Last weekend I attended the 10th Annual Disney Dreamers Academy where Lisa Nichols was speaking. The focus of her presentation was having the courage to disrupt your life and follow your dreams, and at the end of her talk she asked audience members to participate in an exercise in which they were repeatedly asked by another attendee: What's up with you right now? And in the second round: What are you ready for?
To demonstrate, Nichols had someone from the audience ask her these questions and one thing that's up with her, she said, is learning how to get comfortable in her new body after losing a great deal of weight. It was a struggle I could relate to and didn't quite conquer; hence my current weight loss go 'round. And when I asked the transformational coach about her process to self-acceptance and what mental hurdles have come up along the way, she said this:
"As a full-figured woman I was so brutal to myself in my head; I was very unkind. And it's embarrassing to say that but I was very unkind to myself about my weight. Everything else I was decent about. Everything else I gave myself grace. But when it came to my weight, I only gave myself one path to weight release and if I didn't do that that way, the way everyone else did it...then I was a loser. And it's the quiet hell that we put ourselves through.
"It was never about being a size 8 or 6 for me," she added. "It was about allowing myself to be seen from the neck down."
As Nichols points out in the video below, her words brought me to tears and they still do whenever I watch the video because brutal is an absolutely accurate descriptor of how I've treated myself and sometimes still do because I don't like what I see from the neck down. And like her, it's the one area of my life where I've been unwavering in my criticism. I'm not even certain how Nichols found the courage to share those words with me, as I felt embarrassed just standing before her, knowing that she could see the lack of grace I've extended myself. But I'm so thankful that she did because I know I'm not alone.
Watch the full interview and share your thoughts below.