contribution – The Healing Modalities

You get to decide.

Over the weekend, I attended the Kidpower International 35 year anniversary conference in Healdsburg, California. I’ve been part of Kidpower since 2002 and for this conference, people in the Kidpower community gathered from many places around the world, including Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, New Zealand, Nepal, Vietnam, Pakistan, Montreal, Germany, Sweden, Russia, and Iran, and from various places within the U.S. We gathered together to learn, connect, and celebrate. I felt a strong sense of community and shared values.

At the conference, I made a presentation about Transformative Self-Care and received a question that I want to write about today: “What is the difference between self-care and being selfish?”

This is an important question – and it might also contribute to being an obstacle for some of us to engage in our own self-care practice. If we see self-care as selfish and we don’t want to view ourselves as “selfish,” then the cognitive dissonance will get in the way.

One conference participant shared a new concept: self-fullness vs. selfishness. I appreciated that idea! It’s like being mindful about ourselves by being self-full of what we need to for ourselves.

A question came to me that felt very powerful as well:

Is it selfish to take care of ourselves if doing so helps us continue contributing to and taking care of others?

When put that way, I don’t see the selfishness. I see someone who is prioritizing themselves so that they can continue to actively contribute to others and to the world.

When we are depleted and worn down, contributing to others can feel like a burden. But when we are taken care of and filled up by our own efforts to care for ourselves, contributing to others can feel more joyful and desirable.

Your turn: You get to decide – is it selfish to take care of yourself so that you can continue taking care of others and contributing in ways that feel good to you?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Care for yourself instead.

Do we have space in our lives for self-care? Some of us may think that we don’t because there are “so many” other things that we “need to” do. Why are we doing so many of these other things and not caring for ourselves?

In the past I used to think I needed to DO all the things in order to prove my worth, because I used to think I wasn’t “good enough.” I wasn’t even conscious of this as a choice I was making-–I just thought it was how I was supposed to be living my life.

I’d do things from a sense of internal pressure—take classes to learn a certain skill, exercise only for weight loss, do activities where I could “meet new people,” be on nonprofit Boards for a sense of prestige, volunteer my time in other ways. I ended up DOING so much in order to feel like I was “good enough” that I ended up exhausting myself and feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. With no time to really care for myself in intentional ways.

Only looking back, and through the self-awareness work I’ve done through therapy and coaching, I see that I was “doing” in order to prove myself as worthy and valuable. Because I thought I wasn’t good enough, I thought I could DO things to feel good enough.

Now I know that worthiness comes from within, that I can choose to have the belief “I am already 100% worthy. I don’t need to DO anything to prove that.” And that belief is available to ALL of us. We get to choose to believe it (or not).

So if we decide that we don’t have to DO things to prove ourselves, what might we let go of doing? How might letting go of some of those things create more space in our lives to prioritize and care for ourselves intentionally instead?

Your turn: What if you stopped doing all the things to prove your worthiness and value and started spending time checking-in with yourself? What’s good about you? (Think about who you ARE, not what you DO, to answer that question.) How can you enjoy being with yourself even more? How can you enjoy being YOU even more so that you feel deserving of the care you’d like to give yourself?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

Tag: contribution

Is it selfish?

Doing all the things?