DailyJim: We givers often don’t give to ourselves

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Thursday, October 10th, 2024. And today I want to talk about how givers often don't give to themselves.

It can be themselves, it can be ourselves. So what I want to talk about is so the last two days I I talked about this concept of givers and takers and matchers and how the idea is that givers are at the bottom of the organization, also at the top. And Adam Grant in his book says that the unsuccessful ones at the bottom are the ones that don't know when to not give to others. And the ones at the top are the ones who do know. And then yesterday I talked about how the ones at the bottom are probably the ones that don't let other people give to them. We don't want other people to give to us. And then the ones at the top are we do want other people to give to us we like to give to others and we want other people to give to us and I think what I realized is that, maybe those are the same thing because when we.

Give to others and somebody's asking us for something or we have desire to give because we realize that they're struggling with something, we give. We give, we give, we give to them. To not give to them is to give to ourselves.

And let me reframe this. Often people will say, you know, I'm just not good at saying no. Or, you know, they'll say they're not good at saying no. And what I say to them is, no, you're very good at saying no to yourself.

Because you often say yes to other people and no to yourself. Saying no to someone else is saying yes to yourself. If somebody wants me to go out tonight and I feel very tired and I say no I'm not going out tonight, it's because I'm saying yes I want to sleep. So I'm giving myself the time to sleep. I'm not giving my attention to them, I'm giving the attention to myself.

How often do we, and do people, right, I'm often in this category, who like to give help to others, who like to give attention to others, who like to give money to others, who like to give a help, like a physical helping hand to others, don't give these things to ourselves.

I think so often, sometimes we don't give ourselves these things. When people are, and so then if we ask somebody to give something to us, they may feel resentful because they'd be like, why are you asking people to give to you? Maybe on a deeper level, it's like, why are you caring about yourself? You shouldn't care about yourself. You shouldn't give to yourself. You shouldn't love yourself.

Because your role is to take care of others. It's like, wait, what? And I see this so much that some of the people I believe who have the most care and love for other people often don't have that same care and love for themselves. Or they do, but they push it away. And if I'm pushing away love from myself, then of course I'm going to push away love from other people.

If i'm pushing away attention from myself of course i'm going to push away from other people or maybe oppositely i crave it but then if they give me too much of it i freak out, or if they give it to me then i must give it back to them it can't be one way it's got to be two way um i gotta like make it even and balance it out immediately, yeah I just I'm curious how deep this concept goes um.

Because I think sometimes people will say to me like who do you think you are for going after your dreams I'm like somebody who's trying to inspire you to go after your dreams you want me to like do you you don't like your job you want me to not like my job either oh but you know that's just the way life is. No, life doesn't have to be that way. I can do what I want and you can do what you want. No, but I can't really, but you can, you can. I just had a call earlier today with some of my friends in this organization, ISAC, from East Africa. And one thing that they brought up about the ISAC culture that helped them so much in their experience, ISAC was a student organization at the time that was focused on leadership development across countries. I'm trying to make it be more than a student organization.

And one thing they said about the ISEC culture that really helped them is that with ISEC, people would encourage them to be more ambitious, would encourage them to do what they wanted.

So if you're all out having drinks or whatnot and you wanted to go home, it's okay. Whereas some other culture would be like, no, you have to stay. And like a lot of peer pressure or if you wanted to go down a certain career path or if you wanted to do an exchange overseas Isaac would say do it if you didn't want to do it it's okay, If you were telling your friends and family you wanted to do an exchange overseas, they say, why? You're crazy. What's the point? How is that going to help you in your life? Hey, I've heard all these things because I've lived overseas. So many Americans. Why would you go overseas? What's the point? Okay, so why are you going there? How is this going to help you with your career? I said, I don't know, but it will. They said, I don't think so, but I really want to do it. So why are you working on this? Because I want to. But you know, you should do this other thing. But I want to do this. No, but you know, yeah, everyone has the things that they want to do. I'm like, uh-huh. How many of us have the courage to go after them and do them? How many of us have the courage to push against and to stand up and demonstrate that it's possible to do the things that we want to do, or at least try?

And for me, that's the aspect of maybe why the givers who are at the top versus the bottom, the ones at the top, know when to give to themselves. It's not just about giving to other people. It's about giving to other people and giving to ourselves and asking other people to give to us and wanting other people to give to themselves too. And so I asked for financial help the other day and I asked if someone is in the position and excited because they're familiar with the work that I do and they're excited to contribute some money, either in a one-off or a recurring manner, I would be very grateful. And I think some of the people who got angry and frustrated by it.

Didn't see the if you're excited part, or maybe they feel so compelled to give to other people even if they're not excited and they don't think that I would be okay if they said no to me. I'm like, no, I actually want you to say no to me because it's saying yes to yourself. I don't want you to say yes to me out of guilt and resentment.

I want you to say yes to me when you want to. And I want you to say no, again, yes to yourself when you want to. Because it's a balance of taking care of me and taking care of you and taking care of other people in your life. We are trying to navigate all these conflicts at the same time.

Yeah, I think the episode for today is just really reflecting on that concept of saying no to someone else is saying yes to ourselves.

And when we say yes to other people all the time, we're really saying no to ourselves a lot. Another way to say that is when we give so much to other people, often we don't give much to ourselves at all. And if we don't give to ourselves, then a lot of times we can get really angry, really frustrated when other people want to give to us, and we reject it. You know, I thought about this the other day. It's like, I think so many of us feel attacked by love. That's why I call it, like, one idea is to attack people with love. We feel attacked by love because we may not give that love to ourselves. We may be attacking ourselves, not with love, but with hate or with indifference. We may be ignoring our problems. We may be belittling ourselves and attacking ourselves with hate, saying, you're so stupid. I can't believe you would do that. Or you're such a coward or whatever. Instead of, hey, you're trying your best. You know how hard you're trying? You're trying so damn hard. I appreciate how much you try and how much effort you put into this. so, I think.

Yeah if we want to avoid burnout and we want to actually feel really alive in life it's not about just giving things to other people it's also about giving things to ourselves, and letting and I think if we do that then we let other people give things to us as well whether that's resources or money or time or energy or just love.

And what a world we would have if we all gave ourselves a little more love, a little more time, a little more attention. So on that note, I'm going to end this before 10 minutes and I'm going to go sleep. Give myself some good attention. All right, good night, y'all.