice yoga. Begin a gratitude journal and in it, write five things about your physical self that you are grateful for at the start or end of the day. Simply sit in silence for a few minutes. Step outside and get some fresh air. Have a healthy snack. Dance. 

So you can ramp up or cut back your efforts if you want or need to. So you can dial it up by doing two or three, five minute actions in one day, or extend the five minutes to 10 minutes or longer. Or extend this invitation to the weekend as well as the work week. Or perhaps you need to dial it down this week. So maybe you reduce the number of days that you try this strategy. So just a few days this week rather than every day, or opt for just two minutes rather than a full five minutes. 

So in the book I give you a place where you can record the action you took and any notes or thoughts you want to remember. What did you do? How long did it take? How did it make you feel? And then at the end of the week, I offer these reflection questions. Did you incorporate a five minute action this week? If not, why not? If you tried more than one five minute action, what was your favorite and why? How did taking a five minute action make you feel? What difference did you notice in your body? Did you extend the time spent on any action once you began? If so, why? Do you plan to continue to take five minute actions? Why? What actions will you take and how will you incorporate them into your daily routine? 

So that's week one, that's chapter one. And as I said, I give you a little, what's kind of fun about the book. What I really love about this particular text is that I give you an accountability chart. We know that accountability can be kind of the bridge between saying or knowing what we want to do and actually doing it. And so that's a little preview of the book and it serves as your invitation for this week committing to a five minute action.

I would love if you jump over to the Facebook group or just with your own accountability partners. You know, I always think this is a great one to share with each other, kind of do some crowdsourcing. I gave you that list of ideas that I have in the book, but there's a gazillion more, so that's a good thing to just kind of ask each other about, talk about, maybe you start a note on your phone or a sticky note or iIn a journal somewhere. So you've got all these five minute actions written out so that if you find yourself with a few extra minutes, rather than picking up your phone and scrolling, like most of us do, you go to that list and you think, ah, here's something that I could do that doesn't take a lot of time, just two to five minutes, like teeny tiny, little itty bitty things that we can do.

And to help support you with this, I wanna remind you that if you go to solution tree.com and use the code Wellness20 At checkout, you will get 20% off of this book, which is the 180 Days of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators. Enjoy. 

I hope you make it a great week. I'm cheering so hard for you, so grateful for Adrienne and Solution Tree and Marzano Resources and you my Badass Self-Care squad. Five minutes. That's all we need. We can change our life in five minutes. Make it a great week. I'm cheering so hard for you.