How to stop feeling guilty for choosing yourself

Setting personal boundaries is unfortunately something a lot of women struggle with. I know I do. As women, we grow up with the idea that in order to be valuable we have to be *of* value and service to others. This belief has become so ingrained in us, that setting boundaries and learning to put ourselves first not only seems like a scary task, but one that comes laden with guilt.

It’s not that it’s bad to give of ourselves to our families, friends, communities and work. It’s that if we over-extend ourselves to others, we put ourselves on the back burner of our own lives.

We end up being lived, instead of being fully alive.

That’s why we need healthy boundaries. They set the standard on how we want to be treated, and help us regain control over our existence.

Why We Fail to Set Boundaries

Societies all over the world teach girls that we must be good, quiet, polite and obedient. Women grow up (I’m one of them) learning that showing *too much* emotion will be frowned upon. We learn to be understanding, say “Yes” even (especially) when we want to say “No”.

When we say yes to everyone’s dream instead of our own, we experience a slow death of the soul. My bet is, if you can relate to any of these good girl symptoms you probably can relate to this soul-death as well.

As women, we have learnt how to settle in and with our lives for far too long. We have been trained to give our power away. Expected to let others make decisions for, and about us.

No wonder so many of us never learned how to set healthy boundaries.

Guilt

What happens when we do decide to put ourselves first? Guilt sets in. We get worried and anxious about what everyone will think of us:

• Will they be upset?

• Will they like me less

• Will they still love me?

Standing up for yourself is hard work. It’s uncomfortable. It requires discipline, perseverance and devotion. It took me YEARS to be able to speak my truth, express what I needed, and stand up for myself. Even today, when I enforce a personal boundary, I immediately feel the pull to make things right. Guilt, shame, fear never fail to show up. As if I’d done something terrible wrong.

Does this sound familiar?

If it does, I want you to know that none of this is real. It’s all programming.

To liberate ourselves from guilt we need to understand that the only validation we truly need is our own. When we constantly look outside of ourselves for it, our boundaries are ALWAYS at risk. In fact, some of us put off making big life decisions and wait until they’re made for us, simply because we think we’re not allowed to.

That’s been me a few too many times in my life: selling a house a loved because my partner didn’t like it, chasing material success to gain my parents’ approval, accepting bullying and gossip from in-laws because I was expected to become part of the family, …

This sensitivity to the opinions of others and the need to do the right thing – and be the right woman – comes from the many centuries women lived under the rule and control of good old patriarchy. Again, it’s all learned beliefs and behavior.

In order to stop feeling guilty about choosing myself I had to reprogram my mind with new beliefs, and leave consensus reality behind for the real world: the one in which there’s nothing wrong with me to begin with (whatever the media and society are telling me), the one where I’m the leader of my own life.

If you want to stop feeling guilty for choosing yourself you have to reset your beliefs about yourself and the world too.

You have to free yourself.

Patriarchy: What it is?

Patriarchy refers to the social construct in which it’s the accepted norm that men have more authority, power and privilege than women. This bias towards men permeate all levels of society – from conventional religious and political roles to family structures, where men are viewed as the head: the decision maker and the one who has the final say.

Patriarchal societies (the oppressive power of which is still present in the world today) are often patrilineal: properties, titles and other forms of wealth are passed down male lines only. An example of this is the Salic Law, excluding women from royal succession. Such laws – although ancient – are still very much alive. Belgium, for instance, home to yours truly and – incidentally – a monarchy, only allowed women to inherit the royal title in 1991. Not a time before time, but right when R.E.M. were losing their religion.

Another example of patriarchy are the earliest memories I have of my mother and money. She took care of it, made ends meet, but wasn’t allowed to open a bank account without my father’s consent.

The same is true for being allowed to work, own property, get a divorce without losing everything – including your children, and the right to vote (to name just a few things). American women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920 and British women were allowed to vote in 1918, given they were over 30.

But it doesn’t stop there. Bias, stereotypes, and discrimination towards women can be found throughout history. In fact, it’s been built into it. Women have had to fight every step of the way to achieve the same basic rights as men. For many, this is still an ongoing struggle today.

How could anyone NOT feel guilty for choosing themselves in such a context.

How to Stop Feeling Guilty

Letting go of over-giving and the fear that comes from standing up for yourself takes time, commitment and effort. It requires a complete paradigm shift to reprogram your thoughts, change your beliefs and eventually reclaim your life. Saying “No”, taking up the space you deserve, and protecting your time are all part of the process. They’re all steps towards putting yourself first.

This paradigm shift will get you to see that your needs are just as important – you are just as important – as everyone else.

Choosing yourself is a life-long practice, but the more you practice it, the better you’ll get at it. As you become aware of your default thoughts and actions when you’re called to put yourself first, change will happen. Eventually your practice will be rewarded. Choosing yourself will become natural.

You’ll be (guilt) free.

What has your experience with setting boundaries and choosing yourself been like? Let me know in the comments below.

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf

What is beauty? And why are we so obsessed by it?

If you’ve ever suffered to make yourself more “beautiful”, as I suspect you have if you’re a woman alive today, then those questions are worth asking. Not only because of the massive amount of accumulated pains, and moments of physical or emotional discomforts you’ve put yourself through, but more importantly because of the effect it’s had on your personal development, and your position in the world.

I remember my first leg waxing experience as if it was yesterday. I was fifteen, and had just entered puberty. Over the course of a school year I went from flat chested to busty teenager, from boyish hips to curvy, and from hairless girl to hairy lady.

At first I didn’t think much of it. At home beauty wasn’t a thing. My parents were struggling with many issues, for sure, but their appearance, or that of my siblings and I, wasn’t one of them. Actually, if it wasn’t for my then best friend, a girl I did absolutely everything with in total Barb Holland style, I could have walked around like that much longer (OMG imagine that!).

When social pressure turns nothing into something

So one Summer day that year, while we were hanging out my friend looked at my legs, pointed with her index finger towards my tibia, and articulated a alarming “eek!”. Following my friends’ “good advice”, a plan was immediately put in action. She would make an appointment for me to have my legs waxed. A few days later, by then convinced that having hair on your legs was a terrible thing, I laid my faith, and my legs in the hands of a beautician.

I don’t know if you were around in the nineties, but getting a wax back then was a real adventure. It wasn’t quick, or easy. In fact, it was an excruciating process with lukewarm wax paste that could only be pulled off your legs slowly, and little by little.

So I cried, and screamed the entire time. And I also learned a thing or two that day.

First, that when it comes to pain for beauty you’re not supposed to scream, or cry about it, but instead be a brave girl and take it. The beautician made me well aware of this by rolling her eyes about a million times, puffing almost all the air out of the torture chamber, to eventually – when I didn’t get her subtle social cues – telling me to shut up. By the end of the session I must have gotten it, because as I was leaving with my brand new pair of legs, I apologised to her for my seemingly unacceptable behavior.

Then I got a glimpse of what suffering to be beautiful really meant: real pain. There was nothing self-loving or self-caring about the experience, it was just painful. Writing these words as I think back on it I feel for my younger self, and shiver at the thought that our society has managed to brainwash girls, and women into believing that such an act of self-hatred towards the body, and the self is – in fact – self-caring.

The sad thing is, it was my first time going against the nature of my body, but certainly not my last. And so many years later, among many other “self-caring” beauty treats I endure, I’m still having my legs waxed. Aren’t you?

Finally, I noticed the difference. Boys my age were also starting to show hair on their legs, but nobody was telling them to lay down on the torture rack to fix it. In fact, while I was worrying about hair growing on my body my male counterparts were competing with each other to see who was getting the most facial hair…

What about the book?

A long but kind of necessary intro to get to the central premise of The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, written by the incredibly talented Naomi Wolf when she was only 26 years old.

The book, whose first edition dates back to 1990 (how appropriate), poses the thesis that, as women found a way out of the house, and into the workforce corporations shifted their sales efforts away from women’s homemaking and onto women’s bodies. Where previously advertisement had focused on tyrannizing women into being good homemakers, the pressure is now coming from within as much as outside, with an entire industry telling women to live up to unrealistic beauty standards. This pressure, still present today, then leads to an exacerbated preoccupation with physical appearance both by women, and men, unhealthy behaviors such as eating disorders, and eventually undermines the position of women socially, economically, and politically in society by stealing away their power. Wolf writes:

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Throughout the book, Wolf addresses different areas in which beauty is used against women: our workplaces, the cosmetics, and the diet industry. She also discusses the elusive notion of beauty in relation with aging, and states that when women grow old the grow invisible.

The economic animal cares about profit, not women’s rights

Unlike Wolf I don’t believe there’s someone, or a group in particular out there with cunning plans to keep women oppressed, but I do believe there’s an economic animal living a life of it’s own that has been thriving on our insecurities, and that those insecurities are the result of social norms created, and upheld by a masculine – not to say misogynist – society.

This animal feeds on our desire to be loved, and appreciated by feeding us the same lie over and over again: that we’ll never be good enough.

You have to go back to a time before time almost, to an era where the world was ruled by goddesses instead of gods to find societies where feminine qualities were revered instead of shunned, and where being a woman was enough to be called beautiful. I cannot imagine that in such a time women would have the same issues with feeling good enough as we do today.

And so I follow Wolf when she sees this obsession with appearance, and beauty as the current expression of a long lineage of instruments of oppression against women.

Right after the myth of the immaculate home now comes the myth of the immaculate beauty. Especially when you understand how elusive a concept beauty really is…

Reform cures the symptom, but doesn’t fix the problem

In a recent conversation between Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey (a Netflix original that I can only recommend you watch), DuVernay talks about how the criminal justice system in America (following her incredible documentary 13th, another one you really have to watch), is the modern-day equivalent of slavery, only disguised by law, perpetrating an system of inequality primarily affecting the poor, the black, and the brown (as she calls them). DuVernay says:

Historically reform has always led to further repression. Because reform is really people reshaping these mechanisms, these systems to their own end. (…) Which is basically just change it and make it so that it benefits me. And so reform isn’t really what’s needed.

I believe that the same mechanics are at play where the beauty myth is concerned.

Ever since women started being oppressed by men we have fought back. And when the fight was long, and hard enough things (seemed to) change. But why then are we still fighting? One of the reasons lie in the concept of reform.

What we are given every time we “win” isn’t really what we asked for, but a reshaped version of what we had before.

In a way, it’s a problem of semantics.

We get what we seemingly ask for, nothing more, and quite literally.

For instance, women had to fight until the 20th century to be granted the same voting rights as men, but we’re still waiting for the first woman president in the USA, and in countries where women attain the top politically, they still only represent a very small percentage of available positions. So we got the right to vote (literally) but the implied right to participate in the political system… not so much. Wolf writes:

As soon as a woman’s primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

Or what about this “new” social fixation on how women look, born almost exactly at the same time that women entered the workforce, some 50 odd years ago?

In her conversation with Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay goes on to say that she is in favor of prison abolition as it exists today. Again, I see the parallel with the beauty myth. As long as the oppressor has a say in what the reform will look like, the inequality – how well-disguised it may be – will remain. The only real solution is for the oppressed to take charge.

How do we fix it?

Wolf ends by stating something similar when she says that it is not men who will change what society dictates us to look like, but that if we want real change we’ll have to do that ourselves. By loving ourselves more, but also by reshaping the relation women have with one another. She writes:

By changing our prejudgments of one another, we have the means for the beginning of a noncompetitive experience of beauty. The “other woman” is represented through the myth as an unknown danger. “Meet the Other Woman”, read a Well hair-coloring brochure, referring to the “after” version of the woman targeted. The idea is that “beauty” makes another woman – even one’s own idealized image – into a being so alien that you need a formal introduction. It is a phrase that suggests threats, mistresses, glamorous destroyers of relationships.

This makes The Beauty Myth an ode to sisterhood, and a plea to reframe the relationship we have with each other back into what I believe is our natural state: one of friendship, compassion, support, and love for one another.

Only then will we be able to challenge the status quo. Only then will we achieve women empowerment, gender equality, and peace on Earth. Wolf ends:

Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it.

What about you? How do you feel about beauty, and our society’s fixation on appearance? Let me know below, I’d love to know.

52 books in 52 weeks is a self-improvement goal I’ve set for myself, and my business this year. You can follow my progress here, and/or offer a book suggestion here.

Why it’s Important For Women to Gather in Sisterhood. And How to Create it For Yourself.

For the biggest part of my life I wished I was a man.

It wasn’t until a personal tragedy woke me up in 2010, that I realized all I’d done was to live my life in the most masculine way possible.

Very early on in my life I made up my mind about the world, and concluded that being a boy would be so much easier than being a girl. I saw boys play, scream their lungs out, climb trees… and never being reprimanded for it. While I was being told to be careful, not to venture too high, to be quiet, to be nice.

What it’s like to be a woman in a male dominated world

Throughout my childhood I feel that I was groomed to fit into traditional gender roles, but with the added difficulty that I was also told to go out and get a job, to be ambitious, and to make it. I know I’m not alone in this. Especially in the West, millions of women are suffering the results of being brought up in a male dominated culture, where we’re being told that competition, success at all costs, and being the winner can coexist perfectly with our feminine qualities such as compassion and love, and even motherhood.

It simply isn’t so.

Of course it’s true that many women retain their feminine qualities, and that a whole lot of us give birth (duh!), and become mothers, but I’d like to argue that this happens despite the world we live in. Our world does not run on compassion, or love.

Our world runs on oil, not on coconuts; on profit, not on charity; on money, not on gifts; on competition, rather than collaboration; and on opposition, rather than support.

And that’s why women need to gather in sisterhood

Something I realized after having spent years of my life trying to become part of the o’ boys club. It would never happen. I was not a man. And even though I was playing by the rules, living my life, and building my businesses in the most masculine way possible, I was never really one of them.

In a male dominated culture, women can never really win. We start out with a handicap that we can never make up for. Even if we try our hardest, succeed in business, throw all of our compassion and love out the door, and toughen up like we’re supposed to, we’ll never live up to society’s expectations simply because we’ll always just be women.

When I understood this, my world broke open. Having thought of myself as a feminist all my life, I realized I had been the worst one at it. I had tried so hard to be a man that I despised myself for being a woman. In fact, I had forgotten how to be a woman. I had completely alienated myself from my feminine, that I had lost all sense of what it meant to be one.

The power of sisterhood

So I went in search. First of myself and my womanhood, then of my sisters. And what I found was nothing short of extraordinary.

#1 Women need women

After waking up to the fact that it was time to fully be a woman, and ever since I started my coaching practice, I realized how much women need women. Many studies have been devoted to the benefits of friendships, especially among women. In one such study, women with a strong, supportive circle of friends had much greater chances of survival than women who where socially isolated.

But there is more, much more.

#2 Sisterhood means deep, emotional connections

We are all social animals, and women especially thrive better when they have a sense of belonging, and community. Through sisterhood, women are able to make deep, and lasting emotional connections. At it’s most basic level, an emotional connection is how we give and receive the emotional support we all need. Emotional support means you’re being seen, being heard, being understood. It’s one of the most healing things we can experience, and something we get from sisterhood.

#3 Sisterhood is empowering

Science has long established that sisterhood is good for your health. But that’s not the whole story. Sisterhood goes way beyond the realm of the physical. In sisterhood women are empowered. Because in sisterhood you’re essential, and what you say, feel, and think matters. Being supported is a big part of sisterhood. You know others have your back, which allows you to stand in your own power more easily, and become the leader of your own life.

#4 Together is freeing

When women are supported like they are in trustworthy women groups, many of them talk about a new sense of freedom. I’ve spend many hours talking about this with women in my work, and what they often tell me is that they felt as if nobody was judging them, as if they could be themselves 100%. And I love that, because what they’re experiencing is exactly that. Gathered in sisterhood we’re able to shed our masculine skins, and to experience our feminine qualities fully. It’s scary at first, I know it was for me, but being together this way is so freeing! There’s nothing quite like it.

How to create sisterhood for yourself?

When I realized the masculine state I was in, I set myself out to rediscover what it meant to be a woman, and to create a tribe of women to gather with. Although it took a while to accomplish, it really wasn’t all that hard. Since, well… women are all around us!

• Be pro-active about getting in touch with the women in your life: when I decided I wanted women in my life, I took matters into my own hands. Instead of waiting for women to walk into my life (which honestly never happens), I decided to be pro-active about it, and (re)connect with women myself. I called or emailed all the women I’d known throughout my life that I liked, and from there build up relationships with them (again). With some, beautiful friendships emerged while with others, not so much. But that’s totally OK. So much so, that it has become a habit that I really cherish. Whenever I meet a woman that I feel a connection with, I’ll get in touch and see where sisterhood can take me.

• Focus on women, not men: following the previous point, another habit I’ve made my own, is to focus on women, not men in social situations. I feel that this is a very important part of this work – and being a woman actually – that women have not learned. Before, when I was in my masculine, when I would go to a business event or any other social happening, I would mostly talk to men, and give my attention to them. Now I do the opposite, and focus on women. I’ve made some amazing friends this way, and every time it’s a beautiful reminder not only that I am, in fact, a woman, but it also helps me to keep choosing compassion, and love over competition, and fear.

• Choose the women you want to surround yourself with: the saying goes that you become the five people you surround yourself with. I believe the same is true for becoming a powerful woman, and sister. If you’re being as intentional as I am about new female friendships, you have the right to pick who you want to surround yourself with (actually you always have that right). By choosing women that share the same values as you, that uplift you, and love you, you’re allowing powerful forces into your life. And that’s precisely the point!

• Don’t be afraid to go deep, and to love: making deep connections with women is not superficial, it’s not a gathering of women to gossip, to make each other jealous, to exchange platitudes. We have enough of that in the world already, don’t we? No, stepping into the sister circle means that you’re willing to go deep, and to love fully, with all that you are, visible, vulnerable. It’s a conscious choice that you have to make. Sisterhood, deep connections with other women, is not something that happens to you, it’s something that you willfully create.

• Leave our male dominated culture at the door: following the previous point, it’s important to mention that in sisterhood the male dominated world must be left behind. Even during my Sisterhood Retreats, where we come together in powerful, and sometimes very pragmatic gatherings on topics such as mindset, fears, goals, we come at it from a beautiful feminine place. Through sisterhood we unlearn what we’ve been told about the world – that it’s a harsh place for women, where competition and jealousy rule the relationships we have with each other – to come out on the other side anew, empowered, supported, and knowing that we’re not alone in this, and that together we can achieve anything.

If you want to experience how powerful it is to gather this way, why not come to my next Sisterhood Retreat, a yearly event in the heart of Paris (France) for women to come together, support each other, and achieve their goals.

Feeling like you could do more in your business or career if you only had some guidance?

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