By Karin Fields
I am a mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt, friend, boss and neighbor. I’m also the organizer of my village, a mentor and most everyone’s ICE (in case of emergency) contact. In other words, I am the person everyone calls when there is a problem. That’s who I am; it’s my lot in life. And you know what? I don’t mind.
I feel honored to be seen by the people I love as the person they can count on when something goes wrong. I want to be that person for them. But making sure everyone else is OK doesn’t leave me a lot of time to make sure I’m OK, and that’s not good. I learned long ago that you can only give so much because at some point the well runs dry and needs to be replenished. And that is why you need to have guilty pleasures!
A guilty pleasure is anything you do to take care of yourself. The rest of the world may see it as frivolous, excessive or even beneath you. Ha ha ha! I say beneath you because when I confessed my guilty pleasure to a male friend, he looked at me and said he had just lost a little bit respect for me! See, for several years, my guilty pleasure was watching any and all Real Housewives episodes. The bad behaviors, excessive spending and cat fights of Ramona, The Countess, Phaedra, Kim Z, Kyle, Lisa V, Vickie and Tamara, et al, were my escape from reality. It replenished my soul, so I could be the person a friend called at 2 a.m. to come stay with her sleeping children, so she could rush her husband to the hospital.
What is your guilty pleasure? That thing you do to replenish your soul and take care of yourself?
You need one or more, in my view. But you need to make sure it has the desired impact. Having chocolate as a guilty pleasure when you are trying to maintain your weight defeats the bigger goal. Buying an expensive purse or shoes when you are trying to manage your budget won’t help, either.
For a guilty pleasure to be something that recharges your batteries, it needs to replenish you without diminishing you. And guess what? It can change over time. The RHO series doesn’t give me the same pleasure it used to. Seeing all the cattiness started to stress me out. Now my guilty pleasure is a relaxing 90-minute massage.
Consider something I was told long ago: On airplanes it’s standard safety procedure to put the mask over your own face before helping others. I remind myself of this frequently. Guilty pleasures are a safety procedure. They ensure you’re able to be there for the ones you love.
About the Author
Karin Fields, an award-winning, 20-year veteran of the telecom and cloud industries, is CEO/COO of MicroCorp, a leading master agent and distributor of commercial data, voice, UC and data center services. Fields also is Chair of The Alliance Partners, two-time recipient of CRN Women of the Channel, a founding member of Alliance of Channel Women and a recipient of ACW’s 2017 LEAD Award.