This is for my people pleasers out there. Meeting your needs versus meeting the needs of others is a tricky one. We want to be kind and altruistic, and continuously looking to serve the people around us by meeting their needs.
We also don’t always know how to scale back and meet our own needs. Sometimes we don’t know if we should be doing both at the same time, or one or the other. It can be really confusing.
How to know if you need to prioritize your need first:
Something to help you navigate through this is the minute you meet your own needs, the better you’re going to be at meeting the needs of other people. Meeting someone else’s need as a priority is like trying to put on your child’s oxygen mask in a plane, before yours. Bad idea.
For example; you notice someone is in distress and you feel the need to go help them. Use that trigger to help you identify what you need in that situation first. Think about whether you can meet your own needs first or not.
Example: am I safe if I rush in to help that person? Can I stay safe if I rush in to help that person? What do I need right now, in order to help this person fully?
Sometimes if you have a people-pleasing dynamic or a need to take care of other people of your past relationship dynamics, we go out of our way to meet other people’s needs and forget what our own needs are.
Take a moment, sit with the fact that you may have needs to attend to at that moment. See if you can meet your needs before reaching out and helping the other person.
You’re looking for the greatest outcome for everyone involved and that’s a great characteristic of being kind. First be kind to yourself, then meet the needs of the other people around you.
