‘
‘Beach Body Ready’ is a mindset, not a dress size
Everyone harbours some level of negative beliefs about themselves. The ‘Am I good enough?’ Or ‘Do I look okay in this? These kinds of self-doubts are the sort of internal conversations that pretty much everyone has.
When you have a healthy sense of self-esteem, you can often override the niggling voice of self-doubt in your mind by batting it away and effectively ignoring it.
That’s because there is a part of you, at a deep core level, that acknowledges you are ultimately good enough. If this feels like you, then congratulations, you are equipped and able to tackle the challenges your life throws at you – even on the beach!
The flip side is that if you are already highly anxious and your self-esteem feels battered, it can feel much more difficult to dismiss or silence the voice of doubt in your mind.
Planning holidays is a prime time in the year when some people’s negative voice can really ratchet up self-doubt and negative self-talk about what they will look like in either their ski-suit or in their bikini.
I’ve worked with both male and female clients who, to the outside world, look absolutely fantastic and yet are racked with self-doubt or who suffer body dysmorphia that continually steals their joy.
Everyone on this season’s Love Island UK TV series is typically good-looking young men and women. They are prime examples of the narrow, heterosexual, mainly white, western idea of physical perfection, with the boys’ hairless torsos, perfect pecs, and tight bums alongside the girls often enhanced breasts and plumped up lips.
It would be easy to assume that along with this level of physical perfection would come security in who they are and that they would have confidence in their own worth. Watching the series, though, this is apparently not the case. The way the contestants speak about themselves and interact with the others on the Island demonstrates they are as prone to insecurities and anxiety about how they look and how they come across to others as any other mortal not blessed with their god and goddess’s good looks.
There is no perfect body in existence that can shut off inner negative self-talk, as critical self-judgements merely raise the bar of perfection ever higher, so that already beautiful people feel inadequate and seek out plastic surgery and enhancements to ‘improve’ their looks.
You might already recognise how profoundly your negative self-talk and critical self-judgements get in your way of you feeling good about yourself. Your negative self-talk might actually be destructive enough to stop you from doing what you really want to do. Only you know how much you temper your behaviour or hide your light from the world when you don’t feel good enough or deserving enough to live your life to its full potential.
The reason negative beliefs can be such a huge influence is that they happen in your subconscious mind and can be triggered when you least expect it to make you feel really insecure and doubt your abilities. Often they feel so overwhelmed with self-doubt that they just give up at the first hurdle and end up playing small in their own life.
Your negative beliefs can feel as though they’ve been there forever, and they are often unquestioningly accepted as if they are part of your DNA. As they usually exist just below your conscious awareness, your negative beliefs are immune to your usual rational judgment, so that you only accept that they must be true.
They are not true. Negative beliefs are stories you have told yourself, often created many years ago, and yet they can continue to influence and control your life today.
Now is the perfect time to spend five minutes to find the origin of your negative beliefs and to rationally assess, possibly for the first time, whether they serve you or whether they hold you back.
Spoiler Alert: You may even be surprised to discover that the negative beliefs you had about yourself were never really about you at all and originated from someone else’s projected insecurities.
If body dysmorphia or merely negative self-talk is limiting the life you want to live, then you can connect with me with an obligation-free discovery call to find out some tried and tested strategies that would change your mindset from not being beach body ready to being prepared to take on the world.
