The shocking link between women’s mental health and domestic abuse

4 Questions Your Organisation Needs to Consider to Prevent Gender Balance Deteriorating

TW: mentions suicide, mental health, abuse

New research is just out highlighting a shocking link between women’s mental health, specifically suicide attempts, and domestic abuse.

Commissioned by Agenda Alliance, an group consisting of 100 organisations such as Oxfam, Women’s Aid and Mind, the research shows that women subjected to domestic abuse are three times more likely to attempt to end their lives than their peers. When sexual abuse occurs within a relationship, the number shoots up to over seven times higher. When it comes to self-harm, women suffering violence from their partner are three times more likely to hurt themselves.

It is suggested that all professionals who come into contact with women struggling with their mental health should, as a high priority, be asking about their personal safety, especially if a woman discloses suicidal ideation.

Given that at least one quarter of all women will experience domestic abuse (DV) -  emotional abusive, coercive control and/or physical violence - this is an important factor for workplaces to be considering when it comes to supporting their women with mental health, avoiding long term mental health sick leave and retaining their staff. The cost of staff who are on long term mental health sick leave is enormous, £42-45 billion annually in the UK alone; the impact of domestic violence is a proportion of this.

Consequences for Gender Balance Within Organisations

Here are 4 things what you/your company need to be thinking about from an HR and DEI perspective, loosing women means upsetting your gender balance:

1) How can you absorb the implications of this research into its mental health policies and practices?

2) Make your mental health first aiders aware; can they gently enquire about personal safety if they are supporting women with spiralling mental health, self-harm issues or suicidal ideation, since these could be signposts to a lack of safety at home?

3) Know where to get support for your women. Have info ready with helplines, refuges and relevant organisations. Consider safeguarding requirements for children and pets. The Dogs Trust has a fostering program called The Freedom Program specifically for this situation. Women don’t leave if they will have to leave children or pets behind.

4) Consider hosting a training day on the psychology of victim blaming, to help all staff supporting women and to be better allies if domestic abuse is disclosed; any notion that they will be blamed may deter disclosure and keep women unsafe. I am accredited by VictimFocus to facilitate this training. Learn more here.

Ultimately, staff are a company’s greatest asset. Being able to support staff to stay well, be safe and be able to continue to do their job is of enormous benefit all round. Companies must create enough safety that their women can talk about what’s going on, and not be afraid to ask if someone is safe at home if their mental health deteriorates. Organisations should be working to prevent gender balance deteriorating, including loosing women to DV related absence.

Sexism, ageism and inclusivity: why what your staff are saying about Madonna matters

The women, especially the older women, in your organisation, are taking note about how Madonna is being spoken about after her appearance at The Grammy's. 

Madonna has chosen to have plenty of cosmetic treatment on her face to keep up a youthful appearance, and commentary globally has completely slated her for it since Sunday. 

You cannot open a magazine or app without an abundance of ads and features for anti-aging products and gossipy articles about famous women's looks. Here's the message this emits: it is completely unacceptable to look too old, too big, too wrinkled, too grey...do something about it or you'll be ridiculed and discarded. The ageist pressure on women, especially women in the public eye, not to look older, is intense. 

Men do not face this criticism, scrutiny or shaming for ageing. Quite the opposite most of the time; men can be seen as more valuable as they age, in looks, experience and appeal - it's a big compliment to be called a 'silver fox.'

How do you want the more women in your organisation to feel about themselves as they age? Valued, appreciated and respected, as though they very much still belong, and are welcome in the organisation regardless of how age impacts their physical appearance. 

Surely not as if they have to take expensive, time consuming and sometimes dangerous measures to keep their youthful looks BUT DON'T GO TO FAR or you'll be a laughing stock and an outcast. 

Harmful stereotypes of older women have a lot to answer for, not least in the way they work to cause younger women to go to great lengths, expense and sometimes danger not to appear older. 

The government has been pushing the idea of enticing older workers back to the workplace. Stigma around ageing, women's perceived decrease in value as we age, and of course menopause related challenges, are a real barrier for women. 

How can your organisation truly be somewhere that values and retains women? Not ridiculing women's efforts to stay young when societal pressure constantly tells them they must, and not adding to this pressure, is just the start. Speak up if you hear this happening. Call it out. Send a clear message of allyship and inclusion. 

Want me to support your organisation with gender diversity issues? Book a call here.

People pleasing will never win you respect

People pleasing is generally driven by the desire for one or both of two things. 

First up, approval or validation aka please like me, respect me and fill up my low self-worth tank. This looks like not speaking your mind, going along with things to avoid conflict, compromising your own needs to do things for others and so on. Second, control. Needing things to turn out a certain way, especially in a way that feels safe and calm.

However, there is often a deeper reason that people pleasing shows up as a deeply entrenched pattern. And that reason is that it can be a trauma adaptation and learned survival skill.

When faced with danger or threat, the responses we most commonly hear about are flight or fight. Research used to focus on these as human's responses to danger because studies used to only have male participants until more recently (I know, maddening, luckily women are much more frequently included these days). 

For women, we may well not win at either fleeing or fighting, and so we are likely to freeze in the face of danger to survive. This is one of the reasons why women’s lack of fighting back nor attempting to escape has be used against us in cases where we have experienced violence.

Alongside freeze, the most common response to danger for women is to try to appease or placate the source of danger in the hope that we will get away later. This is sometimes known as the fawn response.

People pleasing, keeping others happy at our own expense, and abandoning our own needs to win validation, can be a coping strategy carried over from times in our lives when we’ve faced ongoing threat or danger. If we learn that by not rocking the boat, we avoid something horrible or painful, then we might develop people pleasing as a coping mechanism and then carry on doing it as a way of avoiding conflict long after it has served its purpose and the danger has passed. 

The problem is that people pleasing causes the opposite result to what we want. 

• We want to be liked and appreciated, and instead people pleasing causes a lack of respect from others and being walked all over. 

• We want to be seen as capable and confident, yet we’re seen as doormats who will unquestionably do more than our fair share. 

• We hope others will see how hard we work and how much take on, and see us as having leadership and promotion potential. But instead, we are seen as bad at delegating or managing our workload, unhinged when we explode at the resentment of being unappreciated, and incapable of leading a team since we cannot balance our lives, nor simultaneously manage self-care and being a high achiever. 

When people pleasing is a coping strategy as a result of trauma, you might experience some or all of these:

1. You feel misunderstood, unseen or like no one knows the real you. That's because you aren't being authentically yourself, because you learnt that it wasn't safe to speak up or be yourself, and that keeping others happy, perhaps morphing into a person they would like or at least not dislike, was vital.

2. You say yes all the time even when you're already overloaded and exhausted; saying no feels impossible. Why? Because you might upset people, they might get angry you've refuse their request for support, and you feel safe when you avoid that possibility. Trauma can result in being hypervigilant to others needs to avoid them kicking off, and this becomes far more important than self-care, and saying no becomes impossible.

3. You keep your challenging emotions and needs away from those you are close to. Instead, sometimes you share your troubles or life story in all its gory details with a taxi driver or someone you just met, because they are unlikely to reject you, and you might never see them again anyway so there's not much to lose.

4. You have resentful meltdowns about how unappreciated you feel by others and how exhausted you are from helping them and never taking care of yourself, but are quickly remorseful, guilt-laden and apologetic, so you shift back in people pleasing to keep the peace asap.

5. You take too much responsibility for other people's feelings and behaviour, instead of recognising that it's theirs to own and choose.

If you are reading this and recognising yourself in the patterns outlined above, you are probably wondering how you move past all of this. I want to reassure you that it is more than possible to let go of coping patterns that are no longer serving you, and shift to a much better place in how you think, feel and act.

The first step in making change is acknowledging that what you’re doing now is not working, and then becoming fully ready to change and move past it. 

If you are genuinely ready, book a discovery call that will help you leave behind sabotaging patterns including people pleasing so that you can create a life and career where you are genuinely respected and successful; a balanced, happy, healthy life full of self-worth.

I want you to reach a place of empowerment, feeling calmly in control and full of inner peace. 

Book a conversation

Before you lead others, lead yourself: The important of self-leadership

“Exceptional leaders distinguish themselves because of superior self-leadership.” Daniel Goleman, ‘Emotional Intelligence’

What is self-leadership? 

It is far more complex and nuanced than being ‘in control.’ Think of self-leadership more about being in the driving seat of our own lives: owning our own thoughts, feelings and actions, plus being in charge of our own direction of travel. 

Self-leadership is about how we observe and manage ourselves; how we compassionately and deliberately reflect and evolve. It is about how we prioritise taking care of ourselves, how self-aware we are, and the extent to which our behaviour is consistently congruent with our values. 

Good self-leadership is incompatible with playing the victim or being a people pleaser. It also means rejecting perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage. How we handle disappointment, failure and challenges with honesty and compassion, and without self-rejection, catastrophising or blame shifting are all part of self-leadership. 

It includes taking responsibility for doing the own inner work necessary to move past childhood or other issues, so that the past does not impact how we show up in the present in our relationships and working life. This means investing time, energy and emotional capacity in to therapy and/or coaching.

Another aspect of self-leadership is all thing to do with self-validation and self-worth, inner stability and self-trust. Knowing your value, and fostering the skills to handle your inner world even when thing get sticky and curve balls hit, means feeling calm and confident in your ability to cope no matter what. In this way, self-leadership is a core pillar to our resilience and adaptability.

It also means taking responsibility for how we spend our time and energy, how we balance our lives, who we spend time with, the media we consume and so on. 

The Value of Self-Leadership for Leaders

The most effective leaders walk their talk. They do not ask of others what they are not doing themselves. Self-leadership brings self-respect, and this is an important component of being able to command the respect of others too, as well as role modelling to everyone around you many excellent, desirable personal traits. 

One of these is trust, which is such an important trait for effective leaders to foster with everyone around them. Our people need to trust us to work calmly and effectively, to buy into the vision we ask them to contribute towards: with trust comes results, good culture and team spirit. If we cannot trust ourselves, how will others trust us? Self-leadership equals self-trust. 

Strong self-leadership inspires, informs and empowers others around us to lead themselves too. If we assume that a good leader is empowering others to succeed rather than instructing and micromanaging, it ties in with wanting their team to be independent, responsible, self-aware and growing too. 

A rising tide lifts all boats, and who wouldn’t want their leaders to have excellent self-leadership skills, in order for this to lift everyone around them and below them.

Developing Your Self-Leadership Skills

Balanced self-awareness is the first vital step in developing your self-leadership skills. Compassionate self-appraisal will take you far when you marry it with a growth mindset; be  willing and humble enough to take steps to grow in the areas where you notice that you would like to show up differently. 

The ability to ask for help and embrace the value of others on our journey can be a vital, courageous step that accelerates your self-leadership too.  It could be from colleagues, family and friends for a 360 view. It could be working with a coach, therapist or mentor to support you to move beyond limiting patterns of feelings, thoughts or behaviour. 

Great self-leadership happens deliberately when you choose it and move towards it, and I invite you to do that right away!

How can I help you with this? 

Are you an ambitious woman who would love to see a radical shift in their confidence and leadership over the next 3 months and are ready to take action? And you are ready to step into a whole new level of self-leadership, respect and success, book a complimentary call consultation on this link: https://harrietwaleycohen.as.me/schedule.php

Imposter Syndrome: Busting Myths

Dispelling 3 unhelpful myths for women about imposter syndrome

Imposter syndrome is that horrible feeling that despite all the success you've achieved and the life that you have, that you don't deserve it, that you're a fraud, and at any moment you might get found out and lose everything.

Having supported thousands of women over the last 20 years to believe in themselves and their potential, imposter syndrome is definitely a 'thing' and not just a made-up problem. Research backs this up, indicating that highfliers as well as those from ethnic or religious minorities are more likely to suffer from it, as well as women being more likely to experience feeling like an imposter than men.

One of the biggest myth that I come across is the idea that it's only women that get it and men don't. This is categorically untrue! Men do struggle at times with this too. However, men are much less likely to talk about it, to own up to feeling this way, or to seek help for it. A while back I posted on Facebook asking for men only to share their stories of feeling like an imposter and the response was huge. Many men shared that they had felt like an imposter in the workplace, and when dating, and that with talking about their 'feelings' being out of their comfort zone in general, that they felt they had to keep quiet about it. Fear of being judged negatively is a big barrier in speaking up for men even more than for women, and the impact this might have on how others view them.

The second myth I want to dispel is that it is purely a mindset issue. 'Stop thinking those negative thoughts, think positively about yourself, just stop feeling this way and be confident'. Firstly, mindset shifts aren't always quite that simple. And secondly, this places all the blame on the individual and ignores all cultural and systemic factors. A raft of factors from the gender pay gap, to the overwhelming bias to women's negative feedback on communication style vs men, negative gender stereotypes, power structures in corporates and politically, the media, diet culture and so on, are all stacked against women from the outset. The efforts to make change have to stop being hyper fixated on fixing women and elevate above this to the bigger picture.

Both Laura Bate's excellent book 'Fix the system, not the women' and the workshop I give called 'Women & The Self-Worth Crisis: a call to action' go into all of the cultural and systemic factors in detail, highlighting where the real change is needed.

The third myth that needs to be cut loose is the idea that imposter syndrome is actually a good thing because it makes sure people don't get too big for their boots (oppressive misogyny, anyone?), and keeps you working really hard to prove yourself. Who does this actually benefit? Not the individual, that's for sure. The individual takes on too much, never says no, puts their own needs on the back burner in a desperate attempt to perform their way to approval and validation. Even if they achieve these things, they still don't feel any better on the inside and can end up unwell or burnt out. Plus, they do not win respect from others, they are seen as an eager to please doormat to be walked all over. No one wins apart from the profit-making machine...

How has this shifted your thinking on imposter syndrome? Comment below.

Next steps: To book a powerfully transformative coaching program to support you with your confidence or having me speak at your organisation:  https://bit.ly/HWCconsultation

A celebration of 20 years of sobriety

Today marks a very special day.

1st October is my sobriety anniversary, and today marks 20 years clean and sober.

What started as a search for a new way of living from a truly dark, hopeless and baffled place, has blossomed into the most incredible life. Getting and staying clean and sober has provided the ultimate foundation. Everything I do on a day-to-day basis, whether that’s being a good mother, having food in the fridge, running my business and changing lives, having clean hair or taking the dog for a walk, happens because I deal with life without changing the way I feel or numbing out with drugs and alcohol.

How my life looks now is the collective sum of 20 years of sober decisions, behaviour and responses to life. 

Here are 10 new ways of doing things that I’ve taken on board that have made a massive difference:  

1. Ask for help. You do not, nor should you, have to do life alone. Everything gets figured out and sorted out much more quickly when you have others to help, especially when they have trodden the path already and can share specific experience. Swallow your pride, let go of the idea that asking for help is a weakness or ignorance, and allow others to support you. (Hyper independence is sometimes a trauma response.) Without this concept, I would have stayed stuck in my business and personal life so many times! Invest in help in the form of mentoring, therapy, coaching or support when the best person for your situation is a professional. 

2. Feel your feelings, process them and honour them. Every time you sweep something under the carpet, stuff it down or pretend it’s not there, you stop yourself from being free. Unprocessed emotions have the power to impact you long after they need to, causing disproportionate reactions, regrets and disempowerment. Feeling your feelings and honouring the wisdom within them, even when they are painful or unpleasant, is a great gift to yourself. 

3. And no matter what you’re feeling, don’t hurt yourself or anyone else off the back of them. This will only result in more unpleasant feelings…

4. Keep evolving. Keep learning. Keep healing. Keep reading. Stay open minded. The older I get the more I become aware of what I don’t know, and rather than finding it disheartening, it has become a way to find magic, excitement and possibility. Part of this is forgiving yourself for not being perfect, and ties in with asking for help. 

5. Reality > potential. We do not have the power to change others if they don’t see the need or want to change. It is liberating to let other people be themselves, accept that this is who they are, and then decide whether we want them in our lives or not and in what capacity. Assume someone will never change, and ask yourself on that basis if they are someone you really want in your life. Never is this more pertinent than in the world of dating! 

6. Get out of your echo chamber. Spend time with different people from different backgrounds, of different ages and with different interests. Seek to understand, not to be understood. 

7. Actions speak louder than words. Whether that’s how I built and now grow my self-worth by showing myself in hundreds of different ways that I love and respect myself (and so can you), or whether that’s figuring out if you can trust someone, this is a show don’t tell situation. When someone shows you who they are, believe them and don’t ignore the signs. 

8. Align with the divine. Spirituality brings meaning, connection, purpose and direction. Develop rituals and practises that keep you grounded and aligned. For me spirituality is about seeing the beauty in the world, connecting with a guiding force of universal love, and focusing on being of service to others and the world. ‘What is for the greater good?’ is an excellent guiding principle. 

9. Listen to your body. Notice what messages your body is giving you, and honour them. Pay attention to physical signs as well as your intuition. Our bodily wisdom is often woefully underrated or underused. 

10. Have fun, and deliberately create joyful moments. Be silly, be playful, be with people who you adore. Let go of worrying what others will think, because this will be a huge barrier to fun and happiness.

That might sound like an impossible to-do-list for just this weekend (!), so how about picking just one for today and seeing how your life and happiness expands when you focus on it.

With immense gratitude to all the people who have helped me get this far, and immense gratitude for this wonderful life I get to live.

Harriet

Why do so many women dislike their bodies?

We are all born beautiful; the greatest tragedy is being convinced we are not - anon

No human is born thinking their body isn’t good enough. Or in fact that they generally aren’t good enough. It’s something that happens over time and there is rarely just one reason why. A myriad of factors interplay and layer on top of each other over the years to sow and then grow the seed of doubt that your body may be inadequate, then consolidate, and leave you in no doubt whatsoever that you’re definitely, irrefutably not good enough physically. 

Disabilities

Anyone who is born with disabilities, congenital illnesses or similar, may learn from a very young age that their body mind isn’t working the way ‘normal’ people’s do simply from spending so much time with doctors or in hospitals, and being seen by experts who are all, with the very best of intentions, trying to ‘fix’ or cure you. To start with this seems normal, it’s the only thing you know, but at some point, you notice. 

You see that others are different from you, you’re the outlier, and you start to decide that something is wrong with your body in some way, and that this means something about your general worth as a person. Endless surgeries or conversations about making you better would do that to a person, wouldn’t it. Imagine the first day at school when you realise you’re the only one with a hearing aid or glasses, a wheelchair, leg braces…it doesn’t matter how much you’ve been told you’re loved and gorgeous just as you are, it’s going to be impossible to notice that your body doesn’t seem to work the same way as most if not all of the others. 

The impact of school experiences

Even if you don’t have any obvious physical disabilities or differences, the words of other children at school who point out anything that comes to their mind when they want to make a point. Age 6, I was told I couldn’t be part of the gang of girls who played with each other’s hair on the school bus. Apparently, my hair became uncontrollable when they tried to brush it, and it wouldn’t plait or ponytail nicely unlike all the others with their silky straight hair, and that made me someone they didn’t want to play with. Even a teacher agreed, telling me my hair was like a bush. I was excluded from this important bonding each week. As you can imagine that did wonders for my sense of belonging and self-worth. 

So, growing up, mean or insensitive words from other children or teachers can be taken on board as meaning that there is something wrong with your body. Imagine being told you’re too fat/thin/tall/short/legs not strong enough/arms too weak/blah blah blah, and being told these things over and over if you’re bullied. Or it could be someone who’s opinion you respect, like a sports teacher or the most popular kid in class. Once from someone like that could be enough to take it on board forever, as gospel truth that hurts, rather than mere opinion that could be disregarded. 

Perhaps you noticed certain others in your class or friendship circle always being told how pretty or lovely they were, yet it didn’t happen for you, and you decided that you didn’t look as good as them and the lack of attention turned into the seed of ‘my body isn’t good enough’. 

Family influences

And what about parents and siblings, grandparents and other family members? Their comments can have a profound effect as we tend to trust and believe them more than anyone else, plus their words are more likely to be repeated like a broken record, tens to thousands of times over the years. ‘Don’t eat too much, you’re being greedy, no one will want to be with you if you’re fat, such a shame you’re not tall like your mother, sit still  - your hair is so hard to manage, I wish it was different, you look just like your father when you make that face and you know how much I hate him, smile dear you look so unattractive and ugly when you frown.’ Ouch. Said by one adult to another and some of it could be classed as emotional abuse, with all the damaging consequences over the years. 

Some girls grow up with a parent with body dysmorphia or an eating disorder. This can bring its own special brand of never feeling your body is good enough, and that you absolutely must look a certain way, be a certain size and control your body to be acceptable and loveable. It also gifts you all sorts of unhealthy ways of thinking, feeling and acting around your body, food and other people’s bodies. If a parent was always hugely judgemental about others behind their back, you might adopt this for yourself. And you can’t only be judgemental about others, it always comes in tandem with frequent and harsh judgements about yourself. 

Even before we reach puberty, there can have already been a number of influences that can make us question whether we look right or whether our bodies work well enough. 

Changes you can't control aka puberty

And then…the hormones kick in. The starting gun is fired for whole new level of the game of comparison. Why has your friend so and so got much taller than you suddenly and has boobs (and all the boys can’t stop gawking at her), and why do you still look like a child that no one wants to go out with? With social media, it is definitely the case that what I call compare and despair culture has started much earlier, and it intensifies during puberty. 

Our bodies develop into adults without us having signed up for it, and without us being able to put in any orders to the universe when it comes to height, bra size, leg length or anything. We are powerless to a great extent over how exactly and when our bodies transform into our adult forms. And at the same time, we start looking at magazines and watching movies with fresh eyes, and see stick thin models or actresses (who’ve been airbrushed to within an inch of their life), pore over celebs and friends on social media (heavy filters anyone?), and notice that our bodies and faces don’t look like Victoria’s Secret models or the women on the red carpet. Well, the vast majority of us anyway…the unfairness of it all. And in our pjs at a sleep over, no one is going to look that glam anyway without an army of make-up artists, hair dressers, personal trainers, dieticians, chefs, beauticians et al that the models and actresses have at their disposal to support their image. But that doesn’t stop you from feeling like there’s something wrong with you. 

The media. The bloody media.

Perhaps you’re with your mates and looking at the latest celeb gossip magazine and there are zoomed in paparazzi pictures of the latest soap star or footballer’s wife who had a baby a few months ago, who is daring to go on the beach and  - gasp - she has a slightly saggy tummy and looks tired. Some other reality star has a less than perfectly toned shoulder on display and a bit of cellulite on her thighs. What a disgrace the magazine screams, why isn’t she covered up or in the gym or starving herself? Women must look perfect at all times, don’t you know, otherwise we shall collectively shame them and reject them - this is the underlying message that is out there the whole time. And what does all this make you feel about yourself? How could it make you feel anything other than distressed about your own perfectly normal and acceptable body and worry about anything that could be seen as an imperfection. 

The media does show a variety of ethnicities thank goodness now. Naomi Campbell was pretty much the only non white model of any fame when I was a teen, so god knows how awful it may have been growing up in the 80s and 90s if you weren’t white in terms of how you felt about your looks. The billion dollar industry of skin whitening creams speaks for itself in this regard, and it’s still doing a roaring trade 

Social media has a lot to answer for. We compare, not just as teens but also as adults, our insides and feelings, plus our no makeup first thing in the morning glory, to the photoshopped, filtered, marketed highlights reel of others. No wonder we think we fall short and feel we can never look good enough (or that our lives are successful or wonderful enough). At least the newness of it all helps me to know that there is a very unreal element to it all, but that’s not how it might feel if you’ve grown up with it as the norm. Kids who spend a significant amount of time on social media are more likely to have mental health problems.

The advertising industry also peddles the not good enough story. After all, if we thought our thighs were fine just as they are, why on earth would be need anti-cellulite smoothing cream to be rubbed in vigorously at least twice a day the week before a beach holiday? The whole beach body ready industry makes me furious. Crash diets for a flat tummy, exercise routines to lift your bum and tone your tum - magazines scream them from their front cover and adverts make promises. What are they all really saying? 

‘Your body isn’t good enough to be seen in swimwear. Buy this thing and you just might become acceptable, attractive and loveable.’

The fashion industry

Fashion…our old friend the fashion industry, with its clothes made for women with uniform, quite small bodies for the most part. It’s easy for clothes shopping to end up in tears of despair, especially when the fashion of the season isn’t made for your body shape. One year curves are in so sorry to all burgeoning teenagers with boyish figures, it’s your turn to feel inadequate. Oh now it’s waif fashion, so everyone with curves, now you can feel like crap because nothing looks good or like the girl in the magazine. Yuk. 

Capitalism

Capitalism must take some of the blame, with its focus on external image. Forget being kind, a positive contributor to society and healthy, you’d better have the right handbag, look amazing in your designer gear and drive an expensive car if you want anyone to thing you are a brilliant person. Success has been overtaken by the capitalists in terms of definition. And by taking it on board without questioning it, you also accept that you must look right to be part of the cool gang. It’s an image based rather than character based paradigm.

So, to recap, bitchy comments at school, repeated criticism and warnings at home, social media, advertising, movies, magazines, capitalism…it’s incredible that anyone actually feels their body is up to standard quite frankly. 

Cruel partners

Now let’s add those first romantic relationships. Some are lucky in that they are healthy and respectful. Not everyone is so fortunate. Some might have partners who prey on your weaknesses or insecurities, and make cruel comments in the heat of an argument. Or just make cruel comments because that’s the kind of person they are; maybe their parents role modelled this to them and they think it’s acceptable or normal. No matter the reason why it happens, already secretly not feeling good enough because of everything mentioned so far, the things that are now said by partners add fuel to fire. The flames of ‘my body isn’t good enough’ rise higher and higher until you’ve accepted it all as fact.

A string of unhealthy or abusive relationships will consolidate these feelings about yourself. Especially comments like ‘no one else will want you, have you seen the state you’re in’ will reinforce the idea that you really don’t look in anyway loveable or attractive.  Once you’ve started putting up with them rather than leaving, it becomes a reinforcing spiral of self-loathing. 

All of these image-based contributors to not feeling good about your body can have a huge impact. Layer upon layer of negative messaging, repeated over and over. It’s a miracle anyone feels good about their body quite frankly.

Now, imagine someone with a disability or an injury that means they can’t exercise or wear certain things. What about illnesses that have needed surgery and now there’s scars - how does that fit with the bikini beautiful ideal? It doesn’t…are you sensing quite how indiscriminately cruel the image-based society that we live in is? 

All praise to celebrities like Kate Winslet and Jameela Jamil, who refuse to have their pictures airbrushed or modified, and want people to see the truth so that they aren’t part of perpetuating the myth of what amazing bodies and faces look like. But they are the exception not the rule. So much more needs to be done in this area. 

Reading this, I want you to know my aim is to help you understand where you’re at, why you might have come to not like your body and think it’s not good enough, and to help you have some compassion for yourself. It is also for you to start questioning whether it really is true, or whether you might have taken on board some opinions as cast iron facts. Show yourself some compassion, kindness and understanding.

If you'd love to have a better relationship with yourself and your body, and see your wellbeing, confidence and success soar, book a call with me on this link: https://bit.ly/HWCconsultation

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The Trap of Toxic Perfectionism

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be perfect, to have the perfect life? For some, this is the ultimate destination, where happiness, fulfilment, health, confidence, validation and success are the juicy rewards. Sounds great doesn’t it! 

Except perfectionism is actually making us sick. Unless you’re a heart surgeon or an accountant, it’s not propelling anyone towards greatness.

Perfectionism has been studied by psychologists looking at 40,000 young people in the US, Canada and the UK over 27 years. An 11% rise in perfectionism was found. The extent to which people attached an irrational importance to perfectionism had risen 10% and worryingly, a 33% rise was seen in the extent to which people felt they needed to show themselves as perfect to receive validation. 

There is a positive association between perfectionism and anxiety, depression and eating disorders, all of which have risen accordingly, and on the physical side it’s associated with issues such as elevated blood pressure.  There is also anecdotal evidence that perfectionism is one of the reasons for suicide attempts, particularly for young men. Of course, this is hard to measure and incredibly tragic. 

Ultimately, this is not the kind of perfectionism that drives people to greater sense of satisfaction and happiness. This is perfectionism that is absolutely toxic for self-esteem, self-worth, mental and physical health. If the numbers are extrapolated into the future, the prospects are extremely worrying. 

Toxic Perfectionism’s Main Causes: An Axis of Evil 

The research highlights three main causes:

•      Compare and despair culture stemming from media and social media. This is about comparing your insides to other people’s projected, marketed, edited and filtered outsides, and deciding that you come up short. 

•      Capitalist culture where material gain, image, is king and the ultimate goals to aim for. Never mind your character or contribution to society, your worth as  a person is judged by how impressive your job title, salary, house, car or handbag is. 

•      The way that and frequency with which young people are tested and measured as they grow up, and the perceived impact that the results could have on their outcomes and success for the rest of their lives. Being measured and encouraged to constantly do better is also prominent feature of life in the corporate world with annual appraisals, quarterly targets, monthly goals and the like. It’s rarely the case the you are patted on the back and told how well you are doing and to keep doing what you’re doing, there is always the question of ‘where next’ and what new dizzy heights of achievement you might push to next and which new skills you plan to acquire. 

Having given well over 20 talks on this topic to a variety or corporate and personal development audiences, there is another trigger too for always striving for more and feeling as though you aren’t good enough unless you are perfect. And that is family pressure. Parents and grandparents who want their children to be huge successes can be enormous sources of pressure to study more, achieve more, earn more and so on. When this pressure is a feature of home life, and then reiterated at school/work and in the media, is it any wonder that people assume that they must keep pushing themselves to be better?

And if you’re pushing yourself to be better, there has to be an underlying assumption that you as you are right now, simply aren’t good enough. Striving for perfection can be seen as the only way to fix this, except the perfectionist solution you try to implement is stealing your self-esteem whilst feeding your inner critic at the same time. This is definitely a game that it is impossible to win. 

Here’s something I know to be true. Trying to fix what feels wrong on the inside with external achievements doesn’t work. Feelings of powerlessness about your ability to be good enough and receive enough validation take hold, providing rich fertiliser for mental health issues and destructive habits to numb how you feel about yourself and your life. Drinking, emotional eating, endless scrolling and shopping are just a few of the habits that are easy to lean on to escape how you feel. 

How to break free from toxic perfectionism

Stepping away from the toxic perfectionist trap is something you change from the inside out, not from the outside in. It is a journey from fear and harsh self-judgment to love, truth and kindness, from ego to heart. It can include a switch around in your internal values system too, where rejecting some of what you’ve assumed to be true about what success ‘should’ look might need to happen. After all, if success comes at the expense of your health and happiness, is it really success?  I don’t think so, and the last year has highlighted the importance of health as a pre-cursor to success and being able to get things done in a way that many have never experienced before.

First, acknowledge the destructive cycle and accept the idea that external achievement is not part of the solution. Now filter external influences and change your attitude to them. It might mean unfollowing a bunch of people on social media, no longer reading fashion magazines, or not giving so much airtime or importance to the opinions of certain people in your life. 

Next, a shift in behavior is required where creating self-trust and self-esteem through meeting your needs and self-validation becomes number one priority. These needs will be partly physical - dietary, sleep, movement et al. They will also be emotionally and spiritually related, including the need to do things for the sheer joy of it, standing up for what you need in your relationships and what’s important for you, plus following a career that is truly fulfilling rather than for status and validation. 

You cannot think your way to a new way of acting and feeling about yourself, you can’t think your way to a new way of treating yourself. Instead, you act first, and the thinking and feeling follows. To feel truly good about yourself, you must treat yourself as if you already have great worth, and as if what your body and heart desire is of the utmost importance. By showing yourself through a shift in behavior, your feelings and thinking follow. Energy has to flow towards self-care and self-validation, rather than the external.

Lastly, focusing on progress and the reality of achievements, rather than the failure to be perfect, works as a powerful perspective shifter of your worth. Plus it’s about how so called failures are interpreted; as a disaster that mean something detrimental to your worth, or as learning opportunities that are the bedrock of your life experience and wisdom. Essentially, this is about celebrating progress and learning, not berating yourself for failing to reach perfection. 

You are already enough, I promise. The sooner you cut the ties between what you look like, achieve or own and your self-worth, the happier and healthier you will be. Interestingly, that then means you will most likely be more successful! 

Next steps 

To book an exploratory to discuss Harriet giving a talk on ‘Breaking Free from Toxic Perfectionism: Create Success With Wellbeing’ at your organisation, email help@harrietwaleycohen.com

To supercharge your ability to conquer your inner world so that you can have anything you want, you will love Harriet’s entry level, easy to implement DIY emotional wellbeing bundle, Calm, Centred and In Control: https://bit.ly/CCCbundle

How to quit the cult of busy

Have you joined a cult by accident?

The cult I'm referral to is the cult of busy.

'If you're not tired, stressed and busy beyond belief, you're not trying hard enough'.

This would be the strap-line for the cult of busy. And it's gifts would be exhaustion, low self-worth and the feeling that there's always more you should be getting done or achieving. 

It was all well and good in the pre COVID-19 world. Getting up early to meditate and exercise, rush to work while listening to a podcast, work a long day with barely a break, squeeze in a social/gym/shopping something or other on the way home, get home, see the kids and get them to bed, thenzone out to netflix until it's a bit too late, and jump into bed knowing you'll be tired tomorrow because it's only 6 hours until the alarm goes off. Exhausted just typing that let alone doing in day in, day out, week in week out.

If someone asked if you had a free space in your diary to meet up, you'd check and see the next free weekend was one evening in July or after that, in October you had a Saturday free at a pinch.

Here's the thing. You've been so busy doing, that not being productive all the time and squeezing the very most out of every waking second feels wrong. It feels like you're underachieving.

But now that we're in lockdown, the result of accidentally joining the cult of busy is that you're stressed all the time that you're not achieving enough and giving yourself a hard time.

What if the answer was not to manage yourself better to do more, but to BE more instead. Be not do. Sit with your feelings. Acknowledge and process your anger, anxiety and feelings about your life in general. Put your wellbeing first instead of productivity.

Do you really still want to be a member of the cult of busy? Is it serving you, your health and your self-worth? Long term is this really how you want your life to be? Is your life designed the way you really want it to be?

This pandemic is a fantastic opportunity to slow down and take stock, and ask yourself what truly matters. When you know (and it'll turn out to be health, family and impact in the world), then how about you stop giving yourself a hard time about not achieving enough, and reframe what achievement really is.

Is success productivity, consumption and busy-ness? Or is it health, family and impact in the world, all in balance? Only build the future you really want. You have the chance to start over. I'd take it if I were you.