121. Selfishness
Does the notion of being called selfish make you want to curl up and die?
When was the last time you found yourself doing everything in your power to try to prove you’re not a selfish person?
Taking on extra work, managing other people’s feelings, saying yes to things you DEEPLY want to say no to?
Was it yesterday? Today? Five seconds ago???
Selfishness is often seen as a dirty word, especially for those socialized as girls and women.
Putting yourself first might be a totally foreign concept to you.
But I think that’s really weird.
If you’re going to be someone-ish, why not you-ish?
Because you ARE your SELF.
When you’re SELFISH, what that actually means is that you’re looking out for you.
Like, who-else-ish are you supposed to be exactly???
Dismissing your wants and needs doesn’t make you a better person.
And it certainly doesn’t make you more likely to have a WILDLY SATISFYING LIFE AND CAREER.
Also: it doesn’t necessarily help others either.
Your kids will learn to treat themselves the way you treat YOURSELF.
Your spouse will learn to do new things when you stop doing their chores for them.
Your direct reports and bosses will learn how the company needs to operate to get things done in a timely fashion when you stop swooping in and saving everyone from themselves.
You putting yourself first and building a life that works for you will actually benefit others in lots of ways.
And it will feel really good for you, too.
If you learn to have a better relationship with standing in your own corner.
And that’s exactly what you’ll learn to do with this week’s episode.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
Satisfied AF is officially open for enrollment! Click here to get on a consult call and talk about what it would be like for you to be Satisfied AF in your life and career.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why people socialized as girls and women are told to never put themselves first.
How the systems of oppression in our society invite us to self-discipline and self-monitor.
Why it’s so powerful to question the notion that you shouldn’t be selfish.
How the desire to not be seen as selfish might be playing out in your life.
What happens when you don’t let yourself prioritize your needs and desires.
Why embracing selfishness is a way for you to get to know yourself on a deeper level.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
Burnout: Solve Your Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about the concept of selfishness.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I have a super interesting and fun podcast topic for you today. And before we jump into that, I have a testimonial from one of my current SAF clients, and I want to read it to you because it just delights me. And this is with permission. And the person who wrote this is also a writer, so that’s always super fun and delightful. This is a wonderful skill set that this person has. And so it’s really beautifully written.
And the way that they did it is they wrote it as a letter from their current self to themselves from this time last year. So to give you a little context on that, this person worked with me one on one for six months and then did SAF for six months. So we just finished up a year of working together. So that’s why they’re talking to themselves from one year ago.
Okay, here it goes. “Dear Maureen from this time last year. You don’t know it yet, but you’re about to start one of the most profound relationships of your life. Tomorrow is your first session with career coach Kori Linn, and in one year, you will have a completely different relationship to almost every element of your life.
You hired Kori because you were having an existential career crisis after achieving a huge goal that represented a decade of work and lots of challenging times. And yet it felt like nothing. Don’t worry. It turns out that you just haven’t learned how to practice feeling satisfied, how to really recognize that sensory experience in your body, and how you can actually inhabit that space anytime, no matter what is going on in the rest of your life.
You think that you and Kori are going to talk about your next steps in your career. How to be more productive, and how to set the next big goal. Instead, you are going to talk about everything under the sun. Work, relationships, heartbreak, emails, family, money, self-friendship, loneliness, intimacy, cats, horoscopes, clothing, anger, fear, resilience, delight, magic, smashing the patriarchy, and worthiness.
Along the way, you will be equally inspired and resistant to Kori’s incredible coaching because the way Kori shines a light on the darkest corners of your self-rejection is powerful and cathartic, even if you want to fight her sometimes. She’s a Taurus. She can handle it.
At the end of the year pf working together, you will be absolutely gutted to say goodbye to weekly sessions with Kori because it’s the highlight of your week. But you will have notebooks full of insights and recorded calls to review any time your brain wants to tell you to give up, that you can’t do it, or that you’ll be rejected for putting yourself out there.
Along with Kori’s loving presence in your life, you will cultivate a deep, loving connection to the magical human that you are. You will develop a new approach to your career that feels rejuvenating and sustainable. Most importantly, you will regain the playful and irreverent personality of your childhood self, bringing more joy and satisfaction to your life right now, not at some future date after you’ve crossed everything off your to-do list.
You will do all of this, and Kori will help you build those muscles, so you’ll never be without those skills for the rest of your life. You will treasure this time with Kori, and it will be exactly what you need, so take a deep breath and give yourself permission to change how you think about everything in your life.
Ask yourself Kori’s question that changed everything, what if this is just another way to practice loving yourself? All my love and joy and delight, Maureen from today.”
Oh my gosh, you guys, it’s so fucking good. This is everything I want for my clients. It’s such a beautiful compliment to me and to the work that I do with my clients. And it’s also such an incredible example of what my clients do and the kind of transformations they create in all kinds of areas in their lives, not just in their careers.
I’m always trying to explain to people on the podcast and people I meet in real life about the power and the incredible capacity of coaching to create amazing things for people and for people to create amazing things for themselves because we all have that capacity in us, coaching is just one way to tap into it.
And I find that even though I’m a language person, like a talkative, talky, talky person, it can be really hard to explain to people exactly how transformational this work is, and I think my client, Maureen, does a great job of explaining that in her gorgeous letter testimonial. And that’s what I want you to think about for yourself.
I think, as we’ve talked about sometimes on the podcast, it can feel so uncomfortable and so vulnerable to imagine a life that feels better to you, to imagine a better career. Like yes, we fantasize about it, like we like to fantasize about it as a way to escape our current life that doesn’t actually feel very scary.
But when we think about actually making the changes in our lives and actually bringing our life, bringing our career, bringing our relationships in alignment or into alignment with who we want to be and what we want our life to be like, that can feel really fucking scary, and a lot of people then choose to believe it’s not possible for them.
So what I want you to know is it is possible for you, and one on one coaching and group coaching with SAF are two proven ways to create these kinds of results in all kinds of areas of your life. And probably you’re going to create some magical shit that you didn’t even intend to because that tends to be something that happens with my clients. They come to create one thing, and we create that thing, and also, there are all these little ripples in their life and all these little areas and big areas that are not the same as they were before in really, really wonderful ways.
So I wanted to share that with y’all so you can feel inspired and excited and think about the changes you want to create in your own life and then fucking do it. Because it’s a beautiful thing to think about changes, but in order to experience something different, we have to create something different.
Okay, so that was the testimonial, and now I want to talk about our main topic today, which is the idea of being selfish. So I coached on this a while ago in SAF, and what my brain said while the person was talking was like, who else-ish would you be, right?
So there’s like selfish, right? The word selfish we generally take to be an insult. It means you’re only into yourself. You only care about yourself. Sometimes we take it as meaning egotistical. If I Google it, it’s like lacking consideration for others, concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.
And it’s seen as like this dirty word. And it’s interesting because I think it’s seen as this dirty word for people socialized as women in particular. And I think there are other marginalized identities, too, where the idea of being selfish is a dig, it’s an attack, it’s a critique, right?
But I really think this is interesting to think about, like who else-ish are we supposed to be? Like selfish is me putting myself first, but who else-ish would I ever be? And why would I ever put someone else first? And does that actually work?
So, in patriarchy, people socialized as girls and women are asked and demanded implicitly and explicitly all the time to give of themselves. To give of their emotional labor, to give of their mental labor, to give of their physical labor for the benefit of other people. And to never, never put themselves first and to always make sure everyone else is happy and to like have it all look effortless while they’re doing it, right?
And I want to pause to just say I want to be really clear like I am all about community. I think community is an incredibly valuable, beautiful thing. We’re social mammals. We need it. But when you exist in a system that’s about one kind of person being oppressed and another kind of person being heightened and lifted up, those systems include patriarchy. It also includes white supremacy. It includes ableism. It includes classism.
Anytime you have a system and a structure where one kind of person is lifted above, it’s a hierarchy. Then I begin to become suspicious. So I want to be clear, that definition I read from Google was about, like, oh, putting your profit and pleasure above everything else or focusing only on that. I am not saying I’m going to focus only on my own profit and pleasure at the expense of everyone else.
What I am saying is I’m going to question the internal and external narrative that I should be putting other people before myself at all times and that, specifically, I should be putting certain kinds of other people before myself. So with the way women are socialized, they’re socialized to men before themselves, and they’re socialized to put children before themselves. They’re socialized to put families before themselves. It might be their family, like their nuclear family, and it could also be like their family of origin.
There are other identities too, where people are encouraged to like put their parents before themselves or to put, you know, again, all the men in the family before themselves. So like, there’s patriarchy, there’s white supremacy, and then there are other kinds of socialization also, like from your particular family of origin or the particular culture you grew up in that may have taught you implicitly and explicitly that it’s not okay to ever put yourself first.
And what I think is so interesting about this is it’s a way that these systems of oppression control people without having to control them directly because then we begin to control ourselves. If I’m so terrified about being called selfish by literally anyone in my life, and if the people in my life are going to call me selfish if I don’t adhere to the system of oppression, then they have kind of invited me to like self-discipline and to like self-regulate into their hierarchy.
So as little kids, first of all, like all little kids are selfish. That’s how we’re born being. We’re born putting our own needs first. And then children are taught and let’s be honest, not all children. Some children are taught more than others. And by some, I mean people socialized as girls and women. And also people socialized with other marginalized identities also are getting socialized this way, too.
So we’re socialized that being selfish is something that’s bad, and that we shouldn’t want to be that, and that we should monitor our own behavior to look out for that. And if we do anything that anyone could perceive as being selfish, then we should correct that. So in that way, when we self-monitor and self-regulate and self-discipline, then the system doesn’t have to regulate and discipline us.
And so that’s why I think it can be incredibly powerful to sort of shuck off this idea that we shouldn’t put ourselves first or to like shuck off this idea that being selfish is a bad thing. And again, I think an interesting way to think about this is this idea of, like, who else-ish, right? Like, I think when we’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to be selfish,” what we really mean is like, oh, I want to like live in harmony with other people. And I want to have relationships that are built on equity and compassion, and kindness.
But often, that’s not what we’re doing, right? What we’re doing is saying, even us just like having a need or a preference, we’re like, “Oh no, what if that’s selfish?” So in our desire to not be selfish, we’re often putting ourselves lower than someone else in the hierarchy.
Which then it’s interesting because that’s even self-defeating the desire to be in equity with others because we’re so uncomfortable even valuing our own preferences, our own ideas, our own desires, that then we either sublimate them and can’t even realize what they are, like we’re not even aware of them, right?
We like to make them unconscious because we’re so uncomfortable with having needs and desires, and preferences. Or we subjugate them and make them less important than the other needs and desires, and preferences of other people in our lives.
So this could be playing out for you in all kinds of areas. It could be playing out at work. It could be playing out your relationship with like a significant other. It could be playing out in your friendships. It could be playing out in how you’re parenting your children or how you’re engaging with your own parents.
And I think it’s so important to begin to think about this because what happens when we’re not willing to let ourselves have needs, preferences, desires, et cetera is we become really fucking resentful of everyone else in our lives because we’re tired of putting all their shit first and we’re not getting ourselves to ever put ourself first.
And it creates a pretty terrible situation where we’re trying so hard to “be a good person,” but we’re doing it in a way where we’re not even really giving ourselves permission to be a person at all because we’re so concerned with steering so clear of this idea of selfish that we, like I said before, then we sort of put ourselves as lower on the hierarchy.
So I just think it’s interesting to think about, like, what if you could have a delicious relationship with the idea of selfishness? Selfish is, like I said, it’s treated like such a bad word. But like selfishness, this is myself. This is my like ish. What if that’s okay to have my selfishness? And again, that idea of, like, who else-ish?
If you’re going to keep the idea of selfish, it’s like, okay, so it would be selfish for me to cancel the plans. So what is the alternate? It’s like, who else-ish? It’s like which other person would I be giving hierarchical value to their needs or preferences if I did the thing that they want to do?
Because I think a lot of us, when we think about this idea of selfish, we’re not thinking about it as like us versus the other person. We’re thinking about it as like our bad, selfish self versus our good, pure, mature, perfect self that we imagine we could be versus realizing that dismissing all your own needs and desires doesn’t make you a better person.
And if anything, you know, what I see over and over again is it makes us feel resentful and hateful, and then we want to like battle people and fight them. Or do this fake nice thing and pretend we feel fine when we really, really, really do not feel fine.
So I just want to offer that, like, it’s a little bit like when people try not to eat when they’re hungry. Like the body has wisdom, and the body is like, “I’m hungry. Please feed me. I need fuel to live.” This is part of the system of the body, and you have needs and preferences, and desires too. And when you try to ignore those for too long, I do feel like they sort of boomerang, right?
It’s like we’ll shove our needs down, and we’ll shove our needs down, and we’ll shove our desires down, whatever, and we’ll put everyone else first. And then, like three weeks or three months or three years later, we just blow up, and we’re just pissed at everybody.
And I think what’s really interesting about this, too, is when we have people in our lives who begin to center their own needs, right? If they’re a person who has an identity that was taught not to center their needs, like when that person begins to center their needs, or if we have people in our lives who’ve always centered their needs because some people in our culture, literally, were taught to always center their needs. Men are taught to center their needs, and women are taught to center other people’s needs, right?
So when we have people in our lives who aren’t following the rules that we learned, so they’re centering their needs when we don’t give ourselves permission to, then we get really mad at them. And we think they’re doing it wrong. And it’s really interesting because what we’ll do is we’ll try to make them conform to our rules, even though our rules feel terrible and are not working for us at all.
Amelia and Emily Nagoski talk about this in the burnout book. They talk about how it’s like women who are still enmeshed and embedded in the patriarchal ideas will try to discipline or regulate women who are stepping out of that into like “getting back in line” and doing it the “right way.” And by the right way, they mean the way that we were socialized to do it, right?
And just to reiterate again, I’m all about community. I have an extremely wonderful relationship with a significant other. I’m not at all a proponent of only ever putting your needs first at all times, and never having a conversation with other people and like, you know, never come together and work on it, blah, blah. That’s not what I’m saying.
What I am saying is you deserve to have someone in your corner. And it would be great if there was always someone else you could count on doing that for you, but I think in this iteration of this life as we are in it now, I think that’s your job. I think it’s your job to be your own advocate.
And again, it doesn’t mean stomping all over everyone else’s needs and preferences. It means being the person who’s fully in your corner and who’s going to help you at least own your preferences and desires. And then, like, yeah, maybe we do have conversations with the people in our lives that then we need to negotiate a little bit to make it work, right?
Like in my relationship with Alex, it’s not like I’m like, “Here’s what I want, and we’re only going to do it that way.” But I need to first say like, “Okay, I’ve thought about what I want, what I need, what I prefer, and what I desire, and this is that.” And then I can hear what she wants, and she needs, and she prefers, and she desires. And we can both have the back of our own selves, which that’s sort of like when I like rebrand selfishness for myself and for what I want it to be.
It’s about me having my own back, and me advocating for myself, and me being willing to get to know myself well enough to even then begin to explain to other people what it is that I would like to have happen. It’s like me having enough care about myself to figure out what it is I want and then begin to orient my life in those directions while still being in meaningful, loving, committed, equitable relationships with other people.
So my rebrand is that by me choosing myself, it doesn’t mean I’m trying to put everyone else on the bottom of the hierarchy. It means that I am allowing myself to come to the level of also what’s important. And then, from there, I can communicate with others. And then from there, me and anyone I need to engage with, we can decide what’s going to work for us collectively.
But if you’re not willing to even get to know yourself, if you’re not willing to even get to know what it is you want. If you’re not willing to be honest with yourself about that, then you cannot come to relationships and to the collective as a whole person.
So I love the idea of actually selfishness is a way for you to get to know yourself deeply enough that you can come to the collective as a whole player. As a whole player, because otherwise, you’re coming under the hierarchy. And subjugated is the word my brain keeps coming up with. It probably sounds really extreme. But it’s like you’re self-lowering in a way that doesn’t allow you to come to the table fully and completely.
And I think it’s a recipe for future resentment and future strife because you haven’t even been willing to get to know yourself fully and then to express that fully, to then see what kind of things we can come up with collectively, like what kind of agreements, what kind of arrangements, what kind of work arrangements, what kind of relationships, what kind of living arrangements, and what kind of chore breakdowns.
I think this is a really powerful concept, and I think the idea of selfish versus who else-ish is going to actually give you a lot of insight about, like, oh, who am I lifting up above my own well-being? And what am I lifting up above my own well-being?
It might be a who. It might be like your significant other is who you’re lifting up above your own well-being because, literally, that’s what you were taught to do as a child. And because people socialized as women are socialized to believe that having a relationship with a significant other is extremely important and gives you more value and worthiness. So you might be like, oh yeah, of course, I’m doing that. But maybe I don’t want to.
And it could also be a what, right? So you could be like lifting up above yourself the idea of household harmony, where you’re always putting harmony above your own needs. But is there ever truly any actual harmony if you are not fully coming to the table? I would offer no. I would offer that’s faux harmony.
That’s this, like, pretend harmony. And the cost of the pretend harmony is you. The cost of the pretend harmony is you and your needs, your desires, and your preferences. But also, no one else is getting to have a real relationship with you if you’re not bringing you to the table.
Okay, this was a bit of a rant. But I think it’s a really, really important concept because when you think about having a wildly satisfying life, when you think about having a wildly satisfying career, those are for you. Like, yeah, maybe it’s also like having a wildly delicious, satisfying relationship with your significant other, like the one I have with my significant other. And so that is also about like you and another person, but it’s also about you, right?
Like, you could have a relationship with a significant other that looks wildly satisfying to the rest of us, but if it doesn’t feel wildly satisfying to you, it’s not wildly satisfying. So there is no wildly satisfying life, there is no wildly satisfying career without you. So don’t hold yourself back from us. Bring you. Bring you to the table.
Bring yourself, share yourself with us, bring yourself to the table, and advocate for yourself. Help yourself have the kind of life and career you want by allowing yourself to be centered equally or equitably to the other things you want and to the people in your life.
All right, that’s my rant. That’s what I have for y’all today. I love you so much. Come join Satisfied As Fuck. It’s going to be incredible. This round is about the start. It actually might have started by the time this podcast comes out. I don’t remember exactly when it’s coming out.
If it’s started by the time this comes out, you should hit me up anyways and try to get into early enrollment for the next round because this is the place to do this work and remove the blocks that are keeping you from having that wildly delicious life. And that’s what I want for you. And you know what? I think it’s what you want for you too. So come join us.
All right, I’ll talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I have a super interesting and fun podcast topic for you today. And before we jump into that, I have a testimonial from one of my current SAF clients, and I want to read it to you because it just delights me. And this is with permission. And the person who wrote this is also a writer, so that’s always super fun and delightful. This is a wonderful skill set that this person has. And so it’s really beautifully written.
And the way that they did it is they wrote it as a letter from their current self to themselves from this time last year. So to give you a little context on that, this person worked with me one on one for six months and then did SAF for six months. So we just finished up a year of working together. So that’s why they’re talking to themselves from one year ago.
Okay, here it goes. “Dear Maureen from this time last year. You don’t know it yet, but you’re about to start one of the most profound relationships of your life. Tomorrow is your first session with career coach Kori Linn, and in one year, you will have a completely different relationship to almost every element of your life.
You hired Kori because you were having an existential career crisis after achieving a huge goal that represented a decade of work and lots of challenging times. And yet it felt like nothing. Don’t worry. It turns out that you just haven’t learned how to practice feeling satisfied, how to really recognize that sensory experience in your body, and how you can actually inhabit that space anytime, no matter what is going on in the rest of your life.
You think that you and Kori are going to talk about your next steps in your career. How to be more productive, and how to set the next big goal. Instead, you are going to talk about everything under the sun. Work, relationships, heartbreak, emails, family, money, self-friendship, loneliness, intimacy, cats, horoscopes, clothing, anger, fear, resilience, delight, magic, smashing the patriarchy, and worthiness.
Along the way, you will be equally inspired and resistant to Kori’s incredible coaching because the way Kori shines a light on the darkest corners of your self-rejection is powerful and cathartic, even if you want to fight her sometimes. She’s a Taurus. She can handle it.
At the end of the year pf working together, you will be absolutely gutted to say goodbye to weekly sessions with Kori because it’s the highlight of your week. But you will have notebooks full of insights and recorded calls to review any time your brain wants to tell you to give up, that you can’t do it, or that you’ll be rejected for putting yourself out there.
Along with Kori’s loving presence in your life, you will cultivate a deep, loving connection to the magical human that you are. You will develop a new approach to your career that feels rejuvenating and sustainable. Most importantly, you will regain the playful and irreverent personality of your childhood self, bringing more joy and satisfaction to your life right now, not at some future date after you’ve crossed everything off your to-do list.
You will do all of this, and Kori will help you build those muscles, so you’ll never be without those skills for the rest of your life. You will treasure this time with Kori, and it will be exactly what you need, so take a deep breath and give yourself permission to change how you think about everything in your life.
Ask yourself Kori’s question that changed everything, what if this is just another way to practice loving yourself? All my love and joy and delight, Maureen from today.”
Oh my gosh, you guys, it’s so fucking good. This is everything I want for my clients. It’s such a beautiful compliment to me and to the work that I do with my clients. And it’s also such an incredible example of what my clients do and the kind of transformations they create in all kinds of areas in their lives, not just in their careers.
I’m always trying to explain to people on the podcast and people I meet in real life about the power and the incredible capacity of coaching to create amazing things for people and for people to create amazing things for themselves because we all have that capacity in us, coaching is just one way to tap into it.
And I find that even though I’m a language person, like a talkative, talky, talky person, it can be really hard to explain to people exactly how transformational this work is, and I think my client, Maureen, does a great job of explaining that in her gorgeous letter testimonial. And that’s what I want you to think about for yourself.
I think, as we’ve talked about sometimes on the podcast, it can feel so uncomfortable and so vulnerable to imagine a life that feels better to you, to imagine a better career. Like yes, we fantasize about it, like we like to fantasize about it as a way to escape our current life that doesn’t actually feel very scary.
But when we think about actually making the changes in our lives and actually bringing our life, bringing our career, bringing our relationships in alignment or into alignment with who we want to be and what we want our life to be like, that can feel really fucking scary, and a lot of people then choose to believe it’s not possible for them.
So what I want you to know is it is possible for you, and one on one coaching and group coaching with SAF are two proven ways to create these kinds of results in all kinds of areas of your life. And probably you’re going to create some magical shit that you didn’t even intend to because that tends to be something that happens with my clients. They come to create one thing, and we create that thing, and also, there are all these little ripples in their life and all these little areas and big areas that are not the same as they were before in really, really wonderful ways.
So I wanted to share that with y’all so you can feel inspired and excited and think about the changes you want to create in your own life and then fucking do it. Because it’s a beautiful thing to think about changes, but in order to experience something different, we have to create something different.
Okay, so that was the testimonial, and now I want to talk about our main topic today, which is the idea of being selfish. So I coached on this a while ago in SAF, and what my brain said while the person was talking was like, who else-ish would you be, right?
So there’s like selfish, right? The word selfish we generally take to be an insult. It means you’re only into yourself. You only care about yourself. Sometimes we take it as meaning egotistical. If I Google it, it’s like lacking consideration for others, concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.
And it’s seen as like this dirty word. And it’s interesting because I think it’s seen as this dirty word for people socialized as women in particular. And I think there are other marginalized identities, too, where the idea of being selfish is a dig, it’s an attack, it’s a critique, right?
But I really think this is interesting to think about, like who else-ish are we supposed to be? Like selfish is me putting myself first, but who else-ish would I ever be? And why would I ever put someone else first? And does that actually work?
So, in patriarchy, people socialized as girls and women are asked and demanded implicitly and explicitly all the time to give of themselves. To give of their emotional labor, to give of their mental labor, to give of their physical labor for the benefit of other people. And to never, never put themselves first and to always make sure everyone else is happy and to like have it all look effortless while they’re doing it, right?
And I want to pause to just say I want to be really clear like I am all about community. I think community is an incredibly valuable, beautiful thing. We’re social mammals. We need it. But when you exist in a system that’s about one kind of person being oppressed and another kind of person being heightened and lifted up, those systems include patriarchy. It also includes white supremacy. It includes ableism. It includes classism.
Anytime you have a system and a structure where one kind of person is lifted above, it’s a hierarchy. Then I begin to become suspicious. So I want to be clear, that definition I read from Google was about, like, oh, putting your profit and pleasure above everything else or focusing only on that. I am not saying I’m going to focus only on my own profit and pleasure at the expense of everyone else.
What I am saying is I’m going to question the internal and external narrative that I should be putting other people before myself at all times and that, specifically, I should be putting certain kinds of other people before myself. So with the way women are socialized, they’re socialized to men before themselves, and they’re socialized to put children before themselves. They’re socialized to put families before themselves. It might be their family, like their nuclear family, and it could also be like their family of origin.
There are other identities too, where people are encouraged to like put their parents before themselves or to put, you know, again, all the men in the family before themselves. So like, there’s patriarchy, there’s white supremacy, and then there are other kinds of socialization also, like from your particular family of origin or the particular culture you grew up in that may have taught you implicitly and explicitly that it’s not okay to ever put yourself first.
And what I think is so interesting about this is it’s a way that these systems of oppression control people without having to control them directly because then we begin to control ourselves. If I’m so terrified about being called selfish by literally anyone in my life, and if the people in my life are going to call me selfish if I don’t adhere to the system of oppression, then they have kind of invited me to like self-discipline and to like self-regulate into their hierarchy.
So as little kids, first of all, like all little kids are selfish. That’s how we’re born being. We’re born putting our own needs first. And then children are taught and let’s be honest, not all children. Some children are taught more than others. And by some, I mean people socialized as girls and women. And also people socialized with other marginalized identities also are getting socialized this way, too.
So we’re socialized that being selfish is something that’s bad, and that we shouldn’t want to be that, and that we should monitor our own behavior to look out for that. And if we do anything that anyone could perceive as being selfish, then we should correct that. So in that way, when we self-monitor and self-regulate and self-discipline, then the system doesn’t have to regulate and discipline us.
And so that’s why I think it can be incredibly powerful to sort of shuck off this idea that we shouldn’t put ourselves first or to like shuck off this idea that being selfish is a bad thing. And again, I think an interesting way to think about this is this idea of, like, who else-ish, right? Like, I think when we’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to be selfish,” what we really mean is like, oh, I want to like live in harmony with other people. And I want to have relationships that are built on equity and compassion, and kindness.
But often, that’s not what we’re doing, right? What we’re doing is saying, even us just like having a need or a preference, we’re like, “Oh no, what if that’s selfish?” So in our desire to not be selfish, we’re often putting ourselves lower than someone else in the hierarchy.
Which then it’s interesting because that’s even self-defeating the desire to be in equity with others because we’re so uncomfortable even valuing our own preferences, our own ideas, our own desires, that then we either sublimate them and can’t even realize what they are, like we’re not even aware of them, right?
We like to make them unconscious because we’re so uncomfortable with having needs and desires, and preferences. Or we subjugate them and make them less important than the other needs and desires, and preferences of other people in our lives.
So this could be playing out for you in all kinds of areas. It could be playing out at work. It could be playing out your relationship with like a significant other. It could be playing out in your friendships. It could be playing out in how you’re parenting your children or how you’re engaging with your own parents.
And I think it’s so important to begin to think about this because what happens when we’re not willing to let ourselves have needs, preferences, desires, et cetera is we become really fucking resentful of everyone else in our lives because we’re tired of putting all their shit first and we’re not getting ourselves to ever put ourself first.
And it creates a pretty terrible situation where we’re trying so hard to “be a good person,” but we’re doing it in a way where we’re not even really giving ourselves permission to be a person at all because we’re so concerned with steering so clear of this idea of selfish that we, like I said before, then we sort of put ourselves as lower on the hierarchy.
So I just think it’s interesting to think about, like, what if you could have a delicious relationship with the idea of selfishness? Selfish is, like I said, it’s treated like such a bad word. But like selfishness, this is myself. This is my like ish. What if that’s okay to have my selfishness? And again, that idea of, like, who else-ish?
If you’re going to keep the idea of selfish, it’s like, okay, so it would be selfish for me to cancel the plans. So what is the alternate? It’s like, who else-ish? It’s like which other person would I be giving hierarchical value to their needs or preferences if I did the thing that they want to do?
Because I think a lot of us, when we think about this idea of selfish, we’re not thinking about it as like us versus the other person. We’re thinking about it as like our bad, selfish self versus our good, pure, mature, perfect self that we imagine we could be versus realizing that dismissing all your own needs and desires doesn’t make you a better person.
And if anything, you know, what I see over and over again is it makes us feel resentful and hateful, and then we want to like battle people and fight them. Or do this fake nice thing and pretend we feel fine when we really, really, really do not feel fine.
So I just want to offer that, like, it’s a little bit like when people try not to eat when they’re hungry. Like the body has wisdom, and the body is like, “I’m hungry. Please feed me. I need fuel to live.” This is part of the system of the body, and you have needs and preferences, and desires too. And when you try to ignore those for too long, I do feel like they sort of boomerang, right?
It’s like we’ll shove our needs down, and we’ll shove our needs down, and we’ll shove our desires down, whatever, and we’ll put everyone else first. And then, like three weeks or three months or three years later, we just blow up, and we’re just pissed at everybody.
And I think what’s really interesting about this, too, is when we have people in our lives who begin to center their own needs, right? If they’re a person who has an identity that was taught not to center their needs, like when that person begins to center their needs, or if we have people in our lives who’ve always centered their needs because some people in our culture, literally, were taught to always center their needs. Men are taught to center their needs, and women are taught to center other people’s needs, right?
So when we have people in our lives who aren’t following the rules that we learned, so they’re centering their needs when we don’t give ourselves permission to, then we get really mad at them. And we think they’re doing it wrong. And it’s really interesting because what we’ll do is we’ll try to make them conform to our rules, even though our rules feel terrible and are not working for us at all.
Amelia and Emily Nagoski talk about this in the burnout book. They talk about how it’s like women who are still enmeshed and embedded in the patriarchal ideas will try to discipline or regulate women who are stepping out of that into like “getting back in line” and doing it the “right way.” And by the right way, they mean the way that we were socialized to do it, right?
And just to reiterate again, I’m all about community. I have an extremely wonderful relationship with a significant other. I’m not at all a proponent of only ever putting your needs first at all times, and never having a conversation with other people and like, you know, never come together and work on it, blah, blah. That’s not what I’m saying.
What I am saying is you deserve to have someone in your corner. And it would be great if there was always someone else you could count on doing that for you, but I think in this iteration of this life as we are in it now, I think that’s your job. I think it’s your job to be your own advocate.
And again, it doesn’t mean stomping all over everyone else’s needs and preferences. It means being the person who’s fully in your corner and who’s going to help you at least own your preferences and desires. And then, like, yeah, maybe we do have conversations with the people in our lives that then we need to negotiate a little bit to make it work, right?
Like in my relationship with Alex, it’s not like I’m like, “Here’s what I want, and we’re only going to do it that way.” But I need to first say like, “Okay, I’ve thought about what I want, what I need, what I prefer, and what I desire, and this is that.” And then I can hear what she wants, and she needs, and she prefers, and she desires. And we can both have the back of our own selves, which that’s sort of like when I like rebrand selfishness for myself and for what I want it to be.
It’s about me having my own back, and me advocating for myself, and me being willing to get to know myself well enough to even then begin to explain to other people what it is that I would like to have happen. It’s like me having enough care about myself to figure out what it is I want and then begin to orient my life in those directions while still being in meaningful, loving, committed, equitable relationships with other people.
So my rebrand is that by me choosing myself, it doesn’t mean I’m trying to put everyone else on the bottom of the hierarchy. It means that I am allowing myself to come to the level of also what’s important. And then, from there, I can communicate with others. And then from there, me and anyone I need to engage with, we can decide what’s going to work for us collectively.
But if you’re not willing to even get to know yourself, if you’re not willing to even get to know what it is you want. If you’re not willing to be honest with yourself about that, then you cannot come to relationships and to the collective as a whole person.
So I love the idea of actually selfishness is a way for you to get to know yourself deeply enough that you can come to the collective as a whole player. As a whole player, because otherwise, you’re coming under the hierarchy. And subjugated is the word my brain keeps coming up with. It probably sounds really extreme. But it’s like you’re self-lowering in a way that doesn’t allow you to come to the table fully and completely.
And I think it’s a recipe for future resentment and future strife because you haven’t even been willing to get to know yourself fully and then to express that fully, to then see what kind of things we can come up with collectively, like what kind of agreements, what kind of arrangements, what kind of work arrangements, what kind of relationships, what kind of living arrangements, and what kind of chore breakdowns.
I think this is a really powerful concept, and I think the idea of selfish versus who else-ish is going to actually give you a lot of insight about, like, oh, who am I lifting up above my own well-being? And what am I lifting up above my own well-being?
It might be a who. It might be like your significant other is who you’re lifting up above your own well-being because, literally, that’s what you were taught to do as a child. And because people socialized as women are socialized to believe that having a relationship with a significant other is extremely important and gives you more value and worthiness. So you might be like, oh yeah, of course, I’m doing that. But maybe I don’t want to.
And it could also be a what, right? So you could be like lifting up above yourself the idea of household harmony, where you’re always putting harmony above your own needs. But is there ever truly any actual harmony if you are not fully coming to the table? I would offer no. I would offer that’s faux harmony.
That’s this, like, pretend harmony. And the cost of the pretend harmony is you. The cost of the pretend harmony is you and your needs, your desires, and your preferences. But also, no one else is getting to have a real relationship with you if you’re not bringing you to the table.
Okay, this was a bit of a rant. But I think it’s a really, really important concept because when you think about having a wildly satisfying life, when you think about having a wildly satisfying career, those are for you. Like, yeah, maybe it’s also like having a wildly delicious, satisfying relationship with your significant other, like the one I have with my significant other. And so that is also about like you and another person, but it’s also about you, right?
Like, you could have a relationship with a significant other that looks wildly satisfying to the rest of us, but if it doesn’t feel wildly satisfying to you, it’s not wildly satisfying. So there is no wildly satisfying life, there is no wildly satisfying career without you. So don’t hold yourself back from us. Bring you. Bring you to the table.
Bring yourself, share yourself with us, bring yourself to the table, and advocate for yourself. Help yourself have the kind of life and career you want by allowing yourself to be centered equally or equitably to the other things you want and to the people in your life.
All right, that’s my rant. That’s what I have for y’all today. I love you so much. Come join Satisfied As Fuck. It’s going to be incredible. This round is about the start. It actually might have started by the time this podcast comes out. I don’t remember exactly when it’s coming out.
If it’s started by the time this comes out, you should hit me up anyways and try to get into early enrollment for the next round because this is the place to do this work and remove the blocks that are keeping you from having that wildly delicious life. And that’s what I want for you. And you know what? I think it’s what you want for you too. So come join us.
All right, I’ll talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.