Confessions from a recovered mean girl

I used to be a bitch. Straight out- I was a mean girl. My insecurities and lack of self-worth resulted in me transferring my own self judgement onto others.

I grew up surrounded by men and patriarchal misogynistic men at that. Women were less than men, they were objects and their bodies were open for opinion. I learnt quickly that to survive in this world that I would need to see the world the same way that they do or become a victim of it.

I’ve been that woman who puts down other women. I used to pride myself on not being like “typical” women. I would shame women to men about being needy, controlling or emotional. I would criticise what they were wearing, if their behaviour was appropriate or not and if I thought they were “easy” or a “prick tease”.

Last week I  was reminded of who I used to be as I attended an ice hockey game between Canada and the USA. Apart from me having a hell of a time yelling and screaming in a way that is only really socially appropriate at sporting games, I happened to sit next to two well presented women and out of sheer proximity I was privy to their conversations.

Mostly, I tuned them out as I was more interested in the game and the company that I was with, however during one of the breaks, I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. It went a little something like this:

Person 1: Have you seen her lately?

Person 2: Yeah, I saw her last week. She was wearing those shorts again-ergh!

P1: Really? Yuck, she really shouldn’t wear them. She has huge thighs and tonnes of cellulite

P2: I know! She just swans around in them as if she thinks no one notices. She’s really got to stop

P1: I mean, I’m all in for body positivity but she takes it too far- it’s disgusting.

At this point I tuned out, I had to. In order to not cause an outright riot and fly off the handle , I kept my thoughts to myself. I was hurt, upset and disgusted.

I was upset for their “friend” who clearly wouldn’t know what was being said behind her back. I was saddened for these two women who felt the need to speak so venomously about someone that they care about. Most of all, I felt for us as women.

All the old feelings of inadequacy came rushing back. Right here next to me was proof that people do judge and more often than not they are the people that we call friends. I recall having similar conversations about my friends in years gone by and how desperate I was to feel like I belonged- oh the irony.

I put down others to make myself feel better- the ultimate bully has insufferable low esteem. As someone who now loves themselves, has great self esteem and works hard to see all people as whole and complete, the conversation I overheard was heart breaking.

We have had to fight for every right we have, our bodies are compared against a computer program and we are still treated like ornaments by many people around the world.

Yet here we are, fighting each other. Putting ourselves down and shaming our own. Haven’t we been through enough? Don’t we get enough shaming from the media without us throwing in some more of our own?

I know why they felt the need to say what they did. I understand the feelings of being threatened and therefore climbing on top of others to bring themselves back up but it still makes me sad.

I set a challenged for you. I challenge you to stop the bitching, stop the judging and stop the shaming. We have all done this and like these women, you may not even be aware that you do it. If you have time to judge then you don’t have time to love.

Self-love starts from within, there is no doubt about it. If you are judging others and putting them down ( even in your head) then you are walking down a very slippery slope.

Every time you judge someone else, you are judging yourself. Choose your thoughts and words wisely.

Let’s lift each other up and show ourselves how magnificent we truly are.

Love Katie Nicole

x

Is a fear of failure holding you back?

As a child, I learnt that if you couldn’t do something right the first time, then there was no point doing it at all. As Homer says to Bart in an episode of the Simpsons after a failed attempt at a goal

“What’s the lesson here boy?  Never try”.

So I did just that, I stopped trying. If I knew that I could do it and be relatively successful at it, then I would give it a go. Things like peer support programs in school, drama and public speaking; I knew that I had a natural propensity towards these things so I did them more. I would confidently conquer activities and “challenges” that weren’t really a stretch for me.

I vehemently avoided things I wasn’t great at, for fear of looking stupid and failing. Even things that I really wanted to do like ice skating, I avoided so I didn’t have to fall and make a fool of myself.

It became an identity belief, the act of failing was not simply a behaviour but was a personality trait; a part of who I was. Failing = being a failure.

I trudged along like this for years, wondering why I felt so unfulfilled. To the outside world I was at times outrageous; skydiving, travelling the world alone, pursuing reality TV shows, moving interstate and talking easily to strangers. I displayed many characteristics of someone who was “out there” but the truth was that it was all within a comfort level I could handle.

The outcomes were predictable; they were open ended so that failure was not so obvious. These experiences rarely put me at risk of being a failure and as a result I was able to avoid what I really wanted to go after in life. I didn’t have to face the stark reality that I might not be good enough for what I really wanted.

Cue 2011; I fell in love with coaching and personal development. I began to learn that there is no failure only feedback, that if it (whatever it was) easy then everyone would be doing it, that you must fall down in order to learn how to get back up. These were all great sayings and intellectually I could rattle them off as philosophic meanderings; but I didn’t really believe it, deep down failing still meant that I was a failure.

Until as a 28 year old I decided to learn to roller skate, something that I had been scared to do my whole life. One of those things that I had desperately wanted to be able to do but was too terrified of looking like a knob. The coaching had propelled me to want to push myself, to really put myself out there and begin to put what I was learning into practice.

Clearly I really wanted to learn the lesson because not only did I embark on learning to roller skate but I decided I would play the all-female full contact sport of Roller Derby. I would have to learn how to run, jump, weave, skate backwards, turn from front to back, take a hit and give one all whilst skating within a 10 foot pack of 9 other skaters.

For years I cried- a lot! I fell down so many times that I was more familiar with the ground than the bottom of my skates. I broke both of my wrists in the first few months and had bi knee surgeries in years to come. Those first few years were both heaven and hell. I had to fall on repeat to learn how to turn around, to stop, to weave. 

Many a trainings I stood face to face with my partner with horrible thoughts going around in my head because I felt like such a failure. I couldn’t do it right away so therefore I was doomed.

I cried because I thought I would never improve. I cried because “everyone” was better than me or progressing faster. I cried because I broke bones. I cried because squatting for 2 hours hurts. I cried because I wanted it so badly that I had to face my own limits in order to overcome them.

With my partner as my coach, I kept getting up and at times I was literally getting knocked down by other people. I had to learn how to get up fast and move on even faster in fear that someone might hit me again. I became agile, resilient and conditioned to failing.

I soon found out that in order to learn the new skill, I would need to fuck it up sometimes hundreds of times before I got it right but when I finally did the thing, it was the most rewarding and fulfilling thing I had ever experienced.

Playing it safe all those years and fearing looking like an idiot had severely limited the depth of my life. I was unable to grow and my self-belief was in the shitter. I had never done anything that created any kind of reference points of success and as a result had nothing to work with.

I learnt how to skate, I learnt how to play roller derby but most importantly I learnt that:

“If you’re not falling over, then you’re not trying hard enough”

Get out there and fail. You only become a failure if you decide to take on that identity. Ultimately, success is the sum of tonnes of failures, each taking you a fraction of a step closer to your goals- without it; you’ll forever stay safe and unfulfilled.

Allow failure, adversity and pain to become your best friend and your greatest ally.

Love,  

Katie Nicole

Believing in yourself is a game changer

When you really think about it, the term “self-belief” seems a little odd. When we are asked if we believe in god we are talking about faith, whether we believe in aliens or ghosts we are talking about opinions,  neither of which (at the time of writing) can be unequivocally proven true or untrue. When we ask these questions we are asking if these things actually exist.

Without getting too woo woo about it, it’s pretty easy to assume that we as people, do in fact exist. We have bodies that age, grow and deteriorate. We have minds that create and can interact with others. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we do actually exist.

Yet for many of us we struggle to believe in ourselves. Is it that we question our very existence? Or when it comes to humanity are we actually questioning whether or not we believe in our ability to achieve?

We’ve all asked ourselves that question “who am I?” at some point in time. Perhaps you were lucky enough to leave that in your adolescence, but for a vast majority of first world humanity we are left with a void and at times an existential crisis of identity. How can we honestly expect to believe in our ability to achieve when we don’t even know who we are?

Self- belief comes when we know who we are and are confident that we can navigate our lives according to our dreams and hearts desires and that despite setbacks, we are able to pick ourselves up and continue on.

We question alien existence because we have no “proof”. Things are generally accepted by the world once sufficient evidence is provided. Imaging telling the average person in 1850 that in the future you will be able to connect to the entire world using invisible waves of current, you’ll be able to have an instant face to face conversation with someone on the other side of the planet and you can get in a huge chunk of steel with hundreds of other people and fly over oceans. You would be labelled insane and probably locked up.

Yet here we are. We do the same thing for ourselves. Without reference points of success we fail to have “proof” that we are worthy/ can achieve the thing we set out to do, so without proof we lose faith. We think that simply because we can’t see it, then it must not be true. We even have a tried and tested saying for this “I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Oh how wrong we are. We actually wait for the self-belief to show up before we take any action. We fail to realise that self-belief is created by doing the very thing that we think we can’t. Our brain needs reference points of success or in other words, it needs proof. There are some lucky souls out there who have been taught to believe in themselves from day dot, but it’s unlikely that they’re reading this article.

For the rest of us, we need proof. We need to see it before we believe it.

Sometimes that’s a matter of shifting our perspective so that we can see the evidence that already exists. We have all been successful at something at some time in our lives but often we down play it because our automatic response is to put ourselves down.

At other times we need to create new reference points of success. We need to go out there and attack our world, fail a lot and break through to success; then we have created proof that we can and our self-belief grows.

When you learn to believe in yourself, you become unstoppable. You will try things that seem impossible; you will go after things in your life that you previously had never dreamed of having or doing. People will believe in you more as a result of your own self-belief and you will get better jobs, more money, better relationships and have a better life.

Create new reference points for yourself by taking action irrelevant of your self-belief and start to notice where you have already had success in the past. Gather all the proof you can and the self- belief with improve.

Doing this on your own can be tough so if you want to learn how to believe in yourself again but have struggled a bit on your own then take advantage of your

 Free discovery call coaching session valued at $197.

Get clear on what’s been holding you back and make way for the real you to shine.

Click here to secure your place today.

Happy self loving

Katie Nicole

moreconfidence.com.au

I hate my body.......

…..but I wish I didn’t. I hate how scary it is to post a partial nude picture of myself on social media when the above statement is true.

I’ve been lying to myself, for years, for decades really. I’ve actually convinced myself that I love myself and my body, that I don’t care about what others think about me and I am proud of my body despite it not falling in line with societies “ideal” body.

Being someone that is confident, someone that has never really hid my body and someone who tends to make her friends feel comfortable about their own bodies by getting my kit off, I always assumed that I didn’t have any body image issues.

I’m a strong advocate of loving your body. As a confidence coach I am passionate about helping women to be comfortable in their own skin and I firmly believe that your body should be more about function that feature. I believe that we need to define our own sense of self worth and value irrelevant of our bodies.

I hear many people talk about beauty standards and defining your own. To me we are still focussed on being beautiful and not on being a person of value. Defining your own beauty or knowing that you are “beautiful” just the way you are, is still placing an enormous amount of value on what we look like, but I digress.

Writing now, I feel like I could spruik for a thousand years on how who you are and what you bring to the world should have far greater value than how you look. I’m angry at the media and social norms for teaching us that we need to be something that we are not and I disagree vehemently with the idea ( and delivery) of the objectification of women in the media.

I’m pissed because I believe in fucking it all off and rocking out to your own rhythm. I believe that everyone and every body has the right to feel attractive, worth while, sexy and valuable. I believe in all of this, I believe desperately in loving your self not matter what you look like.

Except I don’t. * Sigh* I don’t. I know all the above rant to be true or at least I wish it was. It’s complicated because I know it to be true yet I still hate my body. Deep down I hate it. I convince myself that I am proud of it but if I am brutally honest with myself, I think it’s shit.

I think it should look different in almost every way. It should be lighter, it should have less fat, a lot less. It should be shorter but not too short, it shouldn’t have wide thighs or a round, squishy stomach. It needs to have a gap between it’s thighs.  It should keep the large breasts that I adorn yet they should be firm and perky, not soft and tear dropped. My curves can stay yet they should really be more defined, I should have a slimmer waist and a firmer ass. My arms need toning because the tuck shop lady floppy bits are really not ok. My skin should be clearer. My teeth need to be whiter and straighter. My feet are too big, I have too much hair on my body in some places and it’s not thick enough in others. My eyes should be brighter, my nails more shapely. I should have less visible veins and more prominent features. Blurch!!!!

Absurd isn’t it? My veins are too big? What the actual fuck? Insanely enough, I could keep going.

If you’re exhausted by reading this, then know that I am too. For many of you, you probably have an even more extensive list.

I’ve been lying to myself. I do honestly believe that loving myself as I am is my given right and if we go a litter deeper we might even find that I do love my body (Ahh yes, all the contradictions!). You see I have no problem getting nude, in fact I think it’s awesome. I have no issues in sharing my curves and accentuating my shape. When I think about my body outside of the messed up messages and imagery I have received over my life, I actually think I’m pretty hot.

Here comes the but. I have realised that I feel ashamed for loving my body. I feel that being over weight means that I have no right to be comfortable in my own skin. Even when I’ve been lighter I have never thought it was ok to feel sexy or attractive or more importantly, of value. I’ve been brainwashed to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with me; that I need to change myself somehow in order to get that little bit closer to perfection. I’ve been lied to that loving myself is not ok, nor should it be. In order to be accepted I must dislike my body and even better if I hate it and myself to boot.

It’s socially acceptable to talk about the bits we hate about ourselves, I have always been seen as a weirdo for accepting my body. I should be ashamed of my body, particularly if I am overweight. How dare I exercise regularly, drink plenty of water and eat good food most of the time, be overweight and be ok with that.

No matter what we look like we are taught to hate our bodies by the messaging splashed all over society. Everywhere you turn there is someone telling you to shape this, change that, enhance that, tone this down, get fitter, lose weight, be taller, improve this etc. What it’s ALL saying is that you are somehow not good enough the way you are and by buying (or buying into) the next big thing, then maybe you will be good enough, but unlikely.

I still struggle with this, being aware of it is only the beginning of the journey. I do love my body, coming to terms with the fact that the world thinks I should be ashamed of it is where my journey continues. Clearly I care more about what the world thinks of me that I have previously been ok to admit.

So here I am, just me and maybe what I really mean to say is; I care what others think of me and I wish I didn’t. I'm hoping this helps.