This seems to be a selfish place to start
this post with and I invite you to come explore this with me with no judgements
whatsover. Since childhood, we have been taught to distinguish between what is
selfish and the opposite of that was automatically ‘sharing’. If you flip the
coin here for a moment, the opposite of sharing is actually being possessive –
is that really ‘selfish’?
You have seen kids playing around and when a kid refuses to share his toys with his friends, his mom automatically
calls out ‘Don’t be selfish. Share and play with your friends’. And hence from
childhood, we are taught being selfish is a BAD thing. But was that an example
of being possessive or being selfish? What if we learnt to distinguish between the
two – I actually think since selfish is a more common and easy word, everything
is branded as selfish and bad. If you look at the dictionary meaning of
selfish, it says ‘lacking consideration for other people’.
Don’t you think it is high time, as adults,
we qualified the term ‘selfish’ better? We seem to be stuck in a time machine
of our childhood and label anything to do with ‘ME’ as ‘selfish’ and hence bad.
The phrase ‘Me time’ became quite popular
because realization soon dawned upon hard working men and women especially
juggling multiple responsibilities that they needed this ‘Me time’ to unwind
and spring back to action with a renewed energy. Do you know of such people and
how many times have you heard others make snide remarks about these people? I
am guessing lots…
Stop multi-tasking this moment and ask
yourself - ‘What do I want? What can I do today, that will make ME happy and is
a meaningful activity for ME? And if I am happy and fulfilled, the people
around me are happy. So, how is that an act of selfishness and how is that
bad?’
I can
almost hear my husband saying ‘Buying a fancy car would make me happy today…’
Sure, by all means, go ahead and do it, if you think that is what will make you
happy and is a meaningful activity for you. Well, this is where, as adults, you
need to take a call what is meaningful for you…watching TV makes you happy but if that is not a meaningful activity with a purpose for you, you donot feel
fulfilled and the happiness is only temporary and short-lived.
I work with people who have this cloak of
‘unselfishness’ so tightly wound around them that they have forgotten to even
consider their basic needs of existence. They have become such slaves of doing
things for others and in the process losing their own identity, which is a massive
source of dissonance , leading to an unhappy or unfulfilled life. The subject
of doing things for your own self is so taboo and so alien that when I begin
talking about it, it seems like I am asking my clients to commit a crime. That
is where I would ask you to really think about the word selfish and ask
yourself what is really true here…
I would like to introduce a term here
called ‘self empowerment’ – when you are empowering yourself, what is possible
for you? From that perspective, when you ask yourself, ‘How have I empowered
myself today’, what comes up?
4 aspects of success: Health, Wealth,
Relationships and the all-encompassing ME. Successful people are doing what
makes them happy and what is meaningful for them. No one else can define what
makes you happy or what activity has meaning for you except for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment