• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

This Year, Be Selfish; Your Needs Belong to the Top

January 10, 2014 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Your needs belong to the top

You’ve worked hard for your employer.

You’ve worked hard for your family.

You’ve worked hard for your friends.

You’ve worked hard even for your community.

When was the last time you worked hard FOR YOURSELF?

When was the last time you put in long hours on the things that bring you joy? How hard have you worked lately on your hobbies, on your meaningful enjoyment, or on your well-being? When was the last time you rewarded yourself?

What in the world became of YOUR deep-seated need for happiness?

You will become what you will settle for

Given your long to-do list, it’s easy to skip or neglect your own personal needs. When others place demands on your time, your first resort is to cut out the things that are most important to you.

With the arrival of each New Year or on each birthday, it will seem that the finger on the clock of time turns inescapably.

Life will have moved on and you’ll have missed it. Your conscious experience of being will consist of fulfilling your obligations to others.

When you broaden your perspective, you will realize that your life is dull and boring: you are persistently preparing yourself for the challenges ahead and getting ready to seize what the future might hold for you.

There’s always been some barrier to nurturing yourself. There’s always some uncompleted business, some debt to be paid back, something to prepare for, something to be done for others, somebody to be taken care of before your life—YOUR REAL LIFE—would begin.

The years will slip away in the pursuit of an illusion—an illusion that, one day, your real life will begin. Along the way, you will reconcile; you will surrender to the pressures of life. You will surrender your ambitions for what will be possible. You will let circumstances define what you will become. You will settle for something significantly less than what you’ve desired for yourself. Eventually, you will become what you will settle for.

Nurture Yourself

Think of ways you might nurture yourself

While it is virtuous to be selfless and attend to the needs of others, devoting too much time to others can become an impediment to your own happiness. Protect your own time and interests:

  • Listen to your true self and give yourself the care you need. Your experience of being must not consist of letting the little things get in the way of what you truly want out of life.
  • Examine if you yield instinctively to others’ demands or put others’ needs ahead of your own.
  • Consider constructing boundaries on your time. Do not become a victim of your own generosity.

Nurture yourself not only for yourself but also for the others whose lives you touch. Don’t think of self-care as an egocentric act—when you neglect yourself, become overwhelmed, or become melancholic, you can’t be a compassionate, engaged individual for your family, community, or workplace.

Think of ways you might nurture yourself. Don’t settle. Your needs belong to the top.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Related

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed
  2. A Quick Way to De-stress: The “Four Corners Breathing” Exercise
  3. Hooked on Feeling Needed?
  4. How Mindfulness Can Make You Better at Your Job // Book Summary of David Gelles’s ‘Mindful Work’
  5. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’

Filed Under: Living the Good Life Tagged With: Balance

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Popular Now

Anxiety Assertiveness Attitudes Balance Biases Books Coaching Conflict Conversations Creativity Critical Thinking Decision-Making Discipline Emotions Entrepreneurs Etiquette Feedback Getting Along Getting Things Done Goals Great Manager Leadership Leadership Lessons Likeability Mental Models Mentoring Mindfulness Motivation Networking Parables Performance Management Persuasion Philosophy Problem Solving Procrastination Relationships Simple Living Social Skills Stress Thinking Tools Thought Process Time Management Winning on the Job Wisdom Worry

About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

Get Updates

Signup for emails

Subscribe via RSS

Contact Nagesh Belludi

RECOMMENDED BOOK:
Taking Advice

Taking Advice: Dan Ciampa

Executive coach Dan Ciampa offers an excellent framework on the advice network you need on strategic, operational, political, and personal elements of your work and life.

Explore

  • Announcements
  • Belief and Spirituality
  • Business Stories
  • Career Development
  • Effective Communication
  • Great Personalities
  • Health and Well-being
  • Ideas and Insights
  • Inspirational Quotations
  • Leadership
  • Leadership Reading
  • Leading Teams
  • Living the Good Life
  • Managing Business Functions
  • Managing People
  • MBA in a Nutshell
  • Mental Models
  • News Analysis
  • Personal Finance
  • Podcasts
  • Project Management
  • Proverbs & Maxims
  • Sharpening Your Skills
  • The Great Innovators
  • Uncategorized

Recently,

  • Knowing When to Give Up: Establish ‘Kill Criteria’
  • Inspirational Quotations #990
  • To Live a Life of Contentment
  • What You Most Fear Doing is What You Most Need to Do
  • Manage Your Own Career—No One Else Will
  • Be Open to Being Wrong
  • Things Will Look Up Soon

Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.