What is self-care?
Self-care is anything you can do to help your physical, mental or emotional health. There are a variety of, and indeed combination of approaches and strategies you can engage with to help you with this. Discussions around self-care have become more prevalent in recent times as many of us are feeling pressure in life; in that we are always connected, juggling multiple demands, feeling time poor, managing multiple roles across different areas of our lives, and feeling the load of assumptions and expectations that we put on our self personally and professionally. It is important to remind ourselves of the act of self-care. It is important to do, as if you do not look after your own wellbeing, you will find that you are not able to sufficiently care for others.

Guidelines

These cards have been designed to be used to either begin or extend a conversation about your wellbeing, and specifically self-care. They can be used with others or by yourself.

I invite you to consider how you care for yourself across the physical, spiritual/mind, social, intellectual, and emotional areas in your life. Each card has one question that is connected to one of these five areas. You’ll notice the focus with the hashtag label under the question.

The questions have been designed to inspire your self-care routines and habits and to enable you to be mindful, that is, aware, curious, open and non-judgmental.

Ideas use by your self
You can use these cards by yourself in a variety of ways. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

- Randomly shuffle the card deck and select a card.
- Scatter the cards out on a table, select a card.
- Identify an area that needs some work for your self-care routine, work through the questions to support your development and setting of intentions.
- Pick one card from each area, identify areas of strengths and areas that may need some attention. Set goals aligned to these to help you with your self-care routines.
- Pick a question, and notice what other people do to address these question. Use your observations to inspire your self-care routine.
- Use the cards to identify areas of self-care that require some attention in your life.
- Use the cards to inspire self-care mindfulness intentions.

Ideas use with others self
You can use these cards with others in a variety of ways including with others or in your role as a coach or teacher. Here are some suggestions to get you started to promote the process of discussing, recording, sharing, and creation of new habits, routines or mindfulness practices. You may use this deck of cards to:

- Promote reflection as part of the beginning conversations connected to valuing self-care.
- Identify areas of self-care that require some attention in your clients, students or peers life.
- Set up five learning centres or groups that involve a different focus area to promote discussion.
- Support the sharing and brainstorming of strategies via a visual graphic organiser to connect to a specific area of the cards or even a specific question.
- Spark conversation by shuffling the deck of cards and invite someone you are working with in a group or individual situation to randomly select a card that then inspires a conversation.
- Set up a plan of action to explore new self-care habits that may not be currently present.

Keep the conversation going
You’ll notice that each card has a hashtag with one of five wellbeing areas indicating the focus of the self-care question. This hashtag is used to also encourage you to share your use of the cards, findings, strategies, or questions with a wider community on social media (you’ll find @exploreandcreateco on Instagram and Explore & Create Co on Facebook). This way we are also extending our social support and community to both build on ideas and to support connections that illuminate self-care.