Hello. Thank you for listening to I'm speaking with Elizabeth West. I am your host, and today I'm going to be talking with Michelle Rohr. And, Michelle, if you could tell us more about who you are, what you do, and who you do it for, we'll start there.

Well, thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Like Elizabeth said, I am Michelle, and I am a lot of things, but my passion is helping other women put themselves first. And I am on my own journey. Learning how to do that as a wife, as a mom, as a human. And the way that that plays out in my business can look very creative and fun. I make courses about planners and design and personal development. But it all comes down to creating a space where you can come home to yourself, and at the root of that is making it safe to put yourself first.

And it's been a journey because there's so much unraveling in that endeavor, because we have been told so many things about putting ourselves first that are very negative. We've heard that it's selfish. We've heard that it's narcissistic. We've heard that it is evil. And I used to believe that, not outright believe it. I didn't have, like, a statement on my wall saying, thou shalt put yourself last. But it was embedded into my psyche that the only way to make the world a better place was to put myself last and everyone else first. And if I did that long enough and hard enough, then everything would be okay.

And I found out that that is not the case. Everything is healthier and more functional and more true when we learn how to put ourselves first. And it's not you put yourself first, therefore everyone else comes last. It's you put yourself first, and now everyone else can put themselves first, too.

I love that. And it's like, I know being women first of all, it's like we're always and I know this because I'm in your programs. And I remember one time you had a question. It's like, what would you do if you weren't a good little girl? I believe it was one of the.

Questions, what would you do if you were a bad girl?

Oh, there it is. If you're a bad girl. There you go. And it's funny because my mind was blown because I was like, I never thought about that. I never thought about and the thing.

Is, on the surface, that sounds like a bad thing to even consider. Like, what would you do if you were a bad girl? And for people like us who aren't bad people, we don't have some sort of personality disorder that makes us incapable of being empathetic. We're literally crippled with our empathy. We have so much empathy, it's ridiculous. So the question of what would you do if you were a bad girl? Is to kind of clear away that default setting of just sacrificing yourself to the hilt and connecting with who you really are and what you would do if you were being true to who you really are. So the thing is, when you are so used to taking care of everyone else, doing what you really are here on this earth to do as a person who gets to enjoy your life because your life belongs to you, it feels like a bad thing. It feels like you'd be a bad girl to do that. So to ask yourself, what would I do if I was a bad girl? It's really to ask yourself, what would you do if you acted like your life actually belonged to you? Because that's the truth.

Your life belongs to you. And as empaths or as people who just are so used to taking care of other people, we forget what it looks like to treat our lives as our own. We turn our lives into everyone else's Band Aid. Like we use our life to prop up everyone else's. And that's not healthy.

Yeah, that is exactly right. And a quote, I'm not sure where the quote came from, but I heard it recently, which is, what's in your cup? What is in our cups are for us and what's in the saucer?