Just F*cking Do It

OK, now you have uncovered your stories and chosen to embrace a new self-image, it is time to strengthen that self-image and cement it in, just like a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

So, let me ask you something: do you believe in yourself? Let me go further: do you love yourself? This isn’t a trick question where you answer yes, and I then point and laugh and call you an egotistical big head. I am being deadly serious.

Why do I ask this? Well, self-love was a term I only heard in my late twenties. Self-hate was something I was pretty good at practising and I’ve noticed the same among the general population. ‘I am so fat’, I would ruthlessly tell myself on repeat. I would secretly resent the size-6 girls around me, wishing they would binge-eat McDonald’s Big Macs and put on weight to make me look like the slim one! For me to control what I was eating seemed much harder than the self-loathing and cycles of crazy-ass dieting that led me down a long dark road to absolutely nowhere. Your body is meant to be a temple, but mine was more like a kebab shop.

I spent most of my mid-teens and early twenties yo-yo dieting, dabbling in suspicious diet pills that I purchased online, and, shamefully, even contemplating how to make cotton wool palatable as I had read that models ate it to make them full, with zero calories. Serious shit goes down when you hate the body you live in. We don’t punish, berate, condemn or consider stuffing ourselves like one of those toys at Build-A-Bear if we love ourselves. We don’t punish our bodies with excessive alcohol, narcotics and highly processed fast food on a regular basis if we respect the only body we are given.

We currently have an epidemic of extreme self-love deficiency which has resulted in millions of people treating themselves pretty badly. Self-love isn’t some airy-fairy, namby-pamby, sunshine crap meant only for girls or boys who have lost their balls – it’s important. A lack of self-love and self-belief is linked to a plethora of psychological problems from underachievement at school and work to anxiety and depression, alcohol and substance abuse.

A personal experience

I have seen at first-hand how a lack of self-love can tear people’s lives apart, because it results in suffering. It was winter 2010 and I was staying at my family home and enduring yet another night of emotional bullying by a man who supposedly loved us. My mum had gone out and left me at home with my stepdad and I overheard him on the phone saying how awful we all were. He was in an intoxicated state. I felt my blood boiling. I ran downstairs and I saw the bottle of vodka on the side and grabbed it. I frantically took the lid off and started pouring it down the sink. I was shaking from a mixture of anger and adrenaline at the fear of being caught, but this bottle was the antagonist in all of our lives.

In a sudden flash, my stepdad came running over, his face so red I thought it was going to explode. ‘What are you doing?’ he bellowed. I started screaming at him: ‘It is KILLING YOU.’ I was fighting back the tears and still shaking from the adrenaline coursing through my blood.

I looked at him towering over me ready to strike. ‘Hit me, then,’ I shouted. ‘Go on and then I can call the police and you can finally be out of here.’

He stopped in his tracks, threw some more verbal abuse at me and walked away. I ran upstairs and wept. How had this amazing man whom we loved so dearly turned into this monster? The man who married our mother and who we so proudly called our stepdad. A man who used to treat us like family.

My stepdad was an alcoholic. I say ‘was’ because only a few days ago, as I write this, he sadly passed away with a terminal liver disease. I hear on a daily basis that alcoholism is a disease and almost out of the addict’s control. Yep, a disease of the mind. A disease where suffering turns into a way of life and where the only way out for someone is to anaesthetize the pain with a litre of vodka a day.

My stepdad had lost his self-belief. He had no self-love and believed that the world was out to get him. He had lost control in his suffering. Please understand that he was not a horrible man. He had been possessed by the pain of his own self-loathing. Suffering is always linked to how someone thinks about a situation and my stepdad had learned to become helpless, refusing to believe he was good enough, and medicated this feeling with alcohol. One of my motivations when I became a coach was to help people understand that the meaning we give to a situation can help us move past it. That even in our darkest moments, we have a choice to change how we think. That, however difficult, there is always an opportunity to see it through different eyes.

The truth about self-love

There is real irony here because growing up we are taught that ‘loving yourself’ is a negative thing and we associate it with being big-headed, narcissistic or egotistical. But when we love ourselves fully, we don’t treat our body and mind like an enemy. If it were possible to record the things I would tell myself in my head when I was depressed, most people would be appalled, yet so many of us have a playlist of punishing phrases on repeat inside our skulls, berating the one person we are stuck with for life. Yep, we are stuck with ourselves till death do us part so we should be way nicer to ourselves.

Self-love goes way deeper than running yourself a hot bath or treating yourself to a handbag. Self-love is the ability to be really honest with yourself about what you aren’t happy about so you can actually sort it out. Self-love is accepting and owning all parts of your story – however dark those chapters may be. Self-love is accepting your whole journey and the person it’s made you instead of condemning yourself for not getting it right. Self-love is having the discipline to go for what you really want – whether that’s loving yourself more in order to leave the partner who is making you miserable, finally quitting the sugar that is giving you diabetes, or actually going for your dreams so you can be the happiest version of you.

A lack of self-love could be less in your face than alcoholism and lurk more deeply in your subconscious. You might be holding a belief at your core that you are not worthy of the money, the love or the body you desire, which then manifests as you subconsciously take actions that sabotage your success.

The level of love that you have for yourself will determine the actions that you decide to take. If you don’t believe you are worthy of financial abundance, you are less likely to take the risks necessary to build your finances or to take the leap of faith to start that business or go for that promotion. If you don’t see that you are deserving of perfectly toned abs or a J-Lo booty, you are less likely to put the time into working out, since ‘it’s all a waste of time and money and won’t help anyway’. If you do not believe you are worthy of that ‘happily ever after’, you are more likely to either withhold your love or turn into a total psychopath who ends up subconsciously creating arguments in an attempt to break up the relationship at every twist and turn.

I’m guilty as charged on all of the above. How about you?

Self-love is not something that you are born with or born without. It does not depend on how successful you are, and it is not a personality trait. Loving yourself is a way of life, a daily ritual – a practice. The truth is, lots of people look at me now and see a happy, bubbly, successful, confident woman because they don’t see the war wounds. I have spiritually lasered away the scars of my past and they are not detectable to the naked eye. They are there, though. But instead of letting the pain define me, I have let it teach me. Instead of holding on to the past which resulted in me punishing myself, I have learned to forgive myself so I can truly move forward. I made a decision to love myself, not just like myself, because loving myself is so much more powerful. You too can choose to shamelessly believe in and love yourself.

So how do you make that all-important shift from the clutches of condemnation into the happier, more loving relationship with the one person you spend all your time with? Well, Step 1 is forgiving yourself for the past – letting go of anything that has to led you to believe today that you are unworthy. Step 2 is embracing life in spite of the fear (which shows up in various forms) because you love yourself enough to go and find that biggest version of yourself. And Step 3 is respecting your journey enough to be grateful for all the highs, the lows and the three loop-the-loops that got you here.

‘As you love yourself, life loves you back,’ writes Kamal Ravikant in Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It. ‘I don’t think it has a choice either. I can’t explain how it works, but I know it to be true.’

Let’s talk about the F-word

As you may have gathered, I like words beginning with f, but it’s not just the ‘rude’ ones. I happen to have two other F-words that I think are pertinent in this magical journey of self-discovery. The first is faith (we have covered that already, in Chapter 2) and the second is forgiveness.

Forgiving yourself and also forgiving others in spite of what they have done is one of the hardest actions on the path towards self-love that we can take. You see, when you embrace this loving yourself malarkey, it shows that you are willing to put your own energy first. Holding on to your resentment towards others because they weren’t good enough in your eyes affects your energy mojo terribly, which in turn affects your ability to create a much more abundant life.

SARAH’S STORY

Take Sarah. When Sarah was five years old, her mother left her to be brought up by her much older and retired father. From the ages of five to 13, she only saw her mother once a year. She went to a school in a nice area where everyone seemed to have a lot of money and, in Sarah’s words, belonged to ‘perfect’ families with ‘normal’ lives.

Sarah felt uncherished and unloved compared to her friends, and she started to form a belief that she wasn’t good enough to be loved, which was why, she thought, her mother had left. She carried this horrible thought lodged in her subconscious until she was 35.

When we started working together she told me she was scared of having a successful business. As I delved deeper, it became clear that she didn’t really believe she deserved the success because she didn’t believe she was good enough. Let’s face it, if you didn’t feel loved by those who brought you into the world, why would you learn to love yourself or believe in yourself?

Her fear of success was just a way of keeping herself small. She needed to forgive her parents, let go of any resentment and make peace with the fact that these beliefs she had formed were totally false. There was a little girl inside Sarah who needed some loving and healing, and that meant taking the time to acknowledge that her self-worth as an adult had nothing to do with how she was treated as a child.

I wonder whether you can relate to Sarah’s story. I know I can. When I was 11 years old, my life changed when two girls of the same age and very close to me confided in me that they had been sexually abused. They swore me to secrecy, and as a loyal 11-year-old I kept schtum. Even though I was only 11, I remember fully understanding the gravity of what sexual abuse was. I inherently knew that something very, very wrong had happened and cried hysterically when I found out. But I promised to keep it a secret and consequently felt a level of responsibility that no 11-year-old child should have to bear.

As I grew older, the secret became heavier. It caused me to have terrifying nightmares, but I could never tell people why. I felt a palpable level of guilt that I had let these girls down. Of course, I hadn’t. I was 11 years old, but I created a deep-rooted belief which then manifested in me developing the first signs of depression when I was about 12. I lived with this secret for almost a decade before reaching out to tell someone. Shortly after, the perpetrator died and so got away with it. The anger and the guilt festered inside me for years to come and subconsciously I didn’t believe that I was deserving of success.

When I was 12 my parents divorced. Unlike for most children, this was a welcome change. I had lived in a war zone for most of my childhood and had been caught in between two parents who had no clue how to make each other happy. During this time, I was also getting bullied at school by a girl who was determined to make my life a misery. I went to a girls' school and … well, girls can be pretty nasty. This girl would go out of her way to exclude me and, as someone who suffered from a chronic need to be loved and accepted, this hurt like hell. I’ll never forget the time that one of the girls had a party and proceeded to invite everyone in my year, bar me. It seems so trivial now but at the time it felt like a physical punch in the face. I still to this day don’t know what she found so offensive about me. I had never really fitted in with any of the cliques, and I remember always feeling deeply uncomfortable as I was always trying hard to conform.

Aged 16, I fell in love for the second time. He was five years older and drove a car, which made him super-cool, and initially he made me feel like a million dollars. The kudos of dating an older guy gave me serious street cred at school and elevated my status from total loser to at least slightly cool. And he made me laugh and I loved him.

But things started to unravel quickly. I started to drink a lot at the weekends, especially as I could get into pubs and clubs because I was with my older boyfriend. He was very controlling, emotionally manipulative and insanely jealous, and he used my heart as a punchbag. There was an incident when we were in the pub and I was talking to one of his friends. He walked up to me and started calling me names and then proceeded to pour a whole pint of beer over me: ‘No one will like you now,’ he sneered. I remember the devastating humiliation and the belief that he was right. And yes, like most girls who don’t value themselves, I stuck around for more because I loved him.

The lowest point was waiting in the hospital as he had his stomach pumped after he tried to commit suicide by over-dosing. Thank God he survived, but soon after he told me that it was my fault that he had wanted to kill himself. With his threats of suicide and the petty humiliations he inflicted on to me, he co-opted me into his own internal emotional warfare. That’s when I started to develop anxiety and a lot of bad thoughts. It felt like I had an invisible emotional cord that bound me to him, and the cord was just getting tighter and tighter and I didn’t know how to untie myself. This boy I loved so deeply I also hated deeply.

I kept wondering why everything, even at the age of 16, felt so hard. If life was this hard, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to participate any more. By the time I was 16, I was on Prozac^®. I distinctly remember being in my GP’s surgery and explaining to her that I just didn’t feel like I could go on. There were days when I felt fine and happy (usually if I was out getting drunk) but most days I just felt low. I actually stopped taking the antidepressants after a month and I finally ended that toxic relationship months later after he turned physically abusive one evening.

I desperately wanted someone to notice me and love me, to help me feel better. I had developed a deep-seated anxiety that I later realized stemmed from a fear of people hurting me. I was so frightened that I wasn’t good enough, and I couldn’t bear the feeling of heartbreak that comes with rejection. The anxiety was sometimes so unbearable that I could barely breathe, and my heart would pound so hard I was convinced that it would break through my chest and split me in half.

The anxiety was strongest when I was in relationships, yet ironically I was so desperate for love that I went from one relationship to another. It was a vicious cycle in which I truly believed that my happiness lay in the hands of another person. I was always waiting for Prince Charming to come and make me feel truly happy, and yet every time I entered a new relationship the anxiety would return. Although there were some wonderful times, I always found myself dealing with an undercurrent of fear that this person would hurt me or leave me. Naturally enough, this fear made me act like a total looney, and consequently each and every one of those relationships ended, leaving me depleted and drained.

At 20 years old, when I was dumped yet again, I discovered the greatest antidote to pain – cocaine. It felt great to anaesthetize the suffering. I was someone else every time I snorted a line of that white powder; I was strong, powerful, carefree and fun. I was the life and soul and my confidence was on another level. I was popular and funny and outrageous. I could look my ex in the eye and send him a metaphorical ‘Fuck you’, even though inside I desperately wanted him back.

Soon after, I also started using ecstasy. I was having fun and going out as much as I could. It gave me the excuse to get high as a kite. But where there is an up there is always an almighty down. The comedowns were horrific. My anxiety worsened, my low days became lower and I started suffering from insomnia and leg spasms. As anybody who has experienced insomnia knows, it’s nothing short of torture to be awake all night with only your own thoughts.

I was a party girl, but it was only in hindsight that I realized that the fun was there as a distraction from myself. And, quite honestly, I didn’t like myself at all. I hated my body, I hated the fact I was single, and I hated the fact I had anxiety because it was ruining all my relationships. So, you see, I understand how easy it is to fall out of love with yourself. I felt like my life was a mess.

I know that I’m not alone in my experience. Most of us have such a fraught relationship with ourselves that we look for love and happiness from outside of ourselves. We base our joy on the validation and acceptance given by others. Depending on others to make you happy, as I did, is hugely disempowering and results in you becoming needy, possessive and jealous.

I finally learned that, until I loved myself, I would never truly feel the happiness of being loved by another. So many people think that we need to be in love with another person to shine, whereas, in fact, it’s when we learn to love ourselves first that we truly blossom.

When I started a brand-new relationship with me, that was when my marriage changed for the best and I engaged in a deeper, more respectful relationship based on mutual appreciation instead of reliance.

Forgiving yourself

All of the experiences I went through put a mental stamp on my brain, and all your experiences will have done the same. So, forgiving yourself is really crucial. Your pain and mistakes, when properly examined, can become your spiritual director, and it’s actually those times of great distress that will provide you with an opportunity to find your inner gold and the lessons that will help you become the best version of yourself.

I want you to write down a list of mistakes you have made in your life. Things you regret. Things that you wish you had done differently.

Now I want you to write what you learned from each of them.

Now go through each one, cross it out and repeat: ‘I forgive myself, I love myself.’

Forgiving others

The people who cause us pain or anger – they are our most important teachers. They are the ones who indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness. Blaming others or, even worse, blaming yourself for things in the past will not help you move forward into the future, and so it is incredibly important for you to acknowledge that, as well as forgiving yourself, you also have to forgive those you feel have wronged you.

Forgiveness does not make what they did right. It doesn’t mean you negate the fact that what they have done is wrong. To forgive someone is you powerfully saying, ‘I no longer choose to hold on to the bad energy that this resentment or blame is giving me.’ It’s about you choosing to love yourself more than your anger and pain.

I want you to write down a list of people who have hurt you and towards whom you still hold some negative energy.

Now I want you to write a letter a forgiveness to each of them. You don’t need to give it to them if you don’t want – this is more about you taking it out of your brain and putting it down on to paper. This conscious acknowledgement of forgiveness will be powerful.

Remember, true happiness comes when you can be thankful for an experience, whether it’s positive or negative, and forgiveness is an important part of this thankfulness. In order for you to move forward, you must let go of all the pain in the past.

Don’t fake it till you make it

Choosing to love yourself takes courage as it requires you to accept your truth, accept your story and understand that you have the power to change it. Keeping up the pretty picture that your life is perfect when internally you feel the opposite will leave you feeling emotionally and mentally depleted.

While reading this book you may have gathered by now that one of my dreams was to be on stage. So, when I got offered the opportunity to be an extra in a film, I jumped at the chance. No, I wouldn’t get a starring role, but I would finally get to experience what it was like to be in a film. I was flown out to Spain to take part in a scene on a boat in The Inbetweeners. If you were to watch the film now and flick through to the boat party scene, you would see sunshine, dancing, happy faces and a glorious scene of teenage debauchery on holiday.

The reality on set was a very different story. First, it was freezing, as there was a cold wind blowing. The boat was filled with fake-tanned extras fighting over big brown blankets to keep themselves warm and popping seasickness tablets in an attempt not to throw up on one other. Sometimes filming five minutes of the final film would take hours of shooting. The whole experience, in short, was a far cry from the glamorous lifestyle I had pictured as a child.

It was that week that I finally dropped the dream of being an actress. Truth be told, a lot of people keep up this pretence that their life is the perfectly edited blockbuster when behind the scenes they are cold, sick and huddling glumly under a blanket: the woman who refuses to share with her friends that her husband is cheating for fear of being judged; the man who puts on the front of a happy marriage to cover up the fact that he’s gay; the lawyer who goes home and drinks every night because his successful career is burning him out.

Trying to keep your shit together and be perfect is exhausting. Keeping up appearances for fear that someone may see the real you is a sure-fire route to end at misery hotel. Self-love means having the honesty and courage to look your life in the eyes without blinking and ask yourself: ‘Is this what I truly want? Am I being the person I truly want to be?’

Say no

Loving yourself also means choosing yourself and managing your energy so that you can be as high-vibe as possible and totally in your manifesting lane. Imagine yourself as a generator of energy. You need to be full of positive vibes and every time you choose to do something that doesn’t energize you, it’s like you are throwing a cord out of your generator which causes an energy leak. You are allowed to be selfish and put yourself first. When you acknowledge that your energy is crucial to your success, you will fiercely prevent any energy leaks happening.

ELLA’S STORY

I would like you to meet Ella. Ella was a chronic pleaser and found it hard to let anybody down. This meant that she was forever saying yes to everyone and everything, which meant she never had time for herself. Not only was this physically draining but also mentally and energetically because every time she had to say yes to something that didn’t light her up she felt resentful. When your heart is not in something and you say yes, it’s because your Ego is telling you that you are a bad person, so instead of behaving in alignment with your desire, you are acting and faking it.

Stop asking for opinions

One way to trust and love yourself is to drop your need for validation from others. We all do it. That moment in the changing room where you look at yourself in the mirror and secretly think you look epic and yet you still turn to your friend and ask for their opinion. How many times have you asked someone if they prefer your hair one way, or whether they like your outfit, or their opinion on the big life decisions you need to make?

When you honour yourself, you don’t wait for someone else to tell you if you look good or are making a good choice. You love yourself enough to make that decision for yourself and embrace it boldly. Yes, there will be occasions when you do truly require a second opinion but make those occurrences a rarity. Get good at validating yourself.

Make every day your birthday!

I explained earlier that self-love is a practice and part of that is celebrating yourself. In this fast-paced world of go-go-go, we don’t take a moment to really reflect on how far we have already come. When was the last time you actually just stopped and took the time to celebrate and reward yourself? If you struggle with this idea, you aren’t alone.

I used to believe that celebrating yourself only happened on your birthday and even then it was about other people celebrating me. I never just sat down and said, ‘Hey, Noor, you’ve done good.’ If you are constantly doing and not being, you will miss out on all the beautiful moments in life. Sometimes, we just take life too seriously and become so attached to the final outcome that we forget to enjoy the journey.

JASMIN’S STORY

Jasmin is an entrepreneur and a mother, and her days get busy. Every morning she would write down a huge to-do list and at the end of the day her mind would become fixated on the things that she hadn’t ticked off, instead of the things that she had. Instead of acknowledging and celebrating herself for getting the stuff done, she had fallen into the trap of beating herself up for what she hadn’t.

This is a big middle finger up to the Universe and a sure-fire way of tuning in to ShitFM. Don’t wait until you’ve reached your goals to give yourself a round of applause. When you take time every day to acknowledge the little actions that you are taking towards the achievement of your goals, you strengthen those actions. The Universe loves a party and every time you congratulate yourself for getting through a day and moving closer towards your goals, you are tuning in to the right frequency.

When you celebrate your successes, it will motivate you to achieve more, which in turn will skyrocket your confidence. When you do so, you are telling the Universe that you are unstoppable, and this, in turn, attracts more positive energy into your life. Are you ready to own your amazingness?

You deserve to have your accomplishments recognized even if they are small. If you don’t celebrate yourself, then who will?

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Self love is more than just running a bath. It’s a deep appreciation for yourself and all of your story.

• Until you love yourself, you will never fully allow your deepest desires to appear.

• Forgiveness of yourself and others is crucial.

• It’s OK to say no and be selfish.

• Celebrate yourself, every goddamn day.

JFDI!

Dance like nobody is watching!

Spend one minute every day celebrating your life – make every day your birthday. It will put you into a high vibrational state. Go to your list of goals and write down one thing you will do for yourself every time you achieve each one – whether that’s to buy a gift, have a glass of champagne or book a trip away, just decide how you will celebrate.

Life is not a race. When you learn to find the fun in the journey, the destination feels all the more worthwhile.