View Content #27173

By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director

It has become tradition at CASLS to make July about self-care. Last year, we focused on Languaging and Self Care and will continue the thread this year. We encourage you to revisit last year’s post and read it here. We will continue these practices this month and add to them as the weeks unfold. As a recap, last year, we highlighted three critical dispositions and suggested journaling about each one.

Disposition 1: Suspend judgment

• Notice without passing judgment.
• Move beyond assigning blame.
• Reserve assigning value and gather more information.
• Ask fundamental questions to challenge unconscious presuppositions.

Disposition 2: Participate with intention

• Know your capacity and give yourself permission to opt out or double down.
• Practice the art of knowing your needs.
• Honor your boundaries.
• Ask fundamental questions to challenge unconscious presuppositions

Disposition 3: Elevate the discourse

• Cultivate a gracious internal dialogue.
• Practice generous assumptions with others.
• Tend to your own side of the street and mind your own business.

This year, we will dive more deeply into each one and add two additional to the list:

Disposition 4: Support others’ intention

• Respect others’ capacity and give them encouragement to opt out or double down.
• Honor the boundaries of others.
• Reserve assigning value to the choices others make.
• Challenge others to hold themselves to their own intention.

Disposition 5: Prioritize mental and physical health (Also see Disposition 2 above)

• Schedule time each day to reflect on your own needs and make time for them.
• Add wellness to your To-Do's.
• Encourage the wellness of others.

We hope you enjoy going on this journey with us. This July our hope is that InterCom serves as a reminder to ourselves and those around us. Focusing in on personal and professional well-being is critical for reaching our fullest potential. For some this might mean taking the month to rest and recharge. For others it might mean using the month to work far ahead into the school year to make things more manageable. For others, summer might just be about handling the tough or amazing parts of life, getting married, caring for a new baby, moving, finding extra family time, or a million other possibilities. So, for the next five weeks, InterCom is about YOU and giving yourself time to reflect on whatever that might be.