If I were to call you SELFISH, how would it make you feel?
Angry? Offended? Hurt? Defensive? All of the above and then some? (I mean, just to be clear I would 100% feel all of the above and be prepared to show you my receipts of acts of selflessness to boot, so you and I are totally not alone here).
Let's talk about selfishness for a hot minute. What does it MEAN to be "selfish"?
For a long time, selfish (to me) has been synonymous with "a lack of care for others". Egotistic, unkind, thoughtless, insensitive, uncaring, non-empathetic, self-centered. If you literally google (which I did, just for this newsletter) "definition of selfish", here's what you get: lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.
I'm pretty sure NO ONE wants to be thought of as someone who doesn't consider others, so my guess is that we all think of selfish as a bad thing.
...but what if it isn't? What if it's necessary?
Google may strictly define selfishness as the worst thing ever, but in psychological science and in the wise words of life coach Martha Beck:
"Selfishness happens when someone is starved of self. If someone holds a pillow over your face, you can think only of your breath. But if you can breathe freely, you don't think of your breath at all. There are people who are very selfish and mean and awful, and you can guarantee that that person's 'self' is being stifled to the point that they cannot think of anything else."
Selfishness is a way to COPE.
If we look at selfish as just a "bad way to be", that doesn't answer the question of WHY we are being selfish in the first place and what to do about it.
What is it that's stifling us and making us act selfishly?
Here's the tough pill to swallow: it's all the things that make us feel bad inside. All the metaphorical pillows making us focus on ourselves because we can't think of anything else in order to survive.
The job that you dread waking up for.
The to-do list that never ends.
The relationships that feel exhausting rather than energizing.
The workout that you feel you "have to do" and you feel like a failure if you don't.
I've heard so many of my clients talk about their own shame of "falling off the bandwagon", drinking the bottle of wine, having the edible, scrolling absently on social media when they "should have" been going to bed early, the list goes on...
THESE are not the things that are suffocating us. These are the things we are using to COPE with the things that are suffocating us.
If we are not selfish, we can't make it through the things that make us feel bad inside.
We can only be selfless once we take the pillow off our faces.
In order to do that, we need to first identify what the "pillows" in our lives ARE.
And until we know what our "pillows" are, being selfish is not only important but VITAL.
Being selfish isn't bad, it allows us to take care of our own needs so that we can actually survive. Selfishness is the psychological equivalent of putting on your own mask before helping someone else with theirs.
So my questions to you this week are two-fold:
1) What "pillows" exist in your life and what is one tiny thing you can do to shift that pillow slightly away from your mouth? Here's my blog on breaking a habit cycle if you find this helpful here!
2) What is one thing you can do this week to be unapologetically selfish and fill your own cup so that you can actually be more selfless?
You are not a bad person for being selfish. You are doing the very best you can and it is important to be selfish. What I'm asking here is really, really hard. This isn't an overnight change, this is a big, hard, emotional thing. Maybe you just sit with these questions right now and don't answer or act on them just yet- that's okay. That's a form of self-care too.