Ep257. Debunking the Selfishness Lie: Why Healthy Selfishness Creates a Better Life.

In this episode, Mike challenges one of the deepest beliefs many of us inherited as children: "Don't be selfish." While the intention behind that message may have been good, the long-term consequence is often a life of over-giving, under-receiving, and quietly sacrificing our own needs to avoid appearing selfish. Mike explains why healthy selfishness isn't something to avoid—it's something to cultivate. 

Drawing from his own life, his coaching work, and the foundation of his upcoming book, Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive, Mike explores how our earliest conditioning shapes our relationship with giving and receiving. He shares why learning to receive isn't selfish at all—it's the key to creating a life of greater abundance, fulfillment, and generosity.

Key Takeaways

1. Childhood conditioning often creates adults who over-give and under-receive.
Messages like "Don't be selfish," "Don't ask for too much," and "It's better to give than receive" become unconscious programs that continue shaping our lives decades later. 

2. Healthy selfishness is not the opposite of generosity.
Wanting what you want, asking for it, and allowing yourself to receive doesn't make you selfish—it creates the capacity to give from overflow instead of depletion. 

3. Giving and receiving are equal.
Like breathing in and breathing out, both are essential. When one side of the exchange is blocked, life becomes imbalanced. 

4. Your relationship with receiving determines the quality of your life.
Many people unconsciously reject support, ease, abundance, and opportunity because they were conditioned to believe they must first earn or deserve them. 

5. Becoming an easy receiver changes everything.
As you release unhealthy beliefs around selfishness, you naturally become more open to life's opportunities while simultaneously becoming a more generous person. 

Notable Quotes

• "The greatest lie ever told: It's better to give than receive."
• "It's not better to give than receive. These are equal. It's kind of like breathing. Inhaling is not more important than exhaling, and exhaling is not more important than inhaling. They're equal. Both are required."
• "There's a huge difference between giving from a place of sacrifice than giving from a place of overflow and abundance."
• "The more you receive, the more you have to give."
• "Because a lot of times we give really easily, but receiving is a struggle-icious event. And if receiving isn't as easy as giving, you're always gonna be on the depleted side of life."

Call to Action

If this episode challenged the way you've thought about selfishness, spend a few moments reflecting on where you've been saying "no" to yourself in an effort to avoid appearing selfish. What have you stopped asking for? What support have you rejected? Where have you been giving from sacrifice instead of overflow?

If you're ready to transform your relationship with giving and receiving, join Mike for the Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive Workshop on August 28–29 just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Together, you'll identify and release the conditioning that's kept you on the over-giving side of life and rebuild your ability to receive with ease. Click here for details and to register.

Questions about the workshop or working with Mike one-on-one?

mike@innerwealthglobal.com

No assistant. No gatekeeper. Just a conversation about creating a life where giving and receiving flow with equal ease.

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Music Credit: "What's Left of Me" by Wes Hoffman & Friends

Transcript

Wake Up Inspired Every Day

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You want to wake up doing like your stump and business in your life? You won't feel the need to escape your business. Are you running your life or is your life running? I'm my keep going. I'm helping designing three life is no authentic and alignment who you know yard. You don't get excited just to wake up. I'm helping you putting real wealth to accept your freedom from the inside out. Welcome to the Inner Wealth Podcast, where we learn and choose to live inspired each and every day. Just about every call I've had over the last week or two, I've encouraged everyone on the call, whether it was a private client or my mastermind students and my community students, I've encouraged them to be more selfish. Now, I went to Catholic school growing up in my elementary years, and I would have gotten beaten by the nuns for encouraging people and advising people to be more selfish. And it would have gotten me probably scolded by my parents. And it, you know, it would have, it wouldn't have been pretty. Let's just say that. But I am at a stage in my life where I understand uh life.

Why I’m Promoting Selfishness

SPEAKER_00 1:15

I feel like I understand a life uh life better than I ever have. And I'm encouraging people to be selfish. Now, I'm if you want to, if you want to hear more about that, just hang out. But I gotta give you some background real quick, okay? And this isn't background that I haven't provided before in many, many ways, but it's background that's really important to understand why it's why I'm encouraging people to be more selfish.

Childhood Programming Runs Your Life

SPEAKER_00 1:39

So from the ages of zero to seven, you are a complete subconscious sponge, which means you will believe whatever people tell you. Okay. You you believe in Santa Claus, you're the tooth fairy, Easter bunny. You believe all these things because the people that you love the most and the people that are there to take care of you and keep you secure and to keep you safe, right? They're telling you these things and you there's no doubt in you. There's no, there's no um uh there's no mirror to to really uh assess whether something's true or not. Between the ages of zero and seven, you just really believe just about anything that people tell you, all right? And you're conditioned and you're programmed from that place. And if someone looks at the color red and says it's yellow, then you're gonna believe that. And first day of kindergarten, your teacher, your kindergarten teacher is gonna think you're a freaking nut job. But the point being is you'll believe anything, especially the people that that that love you and the authority figures in your life. And I went to Catholic school for eight years and they taught me some beliefs that weren't really encouraging or didn't promote creating wealth and didn't help become successful. They they they gave me and gifted me, I guess, and taught me from their value system, their rules of engagement in life and how they saw life and from a religious context.

The “Everything Is Hard” Trap

SPEAKER_00 3:12

But that religious context didn't make life easier for me. All right. But you, you know, my dad taught me that you got to work hard for your money and that making money is hard and the marriage is hard, and all these hards, hards, hards. Everything's hard, everything's hard. And the little Mike, right, with this subconscious mind, just absorbed all of it. And then from that everything's hard, whenever something was really easy, I made it hard because subconscious, the subconscious and the wiring and my subconscious and my nervous system, it was built around hard and only hard was valuable. And if it was easy, then you were doing something wrong. It it also, you know, when when I absorbed that belief that making money is hard, when money came easily, I made my life harder to prove that making money is hard. And I kept getting promoted in corporate America and I kept making more and more money. And every time I would get promoted, and I would, I would have another uh level of authority or or management or title or role responsibility or authority level up that I would increase the amount of hours that I was working, and I would, it was almost like punishing myself for being successful. And it didn't getting promoted wasn't hard for me, but I made my life hard because of this subconscious imprint that making money is hard. So I made it hard, even when it was easy. And I've seen myself do this in so many different ways. Like when in my health regimen, you know, when I when I would work out, if I was enjoying the lift, I wasn't punishing myself enough. If I was enjoying the run, I wasn't running fast enough. And I didn't allow myself to enjoy or be on the receiving end of life. I always punished myself because I thought everything, only hard things were valuable. I hope this is making sense. But this was imprinted in me by people that I loved who saw the world that way. And now I can look back and see how hard they made their life, their lives, because they believed these things and they they worked jobs that they hated, and they they did things that they didn't want to do because they they saw the world and life through the lens of everything is hard. And if it's not hard, it's not valuable. And one of the beliefs, one of the things that they gifted me with, and they were just sharing from their point of view and from their point of perspective and out of their value

Giving And Receiving Must Match

SPEAKER_00 5:52

system. But one thing they said over and over and over during during the course of my childhood is don't be selfish. They they shared constantly about how it's not okay to want too much, stop asking for too much, don't be a burden to other people, right? Don't you're here to give. It's better to give than receive. The greatest lie ever told, it's better to give than receive. And we pass that shit down from generation to generation. So we've got a whole lot of people in the world that give easily and receive. It's a struggle for them to receive. And then you've got really wealthy people walking around who receive easily and everybody thinks they're greedy, and they're not greedy, it's just they receive easily. They're they allow themselves to be on the receiving end of life. People who who ask for what they want, who want what they want. They ask for it, they they receive it. And then people who struggle to receive look at those people and say, you're you're selfish, you're greedy, you're you're manipulating and stealing from other people. You've got too much. And and a lot of this comes from some of the resistance that was conditioned into our bodies and our minds when we were, when we were children. And that's what puts us on the giving side of life and makes it difficult to receive. And over the last few episodes in the Interwealth podcast, I have talked about it's not it's not better to give than receive. These are equal. It's kind of like breathing. Inhaling is not more important than exhaling, and exhaling is not more important than inhaling. They're equal. Both are required. And in order to live an awesome life, in order to have an awesome experience in this meat suit, walking around on this planet, the material world, experiencing life, getting more of what life has to offer, experiencing more in life and seeing new things and tasting new things, and uh just witnessing and being going to new places. All of these things require the ability to receive. And if we struggle to receive, we'll struggle to really, really experience the material world that we came here to experience when we chose to put on this meat suit. Now, I must have heard Mike, don't be selfish five bazillion times before I was seven, before I was 10. It was constant. You're you're selfish, you're greedy, you're asking for too much, you want too much. And then if I would, I was the baby in the family. So when I when I got what I wanted, my brothers, my older brothers would guilt and shame me for always getting Mike, Mike always gets what he wants. But I at that point, when I was a kid, I was willing to be on the receiving end of life. And over time, it was the repeated selfishness that that tipped the balance and took me from the being on the receiving end of life to, I don't know, just completely pegging the other way and being a massive over-giver and a massive under-receiver, where I took care of everybody else's needs. Me and my friends would go to the bar and and without asking, they they never wanted me to, and they tried to get me to not to, but I would pay for everybody's drinks. I was a great giver. My head was on a swivel with my family, always trying to anticipate where I could take struggle off of them and put it on to me. I was always, always looking for how I could give in life. And I never, I never really understood that I had a block. I was carrying this receiving block. And this is what we're working through. This is what we've been working through over the last few episodes. The ability to level up our receiving game and make it equal to giving so that we can have a nice even exchange in in life. Where we give, like we exhale and then we inhale, we breathe. Right? We exhale and we're giving life to trees because we're emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that trees need that to live. So we're we're creating life by exhaling, but then we're staying alive by inhaling. And both are required. The trees thrive because we exhale, and we thrive because we inhale. Both are required. Same thing with giving and receiving, and that's what we've been exploring over the last episode, a couple episodes. But one of the biggest blocks that I see in that I've witnessed within myself and with other people is this tendency for people that struggle to receive.

The Shame That Blocks Receiving

SPEAKER_00 11:00

One of the one of the shadows they're facing that's buried into the conditioning and into the programming that they're carrying around in their body is they're trying to avoid being, appearing, or feeling selfish. They've got an unhealthy relationship with selfishness, where probably, likely, at some point they received and they were shamed as well. They were guilted as well. They were taught to to give and not receive, or overgive that it's better to give and not receive than than it is to receive. They were taught some of these same things. And it's like once my eyes open to this, I'm surrounded by them. And there are certain people, like the one of my private clients, he can easily receive financial uh finances in his business, right? Money through his business, he can easily receive money, but allowing other people to fully take care of the uh challenges and obstacles that come up in work, he hasn't quite mastered allowing his team to solve all the problems in his business. He still feels like there's still some sense that he needs to struggle when they're struggling, even though he pays them the his, especially his leadership team, pays his leaders a lot of money to solve problems. There's still part of him that leaks, that won't let allow himself to receive ease when his team is going through challenges and obstacles. And it's just one aspect where he's leaking the ability to receive, to fully receive what he wants. In in other areas of life, he wants what he wants, he asks for what he wants, he receives what he wants, he he possesses what he wants, but in some of these other areas, he wants his team to lead and to solve the problems, but but he struggles to fully ask for it and receive it and allow it into his life. Because there's this sense that he's being selfish and he's got to struggle when other people are struggling, especially the people that he loves. When uh when we work through and we understand what we have been willing to receive and what we haven't been willing to receive, what when we see what we haven't been willing to receive, we can start to see the stories and understand the stories and diagnose what is the reason I struggle to receive in that in that aspect. Like sometimes it's I need to deserve it, I need to do something, I need to struggle, I need to sacrifice to deserve it. I need to, I need to prove something before I can receive it. I need to earn it. There needs to be so much, so so much like over-efforting. But you're putting that permission and that reward in the future, not allowing yourself to receive. And and when when you have a really poor relationship with selfishness, then a lot of the times that overgiving is going to be so that you don't appear or feel selfish. So that so that you don't show up as somebody who's selfish.

Selfish And Generous Can Coexist

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Now, I am blessed to have a a man in my life that's my best friend and my closest friend, my closest ally, and my mentor, and everything else. He's one B. Angie's one A and he's one B. And he has he has helped me see the potential and the possibility in life that little Mike never thought was possible. And and what I can tell you about this human being is he is unashamedly and unapologetically, he'll express that he is selfish, but he's also very, very generous. And what I've learned, and what I what I had to unlearn, is that selfishness and generosity can't coexist. But but what I now see and what I now witness, what I've got to see uh exemplified and modeled with one of my closest people in the world, is that selfishness and generosity can occupy the same body and the same life experience. And the more you receive, the more you have to give. And it's not better to give or receive, they're equal. And if you allow value to be poured into you, then you have more value to give the world. And there's a huge difference between giving from a place of sacrifice than giving from a place of overflow and abundance. And in order to give from a place of overflow and abundance, you must first be willing to receive. And in order to receive, you must not feel selfish at receiving or be selfish or be worried about a peer. He does not care if somebody views him or judges him as selfish. He's his nervous system has been uh deconditioned and healed, and the loosening of judgment, people people's judgment of him, the control it has over him, it's non-existent. And and although he enjoys this magnificent life with houses and huge houses and mansions and and and Airbnbs in Sedona and a beautiful lake house that that I love walking into. It feels so good to be there and to sit on the lake with them. While he's enjoying that, he knows that some there's somebody out there who sees him as selfish, sees him as greedy. And and he doesn't really like care. He's enjoying an awesome material life because he's given up his unhealthy relationship with selfishness. But but he's also in a room full of real estate investors. One guy stood up and said, How many people have in this room have Brian like helped become a millionaire? And like 75 people stood up because he's also the most generous person that you'll ever meet in your life. And he's got the exchange figured out, but he allows himself to be selfish first and want what he wants, get what he wants, receive what he wants, and accumulate what he wants. And then he gives from that place, not from depletion. Where some people who are overgivers and who struggle to receive, they're scraping pennies together for themselves, trying to give it to somebody else. They're coming, they're trying to give from a place of lack, they're trying to give from a place where they they barely have enough, and they're trying to give from that place and find a way to give from that place where if you learn to receive and you stop trying to not be or appear or feel selfish, you can start to be on the receiving end of life. Let life pour into you and accumulate and then reciprocate and be generous. Easy in, easy out. Breathing in for life for me, and exhaling for life for you in a reciprocal way.

Money Stories That Prove The Shift

SPEAKER_00 18:38

A couple stories, one story, but it's got multiple threads and angles. Is I remember back in October of 2018, I was working with a coach at that point, and that coach helped me go from probably an average of $10,000 per month in my coaching business to having in $44,000 October uh 2018. I closed the month at $44,000. And I've never made that much up to that point. I had never made that much money in a single month. And I immediately called him up after I closed the month and I said, hey, double my double my my coaching fee. I want to pay you like you help me do that. So double my coaching fee. And he did it, he received it. There's been multiple times that I've gotten on a phone call with somebody, they've gave me, they've given me so much tremendous value. They've poured into me. They changed the way I saw things and the way I perceived things. And I immediately got off the call and I like, I would Venmo them or send them money or whatever, do something to show a sense of appreciation. But it was usually financial in nature. I wanted to, I wanted to exchange. I love the exchange of money as a uh acknowledgement of value. So I wanted to, I wanted to give them in that way. And I've done that multiple, multiple times to the point that Angie's like, do you see you're the only person that's ever done this before that that does this? Like is proactive about that. We had somebody come in to to to finish, we had somebody come in do the floors one time, and they did 95% of the job. And then we we were trying to get the other 5%. And we had a uh Angie put on Facebook that what we were looking for, and we had a guy come in and says, I'll charge you $200 to finish it up. We're like, shit, hell yeah, let's go. And he he worked for like four or five, six hours, and zero, there was zero percent chance. We were only gonna, we were not, we were not paying him $200. And and we gave him a lot more than that to honor his time and to honor his value, to honor his his practice, to honor his energy, to honor his efforts. Like that's overgiving. But Angie and I were never really on the receiving end of that. And that's what Angie was trying to say. Stop doing things like that so so easily because it's not being returned. And that's because I realized that I was built to give, not built to receive. And lately I've been sitting outside and working through letting go of any recognition of selfishness or or and rebuilding my relationship with selfishness and allowing myself to to receive and to want what I want and to ask for what I want and to expect and receive what I want. And I've been looking for opportunities that when somebody tries to tries to give to me, I just say thank you and take easily. And I was on a phone call, one of my old mastermind students called me up out of the blue, and we were on the phone for 90 minutes, and we caught up and I poured into them, and we die, I helped him diagnose and get his mind wrapped around some challenges he was having. And I'll be damned if I didn't get off the phone call and he Ven mode me. And nobody had ever done that before. And it's not a coincidence. The reason that happened is because I have let go of selfishness. I have begun to let go of the resistance to wanting what I want and asking for what I want and receiving what I want and becoming an easy receiver. And this is why the title of my new book, Connects, and the new workshop that I'm gonna have August 28th and 29th is titled Built to Give, Rebuilt the Receive. Because a lot of times we give really easily, but but receiving is a struggle's event. And if receiving isn't as easy as giving, you're always gonna be on the depleted side of life. And to find our way back home into that early Mike, that the early Angie person that was born that received easily, we've got to let go of the conditioning of those first seven years and that life conditioned us not to be selfish, not to ask for too much, not to be greedy, not to uh appear or or be or feel selfish or ask for too much. We gotta let go of that conditioning. And when we do level up in our receiving, in our ability to receive, then things like Venmos popping in will happen because the only reason they're not happening now is because you're not open to receive them. And uh, I'm ready to be on the receiving end of life for a while.

Workshop Invite And Closing

SPEAKER_00 23:40

How about you? All right, guys, if that was helpful, if it was useful, I'd love to hear your thoughts, your comments. Send me a text, send me an email, get in touch. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'd love to hear where you are. If you're interested in uh the workshop, built to give, rebuilt to receive, it's it's August 28th and 29th, just outside of St. Louis, uh Missouri, in where I live, in our our hometown, our current hometown of St. Charles, Missouri. It's right outside of St. Louis. We're gonna have that workshop. But for two days, we're gonna be working on letting go of the resistance to receiving and leveling up in the receiving game and practicing some healthy selfishness. All right. Love you all. Thanks for listening. See you next week. If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to www.innerwealthglobal.com for more tools and reports.