416. Selfish

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 416, Selfish.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master-certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

Hello, everybody, welcome to the podcast. I’ve got a nice quick episode for you today. This episode airs on July 7^th, which is kind of a busy week, 4^th of July. Happy 4^th of July. I hope you have an amazing, beautiful week and a fun summer, hope you’re getting lots of downtime and sunshine and all the fun things. I’m recording this of course before that day. So I’m just starting to think about 4^th of July. Personally, we’re going to hang out with family. My brother has a nice big pool in his backyard. So he’s always nice enough to host us at his house.

And we’ll have some good food and swim and go find some fireworks somewhere at some point. And then we’re taking the kids and my parents and going to Vegas for a couple days, wish us luck. It’s going to be very hot. We are going to go to a couple of shows. We’re going to go see the Michael Jackson show there and the Beatles show. They’re both Cirque du Soleil shows. And I have actually seen them both before but I wanted my kids to see them and my parents. I love them so much. I love a good show.

I love especially a show with good music and really talented artists, which both of those shows are. So I hope you’re doing something fun as well.

I want to talk to you today about this word, selfish. If you’re like me, you were raised by great people who taught you the importance of not being selfish. Or maybe you had a teacher or church leaders or somebody that taught you about selfishness and how destructive it can be not only to the people around us but to ourselves. Being selfish is a no, most of us hear that word selfish and we immediately think about what not to do. I’m not trying to say that’s wrong.

I’m just here to point out to all of us today that I think many of us took that advice and that concept and we use it now against ourselves. And we use it to create problems unintentionally, but that’s why I want to call us all out on it today. Any virtue that is taken to an extreme usually becomes a problem. So let’s just begin with a basic definition of the word selfish from the Oxford dictionary online. It says selfish is a person, action or motive lacking consideration for others, concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. Concerned chiefly with one’s own profit or pleasure.

So first thing I want to point out is that if you are asking yourself is this selfish, am I being selfish here? Then by definition you are not being selfish, just asking the question. Because the first part of this definition, lacking consideration for others. When we don’t stop and think about how our actions are going to impact others, we maybe are operating out of selfishness. But any time you find yourself asking, is this selfish, it means you are definitely not being selfish.

Do you see what I mean? If the definition is not considering others then considering others, you’re no longer selfish. Okay, that’s good to know.

The second thing I want to say is that there is a difference between taking care of yourself even if taking care of yourself means that sometimes the people around you don’t get exactly what they want. And selfishness in the way that we all think of it as something that we want to avoid. Selfishness is in my opinion more like the kinds of things we do that may even be harmful to others. It’s a lack of care, a lack of regard even for others. I promise you that you are not operating from selfishness very often if ever.

What I see happening where this virtue like I said has been taken to an extreme especially with women, especially with mothers is we have stopped taking care of ourselves. Because we believe that if people around us are inconvenienced, unhappy, don’t get what they want, have to sacrifice, have to go without or any other kind of inconvenience and there’s something we could do to prevent that, then we should prevent that. And if we don’t, then we’re being selfish.

That is what I see most of the women I coach on this topic and men but it comes up a lot with women, that’s the place I see them operating from. Let’s look at some examples. If I want to go for a walk and my child has something they really want me to do with them instead and I choose to go for the walk and the child doesn’t get whatever it was they wanted. Maybe they wanted me to play a game with them, maybe they wanted me to take them somewhere. My kids are always like, “Can you sew this hole in my stuffy?” And I say. “Yeah, I will, in about an hour I’m going to go for a walk first.”

And they’re like, “But I want it right now. Can you just do it right now?” “No, I’m going to go for a walk.” So they don’t get what they want immediately in some cases. And we go for a walk and they have to wait. They have to practice patience. They have to sometimes sacrifice. Sometimes they’re not going to get what they want at all in certain cases. And even if the reason they’re not able to get what they want is because we are doing something that takes care of us. And when I say taking care of us I mean physically, mentally and emotionally and spiritually.

All four of those ways are extremely important, that we care for ourselves. And if we don’t there are consequences. And if the people around us have to suffer or be inconvenienced at times, it’s okay. It’s okay. Now, I’m not talking about all the time, there are times when I have to sacrifice or I choose to, I should say, sacrifice or be inconvenienced in the name of taking care of my kids or serving other people in my life in some way. I am not suggesting that you would never want to sacrifice your time or efforts or energy or money or what have you.

I’m simply saying that it’s okay for the people around you to have to sacrifice as well. And that is not you being selfish. That is you taking care of yourself. Now, here’s the reason I feel so strongly about this. Whose job is it to take care of you? Tell me, whose responsibility is it to make you happy? Whose responsibility is it to make sure that you are physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually as healthy as you can be? And if you want to improve your spiritual, mental, emotional or physical health, is that a selfish thing? No, it is not.

I’ll just give you the answer before you have time to even think about it. It is your responsibility to take care of all of those areas for yourself. It is nobody else’s responsibility, just like it is my responsibility to take care of all those areas for myself. And stay with me. It is your children’s responsibility to take care of those areas for themselves. What? Hold on, back up the train for just a minute. I thought it was my responsibility to take care of them. No, it’s their responsibility ultimately.

Now, when they are young and less able to care for themselves we step in and help, of course. And we are teaching them how to take care of themselves. They are not able to fully own all of those areas. That is why we support and assist and help. But do you know how they learn how and how they get stronger and how they get better at it? By practicing doing it. And if we’re constantly there doing it they don’t have the opportunity to practice doing it.

The way that you get better at taking care of yourself emotionally is by experiencing negative emotion and then practicing choosing to regulate yourself. And again I’m not suggesting we wouldn’t want to guide our children and teach them skills for how to do this. We need to, if you don’t know how to do it yourself, come and join me in my coaching program because it’s important that you know how to do it for yourself and then you can teach your children how to do it.

But if they never get the opportunity to practice it they will never develop the level of skill and strength that they’re going to need in life to do it. And maybe you’re thinking back going, “I never got the opportunity to do it.” Either because you were overly pampered or taken care of by an adult or you were neglected and you experienced a lot of pain and had to put up defense mechanisms and have some trauma we might say or wiring in your brain accordingly, fair enough.

Or maybe you’re somewhere in the middle where you’re just like, “We didn’t really talk about that in my family. Nobody taught me what to do when I feel bad. We just sort of, it was like suck it up, let’s go, chin up.” Whatever the reason, it’s okay. I simply want to point out that you have the opportunity now to do it differently for your children. You have the opportunity to set a different example, to paint a different picture of what it means to be an adult in the world, a caring, loving, serving, giving, strong, healthy, confident, happy adult. What does that look like?

Here’s what I’ll tell you. It looks like a lot of taking care of you. Now, how do you take care of you? That is a valuable question to have living in your mind. I constantly have it living in my mind because I have some ideas. I know some things that I do that help me feel better, help me increase my mental and emotional health, help me increase my physical health, help me stay spiritually grounded and connected. I know some of the things but some I still feel like I have some gaps in. I’m still trying to figure out.

And here’s the reason I always keep that question alive in my mind is because the things that help me at certain times sort of lose their effectiveness after a while. Or I become sort of bored with them or I master something and now I need something new. And so let it be dynamic. Let it change. And let me just give you some examples of the kinds of things that I mean, that help me. And this is by no means to say these are the best things to do. I just want to get your brain going as to what might be helpful for you.

So first of all, basic movement of my body helps all four of those areas. When I say basic movement, I mean go for a walk, do some moderate weight lifting, get my heart rate up every now and then. Really I don’t do really high impact exercise anymore, my joints can’t really handle it. I used to run marathons and I used to do turbo kickboxing, really high impact hit classes. My joints just don’t tolerate that anymore so now I walk and I lift weights. I cannot even get over how it doesn’t have to feel like a super grueling workout. I’m not all sweaty at the end like I used to be at the end of an aerobics class.

But just that little amount of movement, when I put it in makes the biggest difference in how I feel in my body but even in my mental and emotional health. So I go for walks, I want to say every day but that would be a lie, just about every day, three to five days a week, three days on a really busy bad week, five days on a good week. And sometimes it’s inconvenient. Sometimes it means dinner’s going to be a little bit later and people are going to have to wait. Sometimes it means somebody else is going to have to make dinner.

Sometimes it means people aren’t going to get exactly what they wanted when they wanted it immediately. They’re going to have to wait until I get home from my walk and that’s okay. It’s not that I only care about my own profit or pleasure here. I care about everyone. I have to take care of me. It’s my job to take care of me. Going for a walk has exponential value because it impacts me so significantly that I’m so much better at all the other things I want to do in my life. So basic exercise.

Getting enough sleep. Literally my teenagers sometimes want to stay out late and I say, “Okay, yeah, you can stay there till that hour but I’m going to be asleep when you get home. So I need you to come in and wake me up and tell me that you’re home so I know you made it home safely.” I know there are people out there who are like. “You have to wait up for your teenager. When they get home they’re going to want to talk.” You know what, we’re going to have to talk a different time because if I don’t get enough sleep I’m not a good mother.

I’m not going to know the best answers to give them in those talks. So that’s just for me, again not telling you how to live your life but getting enough sleep makes a huge difference for me.

Listening to audiobooks or podcasts like this that are uplifting, there are times when I’m going out to run errands and a child wants to come with me and I already have planned that I have a podcast or an audiobook or maybe a coaching call in Be Bold that I want to listen to that I know I need to get some good stuff in my head. I literally say, “I’m sorry, you can’t come this time, you’ve got to stay home.” Because I know if they’re with me, I’m not going to be able to listen to the thing I need to listen to, to get into my head to help my mental and emotional health.

So whatever that means for you, when do you put useful information into your brain to guide your thoughts? You’ve got to do it even if other people have to sacrifice for it.

Listening to music also has really healing uplifting effects for me, spiritual effects too, playing the piano. I love to play the piano. I take a bath or a shower every morning when I wake up. Just cleaning off my body like that gets me ready for the day. If I don’t I feel like I can’t really wake up. I can’t really regulate my body temperature. I get hot and cold. I just need a quick rinse off of my body.

So even if we’re going to go skiing that day as a family or boating at the lake or something, my husband will say, “What time do you want to leave?” And I consider in my head what time am I going to get up and get in the shower or the bath because that is something I do for my own self-care. It just helps me physically, mentally, emotionally feel better.

Going to church helps me and there are a bunch of other things that go along with going to church, but my religious practices, participating in church services on Sundays. But also I like to listen to podcasts that talk about scriptures. That’s easier for me than reading scriptures. I get a lot more out of it because my brain stays focused. So scriptures, study in various ways.

Prayer, lately I’ve been meditating more. I taught a mastermind with some of my students recently and I’ve never done this before but I start out the day with a meditation. I played a meditation by my friend, Thomas McConkey. And I just thought, you know what, we need to get more grounded, we need to get ourselves present, we need to get into our bodies. We need to be focused before we dive into this hard work of building businesses.

And it was amazing, everybody said to me, “Gosh, that was the best start to our day.” So meditation, mindfulness, stillness, those kinds of practices. I like to do a lot of what we might consider high maintenance girly stuff like get my hair done, get my emails done, get my false eyelashes put on. People always say, “Well, I would do lashes but you just have to go in so often and get them done.” I’m like, Yeah, that’s my self-care.” That’s my time to get out and relax and lay there on the table. I listen to something good on my AirPods or I take a little nap.

And I come out with beautiful lashes. I like that. That’s what I choose to do. What do you choose to do? Now, I was talking to my Sister, Natalie Clay, many of you know Natalie Clay. She does couples coaching. And she said to me the other day, “You know what I realized is I have to go every day, go do something kind of fun.” And she’s like, “I am not always good at doing that especially in the winter because I constantly think I should be doing this, I need to do that.

There’s all the stuff that needs to happen around the house. There’s all the stuff I need or want to be doing in my business. There’s all the stuff that the kids need or that needs to happen for school. And there’s planning dinners and grocery shopping and laundry. And there’s always just feels like stuff I should be doing and so I don’t let myself stop and go do enjoyable things. And I realized I’ve got to go do something enjoyable every day.”

For example she said on the day we were talking she said, “My daughter and I went with our son to the skateboard park and just sat there and watched him. He rode his skateboard and it was just so sweet to see, he was so happy. And all the older boys at the skateboard park were so nice to him. And it was a beautiful day and we just sat and enjoyed the weather and it was awesome.” She was like, “I don’t do stuff like that enough, I need to do it more.”

And I was like, “I can totally relate to this.” And I remember coming to this realization at some time in my life where I went, “Hold on, I’m constantly waiting to be caught up, to be done, to be on top of things enough to be able to go and relax and enjoy my life. And I don’t think that moment is ever coming. I don’t think I will ever run out of the to-do list in my head of things that I want or need to accomplish. So I think I’m just going to have to choose to set it aside and enjoy my life at times.” Once a day I recommend at least.

Now, here’s the final thing I told Natalie, I was like, “So right there with you girl, I can totally relate to this.” And I have had this realization in the last month or so that I used to think of it as I’ve got to think of myself the same way I think of anyone else in my family. And I’ve even coached some of you this way before where I’ve said, for example, I have four kids. But I say, “What if you actually have five kids or we could say six kids if we include your spouse.”

So there’s times when we all sacrifice our Saturday morning to go to somebody’s soccer game and support them and that’s that kid’s turn to get some time and attention. And we’ve put some money maybe into that soccer program or whatever. So we all sacrifice for one another and sometimes it’s this kid and sometimes it’s that kid and sometimes it’s my spouse. But sometimes it needs to be me too. I also have needs and some of the time, some of the money, some of the sacrifice etc. needs to go to my needs.

So this is how I used to think of it, everybody gets a turn, each kid gets a turn, my husband gets a turn and I get a turn. And it’s one for you, one for you, one for you, and one for me. And I’ve realized in the last couple of months that it actually has to be one for you, one for you, one for you and 10 for me. Now, some of you are like, “What, that’s not fair.” No, it is. I’m not talking about everyone giving me stuff when I say 10 for me.

I mean the amount of effort and attention that I give to them, the amount of service, let’s just say that I give to them needs to be one for you, one for you, one for you, one for you and 10 for me. I need to be serving myself 10 times more than everyone else in my life, you know why? There’s tons of them. Because it’s not just my family I want to serve. I want to serve my neighbors. I want to serve in my church. I want to serve in my business, all my clients.

And I’m not even talking about that it should be equal in the end. I’m talking about, I need from me 10 times more in order to even be able to give a good solid one to you, I do. That’s just the reality of it. And I don’t think that I’m unusual. I don’t think that I’m any more needy than most people in the world. I think we all need 10 times more from ourselves than we give to anyone else.

And since I’ve started dropping the guilt and allowing myself to really care for myself in the ways I need, it’s so much better, not just for me, for everyone else because they would rather have a pleasant, healthy, confident, happy mother some of the time than a grumpy, overwhelmed, resentful mother all of the time. I promise you, that serves everyone, even if they don’t realize it right now, even if they wouldn’t consciously say that.

In the end that is what’s best for everyone and it also provides them the opportunity to learn how to meet their needs, super valuable life skill that a lot of people are lacking. So you’re not selfish or you are and it’s okay and you should be more selfish maybe, however you want to think of it, take care of you my friend, you deserve it and you need it. And nobody else can take care of you the way you can, I promise you. And when I say you, for those of you that are religious like myself. I include God in that.

I include myself reaching out to the Lord, asking Him to care for me and meet my needs, but that is a personal experience. That is not an experience that anyone outside of me can create for me. Alright, have a beautiful rest of your week. We are days away from The Art of Happiness so if you aren’t registered, make sure you join me because this may be the last time we teach it. I don’t want you to miss it. I want you to see the power of coaching in your life.

It’s a great way to take care of all four of those areas of your life through coaching, spiritual, mental, emotional, physical. It can literally help in all of those areas and I would be delighted to show you how. Thanks for joining me today. Have a good one. Bye bye.

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.