Being Selfish with Olga Levancuka

When you hear the word ‘selfish’, what do you think of? Inevitably, it tends to bring to mind negativity; arguments; criticism. No one wants to be selfish and selfishness is not a quality that should be celebrated. Or is it?

I was intrigued when I received an invitation from celebrity life coach Olga Levancuka, otherwise known as ‘the Skinny Rich Coach’, to spend two evenings rebalancing my life and exploring the lost art of selfishness. Can we really benefit from focusing more on ourselves?

The workshop started with a discussion about what we wanted and who we wanted to be as children. The aim was to forget about fears and social constraints and try to remember a time when life involved doing the things that make you happiest. By talking through our dreams and ambitions then and now, we realised how much life can focus on others – keeping on the right side of your family, impressing your boss, looking after your partner – and how your own ambitions and desires can get a little lost along the way.

Olga encouraged us to think about what we want from life by asking us to imagine an amount of money that we wanted to earn over the next month. It could be anything from a tiny amount to winning the lottery – depending on what we want to achieve. We then had to think about three things we would spend that money on – this could be anything at all, with the one rule that it had to be something indulgent and positive, rather than paying rent or bills. Talking through these wishes with the group was great fun, between us we wished for everything from a new garden fence to a beachside bolthole in the Caribbean.

But it wasn’t all about wishing for big lottery wins. The next exercise was a real eye opener: Olga forced us to rethink the feelings of happiness we associate with big wishes and plans for the future, and try to identify where we had experienced those feelings in our everyday life. Turns out we had plenty to feel good about – walking through the park on a sunny morning, a great cup of coffee, an evening chilling with the family. We worked on remembering and identifying those feelings and learning to look inwards and appreciate the smaller things in life.

Olga’s direct, no-nonsense style attracts an ambitious, intelligent clientele looking to challenge the status quo and make some real changes to their lives, so there were some lively discussions along the way.

The group atmosphere takes away the intense pressure of dissecting your life, and adds an interesting element of debate – we veered off-course more than once, discussing life, the universe and everything in between.

I won’t go through every exercise we worked through in the course of the two sessions, partly as I’ll go on all day, and partly as it did sometimes become surprisingly personal. For someone with a dedicated running-myself-ragged habit, the chance to sit back and explore whether I was keeping myself happy was an enlightening one. The exercises and thought processes I learned are definitely something I’d like to incorporate more into my daily life, if only for the sake of my fellow commuters on a Monday morning. I might even smile instead of glaring and then disappearing into my copy of the Metro. Stranger things have happened.

To find out more about the workshops, visit Olga’s website

Image by boellstiftung courtesy of Flickr