You are listening to the Life Coach School Podcast with Brook Kistillo, episode number 304.

Welcome to the Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems and real coaching.

And now your host, Master Coach Instructor Brook Kistillo.

Well, hello, my friends. I am still in Grand Cayman. I'm looking out at the beautiful water, and I want to talk to you all about selfishness.

I've been here for the past week training Master Coaches, and it has been such an amazing dream, such a surreal experience that this is my life.

And then I get to be here with all these coaches and enjoying such an amazing experience while I'm giving them everything that I know about coaching so they can go out in the world and apply it to their lives and to their clients' lives.

And it feels like such an honor and a privilege. And I feel like a lot of the themes that come up often with this type of experience is the idea of selfishness.

And when I talk to people outside of my industry, I often get, well, isn't all this self-care, self-importance movement kind of narcissistic? Isn't it kind of selfish? Isn't it just all about me, me, me, me, me?

And I look at people that ask me this question puzzled. And I think it's because they say that as if it's a bad thing.

As if when we focus on ourselves that somehow we're doing it wrong, that we should be focused on other people only and not on ourselves.

And there's something to me that is so illogical about that theory and about that question that I wanted to do a podcast and just address it.

Now for some of you, this will seem super basic, but I think it's a concept that is worth diving into because of this idea that it's not okay or it's not good to focus on ourselves that we call that selfish as if it is a bad thing.

So I want to kind of set this up in a way where it's really easy to understand. And so I looked up the definition of selfish, which is a derogatory term.

But really when you look it up, it says, you know, you put your needs and your desires before other people.

And I kind of laughed when I read that definition because I feel like that's really the only way to show up in the world in any kind of way to contribute.

You have to show up for yourself first. You have to know yourself. You have to understand your brain. And then from there you have so much more to contribute.

I believe that within most of us as humans, there is an intrinsic desire to give and contribute.

And I think that that's impossible to do if you don't have a well from which to draw from.

And I've seen this happen especially in women where this idea has gotten into their brain that it's very important not to be selfish and to give at our own expense, which is I guess the opposite of selfishness, which is we go and we give and we give and we give with no regard to what we need or what we want.

And even when I say that out loud, that makes absolutely zero sense. And the reason why is not only does that sound terrible and that's not the purpose of our life, but it also is impossible to sustain because you're constantly depleting yourself for other people at your own expense.

At the other end of that spectrum is only thinking about yourself and taking from other people at their expense in order to satisfy your own whims.

Now that's what I think being selfish is is taking for yourself with no regard for others.

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