Start with You

Except you think you're not worthy.

Give grace, but give yourself grace first. That’s how you can have more grace to give.

— Abiola Okun

If you apply the subject of this email to anything and everything in your life, you will be shocked at how much of a transformed and measured life you will have in the next one year.

You can pick this subject and write hundreds of completely different messages with different contexts and meanings, and still be spot on because of how universal this is.

Here's the best advice you’ll receive this week: start with you.

When you wake up in the morning, start with you.

Before you step out into life, get into traffic, involve in every other quotidian activity you would usually be involved in; start with you.

Before you speak to someone, respond, or react to a stimuli, there's a space in between action and response, says Victor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning, and that's the space that affords you to start with you. Would you take kindly what you want to say or how you want to respond? If you were the one on the receiving end of that response, would your day be made?

Before you give your endowment, your gifts, your skills, your time, your value, yourself, start with you. Make sure in these moments, you are not cheating yourself out of what should benefit you or make you grow.

When you think of benefits and blessings and prosperity, start with you. You deserve all the good things in life too. Don't put yourself last as people will generally preach for you to do except you have a clear and sure path that benefits you too.

Even in your career, before giving tasks, start with you. Ensure you have taken a chunk of it that fits your skills. Before receiving tasks, ensure it is a task that fully optimizes your skills and counts in your job description. Do you good first.

In your relationships, start with you. It does your partner good because starting with you indicates and leads to the invariable result of giving your partner and friends a healthy version of you. Nobody wants a silent, say-yesser, do-gooder, displeased, disserviced person beside them.

Nobody wants a silent, say-yesser, do-gooder, displeased, disserviced person beside them. So start with you!

Before you say yes, start with you. For every time you say yes, you say no to something else on the parallel. Every time you give of yourself, you deprive yourself of something else. Ensure that you are not depriving yourself of what benefits you much more, simply because you have started with someone else other than you.

Start with you. Anything other than that is you putting someone else in the driver's seat of your life. Anything other than that is you cheating and robbing yourself to give to people who have taken the advice and have started with themselves.

It is okay to give grace and space to someone else. It is okay to allow someone to take the lead. Just make sure they are not taking the lead role in your life. Your life is a movie that you’re supposed to star in as the lead, not someone else.

It is a no-brainer. If you give someone the keys to your car and you sit in the passenger's seat, they will drive you to where they want to go, not where you want to go. And oftentimes, where they want to go and where you want to go are a shadow of themselves.

Start with you. In the good times and the evil ones. When you are given light, shine first. It is when you shine that other people around you get the opportunity to do the same. When you are given food, eat first. It is a filled stomach that has the energy to feed ten thousand. When you are given resources, use them first and let it be evident that you are a partaker of that resource. That is how you preach the gospel of that resource. When you come into knowledge, act on it first, then teach others. That is how it becomes permanent in your life.

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In everything you do this week, at work with your colleagues, in rooms of negotiation with your clients and investors, at home with your family, on the road with other drivers or passers-by, start with you.

Make sure that you never come out of an encounter feeling displeased just because you tried to give grace to someone else. Give grace, but give yourself grace first. That's only how you can have more grace to give.

Start with you.

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨