Gordon Flett
speaker
1,089 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 15 Jun
Gordon Flett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
used up and it's never enough.
And the more I give, the more that is needed.
And people have to be good to themselves at this point.
I think that regarding your friend there and others that at some point you have to think about mattering to yourself and where is the line in terms of needing to focus on restoration of oneself and self-care, because it's so easy to get the reinforcement of having that impact on people and just
let it keep escalating until it gets out of control.
And it's funny that one person who actually had this happen was Herbert Freudenberger, who invented the clinical concept of burnout.
And Freudenberger was working to access himself.
So this is how he got many of his insights about burnout.
He would be working
18 to 20 hours a day so that he got totally burned out and depleted to the extent that in one account that he talks about in his book, it was the case that the family was ready to go on a vacation, the kids were ready to go, and he literally was so physically depleted by giving so much of himself to others that he couldn't get out of bed
And the family vacation had to be canceled or postponed at that point.
And, you know, the moral of the story is that you need to retain some of this for yourself, that you need to matter to yourself and to engage in self-care and know that there is a point at which it's just too much to keep giving and giving without giving something to yourself as well.
Yes, I think there's almost an artificial form of mattering in terms of what Andrew was referring to, where you're pinning your entire sense of self on mattering to others.
We're recently doing work on that need to matter, and we do find that there are people with an outsized need to matter, and that they will probably be seeking any form of getting that sense of mattering, including maturing.
through social media and all the likes and the attention that they can get there, as opposed to developing the caring relationships with people who really truly know you and care about you.
So I would say that mattering is vitally important.
I think everybody needs it to some degree, but it needs to be
in a balanced way and along with other positive sources of the self that in terms of will build self-esteem and address the other needs.
When people talk about psychological needs, they talk about three main ones, the need to feel autonomous and self-determined, the need to feel connected to others and the need to feel competent.
And I would say that mattering is a vital fourth need that needs to be there, but we can't neglect
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