Respect Yourself Enough To Stop Settling

You’re a compromiser. You avoid confrontation and decide that it is better to settle and agree with someone else or a plan in order to move on. New flash, you are robbing yourself of opportunity and experiences by doing this, and you might not even know it.

We often feel that we are being polite by agreeing with someone, and sometimes make sacrifices in order to appease them. You want to go to a coffee shop, but they would rather get lunch. You aren’t hungry but you go anyways because you can get coffee at the restaurant. It’s mediocre and later in the day, you are still craving the coffee that you pictured this morning when you woke up but never received. Has this ever happened to you to some extent?

This is one way that you are robbing yourself of opportunity. You are being complacent and want to appease others instead of serving yourself. I know this might sound like a small example, but if it’s not coffee it’s something else. I don’t want you to confuse this notion with the idea of compromising in life, in the term of common ground. This would be both of you wanting to go to lunch and then settling on a restaurant.

What I am trying to get at here is that you can’t let yourself continuously serve others before yourself and expect to still get what you want. If you put everyone before yourself, you are then stating that you are going to take care of their needs before your own. This is kind and generous until you’ve done this for so long that when it’s time to take care of yourself you don’t even know where to start.

You can’t put your energy in other places and wonder why what you want isn’t happening. You can’t fix everyone else’s problems and wonder why you aren’t getting that promotion at work. You can’t make someone else dinner and wonder why yours isn’t heating itself up. You can’t be two places at once and you can’t make things appear out of thin air. We are only humans, and at the end of the day, you need to ask yourself if what you are doing is benefiting your end goal in the ways you hope it would.

Taking care of people is amazing if they need it. By need I mean they physically can’t do it themselves. Otherwise, we are all adults and we can do things on our own. Our parents and teachers didn’t spend 20 years for us to develop into larger humans who still need a babysitter. You can be anything you want in this world, but being a babysitter for others at the expense of your own needs shouldn’t be one of them. Even if it seems polite. Be polite to yourself for once, and take care of yourself first. Not second or fifth. But first.

You deserve that much.