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What’s the one most valuable thing you have and can never replace, that you paid nothing for, protect the least, but let people take from you for free even when you don’t want to give it away?
TIME.
We spend so much of our lives accumulating assets, material things, whether that includes your latest electronic gadget, your house, or your car. What do you do to protect those things? You buy an insurance plan for your phone in case it gets lost or stolen, and a case for your phone so it doesn’t break if you drop it. You protect it. You pay for a car warranty, wash your car, and do regular maintenance on your car so it lasts as long as possible and looks good. You protect it. You buy home owner’s insurance, perform regular maintenance, clean your house, and renovate it. You protect it. You put your money in a bank, and other valuables in a safety deposit box. You protect them.
If anyone tried to take your phone, car, house, or money, you’d be pissed off, angry, fight them if necessary, and cause a ruckus to guard against anyone taking these things from you. Even though all of these things are replaceable, you would never let anyone take them away from you without a fight.
But your time on the other, you give away without a second though. Especially as an empath or highly sensitive person, time is something you give away freely and let people take from you, even when you don’t have it to give, or don’t want to give it. Because you’re so concerned with what people think, you let people take as much as they want from you in the interest of likability or not offending the person taking your time.
Think about it. You’re giving away your most valuable gift for FREE. If you keep doing this, you will end up frustrated and angry with yourself for not putting a stop to this terrible habit now. When you initially get frustrated with the person wasting your time, you eventually realize it’s your own fault and you wonder why you didn’t put an end to people stealing your time.
WHY IS TIME SO PRECIOUS
Not that this needs much elaborating on, but let’s face it, you only get this one life so from the minute you’re born, you’re living life on a countdown timer. If you think of an hourglass, as soon as you’re born…hell, as soon as you’re conceived, the sand in the hourglass is only flowing from the bottom to the top. While you can do certain things to prolong your life, like eating healthy, and staying peaceful, no matter what you do, that time will run out no matter what you do.
Time is so precious because you can literally never replace it. Ever. If you crash a car, you can buy a new one. If your house gets destroyed in a tornado, you can buy a new one. When you give away your time, it’s never coming back. Ever. It is the only irreplaceable commodity on earth. When you waste time on something, you can’t get it back. If someone knocks on your door to sell you their religion or to sign you up for a fake after school program, then wants to sit down with you for half an hour to discuss it even though you already know your answer is a resolute NO, you can’t later rewind the clock and get that person to give you your time back.
I actually think time is even more precious for a couple of additional reasons beyond the simple fact that it is irreplaceable.
You don’t know how much time you had. If you died tomorrow, but then at the gates of heaven were given the chance to have one more day on earth, can you imagine what that day would look like? Would it start with a Big Mac and large fries at McDonald’s, and end like a scene out of the movie The Hangover, when they went to the red light district in Bangkok? No, not that part where Stu realized he had made love with a ladyboy….
What would be all of those crazy things you would do and how would you maximize your time? Maybe your day would be spent simply curling up on the sofa with your family, watching movies all day and eating ice cream. It doesn’t really matter what you would do because all that would really matter at the end of the day is that you were maximizing your time doing what YOU wanted to do, however that satisfied you.
So what makes time even more valuable is the fact that we don’t really know how much time we have. I remember going to my friend’s, girlfriend’s funeral several years ago. All of her friends were lesbian bikers, so it was quite the diverse crowd. Nonetheless, the son of the person that died gave his speech and I always remembered one line out of it in particular. He said “the problem is that we always think that we have more time”. His mom had died suddenly so he hadn’t a chance to say goodbye. It struck a chord with me because he was so right – we keep putting off things we want to do until tomorrow. Telling your parents you love them, or pursuing your dreams…anything really.
Because of this fact that we never know when things will end, it makes time even more precious. This doesn’t mean that we have to maximize each day with balls to the wall activity, but it does mean where we put our time and who we spend it with should be taken much more seriously than many of us currently do. I’ve seen cancer survivors who were diagnosed to die, end up living a long and prosperous life. I’ve also seen people who have chain-smoked for 40 years, eaten hamburgers and fries every single day, live into their late seventies. On the other hand I’ve known seemingly healthy people die suddenly at the age of 38 because of a massive heart-attack. You just never know when things may come to an end, and this uncertainty adds to the preciousness of time.
The other reason I think time is even more valuable than we realize is because as you get older, time moves faster. I’ll talk about this in more detail in a future episode. But regardless, for those in their teens or early twenties listening to this, time is moving at a different speed than it is for me. And for someone in their seventies or eighties, time is moving even faster for them than it is for me. I always remember an interview I saw on 60 Minutes a few years ago where they interviewed centenarians. The interviewer asked one of them, what surprised them the most about living into their 100s. They responded that what surprised them the most is that they had to brush their teeth every five minutes. What they meant by that was time was moving so quickly and days were passing so quickly that it was like they were performing their nightly and morning rituals every five minutes. Days were passing by in the blink of an eye.
For those that are much younger, like in your teens or whatever, don’t assume that you can discount what I’m saying because you’re still in your teens. When I say that time moves faster as you get older, it doesn’t mean that once you hit 40, time suddenly accelerates. The whole perception of time moving faster is something that happens gradually with each passing year. If you’re not appreciative of this, you will be. Whether you like it or not.
I always think back to being a kid when I would have summer break. In Ottawa, summer break would essentially be from around the second or third week in June to the first week in September, giving me a little over two months of vacation. Those lazy summer days, playing Dungeons and Dragons or Monopoly with my best friends Tony, Jess, or Stefan, were awesome. But what I also remember is how long the summers lasted. Those two months lasted an eternity and were the perfect amount of time. Now when I think of two months, it’s a joke. The days are passing so fast I mix up what I did last week with the week before. Does two months seem like an eternity? Hell no – two months passes as fast as two weeks these days.
I disagree completely when people say that by the time they’re in their late forties they’re middle-aged. Middle implies that you’re half-way through your life-span. If the average life expectancy if someone is 77 years old, I actually will say that you’re probably middle-aged by the time you’re 30. The reason for this is because even if you lived to be 77 years old, the next 47 years of your life after you turn thirty will go by much faster than your first 30 years. Did I lose you yet in the math?
Basically it will feel like time is moving much faster so you will burn through the next thirty years of your life significantly faster than the first thirty years. For these reasons I really believe time is much more precious, especially as we get past our thirties since time starts to fly.
HOW TO GUARD OUR TIME
- Don’t make yourself so available. I used to always make myself available for everyone. I still do, to a fault, but am diligently working on changing that. If I had a list of ten things to do in one day, I would find that at the end of my day I would have completed like one out of ten things. What the hell was going on?
Well, I would wake up and have my tasks set. Before I could even get out of bed though, my phone would be ablaze with text message emergencies or phone calls from people needing things. Being the people pleaser I was, those new requests would somehow turn into new items on my to do list, but they would push my previous to-do list items down. Basically the incoming tasks would take precedent over the previously scheduled tasks. From a list of ten things, the new three things would become numbers 1, 2, and 3, instead of 11, 12, and 13.
What I’ve noticed is that, especially for an empath but true for most people, the more you take on, the more people will give you. If you work a regular job, it’s the same. And there’s nothing wrong with working hard and taking on more things as hard work and dedication can help you get promoted in your job, help you get raises, etc. And that may be all fine and dandy, but outside of work, a lot of us have a habit of just taking on anything and everything that comes our way, always pushing our own needs and tasks down on the list. However, when you prioritize any and every incoming task over the other things you already have to complete, you end up making someone else unhappy somewhere else and what you also do is make yourself unhappy in particular yourself.
What you need to start doing is putting those new tasks at the end of your list. By taking on everything and putting them as priority tasks, you end up creating unreal expectations for everyone and when you can’t fulfill those expectations, it actually hurts your reputation instead of helping it. If you’re at work, someone will eventually think you’re unreliable because you were not able to get something done on time. If it’s in your personal life, then you’re going to disappoint a family member or friend. The upside is that hopefully they won’t rely on you again (which can be a good thing for you). The downside is that you’ll probably end up getting frustrated with your friend and yourself.
The best thing to do is to, if you’re going to accept a task, let the person know that you have a full schedule and you won’t be able to get to it until next week or whenever you think you can comfortably do it. That way when you are able to finish it early, no one can say you didn’t meet your promise. You also set the tone that you’re not some servant ready to jump every time someone asks you to jump. What I’ve noticed with these tasks people give you, whether at work or in your personal life, more than half the time it’s something that person can do themselves. Since you’re the easy softie, they end up asking you since you’re Mr. or Mrs. Reliable. In my job as an attorney, I’ve had people want me to get their bank statements for them from the bank which they could easily get on their own online (even as an attorney, it would take hours and tonnes of paperwork for me to get bank statements), or have me get their paystubs from them, when they could simply contact their HR department. My favorite is one potential client that got mad at me that I wanted to meet her at my office instead of downtown that same day (there was no rush by the way). Since I was more of a pushover back then, I actually even caved a bit and even suggested we meet in Sherman Oaks, which was half-way, to which she got pissed off. Not to get on a high-horse, but I’m not a home delivery service. You do hear about attorneys making house calls, but those are for big personal injury cases. It’s not regular that an attorney spends an hour and a half in traffic just for a face to face meeting, unless they’re billing a client, which this was not that type of client or case.
Stand your ground. Set your day in stone to a degree. Unless it’s family or friends that genuinely need help, be careful with taking on tasks that other people can do themselves. What I started doing was answering my phone less, or taking longer to return calls from certain people. Eventually they realized I wasn’t their 911 service. For an empath, you have to do this to protect yourself otherwise you will continue to be taken advantage of, over and over, and over again. Some of the people you will attract couldn’t care less about you or your time as long as they can use you to please themselves. How selfish people can be never ceases to amaze me. It’s up to you to guard your time ruthlessly
2) Don’t feel compelled to answer every phone call and text message.
In that same vein, some of us have this mentality of jumping whenever someone tells us to jump, or answering our calls whenever the phone rings, no matter how busy we are. Me included over the years.
A couple of things about cell phones – they’ve really made things easier for us, but they’ve made things more difficult for us at the same time. People think it means we can be accessed at their will and for sensitive people, we often feel compelled to answer even when we either don’t feel like it, or we’re busy.
My favorite is when people call me multiple times. They’ll call, I won’t answer, they’ll call again seconds later, I still won’t answer, and they’ll call a third time. None of those times do they leave a voicemail and unless they’re complete idiots, obviously I can see their missed call on my phone thanks to this incredible invention called Caller ID. In some cases I’ll get so frustrated I’ll answer the phone out of breath, exasperated that the person won’t fuck off or just leave a voicemail. That’s a failing on my part which I am getting better at. These days when someone does that, unless it’s an emergency (it is literally never an emergency, it’s just people with obsessive or narcissistic personalities that do that), I purposely don’t call them back until the next day. If they call a fourth time, I add them to the “block” list on my cell phone. You’d be surprised, or not, how long my blocked callers list is on my cell phone.
Too often, we want to be at the beacon call of the people calling us. Whether they’re friends or clients. By doing so with the wrong set of people, we set unreal expectations that end up frustrating ourselves, and giving power to the people calling us, as though we are subservient to them. When you finally don’t answer quickly because you’re pissed off, they hold it against you.
I used to have this client that for some reason would call me twice a day about his bankruptcy case, asking how the case was going. Just so you know, once a case is filed, nothing happens – we just have to wait for a hearing date and then we wait again a few months for the Court to sign off on the paperwork. There are no updates in 95% of the cases. Despite having explained this to the client a couple of hundred times, he kept calling me daily. No matter how much I told him not to call, he would call. But what was WORSE is that I would always answer. I was less self-aware back then. I remember I finally went to Hawaii on vacation where the time zone was some hours behind Los Angeles. I told the client to NOT call me as I was on vacation. Sure enough, the morning after I arrived, sleeping in the hotel room with my other two friends, my cell phone goes off at 6am with the client calling asking for an update. It wasn’t until I became more savvy that I realized that people like that probably have personality disorders. Fortunately those days of that happening are no longer since I’ve been able to set expectations and be much, much more firm with clients.
Remember – your cell phone is for YOUR convenience, not the convenience of the person calling you.
3) Learn to say no.
This underscores everything. Especially true for empaths and highly sensitive people, we tend to have a hard time saying no to people. No matter what the favor is, or who is asking us, we’re afraid to say no. Even when we’re stretched thin and that guy that never does anything for you when you need it, now calls you for a favor, you’re hesitant to turn him down. Or tell him off. Not being able to say “no” more often can be fatal for empaths.
I highly encourage you to watch the movie Yes Man with Jim Carey. It’s about a guy that says no to everyone and everything. Then one day, he ends up saying yes to everything because he realizes he’s been missing out on life. I think happiness is somewhere in between. When we have to consider other people’s feelings all of the time before we say “no”, it can be very problematic to the quality of our own lives. Think of all of the decisions, tasks, and things people ask from you every single day. And instead of thinking about whether you want to do something or not, how often do you find yourself first calculating in your mind all of the metrics of whether it would upset the other person if you said no, would it make other people happy, what would happen if you said no, and in last place of the decision making process, do you finally ask the question to yourself of whether you really want to do something.
Do you realize how crazy that is? Let me get this straight – it’s your life and it’s your job to make yourself happy every day, but you consider everyone else’s happiness before you even get to your own. Remember something very important: it’s not your job to make other people happy. If someone doesn’t like your decision then that’s their problem. You’re not a court jester or a clown.
I challenge you to try for one week the following: whenever you have to make a decision or someone asks you to do something, ask yourself FIRST, “do I want to do this? Is it good for me? Do I have time?” That should be the end of your analysis. If the answer to these questions is yes, then go right ahead.
You should NOT be considering “will this person like me less if I say no? Will I lose them as a friend or will they get mad at me? What will happen or how will they figure out this problem if I don’t say yes and help them?” I’m not saying to never help anyone when it’s inconvenient or anything like that. Friends and family are important and sometimes you just have to help them when it’s not convenient. But you’d be surprised how often we’re trying to please people that really have nothing to do with us. Are you about to buy a house with a realtor but you’ve changed your mind at the last minute? Go ahead and change your mind. Don’t worry about whether it will upset your realtor. Did you hire me to file a bankruptcy for you but later realized you don’t want to do it anymore? Who gives a shit what I think – call me up and tell me you don’t want to go ahead with it. PLEASE YOURSELF FIRST. SECOND. AND LAST.
You will suddenly find yourself with more time on your hands to invest in your own projects and hobbies. Even if you just want to get more sleep, you’ll find you’ll have that time instead of being a robot running around at the whim of everyone who asks you to do stuff. Just say NO.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO WITH OUR TIME
Whatever. The. Hell. You. Want. I didn’t put this together to preach about time being valuable so therefore you need to be productive every second of every day, living balls to the wall, climbing mountains, and starting billion dollar companies. I actually think you should do with your time whatever the hell you want, doing whatever the hell makes you happy.
What matters is that you are doing what YOU want to do, and not what SOMEONE ELSE wants you to do. That is a huge distinction.
Especially for empaths, highly sensitive people, and other people pleasers, we have a habit of not doing what we want to do, but doing what we think other people want us to do, or doing what we think will make us happy. It’s one of the worst habits you can have in life.
Specifically for those of us that have a bad habit of doing this, I urge you to be selfish with your time. I’m not saying to be a jerk and be selfish, nor am I saying to be pushy and force your will upon others, much like others have probably been doing to you for years. What I am suggesting is to make decisions that please you first.
Examples? Let’s say you only have two weeks of vacation a year off of work. You’ve had your heart set on going to Cancun for years and now is finally your chance to go..,you’ve saved up your money, you’ve researched your dream resort, and you even learned a bit of Spanish … “dos cervezas por favor”. Your dream is finally about to come true! Mexico here I come!!!
Oh oh, wait a minute though. One of your friends wants to join you, but he doesn’t have enough money, and he’s already been to Cancun. Instead, he starts trying to convince you to go to Miami. The trip will be cheaper for him, and you’ll have an even better time he claims. C’mon, let’s go to Miami. As though it were up for negotiation, you go back and forth on the merits of Miami versus Cancun. You finally buckle, and decide to go to Miami, giving up your dream trip with the precious little vacation time you were allotted from work. The trip, no doubt, ends up sucking because you realize your friend needs to borrow money from you every step of the way, and wakes up at noon, always wanting you to go to the restaurants he wants to go to, and the clubs he feels like seeing. You come back home angry with your friend, but mostly angry with yourself for not having followed your heart and done what you wanted to do with your time. Sound familiar? Once again your penchant for being a people pleaser ended up screwing you.
What you should have done in this situation is simply state you’re going to Cancun and if your friend wanted to go, then he could tag along. By him going on your trip, he actually made you go on his trip. Not only did he waste your money, but he wasted your time and you’re the only one to blame.
When making decisions involving your time, ask yourself if it’s convenient for you and is it what you really want to do or is it what someone else wants to do. For many of us empaths, not only do we have a hard time saying no to people and have our own plans and time hijacked, but we also are a magnet for people to approach us to steal our time. I swear, I could be standing in a group of fifty people, and I will always be that one guy that is approached by some random guy trying to sell something and chat me up for for twenty minutes about some garbage I have literally zero interest in.
Just the other day I was standing in line at the CostCo food-court. It was lunchtime and there were probably 25 people in line. Some guy not in line, walks up to the line from the opposite direction, eyeing everyone down. His eyes not-so-coincidentally lock onto me and he approaches me in an enthusiastic voice asking me what I did for a living as though we’re at some social gathering even though I’m just waiting in line to buy a Caesar salad. Right away I don’t want to talk to this guy – he had obviously approached me to sell me something so my guard went up. Not only that, but now everyone in line is watching and listening. He tried to engage by complimenting my suit and asking if I had a job and what I did for a living. I kept my answers short hoping he would fuck-off, but he wouldn’t go away. Of course, he eventually got to the punch line in asking if I wanted to “earn” extra income, presumably with some nonsense pyramid multi-level marketing scheme. You gotta love it – I just finished telling him I’m an attorney. Not that we all make a lot of money or anything, but I’m not exactly in a profession where I need or want to be selling Amway on the side.
But I just want to illustrate that as an empath, you have to be extra cautious with your time since you are especially vulnerable to having people take advantage of your time. You are a mark for salespeople, random people who want to do emotional drive-bys on you, people who need favors, run errands, talk about their problems, etc. I’m not suggesting you become anti-social, or a dick that doesn’t want to help anyone. What I am saying is to cut-off people who want you to do things when they would never return the favor to you, and if you can’t cut them off, then at least say NO. What I’ve learned is the more I’ve said no to people, the more people have respected my time, and interestingly, the less random people have approached me in the street and in public to waste my time. Just because someone has a table set-up outside of the grocery store seeking donations to their kid’s school doesn’t mean you have to stand there and listen to their spiel for five minutes when you’ve already made your mind up that you’re not going to contribute. Or if a telemarketer calls, don’t wait for five minutes while they give you the story about why you need to donate to whatever it is they’re asking. At my parents’ place even on the do not call registry, they probably get upwards of 10 calls a day. My Dad actually listens to them, and then is probably too nice in declining because half the time he enters into negotiation with the telemarketer to justify why he doesn’t need to contribute or buy their product. These days I just simply hang up.
Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent. The point is, save your time from these time-thieves so that you can use it to do whatever you want. If what you want to do is eat sour cream and onion chips and watch TV, then do it. But at least you’re doing it because it’s your time and you want to do it, not because someone else wants you to do it.
CONCLUSION
For those that have been struggling with never having enough time because they’re always doing everything for everyone else and not enough for themselves, now is the time for you to change. BE SELFISH WITH YOUR TIME. One of the great things you can do to be successful in life is to be generous with your time, but being generous with your time means you have that time to give in the first place. If you’re always busy running everyone else’s errands, driving two hours to San Diego instead of meeting half-way because it’s convenient for your friend and not you, then you’re not being generous with your time, you’re just being stupid with your time, and you’re flushing it down the toilet.
It is true that you should volunteer and help people etc., but you won’t be able to be generous with your time if you’re not guarding your time and being selfish in a way that preserves it.
Think of it. When you give away your time to something you don’t care about or someone you don’t want to give it to, you’re literally giving away something that you can never replace. TRULY the most valuable thing to a human besides their health. You can replace money, gold, diamonds, whatever it is you think is valuable. You can NEVER replace your wasted time. An hour here, an hour there…it’s adds up over a lifetime. Even at my age, and I’d like to think I’m not that old, the only thing I really regret is wasting my time. I wish I didn’t go on trips with certain people just because they asked (even if didn’t really want to go). I wish I didn’t drive all over the city meeting people just to appease them when they could just have come to my office. But instead of being frustrated, the important thing is to turn the regrets and wasted time into lessons – once you do that then that time is no longer a waste since your grew from the experience.
It’s funny. We buy alarms, video surveillance systems, and locks to protect our houses. We lock our cars, turn on their alarms to protect our cars. We preserve and save our money and when the bank charges us an extra 50 cents in bank charges, we get pissed and fight them to get the charges reversed so you can preserve your money. But yet when it comes to those precious minutes and hours every day, we let people take our time from us without a second thought. We fail to see the time we have is far more valuable than any car, house, or bank account you will ever have. The only problem is that you need to start acting like it!
You have one life to live. Guard your most precious gift ruthlessly.