Beauty and The Female Psyche

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Paula Facci, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

This past year, I had the honour of hosting the Dove South Africa # ChooseBeautiful launch events in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa.

As a professional within the self-development and personal-transformational industry, I find it both inspiring and absolutely essential, that the Dove brand continues to evoke new conversations around how women relate to beauty and themselves.

Over the past decade, Dove has been instrumental in debunking the stereotypes around beauty, challenging women’s perceptions and also celebrating every woman’s unique beauty potential.

An evolution in uncovering the real truth about beauty
This week, at the launch events of Dove’s #ChooseBeautiful Campaign, a fresh conversation was ignited amongst women. Dove asked: Is feeling beautiful also a choice? And if so, how can women be empowered to make this choice for themselves every day?

In the new Dove #ChooseBeautiful film, women are faced with the option of walking through two possible doorways, as they enter into malls in five major cities across the globe. One door market “Beautiful” and the other “Average”. When confronted with these two options, many women were perplexed and chose to walk through the “Average” door instead.

Joining the Dove Journey
When receiving the brief for this launch and after viewing the film for the first, second and third time, I found myself feeling really emotional, even a bit teary. It really struck a chord with me. Why would these women choose to see themselves as “Average” and actually walk through that door? Why as women do we do this to ourselves? Why are we so self-critical? Dove research also reveals that only 4% of women choose the word Beautiful to describe themselves. My view is that our biology might have a lot more to do with the way we relate to ourselves and the world, than we realize.

Survival of the prettiest
Firstly, in the book by Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest – The Science of Beauty, it is suggested that our obsession with beauty, it merely a consequence of the process of natural selection. The most attractive of the species, are more likely to secure a mate for procreation and thereby promotes the survival of the species. Therefore we are naturally inclined to be focused and pre-occupied with beauty and appearance, regardless of what images are projected by Hollywood or the media.

We are wired for negativity
Secondly our brains are naturally wired towards negativity. This phenomenon is called the Negativity Bias. Due to our survival instincts, our brain is programmed to notice, focus, and dwell on negative experiences. In the hunter-gatherer days it was imperative to remember that the last time we walked a specific route, there was a dangerous predator that lived nearby. So our brain is almost like velcro for negative experiences. Not only does negativity stick, but positive experiences are hardly noticed, and merely pass through our awareness and floats through our brain, easily forgotten. No wonder we are so prone to see and focus only on our worst traits and flaws.

The Amygdala-hijack
Another factor which impacts the way we operate our lives, is our Psychological Threat response. Our brain has not evolved to distinguish between an immediate threat to our survival, a Physical Threat, versus a Psychological Threat, such as a social threat. So whether we are chased by a lion, or threatened by a burglar in more modern terms, or a new colleague is appointed in our department which might threaten our autonomy or status, our bodies go into exactly the same threat response to secure our survival. We undergo, what has been termed an Amygdala-hijack.

All our physical and mental resources are deployed to fight for our survival and our primal part of our brain takes over. We go into fight, flight or freeze mode and the parts of our brain responsible for rational, logical, creative thinking and problem solving, shuts down. We in fact dumb-down and our abilities to make decisions and take action, become impaired. We then make highly reactive decisions and might act in ways that could seem counter productive or even like self-sabotage.

Our Sub-conscious mind directs our lives
The last factor which I feel is imperative to discuss, is how our sub-conscious mind directs our lives. Our conscious mind, or that which we are aware of, constitutes only 10% of our consciousness as humans. This is what we can rationally and consciously think and converse over. It also contains our direct, sensorial experiences, such as touch, smell, hearing, sight and sound. The other 90% is our subconscious or unconscious mind, which contains everything that we are not aware of, such as some short term thinking, our conditioning, feeling, beliefs, values and protective reactions.

Imagine the sub-conscious mind to be like a recording device, recording everything from the moment you are born. It does not distinguish between information as being factual or not, helpful or not, true or not. It simply records everything and stores it away. All types of stories lurk in our subconscious mind, which we are unaware of and these stories direct our lives on a daily basis.

Our conditioned beauty stories
When it comes to beauty, limiting beliefs, past experiences or learned behaviours could be stored in the sub-conscious. If you never saw your Mom leave the house without make-up, you might hold a sub-conscious belief that you can’t be beautiful without make-up. Someone might have told you as a teen, that you had a big nose. Ever since then you are still the big-nosed ugly duckling and as an adult still view yourself this way.

These stories direct our lives and our choices as women. The good news is that they are not real, they are not the truth. They only exist in our minds, and only because we unconsciously choose to continue to buy into them.

In a global study done by Dove, data shows that 54% of women are their own biggest source of beauty pressure and that 59% of women feel pressurised to look beautiful all the time. This data, coupled with the various biological factors which affect us as women, reveal that we really are our own worst beauty critics, and that we are doing it to ourselves.

The question now is, do we have a choice in the matter?
Dove2So let’s talk about choice for a moment. Our choices direct the course of our lives. They determine who we become in the future and are a form in which we communicate to the world about who we are and what is most important to us. Choices have consequences, good or bad and they also compound to impact our lives. Even when we don’t choose, we are in fact still making a choice. And most importantly, we are fully responsible for our choices. They are totally within our control. We may not be able to control or change circumstance or people, but we have complete control over how we respond and who we choose to be in any given situation.

So how then do we harness the power of conscious choice when it comes to our beauty and daily lives? We need to shift out of Auto-pilot mode, where we allow our sub-conscious mind, conditioning, automated beliefs and biological reactions to direct our lives, to being Mindful. In the Mindful space, we use conscious choice to navigate and direct our lives instead.

Here are 5 easy steps to shift from unconscious to mindful:
1. Self-Awareness: Notice your defaults and conditioning at play
2. “Don’t believe everything you think”. Question your negative though patterns and let go of negative thoughts that don’t serve you.
3. Focus on your positive and resourceful thoughts
4. Override your defaults thoughts and reactions with conscious choice
5. Repeat…

During the launch events, I guided the attendees through a self-awareness exercise in which they identified their conditioned, default “Beauty Stories” that they unconsciously tell themselves. They then liberated themselves from their sub-conscious stories and replaced them with a self-created, consciously chosen #ChooseBeautiful story. Their new stories empowered them to relate to themselves in a different and more beautiful and self-accepting way, thereby giving them a new foundation from which to make different, more empowered choices for themselves in future.

This exercise reaffirmed that as women we have the power of choice available to us. We don’t need to live our lives as victims of circumstance, our past or our own self-limiting beliefs. We can decide who we choose to be and how we want to see ourselves every day. Be empowered to #ChooseBeautiful.

7 Simple and Practical Tips to #ChooseBeautiful
Specifically related to the Dove #ChooseBeautiful campaign, see these practical and easy tips on how to make the choice to feel beautiful every day. Paste this link in your browser www.thrivefactorcoach.com/media

Book a courtesy session with me
Want a coach in your corner? Interested to explore how coaching could shift you out of Auto-pilot to a space of consciously managing and directing your life? Then contact me for a courtesy session.

Warmest Regards
Paula Facci
Visit www.thrivefactorcoach.com