Happy National Sticker Day! Today is also Self Care Saturday which gives me an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite forms of Self Care: traveling to self-defense conferences.

Self-defense training is fun! The subject of self-defense, non-consensual violence, is upsetting but training for it is actually a lot of fun. And it’s good for you. A big part of my life coaching is in exploring the intersection of life coaching with self-defense soft-skills.

What does that have to do with National Sticker Day?

Five years ago I traveled to Violence Dynamics in Washington DC. My grandparents and aunts and uncles are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, so it was a good opportunity to go visit them.

At VioDy DC, I met and befriended Ben Kennedy (in this photo) and his sister, MacKenzie, and their dad, Bill. When I met them, Ben was 22 years old and he was already one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met in my life!

A few months later, Bill invited me to come to their home dojo in Ohio for a Rory Miller seminar (Rory is a mutual friend), promising me that I could play with Ben’s weapons. That seminar was in November 2019. A few months later, during the Covid Lockdown Ben started posting cool videos on TikTok and IG as @Instructor_Bensei, and he very quickly became famous. If any of you also follow him, I want you to know that he is even more awesome in real life than he is on social media.

Ben’s mom is an amazing artist, she designed this sticker for him of his hand holding his meteor hammer. Ben gave it to me a couple years ago at a 500 Rising women’s self-defense conference in Minnesota.

Self-care is anything that makes you feel important to yourself.

Self-defense and martial art training are my self-care because I’m telling myself I’m worth defending. And it’s fun! Traveling to self-defense conferences and making new friends is the ultimate expression of this.

What do you do for self-care? How do you tell yourself that you are important to you?

#SelfCareSaturday #SelfCare