In an interview with New York Magazine’s The Cut, Keke Palmer shares her perspective on self-love, self-care, and how she stays focused on her endeavors.
When asked how she stays focused on her career:
I definitely meditate and work out, and I’m always honest with myself about how I feel. My type of personality is that I like to be focused. I think I was blessed at a young age to find my passion and I realized how meditative that was within itself — having something you love that you can lose yourself in. I have a tattoo on my arm that says: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” I truly believe you are what you repeatedly do. You can change. You can become anything that you want to become because you are the one who chooses the habits that you do every day. You can make them all positive, or you can make them all negative.
When asked what motivates her to work out:
Do you love yourself? That’s what I ask myself, because after I broke up with my longtime boyfriend, I took a lot of time to realize and understand the concept of truly loving myself — literally treating yourself with care. That doesn’t mean just making sure people aren’t mean to you, or making sure you have good friends, but also physically loving your body and doing right by it. For me, it became motivation simply because it’s not so much about looking nice but more about feeling good. It feels good when I work out. It makes me have energy. When I’m eating well, I’m able to deal with things better. When I started realizing the benefits to my body, health-wise, that’s really what motivated me. I don’t want to be limited by my body because I’m eating poorly or because I’m not exercising and I don’t have the energy. I want to be able to live life to the fullest and so my love for life is what motivates me to keep myself going.
Personally, I love that last part – “I don’t want to be limited by my body because I’m eating poorly or because I’m not exercising and I don’t have the energy.” I think that makes a pretty solid case for finding an activity or a sport – something – you enjoy, and then actively training to make yourself better at it. You’re training because you realize you’ve got to build up the ability to be a competitive player or a leader or even a competent participant – it’s not the same as saying “your body is deficient and needs to be fixed,” it’s saying “you’ve got this thing you love and want to get better at, and you must train your body to be able to handle that.”
I also think working out is a great way to stay focused, especially for someone like me whose brain is constantly moving a mile a minute. Taking a few minutes away from work to do some jumping jacks or meditate (for some, you might swap “meditation” with “prayer,” and that works too!) helps me recenter myself and remind myself what I’m doing, and why.
Quite honestly, part of the reason I’ve been so all over the place lately is because any of my workout time or meditation time is interrupted by feet dragging across the inside of my tummy… but I digress.
What do you think of what Keke shared, here? Can you relate?
