#ReadWomen: Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis

For most of us, women especially, we hold on to some little nugget, some little lie, some limiting belief that we’ve had since childhood. We’ve believed it for so long, we don’t even question it anymore. We heard something when we were younger and our feelings were tender. Someone said something, someone spoke into your insecurity about yourself, so you’ve spent a lifetime ques- tioning yourself and accepting what they said as truth. The crazy thing is, it’s not true. It’s an opinion.

1+1=2 is fact.

Gravity exists here on earth. Fact. Water can extinguish fire. Fact.

You being “enough” of anything? Opinion. Someone else’s opinion, or maybe your own, but either way, it is not grounded in any actual reality other than the weight you give it. So how much of your life are you living—or rather, not living—because you’ve been treating an opinion as a truth?

Here’s what’s so crazy about the idea of enough. Whatever your issues with not believing you are enough, that is the opinion someone else gave you, whether intentional or not, and you have accepted it and made it a doctrine in your life.

We never boil it down like that. We never really think, Oh, I don’t feel like I’m enough, because the media told me so, because my aunt said something to me once, because a girl in eighth grade commented on this and that became my reality. Have you ever thought about how ludicrous it is to be living your life, to be making choices to hold yourself back from your goals, to not try things, to not put yourself out there because of something some random person said to you once upon a time? Whether it came from a voice of authority or a chick on the internet, if you’re hesitating because of someone else telling you that you are not enough, you’re still living your life and making choices for yourself, and, subsequently, your family, based on someone else’s opinion.

Other people don’t get to tell you what you can have! Someone else doesn’t get to tell you who you can be! The world doesn’t get to decide what you get to try. You are the only one who can make that decision.

Here’s the flip side of that. You’ve got to stop blaming your problems on the world. You can’t be like, “Well, I got teased my entire adolescence, so now I’m insecure.” Or, “My parents did these things to me, so now I can’t cope.”

I’m not belittling the trauma we hold from our childhoods. It’s so incredibly harmful to walk through trauma, particularly at a time in life when we’re so malleable to other people’s opinions. But here’s the deal. High school’s over. Junior high was a long time ago. You are not a little girl anymore, and you cannot keep living your life with a seventh grader’s mentality, no matter how painful seventh grade was. You have to decide right now that you’re going to take hold of your life, and you are going to let all of that other crap fall away because it doesn’t matter. Because whoever said the thing to you, your mom or your sister or the mean girl or the mean boy in high school or whoever it was, they don’t get an opinion on your life. They’re not in the ring. They’re not in the game. They’re not the one taking the punches. That’s you.

It’s a simultaneous thing. You can’t live your life for their opinions, and you also can’t keep blaming them. You need to embrace your path. You need to accept that whatever happened did happen and choose to be mindful of the steps that you’ve got to take now to heal and get past those things. You cannot keep living in the excuses of something that happened fifteen or twenty years ago. Because, seriously, how is that working for you?

I know there are people right now who are thinking, But you don’t know what they did. You don’t know what I went through. You’re right, I don’t. But I do know that if your past is still affecting your life today in a negative way, holding on to it is not helping you.

Does it make you  feel better about yourself? Does it make  you kinder to people when you live in that state of misery, in the state of, “I’m too fat. I’m too thin. I’m too young. I’m too old. I’m too . . .”? How is it making you feel?

It’s making you feel like crap. Nobody is living in a place of not enough and happy about it. Nobody is inspired and making great choices and enthusiastic and excited for every day while they are living in a state of not enough.

The amazing thing is that this is all perception. It’s all what you believe to be true. And you get to decide what you believe. If we were girlfriends in real life I would shake your shoulders and remind you that you get to decide.

I am living proof that your past does not determine your future. I am a living, breathing example.

I am your friend, Rachel, and I am telling you that I walked through trauma and I walked through pain and I have been bullied and I have felt ugly and unworthy and not enough in a hundred different ways. And I have decided to reclaim my life. I have reclaimed it and fought back against the lies and the limiting beliefs over and over and over again. I have built on that strength by looking at what is true, not what is opinion. And you can too.

About the book:

Rachel Hollis has seen it too often: women not living into their full potential. They feel a tugging on their hearts for something more, but they’re afraid of embarrassment, of falling short of perfection, of not being enough.

In Girl, Stop Apologizing, #1 New York Times bestselling author and founder of a multimillion-dollar media company, Rachel Hollis sounds a wake-up call. She knows that many women have been taught to define themselves in light of other people—whether as wife, mother, daughter, or employee—instead of learning how to own who they are and what they want. With a challenge to women everywhere to stop talking themselves out of their dreams, Hollis identifies the excuses to let go of, the behaviors to adopt, and the skills to acquire on the path to growth, confidence, and believing in yourself.

About the author:

Rachel Hollis is a #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author, a top business podcaster, and one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the world. As a bestselling author and wildly successful lifestyle influencer, she has built a global social media fanbase in the millions. She’s a proud working mama of four and a big fan of the small town in Texas hill country that the Hollis family calls home.

Hang out with her on Instagram (her favorite social!) @MsRachelHollis. To find out more about ALL the things, head to TheHollisCo.com.