Be Selfish. It’s Good for You.
“Selfish has gotten a bad wrap,” writes Paula G. at her Coaching4Lesbians Blog (which I just found while browsing over at Technorati) and I couldn’t agree more.
Paula lists five benefits of learning to be selfish:
1. More energy.
2. It upgrades your personality.
3. Improves your health and well-being.
4. You become more effective and productive.
5. You get more of what you want and less of what you don’t.
Read her entire post.
I’m in full agreement with Paula on this! Her definition of selfish does not include the standard “at the expense of others” qualifier. I tend to call that type of ‘selfishness’, wholeness because it implies a complete person and it doesn’t have the negative connotations. But that’s semantics. She wrote: “Putting on your oxygen mask and making sure you are OK before you try to help others. “ That’s it in a nutshell for me: if you’re not OK, you can’t help others who aren’t OK. And if you don’t have confidence in yourself and like yourself, it’s highly likely that no one else will, either.
I guess we are playing around with semantics, which usually doesn’t like to play fair with the gray matter of life. But really, the way I see it, altruism does have a dash of the self-first concept in it, just as Jami mentioned in her last sentence. Without it, altruism would fall face first, much like bread without yeast. Wait, I’ve never cooked bread in my life. What am I talking about?
Anyhoo, what I think Paula was describing is not actually selfishness…just the dash of self-first in altruism. Pure selfishness is generaly a lonely place.