Something that I get asked about quite a lot is “how can I help other people when I feel burned out?” – Simply put – you can’t!
As you may have experienced when flying, the cabin crew give a demonstration of what to do to save your life. Each one of these demonstrations is designed for you to have the best chances in an event that you have no control over. Sounds familiar right?
Think about how the oxygen mask falls and you are instructed to pull it over your own face before you attempt to help others beside you. If you didn’t do this you’d be unconscious in seconds and unlikely to make it – so ensure you put yourself first – not because it’s selfish, but it’s self focused!
There’s a difference between being selfish and being self focused. Selfishness ensures you do something regardless of others and taking any means necessary in the process – largely destructive and impacts on others in a bad way. Being self focused however allows you to be determined and measured in what you do and achieve the goals so that you may then enable others to reach theirs. For example, a teacher must study and qualify to then teach others, if they didn’t take the necessary steps then there’d be potentially repercussions for not adhering to a structure.
Something that’s important is to recognise your goals and dreams. If you don’t have any then you probably have no future and will bob about in the middle of an ocean without anything to help direct you (or stop you!). So my advice is to be audacious and ambitious with your dreams – you may not achieve the goal that day or even a week from now, but you’ll be making steps and gravitate towards the things you want and therefore move away from the things you don’t want. Some people see this in alignment with the Law of Attraction (which I’ll cover more in another topic).
So again, help yourself before you help others as you need to keep your energy levels topped up to then energise the others you come into contact with. Without doing this regularly you will soon become flat and lose your mojo and start to be more like those who need the help than able to provide it!
