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Tag: authenticity

70% of women were hunters.

Another piece of evidence that we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing…

Yes, they did it! Proof that women were hunters too. About 70% of them. In fact, they were the ones making the tools. ( so what were the men doing, you might ask?) Anyway, we are done now, right, with this weird patriarchal stuff that we keep telling ourselves??

We carry our assigned genders as if they define our personalities. We dream within the unnatural limitations that come with those labels. We are male or female first, the rest of our lives gets decided from there. Women are more tempted to stay at home, men go to work while they can be as ambitious as they want to, nobody is going to bring them down for it. They might be judged, however, when they want to care.

But that division is not natural people.

There is nothing natural about women being the cares, and men being the providers. I can tell you what natural is, though. Wanne hear it? Might change a thing or two.

It is about what you naturally do best.

You are a person first and foremost. So when we are young we aren’t supposed to be limited by our assigned gender. We are supposed to be free, developing ourselves in a unlimited way. Doing what comes naturally. Meaning, we get to find out what we love to do and get really good at it.

That is what we are supposed to do.

So, back then, if you were good at hunting, or making tools, you would do that. And be a mother or a father if that was your path. But you were the most beneficial to the group doing what you did best. So people wouldn’t question your existence, it was clear you were contributing to the group!

So what on earth are we doing now?

Three minutes after a baby is born their parents start to treat the baby differently according to their gender. Defining them, limiting them. Making it unable to ever reach its full potential because they have to live, work and dream withing that limit. And that I haven’t even begon talking about what happens when a pregnant person discovers that they are pregnant with either a boy or a girl. They will start to treat their pregnant body differently affecting that fetus before it is even born. This might not be so different in the individual scale, but I think we can see what it does on the scale of, well, the full population of the planet that know the gender of the baby before it is born.

So, we are here now. Until now our lives have been determent by our gender. Our dreams were infected by it, our chances, our choices for education, everything. The way we move and how-easy-it-is-to-hammer-something-into-a-wall has been effected by our assigned gender at birth. How to get everything out of life that it has for you, and not just what you are supposed to have?

Because this stuff affects us. If you have that feeling, right now, that you can’t find our purpose, it may be because you are trying to find it within the limitations of your label. If you feel that you might not be contributing to society as much as you could, it may be that your label is limiting you. In the best case, your label isn’t limiting you anymore, but society might be limiting you because they see you as your label and not as the individual that you truly are.

So think back. Find out if you are truly free as who you are; what is it that crosses your mind every now and then, that you love to do but didn’t because it was hard choosing for it? You would have been the only one, voicing the desire. You would have been the only one of your gender sitting in that particular classroom? If you think back to the things that you decided were not for you, than you get a hint at how you are limiting your existence. What you should try out.

At the very least, now that you know all this, try not to be afraid to admit it, anymore. For me, personally, I whished that I was expected to be handy as much as my brothers. Now, whenever I want to hang a shelve and I can’t get the drill in the wall properly, I ask one of the men in my family to do it for me. It takes them a few seconds, they are more experienced than me. But each time I see them finish my work, I realize that is wasn’t that hard. I know I can already do it a lot better than quite a few men.

So what if you secretly dreamt about being a stay at home dad? Or if you wanted to be in IT as a female or in nurse-school as a male? Ok, so maybe it is hard imagining that you would do it from the start all over again. At the very least start admitting to yourself that this, where you are now, isn’t really where you wanted to go. Maybe then you might find a way to let some of those dreams come true. While you are there, changing your life to a place where you feel much more at easy and happy with it, start pointing a finger at the real problem. The thing that made life harder for all of us, not just women. The thing that defines who we are before we have even started to find out who we are. That patriarchy with its labels and its rewards if you adhere to what it has to say. Then maybe, just maybe, we won’t limit the others that come after us as much as we did ourselves.

Self-expression is everything that you do that others can see.

If you base what you do and what you look like on what you THINK is expected of you, you won’t really like your life and everything in it.

Now, the first time you read that, it may sound very obvious.

But most of the decisions that we make are based on external expectations!

We have been taught that a happy life means having a family, it is hard to be different, if you are someone who doesn’t want children you will find yourself having to explain yourself million of times!

We live under the impression that it is your fault if you seem to be unable to choose the right education and the right job from the available options, it seems to work for everyone else, you must be at flaw if it doesn’t work for you!

And you know that if you don’t know what to wear it simply means that you aren’t very good at spotting trends and that it is YOUR fault if you cannot find the joy in fashion!

That is only a snippet of the ideas that exist that put a little, or a lot, of pressure on you.

We are not taught that it is okay to be doing something differently, just because you feel you want to.

And that means that you feel right now that miss something in your life.

That is where I come in.

I help you to be who you really are, and take decisions from that place.

I believe that you KNOW what and how you want to do things, but it is just snowed in.

You have been taught not to believe in yourself.

In your veins runs blood that thinks it’s not good enough.
The cells of your body are trained to keep you form speaking up, because that might make you the next target.
You looks are devoted to not-stand-out and to be appealing to as many people as possible.

I help you to find the strength to believe in yourself and your dreams.

To make sure that you do what you need to do to create that life.

That life that you love to wake up to.

You can live you life as an Icon.

I believe everybody has an inner Icon that wants to come out, but we keep that from happening, either through self-sabotage or because of how we are brought up.

An Icon knows who they are, what they want and how they want to do it.

They have a unique style to them, that is anchored in their authenticity.

There is just so much fake, there is a need for real and for honest.

But…

Being who you are, while others can see you, is hard.

It is the most vulnerable thing you can do.

But not being who you are, drains you.

If it is bad, it will get you a life that you do not really want.

(speaking from experience, see the about me page)

At any point you can start to take back your life.

(Or your marketing.)

And start to share a message that you truly believe in.

Show up for yourself unapologetically.

Wherever it is you want to be seen.

If you, like most of my clients, want to finally do what you really want to do and how you want to do it, we need to talk.

Most of the people I work with want to be honest and real in their communication, in their lives.

They want to be authentic and free from the fear that holds them back.

Let me know if you want that too, cause I dig that sh*t.

I want to help you to feel strong and be successful because of who you really are, not despite of who you are.

Jealousy as a guide.

When you look at how you look, it is normal to also look at how other people look. Lets take a look at at that!

Okay, that was a joke, I am not saying it is a good one. But I want to talk to you about how and why we, yes look, at other people, especially when it makes us feel bad!

Obviously if you can look at your friend, who has just lost all of her pregnancy weight and looks stunning in that newly (made) dress, you can feel different things. If you only feel good, for her, than you are fine. But if you look at her and get ideas in your head like, I wish I looked like that, or; if only I could also lose those extra pounds that I carry around, than something needs to change.

I have seen different ways of how people are tackling jealously. For example, they try not to feel it, which is understandable, as you might actually not feel super well about not wishing your friend to feel great. Some take it as a que, they make themselves think of compliments to give to others when they feel a streak of jealously coming up. I imagine telling your friend she looks lovely with clenching jaws still comes across as slightly false. You might want to start a different approach to tackling jealousy.

Jealousy can help you to plot a course for a life that you love. It might make you feel horrible until you realize what you need to change and put your energy towards that. Or it will stop hurting when you have realized that you just cannot change some things and you need to change your perspective.

You see somebody that has something you want and you can feel the “auch” coming up from inside. That might be things that they own, or they have a relationship or a child that you want but do not have. Or it is that girl around the corner that seems to sport the right colours every year, that gets you thinking: “every f*ck*ng season she nails it”, that sort of thing. The feeling lingers inside yourself like a sort of; If only I had or, If only I was….

Hate to brake it to you, but that rocks.

There is something inside you telling you what is not right about your life right now. But that doesn’t mean that all you need to do is get what they have and than the feeling will disappear. Think about it like this, what if you would have that dress that she is wearing, combined with those shoes, would they really look good on you? Or would that simply be her style that you are emulating? So what is it that your jealousy is trying to tell you?

Your jealousy is trying to tell you what you need. In the case of the fashionable girl around the corner, you do not want that dress and those shoes, but the confidence that what you are wearing is perfect for you. You need to feel and think through this jealousy to find out what it is that makes you feel this way. It is never what you think it is about initially. Something superficial will spark jealousy, while the solution is on a deeper layer.

I want to share with you a personal story, to illustrate… I am a tall brown-haired Dutch girl. My family is pretty strong. My grandfather is rumored to have saved his tractor from a ditch in his heydays using only his hands. My brother singlehandedly lifts washing machines up stairs and my mum used to be a pretty good shot putter in college, according to my dad…

Knowing what my genes are, I still used to envy short and petit build women. I felt they were closer to how women were supposed to look. And if I was unhappy with how I looked I decided that eating less was the way to go instead of working out. Working out would make me look bigger in no time, because I would increase the size of my muscles.

Eating less to look more like how I wanted to look had never worked for me, not in the way that I wanted to anyway. I was just too tall to be petit! It was absolutely ridiculous to want to be so different from who I was. I was just unhappy with who I was and decided that the total opposite was the way to go. I had to do some inner work in order to tackle this one.

That didn’t start with how I looked, nor with my wardrobe. I had all kinds of characteristics that didn’t fit in with what I thought a woman should be like. Not just how she should look but also what she should endure, how she should express herself and how she should live her life. And they didn’t make any sense with who I was.

But I had tucked that away somewhere far.

Only until I started to give myself some room to be and show who I was, often starting with what I wore, I started to realize that I didn’t want to be a long haired blond delicately playing the violin. Or the harp. With her perfect long fingers and her long eyelashes. I am a girl that sometimes listens to Rammstein, loves Lara Croft and knows a thing or two about Klingons.

in the background of this picture there is a little something that I would have never added to my home a few years ago… Can you recognize what it is?

The funny thing is, I always liked Lara Croft. She is more a role-model from my past than my present. Why I gave the idea of the perfect woman being petit more attention that Lara, has to do with feeling insecure and a negative feeling of self-worth.

Now, today, totally accepting the Lara in me, I am working out more than I ever did before. And I love it. It has shaped my body in a way that I would have never liked in the past. But changing my perspective means that I do love how my body looks now. I am not saying it is perfect, but it looks strong. (Want to know something funny, for those of you struggling with your weight, I now weigh exactly what I always wanted to weigh. Letting go of looking trying to look like a skinny model meant I now have habits that work better for who I am…)

It also means that I do not want to look like a petit woman anymore. I still think they look fantastic, and I mean it. It doesn’t make me feel envious anymore. Because they look great, but what the you-know, I look great too. Those things can co-exist. And if you do not feel that I look great, you are not ma thang!