This episode is a continuation of our last episode, Shauna Reitmeier and Brenda Mack summarize the second half of our “You can’t pour from an empty cup” webinar. One of the ways we can refill our cups is to practice self-care. Here we focus on emotional self care and decision making as a way to get and stay energized in the midst of our busy lives in agriculture and farming. 

Transcript

Megan Roberts: Welcome to this session of our Cultivating Resiliency for Women in Agriculture podcast, series one. The Cultivating Resiliency project develops tools for women in agriculture to recognize, adapt to, and develop positive coping strategies to life stresses. This podcast series is developed from our Cultivating Resiliency webinars sessions. I'm Megan Roberts and I co-led this project along with Doris Mold. In this podcast, we feature Shauna Reitmeier and Brenda Mack as our session hosts. Shauna and Brenda are professionals in behavioral health with family ties to farming. In this session, we summarize the second half of our You Can't Pour From An Empty Cup webinar. One of the ways we can refill our cups is to practice self-care. Here, we focus on emotional self-care and decision-making as a way to get and stay energized. Here is Brenda.

Brenda Mack: Something that's been helpful for me regarding what issues am I going to focus on, how am I going to make decisions what's my plan going to be is for me, it's helpful to feel a sense of accomplishment and so I'll look at all of the tasks or activities that I need to do or get done, and I'll write those down, and then I'll look at that like lowest hanging fruit. If I'm walking by an apple tree and there's an apple that is right at kind of my arms length reach, it's easy to pull that apple down and take a bite out of it. And that's really what I think about with when I'm organizing tasks and activities and trying to feel a sense of accomplishment is starting with those things that are more easily and quickly accomplished, and there is something about scratching through that line on your to-do list and seeing that it's done. That gives me energy. It fills my cup a bit.

Shauna Reitmeier: And now we walk into that next step of the process is really how do you make decisions and what the process of decision-making is? And these are just some of the things to think about, and we're going to talk about a couple of those in a little more detail here, but identifying problem solving, identifying what's the decision that needs to be made, gathering the information and do you have the facts? Do you have your personal values that are important for you to weigh this information against, and identifying your options of what you want to do. Weighing what that evidence or that information that you gathered, is it high risk? Is it low risk? And choosing which options that you want to take action on.

So that's really just the process and things that you can be thinking about as you move forward with tackling that list of things that you've just come up with. And so these are some questions, when you're trying to solve a problem, many times it's trying to really get at is there a root or an underlying issue? Because sometimes some things come up that there might be five things, but it's really something that is at the core that needs to get addressed. And so an exercise that I use very often is this ask five why. If you ask five why's to what your first problem or first issue is, you start drilling down and you get to what that root of your question or your problem is that you're trying to solve.

What you could do in asking well, why can't we make this vet bill? All right, because now you're diving into well, because I've got these three other bills. I've got to pay for seed, I've got to pay for feed, I've got labor costs.

Doris Mold: And I've got to keep heat on in the house and food on the table.

Shauna Reitmeier: Well, exactly.

Doris Mold: Okay.

Shauna Reitmeier: And so then you say well, why do we have that? Well, my value and I've got my priority is that my family, I need to pay for this first. And then you start drilling down and what it does is it helps you ... So it doesn't solve the problem. I mean, you're getting to the root of what an issue is, but then you start diving into what do I have control over or what don't I have control over?

This does not mean, when you go through a process like this, does not mean it's going to make it easy. It's giving you a framework to start asking the questions because there are going to be times. The reality is that there are times we're going to have to make really hard decisions that we don't really want to make, but by making them itself relieves some of that pressure.

Doris Mold: Right.

Shauna Reitmeier: Do I have to scale back in my production of what I've been ... With whatever your crop is or your cattle, because I can't keep up with these bills or I need to scale back in some of my fun or personal activities that I want to do to make sure that I can put food on the table and pay the vet bill.

Doris Mold: Right.

Shauna Reitmeier: Maybe I'm going to have to hold off on a trip that I wanted to take or a remodel on something.

Brenda Mack: When I see this and I hear you talk about this a little bit further. To me, it's like that apple that I just picked from the low hanging ... From the tree, and that you're taking a bite of an apple and the core of the apple is your ability to make an informed decision. And so this process of taking those bites of the apple, or if you want to reference peeling away the layers of an onion, it's to get to that point where you make an informed decision, and it might be a difficult informed decision, it might be an outcome that you don't necessarily want to have happen, but you're at that point where you can make that informed decision. Because you've been through this process of asking yourself these questions, reaching out to somebody else where that decision affects them as well, and it helps you to organize and structurally think about that a little bit more.

Shauna Reitmeier: It does, and it also helps you start the what and the why. That kind of gets at the underlying okay, how did this come up? Why did it come up? Is it an interpersonal relationship issue? And then you start getting into who's involved. Am I trying to please somebody or does somebody has an expectation on me? So it helps you start figuring out, getting more to the now how do I address that? And then, so then moving in, as we drill down to how do we solve that problem? What questions am I asking? One of the other pieces here is how do I assess the risk? So when I'm starting to get ready to make a decision to say do I want to move forward with something, and let's use an example of one of the things on the list that you dumped out from your brain dump that you've done is we just found out that a big section of the side panel on the barn is rotting out and that's where the cattle all line up for milking every morning, and you're trying to figure out what do I do. Do I build a brand new barn? Do I just repair a section? You start asking yourself ... Say it's October and the snow ... We won't say it's the 22 below zero that it was here this morning in Crookston, Minnesota. Let's say it's winter is coming and you know you have to do that, so you start weighing out, is it probable? Can we do this? And is there a risk? So what's the risk to the cattle? What if the barn is ... It makes the ...