You First Project | An Interview Series about Prioritizing You

 

In this interview Judith Morgan, talks about owning your life. She brings an inspiring blend of compassion, wisdom and practicality to this conversation. Judith is a business coach and entrepreneur who’s known as the Small Business Oracle. She shares her insights, both personally and professionally, confirming that women in the UK have challenges with this topic as well.

“Only you can live your life and only I can live my life and if either of us live a half life, that’s a terrible waste. And if your life is only about putting others first, you’ve missed a dimension.”

Judith talks about seasons of saying “yes” and “no” by sharing a helpful perspective, “When there’s an abundance of everything, you are welcome to any of them, but when times are difficult and I’m worried about my own ability to access those and I have to choose between you and me, then I have to choose me.” 

I also share a bit about being a highly sensitive child and why I started to put others first.

How can you tell if you’re tipping into overgiving?

From a professional standpoint, most of Judith’s clients are women who work for themselves at home. When they aren’t putting themselves first, it shows up in a few ways:

• Not feeling important enough to have the time and space required to do their work
• Caving to the pressure of people who don’t respect their need for it.
• Illness or exhaustion because they’ve run themselves ragged as a result of not prioritizing their self-care

Simply put, it turns out the space that’s left is too small and they need to make more elbow room to exist in their own lives.

“You need space to do your best work.”

When making this shift to prioritizing yourself first, Judith recommends starting small with something easy that doesn’t matter much to you. This will give you practice during the conscious incompetence we all face when learning a different way of being.

Above all else, she encourages us to own our lives and live them fully.

“If I die without having lived my life to the fullest, my life goes unlived. We can’t do that. It’s a terrible waste. Live your own life, if you don’t it will go unlived. We have to do it in acknowledgment of the value of the opportunity we’ve been given by having a life. You have responsibilities, but we also have a responsibility to ourselves as well.”

This was an amazing interview with too many nuggets of wisdom to mention here. Go ahead and listen for yourself …

 

NOTES

JudithMorgan.com – Small Business Oracle

Judith also offers Small Business Big Magic for strong-minded small business owners and solopreneurs (practising or aspiring) who are crying out for a support team in their corner. Inspiration. Information. Clarity. Community. Wisdom. Woo Woo. Support. Success. All this, and more, within a mentoring group of fellow work-at-home business owners carving out their own path in life. Because all coaching is delivered in a group, you get direct access to her at a uniquely affordable fee. ** Price increases Sept. 1, 2015 , so check it out now if this calls to you.**

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

 ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation