This section guides you in creating a personalised self-care plan for your placement journey. It encourages identifying non-negotiable self-care activities and setting achievable goals across physical, relational, work, emotional, and spiritual domains. The plan helps track goals, required resources, strategies, and emotional benefits to support wellbeing during placement.
Create Your Own Self-Care Plan
Now that you’ve considered the self-care strategies, health pillars and how other health professionals adopt self-care, you get to make your own self-care plan around particular goals and domains to help you on your placement journey.
As a recap, self-care involves tending to different areas of life that support our overall wellbeing. Physical self-care includes rest, movement, and nourishment. Relationships benefit from time, boundaries, and support. Work/placement/university self-care includes balance, purpose, and managing demands. Caring for thoughts and emotions means acknowledging feelings and using healthy coping strategies. Spiritual self-care involves connecting with values, purpose, or practices that bring meaning.
Self-care domains:
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Physical – rest, exercise, nutrition
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Relationships – connection, boundaries, support
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Work/Placement/University – balance, purpose, manageable workload
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Thoughts and emotions – reflection, coping tools, self-compassion
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Spirituality – meaning, values, connection to something bigger
Step 1: Brainstorm
First, write a list of anything you associate with self-care. You can either use the dot points above, or just jot down anything you think of in the moment. There is no right or wrong, and you don’t need to incorporate any of the ideas you brainstorm. It’s just an exercise to get you to think about what your views of self-care are.
Step 2: Structure your plan in domains & consider non-negotiables
If you already know some areas that fill your cup, it may be helpful to decide that some areas of self-care are non-negotiable and must be done regularly (e.g. weekly, fortnightly). For example, a previous student decided that they would go for a 1-2 hour bush walk each week. After a month or so of going on a weekly hike, the activity really did become non-negotiable and provided a welcome reward at the end of each week. If you are not sure of non-negotiables, just leave it and work with the list of prompts.
Using the prompts below, organise self-care brainstorming into different domains.
Step 3: Put together a Self-Care Action Plan
Print a copy of the self-care plan by accessing the Word or PDF (your preference) document under “Exercise Files” at the top of this lesson under the image. Otherwise, you can access the PDF version here: Self-Care Plan Template.
Using your brainstorming list and non-negotiables as a starting point, start to develop your self- care plan according to different domains and planning prompts to achieve them. Please note, your self-care plan may (and should) be nuanced over your placement as your try different methods. Below is an example.
Further Reading
You can read another version of a Self-Care Plan here: Life in Mind Self-Care Plan.
Next up, we are talking about the importance of reflection during placement, and how it can help you recognise what self-care strategies work for you.