Submitted photos Hartford native Megan (Phillips) Weisheipl and family hold up copies of her book on mental health, “The Selfish Hour.” In the back from left is her husband, Nick Weisheipl and Megan. In the front are their two daughters, Codi, left and Devney.

EAST NORRITON, Pa. — It had been an especially rough day at the office. Now Hartford native Megan (Phillips) Weisheipl wasn’t exactly having a pleasant evening at home with her husband. Then came the life-changing question.

“He asked me, ‘Why do you act like that?'” Weisheipl said. “That question on that day made me look internally about everything. That began my journey to understand why.”

The 1998 Badger High School graduate pondered her husband’s honest question — why DID she act like that?

She reflected on how hard she worked at trying to be supermom, superwife, super corporate-ladder-climber, super achiever and super everything.

In high school, she lived on the honor roll and starred in basketball. She attended Youngstown State University for a year and a half before moving to the Philadelphia area after winning the Best Overall Professional Model award in the 2000 Modeling Association of America International Convention in New York City. For a dozen years, she’d pushed her way up the corporate ladder and at the moment, managed a branch of a mortgage company.

She married Nick Weisheipl, head baseball coach of the Cabrini University Cavaliers and gave birth to daughters Codi and Devney. The family lives in East Norriton, about 50 minutes northwest of Philadelphia.

“On the outside, I lived the perfect life. I had everything — a wonderful husband, a good income, two beautiful girls, a house … but I lost myself in the process of doing that,” she said.

Weisheipl realized she’d forgotten to be selfish every once in while — at least for 60 minutes every morning.

“I literally transformed my life one hour a day over two years,” Weisheipl said.

“A working mom tends to think, ‘I can’t be selfish; I have to take care of everyone.’ But you can’t be your best self for them if you don’t take time to love yourself first,” she said. “When I wasn’t being selfish, I wasn’t the best version of me.”

A person who hasn’t taken the time to fill her own tank has nothing left to give to others. And then she ends up mired in feelings of failure and overly stressed, testy evenings with her spouse.

Now a full-time certified life coach who works from home and the author of the newly published “The Selfish Hour,” Weisheipl teaches others how to think of themselves for a change — but only to increase their ability to give more of themselves to others.

“Selfish means love for oneself first,” she said.

‘WHY DO YOU ACT LIKE THAT?’

The question held on long after the argument ended.

“I didn’t know what to do. What I had to do, I had to get quiet. I had to listen to my mind, instead of everything else,” Weisheipl said. “I meditated. I journaled a lot. I needed to declutter the thoughts in my head and get them on paper. Once you do that, you can understand them.”

For the next two years, Weisheipl spent 5:30 to 6:30 a.m. selfishly. “I woke up, and I worked on me. I stopped looking outside myself and carved out time to understand myself and why I reacted the way I did.”

She pondered. She journaled. She read. She reflected with purpose.

“From this came ‘The Selfish Hour’ and a determination to redefine the word selfish. I redefined selfish to mean taking care of oneself first, and filling your cup so you can pour more into others. Being selfish means you care so much about others that you put yourself first to be your best for yourself and everyone else.”

It took a while to admit to others what was happening.

“I thought I was the only one. I kept it inside. I didn’t tell my husband. I didn’t tell anybody because I thought I was strange.”

Little by little, she shared bits and pieces of the journey with others, and many of them said, “Me, too.”

Weisheipl understood that the journal of her journey could be the basis for a book for other unselfish overachievers like herself. “The Selfish Hour” is available from Highlander Press. She is developing a six-week online coaching program “to teach people how to create their own selfish hour to … create the action externally for their best lives.” That will be released on her website, meganspeaks.com, in the coming weeks.

“It’s scary to be (transparent), to be exposed, but on the other end of it, it’s liberating. The reason I’m doing it is to help other people have that liberty,” she said. “They can see themselves through me.”

NIXING NEGATIVE THINKING

Worse than not thinking of oneself at least an hour per day is thinking negatively.

“To me, it’s everything,” she said. “Our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings create our actions and our actions create our reactions in our life.

“Our thoughts are negative without us knowing it,” Weisheipl said. “That’s where I was.

“How you view the circumstances that happen — most view through the negative: ‘Why did this happen to me?’

“We’re not trained to view it through the positive,” she said. “It’s not happening TO you, it’s happening FOR you. What lessons can we learn from this?

“I had the power to shift my thoughts to really take control of my life,” Weisheipl said. “You have to want it. You have to create it. Create habits that set the course for the entire day.”

Her book, with personal anecdotes, practical advice and research-backed evidence, focuses on releasing oneself from the need to people-please and the feelings of impostor syndrome. Taking that one hour to recharge builds the needed confidence, she said.

“If you can’t find one hour a day, who is in control of your life? We can find an hour for TV or to scroll social media. It’s about prioritizing,” she said.

During her journey, Weisheipl hired a life coach herself. Now that she’s altered her career path, she said she gets to take her girls to school, coach basketball and become a better mom and wife.

Besides the online coaching program that she’s building, Weisheipl plans a second book, although she isn’t saying yet what it’s about. It took her four years to write the first, and getting it published was a yearlong process in itself — edits alone took three months of revisions.

The point, coach Megan says, is that self-care not only isn’t taking away from family, career, friends and hobbies, it enhances them.

bcole@tribtoday.com