We all have so many obligations and duties, things that we need to do for other people, and many “shoulds” that make us feel inadequate every day. We should clean up the kitchen, we should exercise every day, we should read all our email, we should…. It goes on and on. In the quest to do all those things for everyone else and complete our to-do list of “shoulds,” we may have lost ourselves. But what’s the point of having a person like you if you aren’t being you. You are depriving other people of yourself.
Challenge yourself to do the things that are important to you. Certainly, you can’t shirk your truly important responsibilities, but recognize that many of them are not truly important.
Ask yourself what would happen if you didn’t do all those things? The answer may very well be … nothing bad.
This is a great point. Especially for new moms to remember! I went so crazy in the beginning…I should make sure all the laundry is done, the house is clean, etc. etc. before I go to bed…that I was running my self into the ground when I should have been using that energy to recover from the birth.
As I was reading a profile of Rosemary Turner, the President and COO of Metro Philadelphia District UPS, I thought of this post about being yourself. Below is the Q and A that I found relevant.
Knowing what you know now, if you were starting out today, what would you do differently?
I would have been more of who I am versus who I thought people wanted me to be. For example, 20 years ago UPS was very militaristic. You had to be a hard-nose to make it and had to treat people in a way that frustrated me. I took a different path as a midlevel manager and engaged people and got out to talk with customers and guess what? I got promoted.
You can read the entire interview at http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/wr07101.shtml.