Improve Your Self-Concept & Watch the Rest of your Life Fall Into Place

What if the life you’re living right now is simply a reflection of how you see yourself?

In this episode, we’re diving into the power of self-concept — the beliefs, identities, and internal narratives that shape everything from your relationships and career to your confidence, standards, and reality as a whole.

Because no matter how much you try to change your habits, your environment, or your goals, you will always default back to who you believe you are and what you think you deserve.

This isn’t about becoming someone new. 

It’s about remembering who you are and choosing to embody her.

Because when your self-concept changes… everything else follows.

Come and connect with me on Instagram @thecyclica for more on feminine empowerment, cyclical living, and becoming the woman you were never taught to be.

Transcript

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I saw a concept this week on Instagram, which was saying about how none of your manifestations are going to come true until you saw it yourself concept. And this is something that just really fucking hit because it is something that I have been going through in my own journey at the moment, and it's something that I really wanted to talk about on this week's episode because I think for so many people we overlook the fact that we potentially at a really deep level dislike ourselves. And it's so sad, and it's something that we must change. So let's dive in. Hello and welcome to the Good Girl Rebellion Podcast. I'm your host Izzy, the founder of Cyclica, and thank you so much for joining me on another episode. The Good Girl Rebellion is all about reclaiming your rhythm in mind, body, and spirit. Each week we are unravelling years of conditioning to reclaim our wild, rebellious and intuitive truth. It's my mission to help women break free from society's expectations, help them reconnect with their feminine power, and live in alignment with the ebb and flow of our cyclical nature. So if you're ready to reclaim your power, reconnect with your wildest self and rise as the woman you were never taught to be, you are in the right place. Welcome to the rebellion. So, welcome back for another episode. And if you cannot tell, I've got a new microphone, and it makes me feel like I have just up-leveled to a new timeline, and it just gives me a different level of confidence with the mic, and I am just so happy. I can't believe it's taken me so long. The last mic that I bought I got in Bali, and it wasn't a bad microphone, but you couldn't move it in any way, you had to make sure it was like static at all points, and it was one of those ones that's supposed to clip onto clothes, so it just wasn't very functional. But this one is so good, it looks really cute, and it just makes me feel like that extra bit more professional. So this week I want to talk all about self-concept, and this is something that I have been going through. Like, I have been, I feel like in the depths of my shadows, this kind of like hibernation period for me. Like I came home from Bali at the start of December. Obviously, in England, everything's kind of getting geared up for Christmas, everybody's happy, everybody's bubbly, there's loads of like excitement in the air, and then Christmas happens and New Year's happens, and it's just you hit January, and it's just like a a slap in the face of okay, now you just have winter. And I mean, I came home intentionally with that purpose to be here in winter to force myself to hibernate because I had spent eight months kind of on and off in Indonesia, it's a very kind of like yang atmosphere, you are out, you are living like in the sun, it's very big, bold energy, and it was just the time to come back, ground myself, re-center, realign. So, yeah, I came back for winter, but I didn't really expect myself, I didn't really expect to throw myself in as far as the deep end as I did. So obviously, January hit, and then I am now in the position where I'm saving up money to go to Australia. So I've gone back to work, I'm kind of going back into like kind of like a more of a standard traditional westernized life, but I'm also living at home with my mum and my stepdad because I want to leave again, so I'm going to Australia later in the year, so there's absolutely no point in me getting my own flat or apartment or kind of house share because I'm only going to be here for three, four months. So I have bought this pause to myself intentionally, but in this pause, I have really kind of faced my demons and my shadows. I have been doing a shadow work course as well, alongside all of this. I've been trying to really kind of like figure out my nutrition, figure out my workout routine. I've basically like stripped every single thing back down to basics to kind of figure out what it is I want from my life, how I want to show up, how I want my body to look, how I want my nutrition to be, what is in alignment with myself. Like I might want my nutrition to be one way, but those kind of foods might not work for me. So I've really kind of stripped everything down, I stripped everything back, and I've also spent quite a lot of time on my own, which has been very confronting. I think it's very strange because being in Indonesia, I spent a very large chunk of my time alone, but you never really feel like you're alone because you are constantly in cafes or restaurants or on the beach, you're surrounded by people, you do have like friends who become like family, really, when you're out there, and you have constant connections, and then kind of being in England alone, you are like at work or you're home on your own, you're at the gym on your own, you're driving on your own. It's a very different atmosphere. England compared to Indonesia, it feels very it can feel very lonely. So it was it was like a real slap in the face to come back and experience all of this change and experience all of this really confronting energy where I purposely made myself stop and pause and wait and see how I wanted to show up. Like, usually I would, for example, always have a vision board on my iPhone screensaver, and I purposely made myself not create a vision board until now, until the spring equinox and like the official kind of as I see it new year. And it was really hard to be in this kind of darkness, in this void, in this space between my next step and where I've just been. And in this void, one of my biggest lessons has been my self-concept. So I've really struggled in this time. If you are following me on Instagram, you will potentially have seen my posts saying about how I actually haven't had my period. So I'm a menstrual cycle educator, I talk about inner seasons and cyclical living, and I didn't realise like I live, eat, and breathe my inner seasons, and not having a cycle has really thrown me because I don't know where I am, and I'm really struggling to kind of navigate that aspect of feeling really out of balance with my body. I've then also struggled quite a lot with my diet and like bloating, and I think it's it is definitely all a knock-on effect. Like I'm stressed, that affects my digestion, and then that affects my cycle, and then it's just a constant kind of like flow. But it has really made me look at myself, look at the way I speak to myself, look at myself concept, really look at how I view myself through my own lens, how I speak to myself behind closed doors, how I think about myself, how I I think this is gonna be a big one for the majority of people like around my age, like born in the 90s, we were born in the nothing tastes as good as skinny feels era, and I put a lot of my self-worth on my physical appearance. And if I wake up in the morning, for example, I've been waking up, I've been really, really bloated and like struggling with my digestion, and I wake up and I instantly haven't even eaten anything, and I'm just like bloated like a balloon, and I'm instantly in a bad mood, it just immediately makes me feel awful, and it's really quite incredible how if we go unconscious and we don't bring our awareness to our self-concept, to our self-image, to our inner critic, how we can just continue throughout our day to destroy ourselves in our mind without even realizing it. Like you can catch yourself in a mirror and have a negative thought, and it's gone in an instant, it's there and then it's gone, and it was a passing moment, and you don't even know you're doing it. It's things like that that I have majorly made myself look at. I have really slowed myself down to understand one, why I'm trying, why I'm doing this to myself, because there is nothing wrong with me. I'm going through a phase in my life where my physical appearance is very different to it was six months ago. But then if you look at it from a physical point of view, right now I am while I was in winter in England, like that's it doesn't really get much more depressing than eight hours of sunlight, not even sunlight, eight hours of grey sky a day compared to a Balinese summer where you've got 12 hours of sunlight and beaches and oceans, and it's a very, like I said, yang outward, vibrant culture. So when you compare the two physically, I mean there's no surprise that I'm not gonna feel as confident in my body now as I did six months ago. When you also look at energetically and emotionally, there's a lot going on for me right now. I am at home, I'm here temporarily, I'm living in kind of like it's not temporary, like it's not temporary where I'm living. I have a bedroom and it's like my home, but it's not like mine. I've got like temp work happening, so I'm really kind of like unbalanced in that aspect. Everything is kind of out of balance, and it's like a it's this void because it's I'm here and I'm only here for a short amount of time and then I'm leaving again. So it's no surprise that I feel out of whack and my body is then responding physically, but it's the internal commentary that has really shocked me when I've actually kind of stripped it back and looked at how I speak to myself and why I speak to myself like that. Like I've been doing quite a lot of shadow work to figure out why I'm doing things like, for example, comfort eating, why I'm so nasty to myself, what it comes down to, and it all comes down to self-worth and the fear to be seen, which then again, as I spoke about in one of my previous episodes with the witch hunts and the witch trials and this witch wound, it is our fear of being seen, it's our fear of being in our full potential, and I think I mean everybody's kind of reasonings will be different, but I just wanted to share like my experience and my journey because if this helps one person, then it's all worth it. But for me personally, I think I self-sabotage myself because I'm so afraid of being seen, because I'm so afraid that if I stop self-sabotaging and I give it my all and I'm seen and it's not enough, then what do I do? Then where do I go? Because have I failed? I mean, no, I haven't failed because obviously it will help some people in some way, shape, or form, but it's like if I get rid of this inner critic and I actually allow myself to glow and I allow myself to step into my full potential and I allow my self-concept to improve and I actually like myself, then if I'm rejected and other people don't like me, what do I do then? When actually it's ridiculous because if you if you like yourself and you step into your self-concept and you step into your highest version, of course people are gonna like you. There's like eight billion people in the world. If every single person doesn't like you, it's just not realistic. Another thing is that not liking ourselves and having a bad self-concept, having a big kind of a loud inner critic, being very critical is just such good girl conditioning, it is so deeply rooted in the world we live in. They want us to hate ourselves. You cannot be sold to, you cannot be marketed to, you cannot be targeted if you have no way you want to improve. For example, if you are completely happy in your makeup-free, all natural face, you're not gonna be buying makeup because you're happy with it. If you're happy with your wrinkles, you're not gonna be buying face creams that get rid of your wrinkles. If you're happy in your kind of your clothes you've had for years, you're not gonna be buying new clothes to make yourself feel better. Not liking yourself for something and then being sold something to fill that void is the biggest marketing tool there is, and as a woman, it's one of the most rebellious things you can do is actually learn to love yourself, to well and truly love who you are, improve your self-concept, and be really proud of who you are and your individuality because we are all so different, and your chance of being here is something ridiculous, like one in a trillion. So, why would you want to be like everybody else? Why would you want to age like everybody else and dress like everybody else? Why wouldn't you want to express yourself in your own unique and magnificent way? So, improving your self-concept is one of the best things you can do, and like linking it back to what I said at the start of this episode, if you are trying to manifest an incredible life, like for example, for me, I do not want to live like the standard norm. I want to be a digital nomad, I want to have some kind of online presence where I can have this podcast and I can sell courses and I can train and coach women and I can help empower as many women as possible to embody their cyclical nature, to embody what it means to be a woman and embody what it is to be the divine feminine. I can't manifest that if I don't like myself. I can't sell to women to embody their divine essence when I don't like my divine essence. I have to like myself in order to empower other women to like themselves too. It's just like I know obviously everybody's kind of manifestations, everybody's things that they're gonna want to be calling into their lives will be different, but it all kind of comes down to the same basic core. You can't embody something that you don't think you are worthy of. So, me calling in this kind of different way of living, I have to actually well and truly believe that it is worthy for me. Therefore, I have to believe myself concept, I have to believe in my self-image, I have to believe in myself enough to know that it is worthy for me. And if we don't like ourselves, if we are so horrible to ourselves, we are never going to call in the things we like. Because behind closed doors, how you speak to yourself, how you act with yourself, that makes up the majority of your time. You live in your head a majority of the time. So being able to separate yourself as like mind, body, and soul is so critical because you are the soul, you are the observer, you are the thing inside you that is calm and listening, you are not the monkey mind that kind of runs 110 miles an hour and has these inner critic thoughts and has all these kind of anxious and bad ideas, and the monkey mind is the thing we need to try and shush. So if you can separate yourself, if you can understand that you are the observer and you are not the monkey mind, and then you can actually allow yourself to observe how it speaks rather than just running on an unconscious loop all day, can you separate yourself and bring enough conscious awareness into your mind, into your present moment to understand? Actually, I don't like how I just spoke to myself just then, or I don't like what I just thought about myself in the mirror. Can you bring enough conscious awareness into your present moment and go, no, that's not how I speak to myself anymore? Or no, that's not how we think about our body anymore. Doing this is going to be life-changing. If you can bring your conscious awareness into the present moment and catch your unconscious in that moment and change and choose to think differently, obviously, you're gonna go unconscious over and over and over again. But if you can catch yourself over and over and over again, you are then going to eventually sever that neuropathway, which is like your automatic system. For example, if you look in the mirror and the first thing you think is, Oh, what's the bad things I can pick out about myself? And then you have that thought and you think, No, no, no, we're gonna choose differently. What's something I love about myself? The more and more you catch yourself and you have that new thought, and you make that new, you make that a new pathway, you will eventually look in the mirror, and the first thing you will think is, What do I like about myself? It's repetition, you have to rewire your brain over time with repetition. So rewiring your brain to like yourself and to improve your self-concept is crucial because you have to like yourself. I think it's so wild that we are so encouraged to dislike ourselves. So many people are not confident in themselves and in their body, and I have come to realise that that was the biggest lesson I've had to learn in this kind of being at home hibernation phase is that I didn't like myself, and I used my relationships and my partnerships with men in the past to kind of just ignore the fact that I didn't like myself. I just didn't look at it because I was so wrapped up in the fact that I was in a relationship and I was secure and I was happy that I didn't actually realize that when I'm on my own, I don't like myself. I would use the confidence of being in a partnership to kind of boost my self-esteem and boost my ego to the point where I almost like bypassed the fact that my self-concept was absolutely shocking. So this has been a real awakening, and this has been a real harsh look in the mirror at myself and at how I speak to myself, and how I view my self-image and my self-worth. It's been a real breaking down, obviously, alongside everything going on with myself physically, showing up for cyclica, showing up on Instagram. It's been really, really transformational to catch myself in each and every moment, to stop myself procrastinating, to make myself show up even when it's uncomfortable, and to show up as I am always. Like if I record something and I really like the message and I don't think it's perfect, can I just show up as I am? Can I allow myself to take up authentic space and then learn to like myself in the process? It's been a really, really incredible journey, and it's something that I encourage every single person to do. Like, can you really look at yourself and your relationship with yourself and figure out how you actually think about yourself? Can you take off all your masks? Can you take away all your relationships? And when it's just you, when there is no one else in the room with you, when there is no one telling you how to be or making you act a certain way, when there is no one to influence how you show up and how you look at yourself, what do you actually think about yourself? Do you like yourself? Because I tell you now, you will not get what you want from this life until you learn to love yourself, until you learn to put yourself first and value yourself as the incredible, magnificent human being that you are, you will not be able to manifest your deep deepest desires, you will not be able to get the life of your dreams, and you will not be able to call in the love and the friendships and the opportunities that you deserve because you don't at a core level think you're worthy of them. Just let that sink in. You are incredible. The chances of you being here in this body as this person with all these unique, incredible gifts that you have is an absolute fucking miracle. So act like it. You are a miracle, you should have the best self-concept. I know that people say, Oh, they're too full of themselves, they're too bold, they're too cocky. Yes, there is a level of arrogance and ego, and I'm not telling you to be egotistic and arrogant and cocky and rude, but you need to really fucking like yourself. You need to know that you deserve a space in that room, you deserve a seat at that table, and you deserve to have this fucking glowing, iridescent, sparkling. Aura, you deserve to captivate people with your energy as you walk in a room because your birthright is to take up space. You are allowed to take up space on this earth, and there is enough space for everybody to step into the power and take up space. So I really encourage you to take a look at yourself, take a look at your self-concept, take a look at yourself image, and ask yourself if you actually like yourself because it has been incredibly transformational to really strip back how I speak to myself and understand that I am not going to get what I want unless I know I'm worthy of it. So obviously, every day is a lesson and every day is a journey, and we are never ever fully healed and enlightened because what's the point of life then? Life is to evolve, life is to learn and grow and teach and share. So from my heart to yours, make sure you look at your self-concept, understand what it is you want from the world, understand how you actually view yourself, and really work on it. Really work on improving your self-concept and stepping into your higher self because know that you are worthy. You are worthy of absolutely everything you want to call into this world, and taking up space is your birthright. So do not waste any more time making yourself small to fit into spaces that you don't belong. Share your light, shine brightly, and yeah, have the audacity to be your biggest, boldest, and most brilliant self. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If it resonated, make sure to send to the guys and girls in your life that need to hear it the most. If you're interested in all things menstrual cycle education, mindset, magic, cyclical living, and everything a little bit witchy and woo-woo, then you can find me on Instagram at the Cyclica. So make sure to head over there and give me a follow. And make sure to subscribe to the Good Girl Rebellion so that you never miss one of my weekly episodes. Thank you again for listening, and I hope that this episode encourages you and empowers you to step into your full potential, to enjoy life, to love yourself to your core so that you know that you can manifest everything you want in this life because you know at a deep core level that you are fucking worth it. Now go out there and be your biggest, boldest, and most audacious self. All my love, and I will see you again next week.