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- Carlee
Are you afraid of what would happen if you put yourself first? Hi, I'm Carlee Myers, a stress management expert, and this month we are reclaiming the word selfish. Now, I've brought on a guest, Danielle Massi, who is a holistic mental health therapist and owner of the Wellness Collective. As a cancer survivor, Danielle understands the importance of holistic health and hopes to bring awareness to everyone about the benefits of taking care of yourself. Mind, body, and spirit. OK, so Danielle, I am so, so excited to have you on the show.
- Danielle
I'm so excited to be here for the third time. I feel like an expert of stressing less.
- Carlee
You are like every time. It's just like a joy, a journey, a pleasure. The whole nine yards.
- Danielle
Well, hopefully we can bring that to people again today. So, yeah, I'm excited for this one.
- Carlee
Absolutely. So, you know, I'm I like I want to announce officially to my audience, to you listeners, that Danielle and I have decided to partner on an incredible journey, event, conference, transformational experience called selfish philly. So today we're gonna be talking about what selfish means to us, but not only that, but why we've been, you know, personally afraid to be selfish and. And how to get over that, how to break through that. So, Danielle, I'm excited to hear from you what your thoughts around are around this topic.
- Danielle
So I think in my own practice, something that I've been seeing for a decade and I didn't really know what it was that I was seeing is a really big fear block around self-care. So what happens is people come into therapy and they talk about all the things that are going on for them. And when I make a little subtle suggestions about how to make their life better, how to take care of themselves fully. There's always a reason why it can't happen. And what I've learned over time is that block that little hand up like, "wait, I'm not ready for this," is fear showing up in a weird way. So many of us have a fear of just fully investing in ourselves. It's a block that we have, typically one that we learned from our families in some facet and then it just gets dressed up and presents itself in a certain way. And when we talk about it, we don't always realize that it is in fact a fear. Maybe it's a fear of judgment of what people would think if we actually took the time to take care of ourselves. Like being branded selfish, which has always been so negative until we obviously took it over and reclaimed it. People are afraid that their families will fall apart, especially women like, "I don't have the time to take care of myself because I have obligations, family members, kids, partners." And that can be for men too. Also, that their work life would be in shambles, like if I would actually take care of myself in any way. Everything will just fall apart or I know, for me personally, my big fear has always been that my family taught me to hustle and that hustle mindset historically has been my downfall. In fact, my business has quadrupled since I started taking care of myself and making self-care a regular everyday part of my routine. The less I do, the more I gain, which is different than what we're taught, right?
- Carlee
Yeah. And it's funny, right before we got on the show in the pre-show, we were talking about this mindset and we were talking about what prevented us from being selfish before we kind of had our own breakthroughs. And my this is reminding me of that conversation, which is, you know, I had a I like to joke that I had a therapy session with my accountant some point a few years ago. Right. My I had that same thing that Daniel's talking about, that my parents hustled. They worked hard. They did overtime. My dad worked third shift for years. And so I took on that and I had this fear that if I stopped hustling, that everything would fall apart, that I wouldn't make enough money, that my staff would abandon me, that, you know, whatever the fears were, and being able to put myself first and prove that wrong was huge. And I had the same experience that Danielle you had, which was when I actually took time off and I actually took care of myself. I was able to show up better for my staff. I was able to show up better for my clients. And as a result, things got so much better.
- Danielle
And I bet as people are listening to this, there's so many people going, oh, but I can't have that, can't actually be me. And that was both of us, I'm sure, for years leading up to the point that we're at. We are so socialized. So taught to just keep hustling, keep working, don't stop. Don't take care of yourself cause if you do, the world will fall apart. And that is fear. That is your ego talking. And truthfully, if you kind of get your ego out of the way and you can tune into your gut, your gut is probably saying slow down, do something nice for yourself, stop and smell the roses. All these things, these little messages of like relax, take care of. And we disregard those. I wish we could teach people to do the opposite, which is what we hope to do is selfish philly, instead of tuning into our ego, we should instead be tuning into our intuition and our gut and letting that rule us versus letting our head get in the way.
- Carlee
So I have a question for you, Danielle, then. So,
- Danielle
yes,
- Carlee
I get this question all the time, and I'm sure you do, too. So I'm curious to hear what your answer is which is, how do we know when too much self-care? Like we've like we've gone over the edge, like now we're being lazy and self-care is at the detriment of our life?
- Danielle
So my rule of thumb for this is always the same. There are some things that people think are self care that are not self care and some things that are 100 percent self care and people don't see it. So my question to everyone listening is, is this activity filling up your cup or is it not? So if you are laying on the couch doing nothing, watching your 40th episode of Bravo TV over the course of three days and haven't showered. That is numbing. That is not filling up your cup. That is just putting everything at a standstill. So if you're numbing in any way. If you're doing things that are repetitive and aren't making you feel good, you're zoning out, playing games or like losing yourself and stuff that isn't filling up your cup. That's the wrong direction to be going in. That would be more in the realm of like laziness or like blocking yourself from success.
- Carlee
Or even like escapism.
- Danielle
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would fall into numbing. Any kind of escapism where you're not actually bringing yourself up any way before you engage in self care, you should be asking is this filling up my cup. And if it is, there's no such thing as too much of it. Go for it. Yeah. If your cup is overflowing, that's great.
- Carlee
Right. And then you have more to give to the world, which I think is what we all want. But you know, I always like. I always like to give this analogy too. We a lot of us love bubble baths. We love to take that warm, hot bath. But at some point when you're in that bubble bath, you're looking at your hands and they're all wrinkly and weird and you're like, I feel soggy. I am done. Get me out. Right. And it goes for any self-care activity. You will intuitively know when you're like, that's enough. Enough is enough. My body feels better. It's time to move on. You'll get that urge.
- Danielle
Yeah. I think most people fall into the realm of like we're not going to do too much of it because we can't afford to or that's what we think. And at the same time, my question to people when they tell me this, what your block is and those things is instead of thinking about it that way. Can we start thinking about it as I can't afford not to? I need to find the time for self-care. It's the thing that brings me back, elevates me, makes me show up in such a way that people are drawn in and I can be my best self.
- Carlee
All of you. I always say, like, all the excuses that we give are oftentimes the reasons we have to. Like, I can't do this because of my kids. I can't do this because of money. I can't do this because X, Y and Z. But you have to do this because you because of your kids, right? You don't want your kids to go into the same hustle lack mindset. You right? like.
- Danielle
Absolutely.
- Carlee
We have to set the example or we have to do it because of all those reasons.
- Danielle
Yeah my kids meditate with me and yesterday we went for a little jog together as a family. We can't afford not to.
- Carlee
Right. Right. So at this point in the show, I know we mentioned the event we're putting together. You're probably wondering why we're so hype about being selfish. Aside from the obvious, right. It's important to put yourself first. It's important to take care of yourself. So I'd co-founded the conference Selfish Philly with Danielle and we are just so freaking excited about it. If you can see me right now, I'm like waving my hands. I'm so excited. All right. We are gonna be having free facials, massages, Philadelphia's best wellness resources, speakers, you name it. And we're gonna be talking about what it means to be selfish across the board. And not only that, we're gonna be talking about how to break through that fear. We're not only talking about the easy stuff easier either. Right. We're gonna be talking general wellness when we talking money. And yes, we're even going to be talking about pleasure. It's going to be one of the biggest wellness events in Philadelphia of the year. So to find more information about the event or to get your ticket now, click the link in the description or if you're watching on Insta in our bio. So I also want to know what selfish like what? Are you afraid will fall apart if you are selfish? Let us know in the comments. What are you afraid? Are you afraid of losing money or are you afraid of being being judged? What is coming up for you? Because we're going to be breaking through that at the conference. Now, Danielle, where can they find Selfish Philly on Instagram?
- Danielle
So all you have to do is look for Instagram, dot com slash, selfish philly. All the links that you need are right in there. And we look forward to seeing each and every one of you at this conference, it's going to be transformative.
- Carlee
It is going to be freaking kick ass. We will see you there. Now, this concludes this episode of The Stress Less Show. If you've enjoyed this week's episode, let us know by giving us a big old thumbs up or hitting that follow and subscribe button. Thanks for listening. And we will see you next week.