This sounds a bit preposterous when you think about it. I mean what is wrong with protecting yourself?

Please hear me on this — you do nothing for yourself when you work hard to protect yourself. When you work hard to protect your job, your reputation or your salary you will increase your chances of not receiving what are trying to preserve.

Here are the primary reasons for this:

1. You become more focused on you than on others — that only leads to people being put off with you as they see you being selfish. They ultimately know you are not for them and that leads to a lack of trust, which affects everything.

2. Your demeanor changes — Have you ever seen a bird protect their nest? They become overly aggressive towards you when you have no plans to destroy their nest. The same happens with humans. The change in demeanor changes the chemistry of a team and the level of influence you had diminishes.

3. Your quality of work decreases — as someone focuses more on themselves they take their eye off what is really important. Once again, what they hope doesn’t happen begins to happen because the quality of their work decreases as their focus on themselves increases.

Self-preservation is dangerous. It sounds honorable — especially as family and friends try to make a case for your grumblings by giving you fuel for your frustrations. Yet, I have seen it destroy some great people. You see, self-preservation always makes you think more highly of yourself than you should and makes you see others more negatively than they truly are.

The irony is that seeking to protect yourself typically leads people towards the very things they don’t want because of the change that happens within them. In the year ahead may I encourage you to give more rather than protect more. Believe me, that will do more for your self-preservation than any other strategy.

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