Do You Consider Yourself Average or Beautiful?
Working with many coaching clients over the years, I can see that a big challenge for women today is still their self-confidence and self-love, being comfortable in their own skin, which I believe is at the root of our success in all areas of our lives. According to a study, only 4% of women today consider themselves beautiful worldwide. This is a shocking number. What about the other 96%? Where did it all go wrong? And what can we do to fix this?
A lot of women today are chasing careers, managing relationships, emotionally containing families… but along the way – with the doing and the running – many have lost a part of themselves. Some of you learned to lead your daily lives from male energy and it’s exhausting you. It’s not getting you the results you wish for and deserve.
Some of you are feeling like you are missing something. You don’t know how to get there but you feel it. Some of you have even lost the passion, the joy, that important spark of life. Some of you have never experienced it, to begin with. It’s time to come back home to yourself. It’s time to learn how to tap into your soft feminine divine energy – the sabrosura – while remaining just as powerful. You were born with this ability. All you have to do is learn how to tap into it and unleash it. It’s innate in your body. Consumerism takes us away from human connections – we look for something external rather than looking inside us for what fills our hearts with that joy of life.
We replace giving love and attention with buying expensive gifts. Parents get busy chasing careers and fulfillment to the point that there isn’t enough of them. Time becomes the scarcest commodity to find. Being fully present becomes a challenge and patience runs out fast. When we don’t get enough love or attention from our parents it impacts our self-love and self-worth, growing up with little sense of security. We need to be received profoundly by our caregivers to know our self-worth and that we are lovable. Add to this the newly created culture of ‘Likes’ and it can be lethal. Love at home is more needed than ever to counterbalance it all and develop a strong internal foundation. Chapman University found a direct correlation between overall satisfaction in life and the feelings we have about our body image. Women’s satisfaction with their weight and appearance was the third largest influence on how good they felt about the rest of their lives. Women feel constantly like they are being compared to other women, which hurts them. When our body image is injured it hurts our self-love which is at the core of the sabrosura.
On top of this, the media’s pressure to live up to an unrealistic model of perfection hurts us further: We strive for an ideal that doesn’t exist that traps us by making us feel like we are not enough, the way we are.
We feel like we are flawed, affecting our self-love and self-worth. This turns into a constant inner chatter of what we are doing wrong and what we feel is wrong with us – our inner critic. The louder the inner critic is, the lower the self-confidence and self-love are. This phenomenon has become so widespread that women’s view of themselves has distorted completely, and there is now even a Body Dysmorphic Disorder. What message are we passing on to the next generation?
You are more beautiful than you know!
A few years ago, this experiment was done allowing women to choose between beautiful and average. These were the results:
Feeling confident and loving yourself has nothing to do with what you look like on the outside. It should only depend on how you feel about yourself internally.There are many examples, all around us, of people that don’t fall into the ‘perfect’ body image or beauty, and they exude such confidence and presence – from in to out. We don’t need Botox to self-love. We need to re-learn how to age gracefully. The constant chase of trying to stay youthful doesn’t allow us to age gracefully and love who we are at every stage of our lives. Whether you grew up with a great body image or not doesn’t have to dictate your future, because you can always change your point of view. This will break the unhealthy emotional cycle. For this to happen you need to get intentional and set it as a goal, then practice till you become it.
We need to realize that our societies can be unhealthy to our emotional well-being these days. If they hurt our self-love and body image then, in reality, they are making us sick. We need, through self-awareness, to decide what we want to let in and prevent what is unhealthy from entering our lives. For this, we need to develop clear and healthy boundaries and emotional resilience. These circumstances are hurting our human happiness and impacting the quality of our lives. In 2018, Wonder Woman came out, starring the lovely Gal Gadot.
What was so different about this character portrayal was that she was very powerful and yet vulnerable, naive, and feminine, the way real women are, the way women feel about themselves. No one has it all figured out. We hopefully get better at it with time, if we invest time and energy in developing ourselves through personal development. I have had the amazing privilege of spending more than 16 years working on a regular basis in Cuba, investigating their culture. It is very different from what we know in the Western World, due to the special circumstances in the country – no advertising, for example.From a human perspective, it’s fascinating to experience and understand how the lack of advertising led to no distortion of the body image. They adore a more curvy, voluptuous, and natural body image. They consider it sexy.
Another interesting thing that happened due to the lack of consumerism in Cuba is that Cubans had to turn inward to find happiness. They could not turn to material things to become happy. As a result, their Somatic Intelligence evolved in ways that are not common in the Western World (i.e. being more connected to themselves through their bodies, tapping to the divine feminine on a daily basis, and more). Cubans discovered how to release dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins through body movements of the sabrosura, the inner rhythm of enjoyment, and the attraction power of mystery. These movements cause a natural high and can connect us to our physical self-love, vitality, and more. The way we move is the way we live life, when we change the way we move we also change the way we live life. We start with ourselves, with knowing ourselves, with understanding how we are constructed inside – how our past shaped who we are and our decisions. We learn to accept and love every part of ourselves, including our faults. We own even parts we didn’t ask for or that hurt us deeply. They are in fact our biggest gift of turning into the person we wish to become if we embrace them with love. When we own it all, we can become a force for change in our families and communities. We can inspire others by turning our own darkness or challenge into beauty. We accept, we heal, we step into our power, we inspire others, reaching our full potential. Be sure to Advance through and hit complete for each lesson.