Spa+Clinic Team Do you find yourself endlessly scrolling through Instagram, blogs and Facebook, seeing perfect images while feeling smaller and smaller yet we can’t pull your eyes away?
“We become infatuated with comparing our lives with others’,” says Cassie Mendoza-Jones, a Sydney-based kinesiologist, naturopath and coach in her new book You Are Enough.
“Not just to people we know but also celebrities, or wellness and fitness gurus who seem to have the perfect life.
“While their intent may be to inspire and motivate you with positive messages, nobody is perfect. Perfectionism is exhausting. What if we are enough just the way we are?
“I know how painful it can feel to compare yourself to others, day after day, goal after goal, achievement after achievement.
“It’s a never-ending cycle of fear, resentment, punishment, pain and perceived ‘emotional’ profit.
“We think that if we finally reach the pinnacle of our goals, dreams and desires we’ll be the happiest we’ve ever been; we think we can profit from the sense of achievement in ways that support us mentally, emotionally and spiritually.”
You Are Enough urges readers that it’s okay not to feel happy all of the time.
“It’s about knowing how you really want to feel, not how you think you should feel, then taking action to feel that way,” Cassie says.
“I wrote and re-wrote the first line of my book a dozen times. Only a couple of years ago, my inner perfectionist and personal critic would have ranted and raged at me to create the most perfect opening line in the history of opening lines of first books.
“While I used to listen to `her’ and bend to her unkind ways, we now have a strange and wonderful sort of relationship; I can acknowledge her need for perfection and balance it with my need for momentum, ease and grace.
“I realised the best way to start [my] book was to simply start it, knowing that what I ended up writing would be the right thing to write.
“If you’re a perfectionist too, if you always listen to your inner critic who tells you you’re not good enough and that you never will be, if you constantly worry about everything and wonder what people are thinking of you, and if you never trust yourself or know how to listen to and follow your own guidance, you’re in the right place.
“A few years ago, I would never have left the house with wet hair, or hair that wasn’t straightened, without some bronzer, mascara and eyeliner – what would people think of me?!
“Am I able to do this now because I care less about my appearance? Oh, no. I’m able to do this because I care more for my sense of self-worth and I know that, makeup or no makeup, I’m still okay.
“The way I explain it to my clients is that self-worth is more than confidence.
“It’s a deeply rooted self-belief, knowing that we are doing enough, doing the right thing, and that we don’t need to earn our stripes or become more accomplished, before we think we’re good enough.
“Negative thoughts that keep telling you that you’ll only be more when you work harder – I want to help people understand what their body is trying to tell them; when they’re burning out and pushing themselves to their limits in the name of self-worth, achievement and perfectionism.
“I know all of this because I’ve lived it and because I’ve been able to support hundreds of people through a place of crushing self-comparison, perfectionism and low self-worth, to a place where they value, love, honour and respect themselves.”
