How To Be Selfish - Grilled Cheese Coaching Co.

Self-Awareness Values May 19, 2023

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are”
~ E E Cummings

As you grow up you develop a set of values – your motivations and drives – the things that make you tick. Whether consciously or unconsciously, your values will play a part in every choice you make, every decision you take. Being in alignment to your values is a powerful source of energy and of joy, allowing you to be the very best version of yourself as you act in integrity with who you are and what you believe. Being out of alignment is a source of frustration, and a drain on your energy and internal resources as you work against the fiction that any misalignment creates.

If you are like most people, it is likely that you have some values that you are sometimes or never living in alignment with. Like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, the path to compromising your values is often a slow sequence of small, unconscious choices, driven by fear – perhaps a fear of failure of judgment – or to meet the expectation of others, whether those “others” are real or imagined.

If you allow that to continue unchecked, each of your values can become suppressed, and you will one day find you are living someone else’s life.

The good news is that our values never leave us. They might be dormant, but they’re never gone. So Leader, this is an invitation. If you recognise yourself in these words, it’s time to become selfish. To take a stand for who YOU are and what really matters to YOU. Growing up, we’re taught that being selfish is a bad thing, that we should share, and consider the needs of others. And that’s fine, but over time if we always put the needs of others first, we will lose the essence of who we are. Listen to the advice they always tell you on the airplane – “You should fit your own oxygen mask before helping others.” If you’re suffocating, strangled by fear, you can’t help anyone. So start by helping yourself, fit your own mask first, and the energy you unlock will help everyone around you.

It is, without doubt, the hard path. It would be easier to continue to live a life in alignment with the expectations of others. But a conscious recentering, and a refocusing on your core values, the very essence of who you are, is an opportunity to reconnect with the most powerful source of energy available to you: Passion.

This week’s inquiry…

Are you living someone else’s life, %FIRSTNAME%?

Dive Deeper…

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“You know it’s a problem when you’re not reaching your greatest potential, when you now there are things you could be doing but you don’t do it because something is holding you back – it’s usually our mindset.'”

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Veteran business leader Paul Alofs presents seven principles for growing and investing in this new asset class and includes insightful stories drawn from business, not-for-profit, the arts sector, and politics for a whole new way of thinking about the very definition of success and how to acquire the world’s most valuable asset.