Health / Wellness

Self-Care Tip: Say 'No' To Unsolicited Advice

What does your self-care practice look like?

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Ed. note: This post is by Jeena Cho, a Legal Mindfulness Strategist. She is the co-author of The Anxious Lawyer (affiliate link), a book written by lawyers for lawyers that makes mindfulness and meditation accessible and approachable. She is the creator of Mindful Pause, a self-paced online program for creating a more sustainable, peaceful, and productive law practice in just 6-minutes a day. Jeena offers actionable change strategies for reducing stress and anxiety while increasing productivity, joy, and satisfaction through mindfulness.

I love having my own podcast because it offers an incredible opportunity to speak with interesting people, learn, and share their insights. I interviewed Aditi Juneja. She is a lawyer, an immigrant, and a feminist who formerly led/co-created Resistance Manual and OurStates.org. She’s also the host of Self Care Sundays podcast.

You can listen to the entire episode here. We discussed the role of privilege, self-care tips, and other topics. Here’s a short excerpt.

Jeena: What does self-care mean to you?

Aditi: Self-care is about having the tools, the resources, the time, the practices that allow you to thrive in this world. A big impetus of the Self Care Sundays podcast was whenever I would see people talking about self-care — it was often like stuff that required money, like go get a massage, go do a manicure. The pictures were always of, white women with blond hair doing yoga. I didn’t feel like the resources that were available was speaking to someone like me.

The work that I was doing, it was really about elevating the voices of those most marginalized and vulnerable. I wanted to have space where we could talk about self-care not just for people like me but also for people with less privilege than me.

Jeena: What does your self-care practice look like?

Aditi: My self-care practice is constantly evolving. I try to set new goals. It’s about re-visiting what I want it to look like.

I meditate, which I find helpful. I write, which helps me to think more clearly. I’ve done therapy, which helped me to be less fixated on things, helped me to realize there are things that I can’t control and I need to let stuff go because I have lawyer type-A personality. I always think I can do anything, I can fix anything — that’s not true.

Boundaries are really important. I started making frequent use of the word “unsolicited” much to my parent’s chagrin, where I say, “That was unsolicited, I did not ask for your advice on that. I do not want your advice. No thank you.”

My therapist and I were talking and I said, “Men just feel that they can just tell us stuff.” And she said, “Yeah. But we also allow them to tell us stuff.” And I said, “You’re right. We should just start telling them that their opinions are unsolicited.” And so that just became like my favorite word.

And I think for me, the boundary component of it, the meditation, the quiet time — I’m often really just going, go go go mode. So learning to sit in quiet has been a big change. And then writing to kind of get some clarity of thought.

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Jeena: Yeah, right. And I think it’s important to emphasize that self-care can look very, very different for everyone.

Aditi: I stopped drinking a few years ago and I have, maybe one drink every now and then. And that was great self-care to me. But for other people, having a bottle of wine with a friend or while watching a TV show or a movie, that’s self-care to them. And so I like that as an example because you can really see the starkness of how what works for someone just doesn’t work for somebody else.

Listen to the entire interview over at Jeena’s website…

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