New Town, Same Girl

It's been quite an adventurous five months!  I've moved across the planet with kids in tow and started a new marriage, new life!  Now the kids are all in school, we're in our house, work is flowing and all is 'normal' in the universe.  Spending plenty of time at Topshop on Oxford Circus, Smythson on Bond Street, and Junky Styling in Brick Lane!

What's in my beauty reading radar lately?  I've been on the Tube A LOT lately and reading voraciously.  Loving "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" by Peggy Orenstein and just finished "I Think I Love You" by Allison Pearson.  Makes me strangely happy that I have given birth to three sons instead of daughters... When I found out that each of my boys was, indeed, male, I was shattered.  With each pregnancy I had visions of pink nurseries, hairbows, Barbies, Mary Janes with white anklet socks, and on and on.

Reading these books, though, is a flashback to my own perceptions of beauty and understanding just how deep those roots go...  When Pearson writes about wearing brown (a shade that makes her skin look decidedly yellow!) because she read in a fanzine that David Cassidy liked it, you realize just how early we are conditioned to conform to someone else's vision of beauty.

For me, I remember experimenting with pin curls because I thought boys liked curly hair.  I was about six and one Saturday night I painstakingly crafted the curls.  At church the next day, I flushed with embarrassment when I was convinced that two older teenaged boys were laughing at me.  Even now I can recall that feeling of just wanting to hide - even though the Grown Up Coni knows the boys probably hadn't even noticed me and wouldn't have thought twice about a little girl's hair.

Beauty Workout:  What incidents do you remember from early childhood that defined your image of how you perceived yourself? How do you feel when you think back?  

Mirror Mirror

Distorted body image is something many women face.  When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

The picture above is deliberately provocative to show self perception in a woman with an eating disorder.  What she sees isn't real - it's a projection in her mind.  (And obviously, this woman would need to be receiving intensive counseling from a professional to deal with an eating disorder of this magnitude.)

While most women aren't that extreme, we do tend to spend more time looking at our flaws than our assets.  Our eye is drawn to the one blemish or the least favorite parts of our body  - the negative is seductive and takes our attention.  The unfortunate side effect is that we don't pay attention to what's beautiful on the inside and the outside - there's no room for a positive conversation when we're stuck in a negative sound loop in our heads.

Your simple assignment today is to look in your mirror and choose three things you like about yourself.  At least one of the things needs to be an external, physical feature (like your eyes, your legs, even your neck!) and one of the things needs to be a personal attribute (like being loyal, kind, a good friend, a good mother, patient, or energetic.)  Write these three things down on a post-it note and put them on your mirror for the next week.

Every time you look in the mirror, read those positive things and think about how you're going to take what's already great about yourself and make it better.  For example:  if you like your eyes - try a new eye shadow, wear a top that matches your eyes, resolve to make more eye contact.  If loyalty is one of your strengths, find a way to show that today.

Work on making your 'inner dialogue' positive and reinforcing so that you feel beautiful and reflect beauty.  It's hard, but worth it.  Pay attention to the voices in your head.  You can also try an experiment:  keep a piece of paper with you for an entire day with two columns labeled "positive" and "negative." Each time you have a negative thought about yourself make a 'tick' mark in the negative and do the same for positive thoughts.  How many more times did you criticize yourself rather than pay yourself a compliment?  If you're like most women, the balance is heavily shifted to the negative.  Your job is to try to balance the scale, and then tip the scale so you're seeing your beauty and positive attributes as the focal point.

Lastly, if you can't find anything good about yourself, it indicates a bigger issue at play.  Ask others to tell you what they find beautiful about you, write it down, and internalize it.  Sometimes our blind spots are so obvious to others and they see wonderful things that we don't see ourselves - so open your eyes to your own beauty, inside and out!

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Best,
Coni