Ep #17: The Truth About Being Selfish

Are you convinced that you will never get the results you want with your body? You are in the best place because today I’ll be sharing how learning this one tool will help you change that story. Let’s go.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 17. Did you know you could lose weight and keep it off for good? After 25 years of hiding behind my quilts, I have finally cracked the code for permanent weight loss, and I’ve lost 50 pounds without exercise or counting calories. I’m Dara Tomasson, professional quilter turned weight and life coach, where I help quilters just like you create a life they love by losing weight and keeping it off for good. Let’s jump into today’s episode.

Hello everybody. Welcome to episode 17. I am curious how do you define the word ‘selfish’? That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. What were comments made about being selfish when you were a kid? Do you know selfish people? How would you describe them? What are their characteristic traits? You would say things like, “They only think of themselves. Whatever they think is the most important. They’re not open to what other people want. They are so self-centered. What other people want doesn’t matter to them.”

There’s all sorts of ideas and thoughts about that. So today’s episode we are going to look at the concept of selfish, why it’s not served you. And I will show you how when we truly focus on taking care of ourselves everyone wins. You can expect to leave this podcast with a clear vision of how you will be able to be self-fulfilled in a way that you probably hadn’t thought of before. So I’m just going to read a few definitions of selfish and I want you to think about how close are these definitions to the ones that you have.

The first one is the definition of selfish is of a person, action, or motive lacking consideration for other people, concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. Another definition of selfish is someone who is selfish only thinks of their own advantage. Another definition is being selfish is having or showing concern only for yourself and not for the needs or feelings of others. And my last definition of selfish is concern for one’s own welfare or advantage at the expense of, or in disregard of others, excessive interest in oneself.

So as you think about these definitions, I’m just going to quickly share just a little bit of a spotlight that’s going on in the Love Yourself Thin program. So this morning in my mastermind group we were answering the question of how has the coaching tools helped you in your life? And there were so many gems that were shared.

And I wanted to just share some of them with you because they truly touched my heart in a way that literally when I got off the call my heart was overflowing with emotion and tears just came into my eyes because I watched every single one of these women completely transform their lives in ways that before I learned these tools I didn’t even think was possible. So I’m just going to share a few just because they were so inspiring to me.

And one of the reasons I have this podcast is that I want to show you how awesome it is to truly be the driver of your own life. And really love the kind of life that you have. And so these are some the examples.

So one of my ladies, she’s just had her 69^th birthday and she grew up with a father who wasn’t super supportive. And in fact if she didn’t eat her food, he would eat it all up. There was some abuse in the family. It wasn’t exactly the kind of growing up that she wanted to have. And what she said was that she was able to rewrite her story about her parents and growing up. And one of the thoughts that keeps coming back to her is that they did the best they could. And she shared an example just recently of a picture that she found of her with her siblings, and it was the heaviest she’s ever been.

And when she shared that picture and looked at it, in the past she would just put it away quickly and not spend any time looking at it. And when she looked at this picture, she had so much compassion and she had so much love for herself. And she’s just able to show up so much more powerfully in her life. And able to have that relationship with her siblings that in the past she never really allowed herself to do that. And that was just such a beautiful experience.

Another example was one of my clients used to get really stressed out about the community garage sale. And she would spend so much time and effort, and walking around the house, and here and there and really in indecision and fear of judgment and planning ahead and just double guessing herself, second guessing herself. And just feeling really like it was a drudgery. And the community garage sale came, she got everything organized in a very short amount of time.

There was a few alterations to the plan, the original plan and she was able to work through those very gracefully. And she was able to have a very successful garage sale, have so much energy and just super proud of herself. So that was a huge win.

And then the last one I wanted to share, and this was kind of a common theme amongst them was they said that they’re getting so much more done in their lives because they’re able to catch themselves quicker and quicker when they’re in overwhelm. So I just wanted to share that, it was just such a wonderful way to spend the coaching call when they all just spent an entire hour sharing all the breakthroughs that they’ve had. And then I was able to help them to continue using these tools more powerfully. So I just wanted to shout them out, it’s just so fun.

Okay, so for the rest of the podcast I’m going to talk to you about the definition of selfishness. We’re going to look at four different ways of looking at selfishness. And then I’m going to give you some examples. And then I’m going to show you some ways of really looking at your own life, being able to through the filter of am I being selfish, or am I being self-made, self-care, what am I doing? So that’s how we’re going to do this. And then I have a really fun treat for you at the end of the podcast of ways that I can help you for free in learning these tools.

So when you look at the definition of selfish, what does it actually mean? When I looked at a book that I’m reading by Esther and Jerry Hicks, they talk about this importance of really looking at this concept of selfish. Now, the common theme of the definitions that I read at the beginning of the podcast talked about someone who was thinking of themselves, for themselves and not others, putting their needs in front of other people.

So when we look at selfish in that way, of course, I feel it’s a little bit like the analogy of the teeter totter. You put someone down so that you can feel better about yourself. And that’s not what we’re talking about. And in fact I’m going to talk about selfish just in the terms of I’m thinking about myself. So there is a huge difference of being selfish of I don’t care about other people. They’re not important. I am most important, what I think is most important to I’m going to spend some time thinking about me.

And when we learn the importance of thinking about me, we’re going to have a lot of different results. So in order to effect change we need to be able to look at what’s happening in our own life. This is not selfish. This is self-care, self-made, maybe you might even say self-help. And in order for us to do this, we need to start paying attention and giving ourselves permission to notice what we want. So I’m not saying what we want is more important than other people. But we need to start having that conversation with ourselves of what do I want for me.

And when we start to accept, allow, and appreciate what we want of ourselves, and of others, then we are able to start being able to create the type of life that we want to have. And if you don’t think of yourself you won’t connect with yourself and then you will have nothing to offer to others. So when you have a problem with someone, it’s usually because there is a lack in yourself that you were noticing in them. So if you aren’t aware of you and your brain you will feel out of control and lacking.

So think about this example. So have you ever had a conversation with someone and you’re just like, “Oh my goodness, that person is so annoying?” And whatever they do it’s just really irritating, and they just get on your nerves and it’s just really difficult. And then as you think about it, it’s usually the thing that’s about them is usually a problem that you have with yourself. So if you’re not willing to go inside yourself and you’re not willing to see what’s really happening then you miss out on learning about yourself.

So when we have a healthy view of ourselves, we get to start exploring. So what do you believe is possible for you? Now, if you never give yourself permission to go inside of your brain and think of what’s going on for you, then what happens for you? You never explore your own limiting beliefs about your life. And when you don’t understand, because remember, 95% of our thoughts are unconscious. We have these old patterns of behavior. And so if we don’t dig in and find these limiting beliefs then we’re going to have a very limited life.

And when we spend time cultivating our own minds, it’s like the seven dwarfs, they go, and they do the mining out looking for those gems. If you don’t spend time cultivating our own mind, we don’t allow growth or discover what’s really going on. So we truly keep ourselves stuck. Now, we cannot perceive life from any perspective other than from our own.

We try to get in other people’s heads, and I don’t know about you but how many mornings do you spend, or nights, thinking, well, if that person, if they would just do this and they would just do that then they’re life would be better? So how often do we do that, we solve for other people? Exactly. And so I want to ask you, if we don’t spend that time in our brain then what happens? We don’t get the opportunity to cultivate our own minds. We don’t get the opportunity to discover what’s really going on for us.

So we cannot perceive life from any perspective other than that of ourselves. So selfishness is the sense of self. It is the picture that you hold of yourself. Unless you are selfish enough to care about how you feel and therefore direct your thoughts in such a way that you are allowing a true connection with yourself, you will have nothing to give any other way. Alright, I want to give you some examples.

So the first example is a personal example that really impacted me, and I find myself, I still will go back into those old habits, and I see this all the time with my clients. And I call this the edible woman or the edible mom complex. So, often we have children, or we get married, or we have a job, this can happen with our jobs, this can happen with our children, our marriage. And what happens is people ask things of us. They’ll say, “Hey, can you do this thing, can you do that thing in the community, in our, whatever we’re involved in?”

And oftentimes we say yes, we have good intentions, we want to be builders, we want to support other people, we want to be that kind of person. But the problem is if we’re always saying yes for everyone else and we don’t take time for ourselves they are literally just eating us. They’re just taking, and taking, and taking. And we only have so much, I call it mind juice, we only have so much energy every day. When we charge our phone, we can only have one charge per phone, and we only have so many hours in a day.

And if we’re consistently saying yes to everyone else and we’re not giving our own self a sufficient amount of time then we are completely depleted and exhausted at the end of the day. So I want you to think about is that being selfish to think about what we need and offer ourselves to be better moms, or to be better community members, or to be better wives, or better employees? And what is the effect of our ability to think, our ability to work, our ability to problem solve when we’re always in a state of exhaustion?

Another example, so you’re at the guild and people are asking you to do things and you want to help people, you get value from helping other people and there’s nothing wrong with serving and being a great support. But if you are not noticing your own body signs of, I’m really tired, one of the things that I remind myself of, when I say yes to somebody, I’m actually saying no to me. So then it takes me out of being considered for what I need.

So if I was planning on going to bed early that night but I said yes to somebody then I’m not going to bed early. So then I’m going to be affected by my lack of sleep. So when we go into that I can help other people, I don’t want to be selfish and take care of myself, then we become more tired and depleted. And so even the tasks that we said that we would do, we don’t have that same energy, we don’t have that same zest. We don’t have that same kind of ability to really commit because we are really, really tired.

Another way that this is shows up is in relationships. So are you always saying yes, are you always serving people and not taking any time for yourself and resting yourself? I used to hate when people said, “You need to rest for yourself.” I had five children and I’m like, “Rest, what are you even talking about, that’s like a swear word.” And now I’m really understanding what they mean by truly resting and letting your brain relax and be calm.

Because if you’re turned on all the time, it’s like a bow. If you keep the string taut on the bow, it’s going to lose its ability to be strong. So that is the same kind of the same idea. So when you’re always doing for other people and then again, you’re exhausted, they really don’t get the best version of you because you’re a little bit more snippy. You have a little bit of resentment. And you feel you’re at kind of the end of your rope.

So let’s look at the definition of selfish again. And I know that I gave you four different definitions. But selfish, someone who is selfish only thinks of their own advantage. And one of the things that I have come to as I have been coaching so many different ladies and walking them through this process of learning to love themselves thin is that sometimes selfish can get a little bit confused with this concept of pride. And the only way that pride works is if you have to make yourself feel better by being better than somebody else.

And I want to just kind of explore this concept a little bit more because selfish is saying I don’t care about other people. But as most of the ladies I know and myself included, when we think of selfish it’s saying I’m not allowed to think about myself. And when we don’t give permission and we don’t give value to our own brain and our own energy, and being able to conserve, really getting our own back then I kind of explain it as you’re like a leaf on the end of a tree in the wind. You’re not grounded. You’re not able to be super confident in yourself.

So I like the idea of thinking about selfish as more as being self-filled. So I will learn to be a better version of me always. So when I show up in conversations, I can be fully present. And I can be the best version of myself. And so I like to think about the pitfalls that women fall into of why this is happening. So I’m not telling you to be selfish. I am not telling you that you need to think all about yourself and that nobody else is important. What I’m saying is I really want you to look at the concept of being self-filled, or self-help, or self-care, self-made. I really like the self-made one.

Because unless we do spend time working on our brains and do work on liking our reasons, and resting ourselves, and worrying more about what we think about ourselves than what other people think. Then when we do those things, we literally are a better version of ourselves. So when we show up at the grocery store and someone is really rude to us because we’re more rested and because we like our reasons and we’re aware of all of our thoughts, we can show up so much more patiently and powerfully.

So what do you think are the pitfalls that we fall into about this selfish versus self-made or self-care version? Well, one of the things that happens is people go into people pleasing. They think that if other people are happy then they can feel happy. So they are basically giving their power to other people for them to feel any emotion. Another pitfall I see is procrastinating. So a lot of people procrastinate because they don’t feel like they can do it well enough and so they’re really insecure. And so they hold off for doing something. And then they disallow themselves the opportunity for growth.

Another one and this is probably one of the biggest ones is perfectionism. So how I define perfectionism is that you worry more about what other people think of you than what you think of you. And so when you learn that these actions of people pleasing, procrastinating and perfectionism, those are actually being selfish because you’re just focusing on you and you’re comparing yourselves to others.

And you’re not allowing yourself to truly have a relationship with you because you’re so worried about what other people think. And so it keeps you away from you developing a relationship with you. And so I feel this is such an important message especially when we talk about weight loss. Because weight loss is we spend so much time worrying about what other people think of our bodies, all the judgments of that.

And so we get ourselves in this loop where we think we’re not good enough, or what are they going to think of us? And so we’re so in other people’s business of trying to prove ourselves, or people please, or whatever that is, you’re getting these dopamine hits from other things that aren’t sustainable. You’re giving so much of your power away. And you’re really comparing yourself a lot to other people and in that you’re not showing up as your powerful you.

So I really want to hear your feedback on this podcast. I really want you to spend some time thinking about this concept of selfish versus self-filled. Some of my clients talk about examples that their mothers gave. And the problem is when their mothers are spending all of their days exhausting themselves for other people, they aren’t fully becoming the person that they truly want to be. They give their power to other people. And I want you to really look at this concept, it’s been in my mind a lot as I coach my clients and as they are resistant to spending time doing the work.

So my program is a money back guarantee. And what they need to do for the money back guarantee is they need to do three thought downloads a week which take about 15 to 20 minutes and then some thought models to go along with that, which takes another maybe 10 minutes extra. So I’m literally telling you for an hour and a half a week if you do these things, I will guarantee that you will lose 12 pounds in 12 weeks, and you’ll learn the way of keep losing the weight.

And so even that, my clients will say, “Well, that’s really selfish of me to spend that kind of time on myself.” And they really are disallowing themselves, growth. They’re not giving themselves permission to be fully present with themselves and so they don’t get to discover how truly amazing they are and capable of what they can accomplish. So this is something that’s been really weighing on my mind as you can tell, I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

So when you worry more about what you think about you what then others think of you, you are then learning how to get your own back. And this is the work we do in Love Yourself Thin.

So just to recap from this episode. Selfish is actually a good thing when you focus on the definition of when I learn to get my own back, when I learn to think about my thinking, and when I learn to see what patterns of behavior I have, and when I learn to really spend time with me and see my pitfalls, and see my problems, and see my triggers. And when I learn how I operate, I now have discovered my own operating manual. I see where I go wrong. I see where I go right. I can start learning to evaluate myself.

We say, “What went well? What didn’t go well? And what can I do next time?” And now you truly become what I say is the driver of your own life. You can totally decide what kind of goals you want to make in your life, what kind of life you want to have. And you just get to work to do it.

So the day that I’m recording this is my birthday. And I turned 48 today. And I also invested, my birthday present to myself is investing in a mastermind, it’s quite a high level mastermind. And it is the most money I have ever spent other than on a car or on a house. And it was a little bit tricky when I was thinking about the money because I’ve invested many times in this business coach. And I have five children and they’re all growing, and the cost of living is really expensive. I live on Vancouver Island so it’s even more expensive.

So there has definitely been the discussion in my brain about this is really selfish of you, Dara. You could be doing this with this money, you could be doing that with this money. And when I did my own self-coaching and I got coaching from my own personal one-on-one coach. What kept coming up for me is when I spend time in my own brain, when I give myself opportunities for growth, I learn my self-limiting beliefs. I learn when I buffer. I learn when I don’t show up powerfully. I learn all of these things.

And so the benefit is when I put myself in this room it’s a higher level of thinking and I get a higher level of myself. And so for any of you who are feeling like you’re not living your best version of your life, I want you to just do, as you’re listening to this podcast, I want you to get really curious with yourself of what do you think are the reasons why you’re not living your full life, truly curious of why this is happening. And I want to invite you to make a list of all of the reasons why you don’t have the life that you want.

And you could share them with me. I always love hearing from you all. Because I was you and you were me, and I am just now with the tools that I have, I can just be further down on the road that I’m on because I’m able to do this. Now I’m going to share a little example, it might seem really silly, but this morning when I stepped on the scale the scale, the number was amazing. And I’m 6 feet tall, I never imagined that I would be the weight that I am. I never imagined I’d have the size of clothing that I have.

And I stepped on the scale this morning at 48 years old at 153.1 pounds. And I literally pumped my fists in the air, and I said, “I am amazing.” I have been able to crack the weight loss code. I have been able to keep this weight off with all of the stresses in life and I do it almost effortlessly. Some days I have to have some effort. But on the whole it’s pretty effortless now. I have been able to keep this weight off for over two years. And I’ve been able to help these women do the same.

And so if someone was to say, “Well, that’s really selfish of you, Dara, to think about yourself and to think about your weight”, I would challenge them on that. And I would say, “What is your definition of selfish?” And I like the definition of self-filled, self-help, self-care, self-made.

And just like you’re making a quilt. If you want to make a high quality quilt, you need to spend the time and effort. You need to spend that time with precision tools and making sure you have a sharp blade, and making sure you have a good iron, and a sharp needle, and good quality thread, and cotton, and batting, and all of those things. And so you would put that kind of effort and time in a quilt, why wouldn’t you do that for yourself? It’s such a good question.

So spend some time with this episode. This was a lot of me thinking and I get a little fired up about it because one of the other things that I say is your brain is your very best investment. And I have spent a lot of money on my teeth, I had braces twice, I had some jaw surgery, I had all sorts of things. We spend money on houses, and they get abused. And we spend money on cars, and they break down. So I love thinking about my brain truly is my best investment is not being selfish of me to spend money on my brain, is not selfish of me to spend time on my brain, on using these tools.

And just like I shared some amazing results from my clients that are doing the same thing. And so this episode probably has a lot of you maybe stopping in your tracks a little bit and I want you to do that. I really want to challenge your thinking because if you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, that really is the definition of insanity.

And I love being the example of what’s possible. And it’s because I’ve learned to work on my brain and clean it up and give myself opportunities for growth, not only has it helped me with my relationship with my husband, and my children but the ripple effects of all the ladies that I work with, their lives have also had such transformation.

Alright, so I have a free Christmas series that I will be teaching every Thursday from November 11^th to December 9^th. Come join me every Thursday where I will teach you how to feel more joy over the holidays. You will learn how to stuff the turkey and not your face, how to navigate family relationships when you see a storm coming. I also have helpful handouts to help you solidify what you are learning. So this year, Christmas will truly be merry and bright. So you can find that free Christmas series, we have it linked below and you can just register through Zoom for those webinars.

Thank you for listening to Weight Loss for Quilters. If you want more info, please visit daratomasson.com. See you next week.

If you’ve been enjoying these tools that I’ve been sharing in my podcast, I have a surprise for you. I have a five day training that tells you all the foods you should eat, why you should eat them. I tell you about the weight loss science. And there are women who have lost 20, 30 pounds just from my free training. And so if you go over to my website daratomasson.com and sign up for my email list you will get that training every day for the next five days.

And not only do you get the free training but being on my email list helps you get all of the first dibs on all the exciting things happening in the Love Yourself Thin community. There will be special bonuses that aren’t available otherwise. So if you want to learn how to continue getting success, I invite you to hop over to daratomasson.com and register for my email list where you will get that free training. And I can’t wait to see how it’s going to help you as you continue to learn how to love yourself thin.

Thanks for listening to Weight Loss for Quilters. If you want more info, please visit daratomasson.com. See you next week.