3 Tools To Build Self Confidence in a World where People Make You Feel Insecure

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Speaker 10 So many of our perceptions of ourselves are based on other ideas that have made their way through time and lasted as almost generational curses.

Speaker 10 We're judging ourselves and the people around us based on standards that we didn't choose.

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Speaker 10 Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty.
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Speaker 10 Hey, everyone, and welcome back to On On Purpose. I'm your host Jay Shetty and I'm so grateful that you're here and taking the time to spend the next 30 minutes with me.

Speaker 10 Now in a moment when time and attention are the most valuable assets, your choosing to come here to explore interesting questions, learn new habits and practices and dive deep isn't something I ever take for granted.

Speaker 10 Now, if you're a long time listener to this show, you probably know that we've always followed a format format of sorts, where we dive into a topic and then I offer you tips, hacks, solutions and suggestions of how best to navigate it.

Speaker 10 Recently though, I've been wanting to go a step deeper, to question the appearances of things some of us might take for granted, my intention being to figure out what's really going on, especially in the information age where most of us are bombarded all day with the same appearances.

Speaker 10 Now, think about it.

Speaker 10 If you're someone who spends any time on social media, and I'm guessing that includes most of you, no doubt you're overwhelmed with images and videos of beautiful people doing things that are incredible.

Speaker 10 Their faces are flawless, their hair's just right, everything's perfect. And usually they're on their way to a party or a city that you feel like you're missing out on.

Speaker 10 Now, with all those images bombarding us on a daily basis, we may feel sure we experience insecurity, sure we may experience envy and jealousy, but there is conditioning and wiring happening right there and then.

Speaker 10 And for this reasons, today's episode is posed in the form of a question. I think so many of us are dealing with challenges with self-worth.

Speaker 10 We hear so many insights on self-confidence, self-love, self-care. but it doesn't seem to be breaking through.
And I think that's partly because we don't even know how we're being conditioned.

Speaker 10 So I want to start off by asking you a question. And the question may seem broad and random, but I promise you there's a reason because we're going to investigate it.

Speaker 10 So the question I want to focus on today is, who is the most beautiful woman in the world?

Speaker 10 Now, when I first ask you that question, either you'll come up with an actual name of someone you know, or maybe it's a celebrity or a model or a well-known person.

Speaker 10 And sure, we could have gone down the lane of who's the most handsome man or whatever it may be, but I want to stick with this for a second.

Speaker 10 Because this question led me to take an intensive dive into the ways we think about beauty from all different angles, historical, cultural, philosophical, even mathematical, a quest that traces all the way back to the ancient Greeks.

Speaker 10 Has the definition of beauty changed over time? And how much is it influenced by where we grew up and the era in which we came of age? Are there certain constants or ground rules about beauty?

Speaker 10 Or do the qualities that come together to create the most beautiful woman in the world change from year to year, decade to decade? And if beauty itself changes, how much has to do with us?

Speaker 10 The innate preferences and biases that each of us is born with? And how much has to do with the big business of selling dreams, whether it's beauty, beauty, fashion, makeup, music, or film?

Speaker 10 The Greeks, I want you to know, were preoccupied with beauty.

Speaker 10 But more than intrigued by beauty as a concept, they were intent on figuring out, using logic, reason, and ideally measurement, what made someone or something beautiful.

Speaker 10 To them, beauty wasn't subjective or a person, and the definition of beautiful didn't vary depending on who you asked. For the Greeks, beauty had to be rational.

Speaker 10 Among the top characteristics, according to philosophers and mathematicians of that time, were order, symmetry, and definiteness.

Speaker 10 Meaning, for example, that a sculptor creating a statue of a Greek goddess should ensure that both her arms are the right length, that her hands should match those arms, that her head should balance on shoulders neither too big nor too small, and that if she is pictured running or simply lounging around, that her every muscle and movement be portrayed in intricate detail.

Speaker 10 For the ancient Greeks, beauty was a function of math. Beauty was all about harmony and proportion.
One other thing stands out too.

Speaker 10 For Plato and other Greek philosophers, beauty was also linked to a person's goodness and morality, an idea that was later picked up in fairy tales and Disney films.

Speaker 10 In other words, if you were beautiful on the outside, you were probably beautiful on the inside too, though it's hard to speculate which came first.

Speaker 10 Because they lived in ancient Greece and weren't inclined to calling something beautiful without taking a shot at figuring out why, Greek philosophers did everything in their power to determine if beauty could be measured using mathematical formulas, which is how mathematicians like Pythagoras produced a concept that many centuries later would come to be dubbed the golden ratio.

Speaker 10 Ask him who was the most beautiful woman in the world back then, and odds were he would say, Helen of Troy, a woman largely credited with precipitating the Trojan War. Why did they say that? Easy.

Speaker 10 Her face contained the same precise mathematical theorems they kept seeing in objects belonging to the natural world that were unanimously deemed to be beautiful.

Speaker 10 Things like nautilus shells, the leaves on trees, pine cones and pine cone seeds.

Speaker 10 It took a few centuries for this theorem to be given a name the golden ratio, though looking back, it shows up in the face of Mona Lisa, in the Parthenon in Athens, and in the Great Pyramid of Giza, though no one can say for sure if they were created with the golden ratio in mind.

Speaker 10 But back to Helen of Troy. What role did the golden ratio play in the fact she was widely considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world?

Speaker 10 For Pythagoras and other Greek mathematicians, the number three had a special significance.

Speaker 10 By dividing the human face into three sections or divisions, he and his colleagues could come that much closer to defining the ingredients of extraordinary beauty.

Speaker 10 The first measurement was from a woman's hairline down to the middle of the eyes. The second measurement started from those same eyes and ended at the bottom of the nose.

Speaker 10 The third and and final measurement was from the bottom of the nose to the base of a woman's chin. The conclusion? The most beautiful faces on the planet were two-thirds as wide as they were long.

Speaker 10 What's more, if all three measurements were roughly equal, a woman's face was more likely than not to be universally seen as beautiful.

Speaker 10 The color of a beautiful woman's hair mattered too, confirming blonde hair in ancient Greece was by far the preferred color.

Speaker 10 Rarely do you see any illustrations or all paintings of dark-haired or red Greek gods, either female or male. Why?

Speaker 10 Because as I mentioned earlier, beauty for the Greeks was also connected to inner goodness and a kind of moral purity, one's outward appearance the purest possible reflection of the virtue contained inside.

Speaker 10 Great art and sculpture, in some ways the earliest form of media, also played a powerful part in how the definitions of female beauty evolved.

Speaker 10 Nearly 2000 years after the end of the Greek Empire, Renaissance artists like Botticelli, Leonardo, Rubens, and Raphael portrayed women as a physical type, curvaceous, fleshy, maternal, and mysterious.

Speaker 10 This ideal incidentally has endured for centuries and across all cultures. Today, female beauty has no link to extreme thinness.
Believe it or not, that idea has been around since the 1960s.

Speaker 10 But shapeliness, not to mention youth, since curviness and youth both communicate to suitors that she's the right age and healthy enough to conceive and raise children.

Speaker 10 In short, the media can prioritize certain looks and figures, all it weighs. But at the end of the day, some things are hardwired in us as animals and won't ever change.

Speaker 10 Evolution, it won't surprise you to learn, always has the final say.

Speaker 10 But I want to revisit the idea of symmetry and proportion and the idea that everything from the face to the arms to the hands should exist in complete harmony.

Speaker 10 It's easy to dismiss this concept as old-fashioned and even dated, but it still plays a part in how we look at beauty today.

Speaker 10 In fact, the ancient Greeks are largely responsible for the Western standards of beauty that appear in our media today. Think of Snow White or Cinderella or Arielle and the Little Mermaid.

Speaker 10 Their beautiful appearance is inseparable from their goodness and innocence, whereas the witches and ogres and villains surrounding them who are eager to do them harm are seen as the opposite of beautiful, as if their evil dispositions have negatively affected the way they look.

Speaker 10 Another factor that's been linked to beauty, a woman's voice. In the 1980s, social scientists did a study hoping to show a connection between women's voices and their levels of beauty.

Speaker 10 They did this by having a team of male volunteers speak on the phone with a group of women. I should add this was voice only.
The men couldn't see the women, nor the women see the men.

Speaker 10 After the male volunteers were asked to assess the most beautiful voices with the faces of the most beautiful women, the researchers conclude that vocal attractiveness was indeed correlated to the beauty of the women in question.

Speaker 10 I might also add that the more youthful sounding voice, the more attractive it came across. Once again, blame evolution.

Speaker 10 Imagine you're visiting Ethiopia, where some tribes in the south still make use of the centuries-old practice of lip plates.

Speaker 10 These discs are inserted into a woman's bottom lip and are seen as signs of both beauty and status. Scars or scarification are also commonplace among such African ethnic groups.

Speaker 10 A knife or a razor is used to make cuts in the skin and ash or clay or pastes are then rubbed into the cuts, which creates bumps and patterns on the skin that take anywhere from six months to a year to heal.

Speaker 10 These two are widely considered great emblems of beauty. In New Zealand, especially among the Maori tribes, facial tattoos serve an almost identical beautifying purpose.

Speaker 10 They also communicate to the world a woman's identity, her social status, her heritage, and her own professional achievements.

Speaker 10 It's quite literally like having your family tree and your place in it seared onto your skin. How do you feel about Unibrows? The ancient Greeks loved them, probably because they were so symmetrical.

Speaker 10 Today in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan, a unibrow is still considered a signature of great beauty, versus in the West, where a unibrow is often considered, well, not entirely desired or welcome.

Speaker 10 Tajikistan women who don't naturally have a unibrow stretching over their eyes can even buy products to enhance the brows they were born with.

Speaker 10 You can see that different cultures value different things and our conditioning means the culture we were raised in, the culture we grew up in, defines what we see as beautiful and attractive.

Speaker 10 But think about this for a second. Consider, for example, the Japanese concept known as wabi-sabi, which emphasizes the beauty that is found in imperfection.
I absolutely love this idea.

Speaker 10 A perfectly manicured back lawn is considered in Japan unacceptable and unnatural. No backlawn has ever looked like that.

Speaker 10 Perfection, this idea argues, may be symmetrical, but at the expense of what we love in the objects and people we loved most, namely their imperfection.

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Speaker 10 Let's return now to the beauty standards of the West, which as we see seemed to change every decade or so.

Speaker 10 Until the 1920s, as we've seen in other cultures around the world, great beauty was marked by a full face and a curvy, voluptuous body.

Speaker 10 Then the flapper showed up, a woman skinny as a boy, with short, bobbed hair and an androgynous appearance. She was followed by Greta Garbo, lean, strong, and enigmatic, a woman a few words.

Speaker 10 Two decades later in the 1950s, beauty standards changed again, with the media serving up two female options, the girl next door, embodied by Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, and another kind of girl represented by Marilyn Monroe.

Speaker 10 In the 1960s, beauty standards changed again with the arrival of Twiggy, an English supermodel weighing 91 pounds who became a cultural icon in London, introducing, or should I say reintroducing, the world to the concept of androgyny.

Speaker 10 In the 1970s, the pendulum swung back again, with the TV show Charlie's Angels and Farah Fawcett posters plastering the bedroom walls of every teenage boy in America.

Speaker 10 Suddenly, it seemed good health and athleticism was in vogue, though this look was soon swapped out by the pale, skinny women who began to appear in fashion magazines in the 1990s.

Speaker 10 Now, I have no judgment over which is more attractive or not. It's what's interesting is how it's being presented to us.
Now,

Speaker 10 as I've walked you through this journey of history, of culture, we can just see that when we try to answer who's the most beautiful woman in the world, it almost feels like it changes every decade.

Speaker 10 And today it may change every week. And what becomes interesting is that our bubble becomes our truth.

Speaker 10 So if you go online and ask who's the most beautiful woman in the world, and AI will come up with its own semi-scientific assessments.

Speaker 10 And among the names that come up, you'll see Jodi Cromer, Zendaya, Bella Hadid, Beyoncé, Simone Barles, Janelle Monet, Arena Grande, Taylor Swift, Margot Robbie.

Speaker 10 But what's really interesting about all of this, we would say, well, they're all beautiful in different ways.

Speaker 10 So the question that we really have to ask, as opposed to who's the most beautiful woman in the world, what do we count as our beauty? And what do we believe to be beautiful about ourselves?

Speaker 10 Are we choosing the same things things that society, culture, and history changes and updates like fashion every so often to be our definition?

Speaker 10 When I first saw Radhi, I genuinely was very attracted to her. I thought she was beautiful from the moment I saw her.
And I still believe she's absolutely beautiful and gorgeous today.

Speaker 10 But so much of what I've learned today is learning to love her for all the nuances, the subtleties that I never knew knew before, the quirks, the curious parts of her, the parts of her that, you know, that surprised me.

Speaker 10 And so I want to talk to you about what it really means to build self-love and self-worth. The first is

Speaker 10 understanding the parts of yourself you don't like and recognizing whether you don't like them because you don't like them, or you don't like them because someone else told you not to like them, because someone in history, culture, art somehow got through to you from all of these decades ago, and you're carrying around an old idea about the way you feel about yourself.

Speaker 10 So many of our perceptions of ourselves are based on other ideas like the ones I've shared today that have made their way through time and lasted as almost generational curses.

Speaker 10 We're judging ourselves and the people around us based on standards that we didn't choose, values that we didn't create, and symbols that we didn't select.

Speaker 10 The second thing I'll say to you is find out what makes you feel confident. It may be developing a new skill.

Speaker 10 I think what people don't realize is that until you develop skills, the skill of communication, the skill of knowing how to present yourself, preparing to have the skill of knowing how to introduce yourself in a room.

Speaker 10 Without those skills, no matter what you do, it's very hard to feel confident because you could dress however you want, you could show up however you want, you could be invited to something incredible, and you'll still feel like an imposter.

Speaker 10 You'll still feel out of your depths or out of your comfort zone without a set of skills.

Speaker 10 Identify the skills that you haven't invested in, skills that you've missed out on, skills that you haven't prioritized that could make a big difference in how you feel about yourself.

Speaker 10 The other thing I want you to do is take a look at how this is an ever-evolving, ever-changing conversation.

Speaker 10 And notice how through times you've seen updates and how you've seen updates and upgrades on what is seen as beautiful and how it keeps changing and keeps you on your toes. It supports industries.

Speaker 10 It builds industries. It allows for industries to actually exist.
just because we believe we're not beautiful enough, we're not fit enough, we're not strong enough.

Speaker 10 And start writing down your own definition.

Speaker 10 Start writing down your own description start writing down your own perception and start disconnecting from the others if you need to unfollow unsubscribe on social media if you need to change your algorithm if you need to just switch off from social media in order to create your own views of beauty to create your own ideals of attraction That may be the best thing you ever do because otherwise you'll be chasing something that was defined decades ago.

Speaker 10 So many of us are pursuing a version of ourself that we don't even know we'll like, but we believe because others may like it that hopefully we will too.

Speaker 10 And the truth is when we try to become who we think other people will like, even if someone likes us, we may not like ourselves.

Speaker 10 And liking yourself is worth so much more than however many likes you receive on a post on social media. I want to thank you for listening today.
I hope that it's been an education.

Speaker 10 I hope it's been enlightening.

Speaker 10 I hope that it's given you insight into recognizing that when you try and answer these questions, when you try and chase a version of beauty, you could chase any definition for any decade and you'd still be behind.

Speaker 10 Thank you so much for listening. Remember, I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you.
I'll see you soon.

Speaker 10 If you love this episode, you will enjoy my conversation with Megan Trainer on breaking generational trauma and how to be confident from the inside out.

Speaker 13 My therapist told me stand in the mirror naked for five minutes.

Speaker 13 It was already tough for me to love my body, but after the C-section scarf with all the stretch marks, now I'm looking at myself like I've been hacked.

Speaker 13 But day three, when I did it, I was like, you know what? Her thighs are cute.

Speaker 2 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work? If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, How do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 6 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 3 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast. That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 4 Hey audiobook lovers, I'm Cal Penn.

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