That might be true now for holistic health coach Charlotte Heald but that has not always been the way and she is now on a mission to empower rural women to prioritise their self-care to create lives they love.
Mrs Heald is speaking on a rural women’s mental health webinar on Wednesday alongside rural development leader and life coach Deanne Parkes and rural mental health counsellor and researcher Kathryn Wright.
It has been organised by Ag in Conversation, the podcast series developed by Otago Daily Times-Rural Life 2023 Year of the Farmer winner Myfanwy Alexander, and her friend and fellow Agri-Women’s Development Trust Escalator programme graduate Emily Walker.
The pair organised a long lunch at Riverstone Kitchen last month, featuring three panellists, which sold out and attracted a crowd of 100 women.
Since then, they had received messages from women throughout the country asking if they could bring it to them, Ms Alexander said.
It was Mrs Walker who came up with the idea of a webinar and the aim was for it to be interactive.
People were encouraged to tune in from home or get groups together to view the event.
Mrs Heald and her husband Russell farm an organic and regenerative dairy farm at Norsewood, in the lower North Island, with their three children. Their values around the way they farmed aligned a lot with her work around health and wellbeing, she said.
Mrs Heald once worked as a registered nurse in her rural community but the arrival of children meant it all became too much of a juggle and she immersed herself in family and farming and burnt out.
For about a year, she had an undiagnosed mystery illness followed by a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and it was at that stage that she discovered health coaching.
Her body healed — "I truly believe our bodies are quite miraculous" — and she had now made a career out of health coaching, bringing together women throughout New Zealand and Australia to support each other and to teach them the foundations of self-care.
As well as working online, she also enjoyed in-person events and presenting workshops and giving keynote speeches.
Mrs Heald said there had definitely been more of a focus on men, rather than women, in the rural mental health space.
Whether that was linked to the higher numbers of rural men committing suicide, she did not know — but it did not mean that women were not suffering.
There were so many pressures and so many factors contributing to that.
Along with the likes of markets and financial pressures, there were also a lot of women who had married into farming.
They might have left a career to move to a farm and they were still trying to establish who they were.
Often, they ended up becoming a "dogsbody", juggling many different tasks and they could feel resentful and "pretty lost in space", leading a life to please and be of service to others.
Fortunately, the community Mrs Heald lived in was very strong but that was not the case in some other areas.
Many women lacked human connection; on the surface, they might appear to have very full lives but, at the core level, they were very lonely.
Often these issues could put strain on relationships.
Women were the "heart and centre" of their home and family and they needed to realise that putting themselves first and taking care of themselves meant they were then best able to serve themselves and those they loved and cared about.
"You can’t pour from an empty cup," she said.
Self-care was "not the massages and nails" — "those things are nice" — but basic things like drinking enough water each day and prioritising.
What might be most personal for women was often also very normal.
Things that felt strange and weird or uncomfortable were more commonly experienced than women might expect.
There was definitely no one-size-fits-all approach as everyone’s life and circumstances was so different.
Mrs Heald intended to build a retreat on the family farm to host her own events in her own space in a way that cultivated rest and relaxation and nurture for people.
