Starting Your Day Focused On You
It’s very easy for us to think that the best way to help the people around us is to move through our day always putting others first. But if you really want to show up at your best for everyone in your life, and if you want to be the best version of yourself, you should start everyday focused on you.
In this episode we’ll talk about why.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
It’s very easy for us to think that the best way to help the people around us is to move through our day always putting others first. But if you really want to show up at your best for everyone in your life, and if you want to be the best version of yourself, you should start everyday focused on you.
Let’s talk about why. Here we go.
MAIN:
At the start of my career I woke up everyday and the first thing I did was reach for my phone.
It was instinctive. My first thought each morning was focused on work and what other people needed from me.
Five minutes into my day, and I was already stressed. And I told myself it was ok because I was doing it in the name of helping others.
Putting clients and bosses first was the way to get ahead - and it was an essential part of running a successful business and being a service provider.
But then right around the summer of 2016, after I worked in a big law firm for several years and after waking up just about every morning and grabbing my phone, I had this realization, and what I realized is that I was doing things backwards.
I thought I was doing good for everyone around me by starting the day focusing on them and doing things like responding to emails or text messages or phone calls.
Everyone around me was doing that, and so without having been told differently I just assumed that that’s how it had to be.
But I eventually realized that the best thing I could do for my family, my friends, and my clients was to prioritize the things that helped ME show up at my best for Them.
I realized that by starting my day immediately focused on work, I was mixing up my personal identity with my professional identity. And what I mean by that is, by having work be the very first thing I thought about each morning, I was training myself to think that work was THE reason I got up today.
But as I dug deeper, it turns out that my work wasn’t THE reason I got up today.
I got up today to be a human being, and live my life, and have fun, and enjoy my friends and family and hobbies and exercise.
And yes meaningful work is incredibly important to me and I’m driven and motivated by the work I get to do now. But the details of that work are a big part how I SPEND my time each day, but it’s not necessarily THE REASON I got up today.
And that’s when I decided that I needed to carve out time for myself each morning that was focused on taking care of me first. I had to start my day by orienting my focus to what it was that I needed to show up at my best throughout the day.
And when I started to experiment with this, I observed something really interesting. I found that when I focused on myself first, I ended up setting an intention that I carried with me throughout the day.
By starting the day focused on me, I was much more aware of and did a much better job of paying attention to what I needed throughout the day. I became better at not neglecting things like needing to take a break, knowing when I needed food or water, understanding when a particular emotion had a hold of me and was preventing me from moving on with my life. I was able to carry that intention of the importance of taking care of myself throughout the entire day.
So I want to encourage you to start your day focused on yourself first. Instead of focusing on others first, what we want to do is flip and have a shift in perception about what we’re focused on first thing in the morning.
This will be a really powerful routine for you. When you prioritize the things that help you show up at your best, it allows you to go and do the things that you need to do for yourself and for everyone else around you throughout the day.
So before we get into how to put this into practice, I want to mention two challenging things that come up for people when I talk about this concept.
First, when I started to put myself first each morning I immediately felt like I was already behind that day. It was almost like the longer the emails and text messages sat there without me responding, I could sense that other people were on the other end of their computer or phone waiting for me to respond. I had this image in my head that they were getting frustrated that I hadn’t responded yet.
And because my routine was to start with an others-first approach, it felt out of the ordinary to spend the beginning of my day focused on me.
I told myself I didn’t have time to focus on me because every minute counts, and there’s always something to be done, and by spending time on myself it felt like I was doing something wrong, and it felt like people were judging me.
But it turns out that no one was waiting for me to start my day that way, the only person who really in the end was putting pressure on me was me. I had created this false narrative in my head. I wasn’t behind at all, and no one was waiting on the other end of those messages for me to respond. They weren’t even thinking about me, they were thinking about what they were doing.
So that’s one thing to watch out for, in the beginning, starting the day focused on you might make you feel behind or like you’re not working hard enough, but that’s just not the case.
A second challenge for many people is that they experience feelings of guilt around putting themselves first.
There’s this narrative that we’re all familiar with and that’s been ingrained in us around the importance of being selfless and putting others first before ourselves and how admirable it is to just give give give to others.
And there are so many people out there who we look at and say “Wow, how do you do all the things you do? How are you able to show up for other people the way you do? Where do you get that strength? I’m talking about the Tony Robbins of the world, those people who are super achievers and have given so much of themselves to so many people.
But here’s their secret: anyone who is giving to others at an exponential level is an expert at self-care and prioritizing their needs. Before they were ever able to help the masses, the first thing they mastered was understanding what they needed to show up at their best. They prioritized it, and they put themselves first and they repeat those things over and over.
So let me just be clear: prioritizing yourself first is not something to feel guilty about. It’s not just ok for you to prioritize yourself. It’s an absolute necessity.
The people around you not only want you to do it, they’re counting on you to do it. People don’t want you to show up in a poor mindset, or feeling tired, or feeling overworked, or stressed. They want and need you at your best.
But when we get busy or stressed, our first instinct is to sacrifice our own wellness because we think we’re being selfless. We abandon the things we need most. We edge ourselves out of the equation because we feel guilty and because there aren’t many people around us who actually do this for themselves.
Instead, what we need to do in those moments is double and even triple down on taking care of ourselves first.
So how do we go about flipping from being others focused to focusing on ourselves first thing in the morning.
If you want to start putting this into practice and if you want to start shifting your perception, the first thing you need to do is figure out what it is that helps you show up at your best.
You’re not going to be able to put together a strong morning routine unless you figure that part out first.
In the next episode I’m going to share with you exactly how you can build a morning routine, step by step, and I’m also going to share with you what my morning routine looks like but for now as a starting point I want you to spend time answering these four questions first:
1. What helps me show up at my best?
2. What brings me clarity?
3. What helps me take care of my mind, body, my soul?
4. What makes me happy?
The way I want you to do this is to get out the biggest sheet of blank paper you can find, and I just want you to start writing. Anything that comes to mind, don’t overthink it just freewrite until you can’t think of any other answers.
Then, as a starting point for developing a new morning routine, I want you to pull just one thing from that list - Just One Thing.
AND. instead of grabbing your phone tomorrow morning, or doing something for someone else first, do that one thing instead. So before you blindly check your email or head to social media, just do that one thing first and THEN give yourself the freedom to do whatever you want after that.
So if the one thing you pick is going for a 10 minute walk, do that first and then go on with the rest of your morning.
So we’re starting small here. To recap, here’s what I want you to do: Take out the biggest blankest sheet of paper you can find, and free-write as many answers to these questions as you can:
What helps me show up at my best?
What brings me clarity?
What helps me take care of my mind, body, my soul?
What makes me happy?
Then, pull one thing from that list and instead of reaching for your phone tomorrow morning when you wake up, proceed directly to doing that one thing. Then when you’re finished, go about your morning as you normally would.
I also want you to save that list that you create and then in our next episode I’m going to walk you step by step through how to create your own morning routine and also share with you what mine looks like and why I designed it the way I did.
Here’s your big takeaway today: If you really want to help the people around you, you’ll start to do things for yourself first. This is how you start to be the best version of you.
Go have a great workday.