How to Put Yourself First (When Everyone Else Needs You)

Hi [First Name],

I read something a few months ago that stuck with me. “Eat breakfast within the first 30 minutes of waking up to get the engine revving.”

Let me tell you what my first 30 minutes of my day used to look like.

I get my daughter out of bed. Move her along. Brush your teeth, keep it movin’ baby.
I get my son out of bed.
I brush my own teeth, which honestly feels like a miracle I fit in. 

I get everyone downstairs for breakfast.
I make her lunch.

I get her out the door for school, play with son until the nanny gets in at nine.  By the time they’re all out the door, it’s 9:30 and I’ll usually have a meeting.

I’m lucky if I eat by 11. Two, sometimes three hours after I got up. Yikes.

(And as much as I would love to get up before everyone else, I would rather have my sleep right now.) 

I’m not telling you this to complain about my mornings. 

I’m telling you because of what I noticed: Every one of those “first 30 minutes” belonged to someone else. Not one of them was mine.

And here’s the part that got me. Nobody asked me to skip breakfast. I just did it, the way I’ve done it a thousand mornings, without ever once noticing. 

That’s the thing about putting everyone else first. It’s so quiet you don’t even feel it happening.

It just becomes the shape of your day. Then the shape of your week. Then the shape of you.

This is how the drift happens. Not because you don’t care about yourself, but because you’ve been available to everyone else for so long that being last in line stopped feeling like a choice. 

And here’s why I care so much about this, why it’s the thing I come back to again and again inside The Movement. A skipped breakfast is small. The habit underneath it is not.

When you spend years putting your own body last, you don’t just miss meals. You slowly stop listening to it.

You stop noticing when you’re tired. When you’re hungry. When you need to move, or rest, or simply stop. 

You start running your body like a machine that takes care of everyone else, instead of living inside it as your own.

Everything I teach is about picking that thread back up. Not with more discipline. With attention. With choosing yourself in the smallest, most ordinary ways, until your body remembers it’s allowed to be tended to as well.

I sent a survey to this list last month and I read every single response. Over and over, in your own words, you told me the same thing. “Make myself a priority consistently.” “I’d value caring for myself as much as I value caring for my people.” “Decrease everyone else’s priority on my time.”

You already know. You just haven’t given yourself permission to act on it.

So here’s what I want to offer you. Not a new rule. Definitely not waking up at 5am. Something you can do inside the morning you already have.

When I make my daughter’s lunch now, I make something for myself at the same time. Same counter, same two minutes. I’m already standing there. Half the time I eat it standing up before anyone notices. It’s not a sit-down breakfast. It’s a handful of almonds and whatever fruit is on the counter. But it’s mine, and I had it before 11.

You don’t carve out a separate hour you don’t have. You tuck yourself into something you’re already doing for everyone else.

One glass of water poured for you before you pour theirs. Three bites while the kids hunt for their shoes. One of those 30 minutes claimed, instead of all of them given away.

Start with one. Choosing yourself doesn’t have to look like a weekend away. Some mornings it just looks like a banana you actually ate.

With love,
Erin

P.S. If a friend forwarded you here and you want these letters in your inbox regularly you can join the list here. No rules, no 5am. Just one honest note a week about coming home to yourself.