I’m off to Tampa for another spectacular Hay House conference. How cool is my life? (Universe, have I told you lately that I love you?) Tune into Hay House Radio this Wednesday at noon EST to hear me and my juicy soul-sister Karen McCrocklin dish about authenticity and the best ways we’ve found to deal, feel, and be real. (Click here on Wednesday to listen and call in.) We’re all born gloriously authentic but our socialization ensures our authenticity is beaten out of us. Here’s what I had to say about that in the Juicy Joy book:
Over and over throughout our lives we’ve absorbed the message, implicitly and explicitly, that “image is everything,” and “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” My friend who works in sales for a large publishing company likes to quip, “Anybody who says you can’t judge a book by its cover never tried to sell one.” The cover is all we judge by! And all of us want us our covers to be the shiniest, most impressive covers we can manage to project. But where does that really leave us in terms of self-love and genuine connection with our fellow humans?
At the root of all people-pleasing tendencies, and most inauthentic tendencies in general, is a fear of being judged. Many of us grew up with some degree of a fear of abandonment from being found unlovable if we were judged and came up short. And we all judge ourselves to varying extents. If you think you don’t judge yourself, it probably just means you have a judgment about judging yourself.
If you’re sensitive to the criticism of others, consider this: The extent to which you feel hurt by anyone’s judgment of you is directly proportional to the degree to which you judge that trait in yourself, either consciously or subconsciously. If I called you a jerk you might feel insulted, because most of us have a fear, deep down, that we have the capacity to be jerks. But if I called you a rhinoceros you’d probably just think I was nuts and shrug it off. You know you’re not a rhinoceros, so there’s no way I can insult you with that—unless you have a big nose or a big butt that you’re sensitive about, in which case your own self-judgment would cause you to feel insulted.
Juicy Joy training transmutes your self-judgments into self-love, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have incentive to make further changes in yourself toward ever-greater degrees of Juicy Joy. Of course you will continue to grow and evolve, but you will do it much more speedily and effectively. Genuine change can only happen when you are first accepting and loving every part of you.
If you try to change anything from a position of “I hate this aspect of me,” you’ll gain nothing from the change. If you hate your nose, and get a nose-job so you have a perfect nose, it will only be a matter of time before you hate something else about yourself. Your nose wasn’t the problem; hating yourself was. Conversely, when you accept and love all of who you are, making changes is juicy fun! You can be as creative and daring as you please. You know that you are fantastic now and you will continue to be fantastic, and that makes it exciting to change and grow. from Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self
