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.

The impact of low self-worth on leadership

Low self-worth stops you from becoming the kind of leader you could be in your life and career.

You might hold yourself back in a variety of ways:

1) Sabotage your health (drinking, smoking, unhealthy eating, lack of sleep) so that you lack energy and enthusiasm.

2) Not put yourself forward, so that others don't notice your brilliance.

3) Get stuck in unhealthy relationships that undermine your confidence further.

4) Stay in jobs too long without pushing your career forwards because you aren't sure that you'll get a yes at the next level.

5) Not delegate, believing that by doing it all yourself, you will be seen more favourably, when instead you are seen as unable to manage others or boundary roles.

6) Wait for opportunities to be offered rather than seeking them out.

7) Adopt the physical posture of someone who doesn't believe in themselves all the time, which can give others the impression that you aren't as brilliant as you really are. Uncertainty is contagious.

8) Put your energy in the wrong place as your try to fix all the ways in which you don't think you're good enough ( extreme diets, people pleasing etc), which leaves no space for you to invest in yourself and actually progress.

My talks and coaching are specifically designed to banish self-sabotage and it's underlying cause which is almost always low self-belief once and for all, by getting people on their own side and helping them truly believe in and reach their potential. 

The Caroline Flack tragedy - an invitation to behave differently

When Geeta Sidhu Robb and I featured on channel 5's Rich House, Poor House in the autumn, Twitter was a hell hole. We were insulted by strangers, targeted by trolls, and picked apart, and accused of ridiculous untruths like abandoning our children to do the show. The truth is that the entire filming schedule was arranged around it being the one week of the summer each of our children were away with friends or their father. 

That nastiness was just for one evening. It was pretty easy to laugh it off, not to take it too seriously and to forget about it. When the press (Mail on Line and Sun on Line in particular) reviewed our episode, they ignored all the positive comments on Facebook and insta, and purely quoted the trolls's insults. These trolls had no following, no trackable identity (pictures of cartoon characters etc) unlike insta and especially facebook, where people are more likely to use names and pictures. Still, that made a much better story than us getting a ton of encouraging and supportive feedback, let's face it.

What would it be like to be constantly in the public eye, where trolls constantly attack you for your looks, your decisions, your every move, and that's what the biggest press outlets pick up on? Bloody awful. Relentless. Suffocating. Hard to maintain your self-esteem for sure. 

Self-esteem and mental health

For someone with mental health issues and a ton of self-doubt because their every outfit, weight gain/loss, relationship and career move is picked apart to sell more copies, it would be horrific. 

It is entirely possible Caroline Flack did hurt her boyfriend and deserved to be prosecuted. Who knows. Domestic abuse is very common and it is also very common for arguments to get out of hand, and for the attacked partner not to want to press charges because they fear for their own safety or simply know that it was just a row that went wrong. 

However, for her to have become so isolated, so desperate and for it to have got so dark in her head that she felt she had no way out, no way of things ever getting better so that it would be better to end it all, is an utter tragedy. 

That the Sun especially, immediately started deleting its articles where they picked her apart not so long ago, says it all. They love to build someone up and then trash them and destroy them. These are people. Not commodities. People. 

I hope this is the end of the demand for reality TV shows, for tabloid rubbish, for gossip magazines where celebrities are put in the spotlight and things are twisted and stories created out of thin air. 

Is it any wonder Meghan and Harry wanted out...

In my work, I support women who don't feel good enough despite how fabulous they really are. They don't feel good enough about their bodies, their careers, their homes, their potential, their anything. They just feel full of self-loathing and inadequacy. 

Why do women feel that they are not good enough?

Why is this? A large part of it is the way the media criticises all women. Did Boris get this kind of scrutiny and career destruction when he was recorded in a domestic situiaont so bad the police were called? No. He became prime minister. The media treats women and men very differently. Men's clothes, bodies, display of emotions, everything, are held to very different standards. Women are 'past it', 'crazy' 'hysterical' and the like when men are distinguished and passionate and entitled to show their anger. 

It needs to end. 

Actions I invite you to take:

- Stop buying tabloid papers and gossip magazines that profit off this cycle. Remove demand. 

- Stop watching reality TV. All of it. Remove demand.

- Hold men and women to the same standards. Notice your own brainwashing by the cultural paradigm and learn to question it. 

- Don't just tell your friends in a random facebook post that they can always call you. People who are so depressed they are suicidal are unlikely to call. Call them. Knock on their door. Stay with them in their darkest moments. Let them know it will pass and that you won't leave their side until it does. Show them you're there instead of telling them. 

- Look after your own mental health, learn to question your limiting beliefs and painful stories as all of them are untrue.

- See mental health as the same as physical health. The two aren't separate. It's just health. Health is wealth, the biggest asset you have. Nurture it and cultivate it. 

- Be kind, to yourself and to others. If you are a kind person, why would you buy those papers and magazines that are unkind, or watch those TV shows that benefit from humiliating the participants? 

- Be real on social media. Neither you nor anyone else is perfect. 

Love to all. And thank you to those of you that have truly been there for me in dark times in my past. I got through them, and so can you if you can ride it out. The bad times pass and so do the good times. 

I am looking for this woman.

Do you know this woman? She is:

• Kind to others but not always to herself. 

• A giver. She gives life 110%, takes on loads of extras, and is busy busy busy. Never mind that she can end up exhausted/unwell...

• A high flier, and on the outside has much of her life totally together - career, social life, home, holidays. 

• A worrier. She worries about what might go wrong, and what others think about her. She worries that the quality of her opinion/work/qualifications means she should keep a low profile. She worries about feeling overwhelmed and tired and not wanting anyone to know; caffeine and sugar are her secret weapon for keeping going. 

• Worried about her body too, because she is sure she would feel better about herself and would have a great romantic life if she was thinner, probably younger, and more toned. 

• Wondering if this is it, or if there is more to life. 

• Fantasising about throwing it all in and moving to the beach to teach yoga...or something similar. 

• Brilliant at shopping, eating, wine, scrolling, Netflix and keeping busy so that she doesn't have to stop and really feel this way. She is also really good at giving herself a hard time about all of these things too...

If you know this woman, could you please tag her because I have a mega important bit of news for her. 

Ready?

It doesn't have to be like this anymore.  It truly doesn't.

Confidence and selflove are available

There is a different way that means you won't have to keep giving too much, you won't have to be so busy and tired, and you won't need to keep running from how you feel. It might seem far fetched right now. 

I promise from the bottom of my heart that you can feel full of self-belief, health, calm and healthy ways of dealing with life's ups and downs. You can be at total peace with who you are, with your body and know the true value of what you bring to the world without pushing yourself to the point of total brokenness to prove it to yourself and everyone else.

I am opening up my diary regularly for some zero pressure, complimentary 45 minute consultations for women who would love to explore the idea of feeling differently about themselves and their lives. This is ideal for women who would kill to get to a place where it doesn't occur to them anymore that they or their bodies aren't good enough, and where they know, accept, and celebrate their true value...confidence, success and wellbeing await. Freedom awaits. 

Perhaps you know this woman? Let her know that I’m here for her.

Find out more about my coaching for ambitious high-achieving women