Short Term Selfishness Enables Long Term Selflessness

Self-care is the necessary prerequisite to sustained service

When I decided to take a week-long trip on my own, leaving my pregnant wife and 2-year-old son at home, it was not really received well by any of our family. Quite understandably, dropping the family and flying away on my own doesn't seem like a signal that things are going well. I called it a retreat, borrowing the term from my Catholic upbringing where retreats were the accepted way for individuals to separate from their family for several days of independent reflection. But regardless of what name I gave it, I had a hard time selling it.

All I knew at the time was that I needed to get away. It wasn't about my family, or my friends, or my work. It was really just about me, and something I had been wrestling with internally. My wife called it my early onset midlife crisis, and I think that's a reasonably good summary. I would expand on that a bit and say, looking back from the other side of it, I had been in auto-pilot on too many aspects of my life, and wanted to become more intentional. And this required a little bit of mental housecleaning.

Everything wasn't solved in that one week away. But what that retreat did do was initiate a nine month period of change, where I slowly but surely course-corrected to better align my actions and my principles. And in the decades that have followed, I am a better person because of this reset. With a clearer sense of purpose, I have been able to contribute more and have a deeper impact on the lives of those around me.

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey shares this gem: "Private victories precede public victories." That is exactly how I feel about the path I took, and I'm celebrating the public victories that continue to come. It feels exactly like what one of the corporate athletes (see the HBR article I shared earlier¹) described, "I really do believe that when you learn to take care of yourself, you free up energy and enthusiasm to care more for others."