How to be confident
The great thing about confidence is that if you don't have any, you can get some for free. You're not born with it and you can't buy it. That means anyone – yes, you – can become confident, but it takes practice. This chapter is all about how to get there.
The more you embrace your positive points, the less you care what you look like all the time; and the less you obsess about what other people think of you, the freer and happier you'll be. And don't worry if you're shy. You can be confident without shoutiness or being chatty. Quiet confidence is really the essence of being cool. Well, that's half of it. The other half is wearing sunglasses, obviously.
The body image struggle
It's now normal for us to hate our bodies. And instead of leaving our vintage frocks and a fetching hatpin to a new generation of girls, we're passing on the horrible shame and self-loathing.
Let's stop.
In this chapter we explore the reasons for all our negative body image thoughts – and then the next chapter's called 'How to Make Friends With Your Body'.
How to make friends with your body
We're never going to be able to stop the trillion-dollar industries that thrive on our self-hatred and depend on it for profit. But we can do something much better and much sneakier and much easier to achieve – we can make ourselves impervious to their cruel and crappy messages.
Plenty of women have made peace with all of themselves and have inspiring things to say about learning to make friends with your body.
Let's make a positive and hopeful start on being fonder of our physical selves, learn how to vanquish some of the negative thoughts, defeat the selfhatred, break the cycle that passes the body-hate to the next generation, and escape the scene of the crime, this super-critical culture, in our shiny new confidence-mobile – our very own body.