Editor’s Note: Every February we are inundated with commercial messages urging us to celebrate “love” in its many forms. Here at Women at Print Alliance, we’re choosing this month to celebrate love in terms of self-worth and emotional well-being. Our Valentine’s gift to you? An excerpt from the award-winning book, “The Joyful Pause: 52 Ways to Love Your Life,” AND a bonus behind-the-book Q&A with author/entrepreneur Nicole Taylor. Enjoy!

Joyful pauses are short, daily invitations into mindfulness and presence that women can use to refresh and refuel throughout the day. They calm the nervous system so you can be responsive rather than reactive when workplace stressors arise.

An effective, enjoyable place to begin is with this pause: At the end of each day, write down or say aloud an appreciation for yourself.

According to Harvard Business Review, the highest-performing teams have a ratio of almost six appreciations given for every criticism. When you think of the way that you talk to yourself, what’s your ratio of appreciations to criticisms? As the head of the team of your body, senses, breath, mind, and wisdom, are you contributing to keeping your team performing well?

One way to increase your appreciation ratio daily is to start and end the day with an appreciation for yourself. I once had a wonderful co-facilitator who taught me this practice when we led a retreat together. Each night at the end of the day, she would take some time to reflect and share appreciations for me and then for herself, and I’d do the same. The quality of my sleep was amazing that week, as I ended the daybasking in positive regard. I invite you to try it!

We can think of the mind as a crystal. When we forget our true nature and start to identify with the roles we play in life, our likes, our dislikes, our fears, or changeable qualities like thoughts and emotions, a film begins to obscure the clarity of the crystal. Practices such as journaling, meditation, and time in nature help to clear the mind of the debris of false identification with such changeable states. As the mind gets clear, the light of the soul shines through with more ease, and that light informs how we experience ourselves and the world.

With your team members, sharing appreciation at the end of meetings is also a fabulous way to create more relational connective tissue amongst the team. Wouldn’t you delight in knowing what your team members appreciates about themselves? I feel excited thinking about hearing colleagues appreciate their amazing qualities. While it might take 10 more minutes with the added time it takes to appreciate yourselves and one another, surrounding each other with mutual respect is a great way to tend to the culture daily.

Making space in your own heart and mind for appreciation is a key ingredient to learning to rest in your true nature. It’s much easier to come home to yourself when you appreciate that home. The act of speaking it out loud or writing it down is the extra step of expression that amplifies the wave of appreciation.

Most important—After you offer the appreciation, pause, breathe, and rest in the sense of inner sweetness that your expression has generated.

You may wish to try the Joyful Pause challenge and commit to doing this daily for a week. As you do, consider the following journey questions to deepen your learning:

• Do you find it hard to appreciate yourself? If so, what are you telling yourself that is creating a struggle, and how can you relax and soften into seeing your own light?

• You can make a game out of appreciation. How many appreciations can you rack up for yourself during the day? You can apply this also at home.

• One gift of the inner critic, which we all have, is that they catch everything. Can you use that skill to catch every opportunity to appreciate the good in yourself or others?

BONUS: A behind-the-book Q&A with Women and Print Alliance and author/entrepreneur Nicole Taylor.

WPA: What was your reasoning behind creating A Joyful Pause?

NT: I created A Joyful Pause to help people fill their lives with more connection. These practices are here to help people bring more of their whole self into their lives every day, and to feel the love that is always there just under the surface of our experiences.

Training ourselves to pause can be helpful. We can practice taking a few moments out of each day to turn our awareness back inward. The practices that restore body, mind, and connection to spirit take time, and they ask us to create a bit of quiet and some internalization. I structured A Joyful Pause to help make this easier for people to do.

WPA: What have been your proudest accomplishments since becoming a business owner?

NT: I love when clients say they leave the coaching/training/retreat with a major perspective shift. When I help someone change the way they think and the type of awareness they bring to their leadership, it’s the best feeling in the world.

While I run my own business, I collaborate with a few other entrepreneurs and we co-create team retreats, leadership development offerings, and other programs. I love how we share ideas and bring deep transformation to leaders across the country.

WPA: I love how you describe your book – “A Joyful Pause is about coming home to yourself.” Can you explain what that means to you and why this message is so important?

NT: Coming home to yourself is about accessing a state of being where you feel a sense of deep connection to your own heart. In my personal experience, tending to my inner life required finding time each day to pause, and in that pause I often found a pulsing sense of joy. I chose things that were fun and that I could do in a few minutes every day, so that it wasn’t a huge time commitment. Consciously creating and attending to the pause became the way I rebuilt my relationship to myself and the way I felt whole and strong regardless of the external circumstances. I want that feeling for everyone.

WPA: On your website you say, “Contemplative practice is core to my personal mission of supporting well-being at home and at work.” Can you elaborate on this? How do you define contemplative practice?

NT: Practices that help us refine our awareness are contemplative. Some examples include watching the breath, meditating, praying, chanting, taking time for reflection, and journaling.

It can be easy to forget that we can choose how to use our attention rather than our attention being hooked by the biggest stimulus. We can choose to turn our attention inward to notice our state, and then make choices about how to respond. We can choose to turn our attention outward and make choices about how to engage in community. But none of those choices can happen if we don’t have practices that allow us to access present moment awareness. Contemplative practices bring us into the here and now and that’s where our power and our best leadership moves exist.

WPA: Since it is February (the month of love), what advice can you give to women who want to work on improving their self-love, self-worth, and emotional wellbeing in 2024?

NT: I would say spend time building your relationship with yourself. Think of self care as tending to yourself— both the part of you that actively moves through the world, and also your higher self. Sometimes part of self care is saying “no.” Sometimes it’s ending something that isn’t working any more, making changes in your life that are uncomfortable, or changing your relationship to things that aren’t good for you. We are talking about that capital S self. It’s important to make choices that are in support of your higher self.

Also, take the Joyful Pause challenge! Spend 5-10 minutes a day doing these Joyful Pauses that support inner connection, a felt sense of well-being, and emotional awareness. The benefits keep reverberating.

If you’d like to learn more about Nicole Taylor and/or how to purchase a copy of “A Joyful Pause: 52 Ways to Love Life,” check out her website at ajoyfulpause.com.