Don't stop being (good) selfish
Am I about to accuse you of being selfish?
If so, then mean it with love, as always. But the word 'selfish' carries so much baggage that even reading it in a business blog probably made you flinch slightly.
Selfish is the thing you were told off for as a child. The thing good coaches, good parents, and good business owners are supposedly never meant to be.
I want to make the case for a different version of selfish – not the (ahem) 'presidential' kind, but what I call 'good selfish'.
What is 'good selfish'?
'Good selfish' is small. It's the extra moment(s) you gift to yourself:
Before you reply to a message
Before you rush past something that is actually important to you
Before the gentle "no thank you" to a request that doesn't quite feel right
It's a handful of tiny decisions each day that put your own wellbeing marginally ahead of everyone else's expectations, on the basis that when you are operating at full capacity, you have considerably more to give. There's a name for the assumption underneath that idea, and it comes straight from an airline safety briefing.
Fit your own oxygen mask before helping others. It's become shorthand for the entire self-care-first argument, and psychologists have a proper name for it: "The Oxygen Mask Assumption".
But the mask doesn't quite fit
A 2024 study by Rosset and colleagues actually challenges this assumption. The researchers propose that wellbeing is not something you secure for yourself first and then distribute afterwards. It's reciprocal. Helping others and caring for yourself aren't sequential steps. They're the same loop, feeding each other continuously.
That matters, because the oxygen mask assumption implies a hierarchy: you, then them. What the research actually suggests is closer to what I'm calling 'good selfish': your own wellbeing and your capacity to help others aren't in competition. They're the same resource, and starving one starves the other.
Helping someone genuinely boosts your own happiness, reduces your stress, and increases your life satisfaction, in addition to whatever good it does them. So, 'good selfish' isn't a euphemism for abandoning others. It's the recognition that your own wellbeing is one of the inputs that makes your help worth having.
Why coaches (and helpers generally) are especially bad at this
I'll hold my hand up to this one too. Coaches, therapists, and anyone whose work involves genuinely caring about other people's outcomes are particularly good at what I'd call 'altruistic deception'.
We tell ourselves that helping others is what gives us inner joy; that our selfless act makes us a better version of ourselves. And we use that story to justify blurring our own boundaries.
Research on burnout among people in caring professions backs up why this eventually backfires. Self-compassion has been shown to enhance the capacity to make wiser choices about your own wellbeing, and a 2025 systematic review of burnout prevention among counselling professionals found that a lack of self-awareness and reflective practice is one of the main factors leaving practitioners vulnerable to isolation and burnout.
Put simply: the people whose entire job is caring for others are also the people most at risk of forgetting to care for themselves, and the cost shows up eventually in the quality of the care they're able to give.
A 2024 pilot study of a mindful coaching programme for social workers found statistically significant reductions in burnout and depressive symptoms among participants, and the group specifically valued the programme's emphasis on healthy boundaries. Boundaries weren't a nice-to-have alongside the real work. They were part of what made the work sustainable.
The two questions again
'Good selfish' gives you the space to properly sit with the two questions I ask every client at the start of our work together.
What is it you really want (I mean REALLY want)?
And why is that so important to you that you are prepared to embrace fear and take the brave and brilliant action required to make it happen?
Those are deeply selfish questions, by design. And the more honestly you can answer them, the easier the small daily decisions become:
When to give yourself the extra moment
When to check back in with what actually matters to you
When to say no thank you to something that doesn't align
The dino-mammoths are long gone
Most of us are running on programming that dates back millennia. Our prehistoric brain still warns us to stay in our lane. Don't ruffle feathers. Do right by others first, or risk getting cast out of the cave where you'll end up being lunch for a sabre-toothed dino-mammoth.
None of that danger exists any more. Nobody is watching to see if you dared to put yourself first today. And yet the instinct to justify putting your own needs before anyone else's, persists long after the threat that created it has gone.
'Good selfish' is the subtle rebellion against that instinct. Not a grand gesture. Just the extra moment. The honest no. The check-in with yourself that you've been skipping.
Step outside the cave. It's safer out here than you think, and there is considerably more good you can do once you do.
Mark Franklin is The Four Fears® Guy: a transformational mindset coach, speaker and author working with creative professionals and small business owners who are ready to close the gap between the business they have and the one they actually deserve.
Where in your week could you afford to be a little more 'good selfish'? Drop it in the comments. Someone else reading this is probably nodding along with you.
P.S. Worth checking out Gary Parsons' take on 'good selfish', especially in leadership.
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