Why do we struggle with putting ourselves first?

I describe myself as a compassionate and conscientious person. In Enneagram language, I’m a 1w2 but heavy on that 2. I’m a helper and a supporter, and I’ve always been that way. It’s hard for me to put myself at the center of attention or in the spotlight — which does make it tricky since I’m running my own business and also like to perform.

But something I’ve discovered in therapy this year is how those helpful tendencies can turn into negative side effects. I was essentially not treating my own needs as priorities. I wasn’t seeing myself as someone who should come first. This meant that my schedule was based off of the needs of others. It meant I treated my time and the early stages of my new career as “less than,” as things that weren’t worthy or deserving of my full attention.

Recently, I listened to an episode of the Boss Babe podcast featuring entrepreneur Kate Northrup. She described similar feelings, but mostly how much they can cause a detriment to a woman’s career and overall enjoyment of life. She also discussed the differences in how men and women have learned time management. (While this particular discussion doesn’t allow for the most progressive terms and thinking, I believe we can expand “men,” “women” and “motherhood” into less of a binary and more of a spectrum.)

According to a study published in the Daily Mail, the average mother gets just 17 minutes per day to herself.

When I read that stat I was somewhat horrified.

Are you horrified? Are you not surprised? Do you feel like you never get enough time to yourself?

Mothering has become synonymous with sacrifice. And we’ve come to assume that a mother who sacrifices her own well-being in the name of her children is inherently a good mother.

But what if making our children our #1 priority and constantly sacrificing our own needs for theirs isn’t actually doing them any good, let alone us?

What if the way we’ve been approaching motherhood is backwards?

Kate’s blog post, which you can read here, ties into her overall concept of doing less (which she wrote a whole book about!).

My point in including some of these quotes and her work is to show that people should be encouraged to create schedules and systems that work for them.

So often in corporate environments, people’s individualities are stamped out to work within a system designed by someone else. We’re asked to uphold time restrictions and give up so much of ourselves to serve not only someone else’s goals but someone else’s idea of what a day, week, month, year “should” look like. And if your work style doesn’t perfectly match or blend in with their ideas? Tough luck. You either conform or you leave to create something for yourself.

I left the full-time corporate world so I could have the freedom and flexibility I knew I craved in my life. I wanted to advocate for myself and design a life and schedule that worked best for me.

But at times, this became hard to accomplish. When I was a freelancer, and then a new entrepreneur, I was so used to forming my days around someone else’s that I lost sight of why I wanted to start a new career in the first place. We’re trained from an early age that we have to abide by someone else’s rules or else we don’t fit in well. It’s human nature.

But it doesn’t have to be the way you live.