Good Life Project - Selfishly Selfless

Episode Date: April 13, 2017

Heard any of these?You have to take care of yourself, before you can take care of others.In an emergency, put your oxygen mask on first, or else you won't be in position to help those who rely on you ...to be okay.The purest form of service to others is when it comes form a place of complete selflessness.Yup, we've all heard them. I'n fact, I've uttered every single one.Truth is, the distinction between self-care and other-care, indulgent and generous, selfish and selfless, well, it's not quite so clean. Nor is the motivation for the behavior associated with any. Why? Because of a little quirk of human physiology.And, that's what we're talking about in today's Good Life Project Riff.+++ Today's Sponsor: FreshBooks +++FreshBooks makes ridiculously easy cloud accounting software for freelancers who'd rather focus on doing great work than bookkeeping and billing. Get paid online, track expenses and invoice all with the click of a button (or tap of a screen). Get your 1-month free trial, with no credit card required, go to FreshBooks.com/goodlife. And be sure to enter The Good Life Project in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's show is sponsored by FreshBooks, which is a super cool cloud accounting software. It helps you take care of your paperwork faster so you can spend all of your time doing the stuff that you love to do in your business rather than trying to bill and follow up and track and do all this other stuff. It takes care of that for you. For a 30-day free trial, go to freshbooks.com slash goodlife and be sure to enter the Good Life Project in the How Did You Hear About Us section.
Starting point is 00:00:29 Hey there, it's Jonathan here with a Good Life Project riff. Always good to be hanging out with you. And today's riff is about a bit of mythology. It is all about the difference between being selfish and being selfless and the mythology around the personal development world and all of that stuff. So excited to dive in to that conversation. Right now, I want to share a little bit about today's sponsor with you. One of the things that we've come to learn about our Good Life Project community here is that we've got a ton of conscious entrepreneurs and freelancers. And that's why I'm really excited to actually share today's sponsor with you.
Starting point is 00:01:13 So FreshBooks makes kind of ridiculously easy cloud accounting software specifically for freelancers who know that making every single moment count is pretty much the center of building a good business and creating a good life. What they do is they seriously simplify things like invoicing and tracking expenses and most importantly, getting paid online. So FreshBooks has really fundamentally changed how something like 10 million people deal with their paperwork now, making it so much easier and also making it so that you don't have to spend all of your day tracking down customers and trying to follow up. To claim your month-long unrestricted free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash goodlife and enter the Good Life Project in the How Did You Hear About Us section. On to our show. So a really interesting thing happened recently. Last weekend,
Starting point is 00:02:14 I was down, I was invited, super fun event, to participate in a kind of a book world type of thing. And what's funny is I'm three books into being an author and I do a fair bit of speaking and you'd figure I'd be, I'd have been at some sort of book world type of event before, whether it's like a workshop, a writer's workshop, a training, something about books, doing book readings, stuff like this.
Starting point is 00:02:43 And I realized that now years into my writing career, I don't think I've ever actually been to anything like that. Most of the speaking that I do tends to be around the topics in the book and around other things and for other large organizations. So I got the chance to come down to the Annapolis Book Festival, which is, guess where? In Annapolis, Maryland, and which is held at this place called the Key School, which is this beautiful, sprawling campus a block away from the beach. And I'm a water kid, so this was super awesome for me. And speak about sort of a blend of what is in my last book, How to Live a Good Life, and also about the writing life, my writing process, the backstory to this book. And it's kind of fun
Starting point is 00:03:31 because I don't have a lot of opportunity to talk about that side of things. So I went down and my wife and I actually jumped on the train and made sort of like a really fun day out of it. And we got there and a bunch of people showed up in the room and I started talking about it. We had a great little conversation. And then what tends to happen in these types of events, as I now know, being the expert that I am in them, is that they need the room for the next person.
Starting point is 00:04:01 And so I was kind of shuffled into another room where book signing was to happen. And there were was kind of shuffled into another room where book signing was to happen. And there are a bunch of people and I signed some books. And as the room kind of cleared out a little bit, a gentleman came up to me afterwards. And when I was in the room with everybody, I did a little bit of reading because I felt, hey, that's what you're supposed to do with these bookie type of things. So I actually read from a chapter that really focused on the invitation to drop the facade and to be what I call unapologetically you, and to allow that true self to emerge, to come out. And it's really interesting when I share that, in particular, that chapter with people or when I've gotten feedback about that chapter from readers, and I've gotten a ton of it.
Starting point is 00:04:50 And a lot of different reactions. So many people are like, finally, I can exhale. Finally, you know, like this makes so much sense and explains why this feels so good, even though it can be really scary for a lot of people. And then there's another reaction that sometimes happens, and that is, who am I to spend so much time allowing myself to be unapologetically me, unapologetically joyful, and cultivating the practices, the skills,
Starting point is 00:05:22 doing all the things that allow me to be that person. I mean, that takes the things that allow me to be that person. I mean, that takes energy. That takes time. And that also necessarily requires me to focus some of my attention on, well, me. And it turns out that a lot of folks feel uncomfortable with that notion. And I understand why. Many of us have been brought up in either a family or a local community culture or a broader culture where the idea is that you are not the care of yourself, take care of everybody else, serve everyone else until, you know, that that is the most powerful thing that you can do in the world is to serve yourself until you're empty. And if you end up empty, you end up empty, but it will have been a life well
Starting point is 00:06:17 spent. And so people feel really uncomfortable with the idea of, wait a minute, so you're telling me that maybe I should set aside a bit of time, energy, love, attention, maybe money to invest not in serving others, but in serving myself, in doing a deep exploration of who I am and what matters to me, what lights me up, in cultivating a level of self-care that allows me to nourish my physical body, my emotional body, my spiritual body, my state of mind. Because that's going to take time, love, money, energy, attention away from others who I feel it's my job to just be in service of. And I totally get that. And the answer to that is, yes, you're right. It is going to. And people are like, but that's not okay. And what's interesting is the popular response to that in this sort of personal development world and probably across a whole bunch of different worlds is the classic analogy that we hear.
Starting point is 00:07:34 Hey, what do they tell you when you're getting the safety talk in the airplane? You know, if we hit a patch where you need to, you know, take oxygen and you're on there and you're a parent, right? You know, the masks will drop down and you have to put your mask on your face first before you put your mask on your kid's face. And the reasoning is because you won't be in a position to effectively help your child or a loved one who's relying on you in less than until you actually are taking oxygen yourself. So help yourself first, because that is in fact what will allow you to be of service to those you want to be of service to. And for a lot of people, you know, that learns pretty well. It's like, yeah, I get it. So you expand that out to the exploration of, you know, self-care in day-to-day life. Well,
Starting point is 00:08:24 you know, I'm going to run three days a week. Well, it's going to take time away from family. It's going to take time away from work. Yes, and that will allow you to function at a level of health, at a level of attention, a level of focus, at a level of emotional presence, at a level of cognitive ability that will be substantially more ramped and more
Starting point is 00:08:46 present and allow you to give in that slightly shortened amount of time, the same if not significantly more than if you hadn't taken that time. And in fact, if you don't take that time, eventually you're going to break down and not be able to give any of that to anybody. And what use is that? So I shared part of that answer when somebody came up to me after the book reading and I could tell the guy was like, you know, I don't know. You know, it's kind of rolling over me. I've heard it all before. It doesn't make me feel better. I said, all right, let's look at this a different way. Because let's be realistic, actually.
Starting point is 00:09:38 The truth is, there is no such thing as a purely selfless act. It is a fiction that is created to make us feel better. And he's kind of like, huh, well, that's different. And I said, let me explain what I mean by that. We are wired in a way where no matter what we do, if we do something that is in some way in service of others, whether we're helping somebody by giving them money, giving them time, giving them energy, being kind, doing even the simplest act that we know will in some way benefit others. The way that our brains, our physiology, and our chemistry, our endocrinology are wired, just happens to be that we benefit,
Starting point is 00:10:27 even if that is absolutely not our intent in any way, shape, or form. So what happens is we get hits. We get basically changes in electrical signals, which lead to changes in chemical signals in our brain. We get hits of dopamine. We get hits of oxytocin. We get hits of neurochemistry that make us feel good and that also very often make us want to do it more. Now, who knows why this wiring is in existence? There's all sorts of theories, but it's not entirely out there to say that the wiring exists because the more pro-social we are,
Starting point is 00:11:02 the more that we stay together as a group and the more likely it is that we survive in a wild and dangerous world from prehistoric days. And that impulse was bred into us over generations and generations and generations. And that, in fact, is still our wiring to this day, even though the world has changed in a pretty profound way. And so the truth is, to sit here and make a distinction between, well, you know, I'm being selfish or selfless. The reality is, there is no distinction. There is a distinction in terms of intention. You know, you can intend to do an act that will
Starting point is 00:11:40 benefit another and have your intention be purely that they benefit, but your intention won't be met because you're going to benefit. You can do an act that will benefit another and have your intention be doing it because you know that you're going to benefit from it. And that is the primary motivator. And at the same time, that other person will still benefit. So every act is both selfish and selfless. Every act that benefits another has components of both. There's no way to separate them because of the way that we are wired as human beasts. So to say that, you know, you're doing something and, you know, you should only be doing something out of this motivation, which is not about you, kind of actually is not a biologically or physiologically accurate thing to say.
Starting point is 00:12:33 Because it can't really happen in real life. So when we start to have this conversation, the fine gentleman who was sort of sitting there was saying, huh, now that's more interesting to me. So why do I offer this to you? Well, a couple of reasons. One, because I think sometimes we fall into these default states of just offering the conventional wisdom and saying, you know, this is the reason. And assuming that, you know, it should land for everybody. And if it doesn't, that's their problem.
Starting point is 00:13:04 And I'm as guilty of this as the next person. And I think it's a really interesting invitation to really be aware in the moment and see if the conversation you're having is landing. Look at somebody and ask them, is this making sense to you? Like, does this matter to you? Is this moving the needle in your thought process? Now, for me, it was pretty clear just looking at his face that this wasn't. So they said, you know, let's try something different. And I don't know if this is going to land for you or not. But at least let's try a different approach. Let's kind of go off the rails a little bit here, in the name
Starting point is 00:13:41 of trying to open somebody to questioning assumptions about why they do what they do. And in the end, giving them an alternative rationale, an alternative theory or explanation to encourage, to inspire a behavior that they may have perceived as being too self-serving and not enough other serving before. And then understanding that, you know what, actually it's okay for me to do this because no matter what I do, it's going to do both. And the other thing is that I actually thought it'd be kind of fun to plant those two conversations with you because I have had that response in various forms in many different ways. So a couple of things to noodle on there with you. I hope you find that interesting. As always, if you've had conversations with anybody, with your friends,
Starting point is 00:14:32 about this idea of selfish versus selfless and the motivation behind doing things and how you can justify taking time out to do things that, you know, in theory just benefit you versus benefit others. Bounce around the conversation because the truth is, no matter what our motivation is, the more people that we have in the world that are taking action that benefits others, the net effect on humanity is something that we need right now. Something to think about, something to share, something to build conversations around. As always, I hope you enjoyed. I will see you back
Starting point is 00:15:09 next week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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