Overcoming the Voice in Your Head: Florence Given – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.feels so hard to like yourself in this day and age but confidence is a skill and you have to actually do the things when you're not ready and surviving rejection surviving someone not liking your art surviving someone making a weird comment about your outfit or walking into the office and someone says "Oh that's not like you." Or like you want to take up a new hobby like running or yoga or maybe you start meditating and you've got a mate who just thinks spirituality is so funny whatever it is doing those things and surviving them and keep shining keep expressing yourself keep doing the things you love that is what built confidence for me feels so hard to like yourself in this day and age there's such a big answer to that question and so many things flying through my head i want to touch on what you said about the rules so I know the rules i know that women are worth more than their bodies and yet every time I look in the mirror I still hate my belly and the fact that it rolls over my underwear i still by weighing scales in January i still do this i still do this and that is how I lived for a very long time was knowing all of the right theory all the mindfulness all the things all the feminist theory about how women are worth more than what they look like i knew it in my head but I did not embody it and that's what actually like living deliciously and creating a life that prioritizes my experience through my body i didn't even intend for that to be the thing that made me fall in love with my body as this gift i didn't even I thought it was going to be you know one more feminist book one more this one more that one more self-help book but it wasn't one more book telling me to love my body and those are so [ __ ] valuable and they should be written but there's that other part of embodying that practice and living deliciously for me I didn't even realize until I finished the book it's the opposite of self-objectification because you're not living a life where you're watching yourself from the outside of how do I look while I meditate in a yoga class still sucking in my stomach what do I look like while I do this thing it's thinking how do I feel it's literally almost like placing the locus of control inside of you even with you know in the book I talk about romanticizing your life and creating a life that makes you that feels visually beautiful to you i wanted to write about that because I think we think it's so frivolous and it almost sounds silly especially as a feminist to like write a book about pretty little things and how they make you happy but the the the practice of creating a life that brings you joy and and visually inspires you it's like you're you're focusing less on how you look and how the world around you looks instead and so inadvertedly not thinking about how my life looks but prioritizing my experience of it like even just taking a breath and tuning into my senses allowed me to experience the gift of having a body the gift of having a body that allows me to taste delicious food the have a conversation with interesting women like you that's what our bodies are here for and I just thought about all the times where I've been on the beach or like not been on the beach because I was so anxious about letting my stomach rolls hang over everything for ourselves and that's your life and and in terms of people pleasing as well like there are dates I've been on that I didn't even want to go on because I was afraid of cancelling because I didn't want to hurt their feelings that's my life that's my life that is a day of my life that I will never get back because I wanted to control how I was perceived and I didn't want someone to think I was a [ __ ] i didn't want someone to think I was selfish and so to go back to your point how do you get from that afraid 14-year-old girl in school to this woman who now can confidently talk about the stuff and love her life more it is through doing those experiences anyway that's how I gain respect for myself and I think when we think of confidence I'll speak for myself i definitely thought of confidence as something that you either born with or something you weren't i would watch other women i couldn't speak like this a few years ago i could only talk to my phone like this but now it's it's like a series of steps of pushing through the voice of fear and doing it anyway and when you do those small little scary things that is what builds the confidence required it's the other way around so I think I thought you had to you either had it or you didn't but confidence is a skill and you have to actually do the things when you're not ready and surviving rejection surviving someone not liking your art surviving someone making a weird comment about your outfit or walking into the office and someone says "Oh that's not like you." Or like you want to take up a new hobby like running or yoga or maybe you start meditating and you've got a mate who just thinks spirituality is so funny whatever it is doing those things and surviving them and keep shining keep expressing yourself keep doing the things you love that is what built confidence for me it's a selfrust even coming into this interview today um you know before I ever do an interview I'm like "Oh my god what if they ask this what if this happens?" And my head my that voice of fear goes nuts in my head and then I remind myself "Oh but I can trust me home is in me i'm I can trust floss." And that's because I've done scary things before and so I I think fake it till you make it is it's great advice and if you don't ever do anything brave that scares the [ __ ] out of you a little bit there's always going to be a voice in your head that has a track record of you always backing out when it gets scary so you have to actually do the things that scare you a little bit and when anyone listening to this who's like "Well that's just [ __ ] frightening i can't public speak i can't even uh go on a date it scares the [ __ ] out of me." It's a baby steps it's tiny it could literally be my first thing at 14 it um when I was reading the mindfulness book was going to walk in the middle of a sunny field and laying in the field it was really embarrassing to me to be seen as like I don't know it's it's this thing I think we culturally think it's quite cringey for people to just enjoy their lives and like embrace like right and um this voice of this voice of fear was in my head and it was like what if the girls from school walk past those dog walkers over there are going to [ __ ] laugh at you and that mindfulness bit again it came in as like the second voice that was like you have to do things outside of your comfort zone otherwise you you won't live your life you will live a life tethered by what other people may or may not think of you like puppeteered and so just snipping those and going into walk in the middle of the field it sounds tiny but it was the bravest thing I ever did because I I ignored that voice of fear and that is how I have gone from being anxious and scared to walk into school every day i even feel that like that voice doesn't go anywhere you know I think that voice that was in my head afraid of going to see the girls at school who used to be my friends um doesn't go anywhere i can still walk past a group of girls innocently laughing in the middle of Oxford Street right where I was on my way today and there's still a voice in my head that goes "They're laughing at you." That doesn't go anywhere you just get better at ignoring it and not endorsing it as true i think that's the the key because so many of us will have had a certain narrative almost put upon us whether we like it or not whether it's one person in our lives it could have been one of our parents or a teacher at school or someone that felt um authorative in their opinion where they've said "Oh you're this or you're not good at this or why do you always do this?" And those voices they do stick around and I think it takes a hell of a lot to overcome that and to think "No I like you say I can trust myself." if someone said "Oh you know you're a big mouth or or whatever it is that you've got to write that yourself." And I think our inclination is we think that someone else will do that for us someone will write it for us by saying "Oh no you're not you're you're this you're amazing you're that." But actually that won't touch the sides we've got to do that and it's it's a bizarre intangible thing that we can't grasp because we've just got to do it in our heads and go "God no no I'm not going to listen to that voice i'm going to still do the scary thing or just be me which seems to be terrifying ab: It is it's so terrifying and I was going to ask you have you found that you know you said it's this intangible thing in your head these voices I call them the inner council like they're just this inner council of people shouting at you every time I post online it will be like "What will this person think what will this person think?" And it's the inner council of voices in my head trying to keep me small julia Samuel calls it the shitty committee oh my god that's perfect so good yeah the shitty Okay okay thanks Julius Samuels the shitty committee okay you know you just said it's intangible in your head have you found cuz I'm sure you've had some success right with overcoming that voice you must have to even even do your own podcast i know that you you left some big parts of the industry to do this did you feel that actually almost imagining it as stepping into a new pathway helped cuz that's what helps me i imagine it like like if if this is the way I've always been going and it's intangible because you can't literally walk down a new road you have to mentally walk down a new road [Music]