I rarely get sick, but this time, it hit me hard. I couldn’t get out of bed, I felt really weak, and doing even simple things was tough. Lots of my friends reached out to offer their help but I said no. Other than accepting my partner Santosh’s care, I couldn’t bring myself to say yes to their support.

I’ve now reflected on some of the reasons why I turned them down when, in truth, I really could have used their TLC! It made me think about how many of us — particularly women — struggle with accepting help when it’s offered, let alone when we could be asking for it outright.

Why do we struggle to ask for help?

Growing up as a feminist, I absorbed the idea that to be a strong, independent woman I should handle everything on my own, and that being vulnerable and asking for help is a sign of weakness. Instead, I was socialized to believe that I should focus on offering my help to others.

I know now this messaging is both misguided and misogynistic, and that internalizing gender bias hurts me personally and professionally. We all need love and support from others. In fact, it’s essential for navigating this difficult journey called life. When we deny others’ love and care, it directly impacts our well-being and can hold us back from thriving.

But I want to go even deeper here and vulnerably share another reason I’m uncomfortable with asking for and receiving help. While growing up, I came to believe that I’m not worthy of others’ care. I know I’m not alone with this. Many of us hold this hurtful belief because of the conditional love that came our way both in our childhood and adulthood. Feeling unlovable can make it really hard to accept others’ care.

How can we get more comfortable asking for and accepting help?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since being sick, and I’ve also been working on changing how I respond when someone offers their help. And there are three things I’ve been doing that I want to share with you:

1. Understand your reasons for saying no

We need to know what’s getting in our way so that we can address the barriers that are preventing us from thriving. To figure out what’s at the root of your tendency to turn down others’ help, try engaging in deep self-reflection work. Here are a few tools to make this happen.

2. When you’re about to say no, say yes

So many of us are wired to automatically say “no thanks” when someone asks if they can help us. When you notice that you’re about to say these words, take a pause, engage in self-coaching, and say yes instead.

3. Identify what you need and then ask for it

I recently had some of my friends over for a big dinner. Many of them asked if there was anything they could do to help. And while the old Ritu would’ve said no, this time I said yes. I asked them all to bring either an appetizer or a dessert. The result was not only less work for me but also some kick-ass appetizers and delish desserts. It was a powerful affirmation of why doing our work to live better matters.

And while I’m talking about living better, I want to underscore that the most powerful healing work we can do to open up our hearts to others’ care is to engage in self-love. When we feel lovable, it unlocks our sense of worthiness. And when we feel worthy, we openly receive others’ love and support.

So the next time you feel yourself shying away from asking for or receiving help, tell yourself: I am worthy of love. And then ask yourself: what simple gesture of help could I allow into my life as a first step?

The post Do You Struggle to Ask for Help? You’re Not Alone appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

On top of this, beauty for women is defined as an external experience, rather than being an internal experience (which in my humble opinion is far more important in defining beauty, and so whenever you hear me talk about beauty, know that I’m referring to both our internal and external attributes), and so for many of us, it doesn’t matter how many times we receive feedback that we’re beautiful, intelligent, kind, or anything positive — we still struggle to believe that we actually embody those attributes.

For example, a while ago I was having a conversation with a friend who is a beautiful woman of color and who I think oozes both intelligence and gorgeousness. When I told her how radiant I think she is, she thanked me but then told me it was hard for her to believe the compliment because of her struggle with her weight.

It made me really sad to hear this, but I empathized with what she was saying. Given that I also used to have difficulty accepting compliments, I know that there’s a difference between being told we’re great and truly feeling it.

Why Do We Believe We Aren’t Beautiful?

For many of us, the reason we don’t believe the kind words coming our way is because we have internalized negative messages from a young age that we lack these attributes.

For example, when I was growing up, I consistently received critical comments about my appearance, mostly as part of the horrible racist bullying I experienced.

With my brown skin and long black braids, I looked different in comparison to my peers at school and was constantly called ugly for it. Also, as a darker skinned brown girl growing up in South Asian culture, where fair skin is valued over dark skin, I spent my early adolescent years believing that I was not as beautiful as others.

The cherry on top of this messy cake? For a chunk of my early teens, I really wasn’t very cute (picture an overbite, acne, facial hair, and thick glasses). When I finally blossomed in my late teens and people started to tell me that I was pretty, I just didn’t believe them.

This is why it’s so important to interrupt the negative messaging we’ve internalized, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m an advocate for self-love. By cultivating self-love, we increasingly move to a place where we start to believe deeply in our core that we are worthy of both receiving compliments and of feeling beautiful. When we cultivate self-love, we start to see that our real beauty lies in being perfectly imperfect and imperfectly perfect.

Feeling Beautiful Comes from Within

If feeling beautiful is something you struggle with, one of the most important things you can do to cultivate self-love is to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is about tuning into the present moment and being aware of what you’re doing, feeling, and thinking without judgment. It’s about slowing down to observe how you talk to yourself — no more negative self-talk! — and how you feel about yourself.

The more mindful you are about your thoughts and about how you feel, the more likely you will be able to identify the negative messages you’re harboring about yourself. Once you identify the negative messages, you can work to replace them with positive truths about who you are, for example, “I am beautiful.”

Aside from practicing mindfulness, there are a few other simple things that I do to help me feel beautiful from the inside out that I’d like to offer you:

1. Focus on Activities that Make Your Heart Sing

Not surprisingly, it’s when I’m doing things that I’m most passionate about, like dancing to my fave tunes, cuddling with my boyfriend while watching Netflix, or presenting to a warm and receptive audience, that I truly feel my most beautiful. And I note, not surprisingly, these are also times when I’m radiating my Authentic Self.

2. Look Good so You Can Feel Good

I believe that one’s body is like a personal art canvas. We use what we wear, how we do our hair and make-up, and more to self-express what we’re about internally. But I also believe that how we self-express externally impacts how we feel internally. Because of this, to feel beautiful on the inside I always make sure that I’m wearing something I’m comfortable in and that I feel great in. Sometimes that means a fabulous dress, while on other days it means leggings, but the point is, I make the effort to do whatever makes me feel good.

While it can be challenging to shift negative self-beliefs to positive ones, cultivating self-love and taking actual steps to change your behavior are critical to get to a place where you’re able to embrace compliments and to feel beautiful inside and out. We all deserve to feel good about ourselves, and it starts with self-love.

The post Why So Many of Us Struggle with Feeling Beautiful appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

When I was writing my book, The Authenticity Principle, I knew that I wanted to include self-love as part of what I was teaching, because self-love is at the core of living authentically. But because I was worried that some people wouldn’t accept this “mushy” topic alongside the neuroscience, leadership, and self-development topics that I discuss in the book, I wasn’t sure to what extent I should talk about it directly.

But the further I got into the process of writing, the more I realized that I simply can’t teach people how to live better — or how to build a more empowered and inclusive world — without discussing self-love. Here are three reasons why I think you should focus on self-love on Valentine’s Day and every day.

1. Self-Love is the Key to Loving Others Better

When I talk about self-love, I’m talking about unconditional acceptance of the self. I’m talking about knowing and embracing who you truly are as much as possible, and that means, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And this can be really hard work!

Learning to accept and love yourself unconditionally requires doing deep self-reflection work to reveal the “tough stuff”, including the wounds, pain, shame, and other vulnerabilities that you’ve experienced and internalized along your life’s journey. This “tough stuff” is exactly what gets in the way of you loving others and inviting them to love you back, because when you’re hurting, you’re more likely to put up walls that prevent you from giving and receiving love. (And let’s be real — when we hurt, love is exactly what we need.)

Acknowledging and facing the “tough stuff” isn’t easy, but doing this work will enable you to work on healing these areas. So whether it’s your lover, children, family, or friends, you must start with loving yourself in order to identify and heal the hurt that’s preventing you from giving love and receiving it from others.

2. Self-Love is the Foundation of an Inclusive World

In my work as a global diversity, equity, and inclusion speaker and consultant, one of the questions I’m always asked is: How can we build a society that’s more accepting of differences?

The answer lies in self-love.

So many of us have been taught to hate and fear differences in others, which is often motivated by discomfort with our own differences. This fear often stems from the fact that we don’t love and accept ourselves for who we are. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that many of us have received repeated negative messages about who we are throughout our lives.

When we experience discomfort with someone who is not like us, what’s essentially happening is that we’re engaging in bias, whether consciously or unconsciously. We do so because we’re afraid of differences and of being hurt, and we have been taught that sameness is safer and makes us less vulnerable. But favoring sameness ultimately pushes fear, intolerance, and hate.

Cultivating self-love will lead you not only to embrace who you are (especially what makes you different), but it will also enable you to feel more comfortable with others’ differences. In short, loving yourself can have a huge impact on creating a more inclusive world as you’ll be more willing to recognize and celebrate authenticity in yourself and others.

(Also, self-love is a radical act (shout out to Audre Lorde!), but for especially people of color, for women (cisgender and trans), and for women of color. Loving ourselves is a way of disrupting the harmful messages of White male supremacy that tell us we are unworthy.)

3. Self-Love is the Secret to Living Your Best

Cultivating self-love is the starting point to having the life you want — a life where you feel empowered, confident, happy, loved, inspired, and so much more. And although it takes work — self-love is a practice where you choose to love yourself even when you’re feeling tired, weak, broken, insecure, like an impostor, and more — the end result is worth it.

Self-love is about the belief that you are worth the emotional and physical investment it takes to nurture and heal yourself. And when you make that investment in yourself, amazing things are possible!

Developing self-love and self-acceptance is a journey, and for many of us, it’s a lifelong one. Wherever you are now, the key is to start!

The post Why You Should Think About Self-Love This Valentine’s Day appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

In reality, I felt horribly disconnected and lost in my life. My day-to-day life — the work I was doing, my romantic relationships, some of my friendships, my pastimes, how I dressed, how I spoke, what I talked about, how I behaved — no longer felt like it belonged to me. So much felt off.

Looking back, I can see that I was immersed in what I call performing — that is, changing my behavior because I lived in fear of the negative consequences of being my authentic self.

As a Brown woman born in Canada to Punjabi immigrant parents, I’d received confusing messages my whole life about how I needed to show up in order to fit in, succeed, and get ahead — whether it was from my family, my Canadian peers, or from society on a whole. As a result, I had started living as someone I simply wasn’t. Living like this had helped me become outwardly successful, but inside I was exhausted and spiritually vacant.

In my early 30s, I started waking up to the fact that I needed to change my life, but I didn’t know where to begin or what my life could look like. I began an intense period of soul-searching. One of the first major steps I took was to temporarily remove myself from the corporate world by taking a 3-month sabbatical. With the goal of deepening my yoga and mindfulness practice (and, frankly, spending a truckload of time alone!), I headed to my motherland, India, to complete a 2-month yoga teacher training program.

Arriving at the yoga ashram in Kerala, India by myself, the contrast to my life back home was stark — I was immediately stripped of everything that had defined my identity. We were all given the same uniform to wear every day, and what we shared about ourselves after that was up to us. There were no labels or titles. Unlike the corporate world I came from, nobody asked me about where I had gone to school or what I did for a living; they just wanted to know which country I was from. With my outward markers of status packed away (no fancy clothes, no bling!), I was just one of hundreds in the room, wearing the same yellow t-shirt and white pants as everyone else.

For the first time in my life, nobody knew who I was, and nobody had any expectations about how I was going to behave — I was free to be anybody. Faced with this situation I asked myself: who am I going to be? I was so used to carefully and meticulously curating my image that doing so had become my default setting. The question of who to be was complicated for me, and felt really scary, because in truth, I simply didn’t know who I was.

At the ashram, I spent nearly 8 hours a day meditating alongside my fellow yogis, engaged in a range of mindfulness experiences. Forced into an environment of deep self-reflection and vulnerability, I decided to go with it — to be the version of me that was the most raw, open-hearted, loving, kind, and present.

When people asked me about myself, I deliberately talked about my values instead of my education or work background. When people asked me how I was feeling, I openly shared that I was feeling really vulnerable in this experience, rather than automatically pumping out an, “I’m doing amazing!” paired with a performing smile. Most importantly, I emoted freely. This showed up as a combination of sobbing like a baby because of joy, sadness, or fear, laughing my head off, ranting to express my rage, and expressing anything else that I felt.

As someone who had worked very hard to overcome my experiences with childhood bullying and social alienation, I was struck when at the ashram I started making friends quickly — and the people I attracted were genuinely good-hearted and kind people who wanted to connect with the real me. The fact that good people wanted to befriend me in my most raw and vulnerable state validated that I was worthy of love and attention even without the markers of success that I’d relied on for my self-worth.

The warmth, love, and self-acceptance I felt not only helped to draw out core attributes of my Authentic Self, but also affirmed things about me that I now hold to be my self-truths: that I’m a wonderful person at my core, that I’m caring and compassionate, that I’m both fun and funny, and that I can develop loving relationships with a wide range of people. In short, my ashram experience helped to kick-start my journey towards self-love and embracing my Authentic Self.

Arriving back home after this experience, everything around me was the same. I sat at the same desk at the same job, I spent time with the same friends, and the same clothes hung in my closet. But I was different. I now knew that it was going to be ok to change my life — and that I no longer needed the things I’d held onto so tightly out of fear. I could let go.

Of course, things didn’t change overnight. But this glimpse of my true, authentic self, and how it felt to live it out, set the wheels in motion for a sea change in my life. I learned from this experience that sometimes you need to take a big, bold step or take yourself out of your current situation in order to identify the change you need.

I also learned that when you awaken to your authentic self, you won’t want to go back.

The post How Losing My Identity Helped Me Find My Truth appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

We live in a society that places a high emphasis on being in romantic relationships. There’s so much messaging out there that being in a relationship is a key measure of life’s success, and people constantly asking why you’re single doesn’t help.

All through my twenties and thirties, I continuously heard things like, “Why are you still single?” and, “Don’t worry, you’ll find someone!” Hearing this from my family, friends, and even some of my professional peers was extremely frustrating, especially when I knew that it was possible to live your best life when you’re single!

Fortunately, I realized that the constant nagging and questions from my peers didn’t have anything to do with me.

In this video, I share my insight into why people ask those annoying questions and why we need to silence the noise.

Watch now!

The post Stop Asking People Why They’re Single appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.