SYNOPSIS
This book guides the modern woman through a deliberate journey of achieving a wholesome personality on all sides. From the state of your mental well being to factors that strengthen the physical, spiritual, emotional, financial and social health of a holistic woman. It is in the elements of the thoughts we entertain, the choice of food we eat, the exercise we engage in, the quality of rest and relaxation we allow ourselves, the positive energy we harvest from the relationships we nurture around us, the deliberate and strategic thoughts we give to managing our financial resources, and most importantly, the wisdom with which we handle the subject of our spirituality. Olivia addresses all these from both personal experiences and proven scientific reports.
After reading this book, the reader would be better empowered to tackle disturbing issues like unstable relationships, poor self-esteem, depression, physical health challenges, financial weaknesses, eating disorders, etc., all arising from the heavy demands on the modern day woman to meet up to society’s domestic, social, economical, parental and religious obligations.
EXCERPT
The issue of personal identity is one that I believe is at the core of most of life's drama. Who I am deep within me determines my outlook on life and shapes my expectations and experiences. But I have heard some people I respect say severally that perception is stronger than reality. As much as I resisted that insinuation/assertion in the beginning, time has proven how powerful perception can be.
Personal identity is who I see myself to be. It is made up of my values, behavior, culture, etc. it is my vision of myself.
On the other hand, perception is the lens that helps my vision of myself.
If you are the daughter of a king and you don’t consider yourself as such, you will expect to be treated as less than royalty and perpetually attract same. Your decisions will be shaped by your perception of yourself.
I've met some ladies who exude such level of confidence that you would find it hard to refuse them anything they ask. Sometimes they don't have any material thing to justify the way they carry themselves. They carry on as though they have everything working out for them and even in the face of likely embarrassment, they stay classy and never lose their cool. In the past, I used to be drawn to such women and just look upon them in awe. They seemed untouchable and completely unperturbed, like Divas and Queens. I have a few of them as friends and work with a few. Among these women, I had identified those who I believed were snobs and the ones who I was sure had inferiority complexes. And so, I treated each person as I thought they deserved to be treated based on my perception of them.
Sometimes someone would move from being an acquaintance to a friend and then after a few months of intense friendship, I would disqualify them and move them back to the outer circle. And vice-versa. Maybe they were getting too close or they were too selfish or too demanding or too manipulative or too nice. But as the cycle continued, I realized that I didn't have stability in my relationships and so I decided to change strategy because I desired more stability and wanted to enjoy genuine human connections found in friendship. Instead of thinking about others, I started to look inward and wonder what it was about me that made it difficult to maintain stable relationships. And that was a turning point in my relationships.
So here are some things I discovered were defining my perceptions and influencing my life choices and experiences. And the more I meditated on these things and discussed it with others, I realized it was the same things that were affecting most other people in their everyday life. The issue of Personal Identity influences our level of Self confidence/belief/esteem, and is a sum total of our cultural identity, family background, and peer influence (this includes social media influence).
2.1 SELF CONFIDENCE/SELF ESTEEM /SELF BELIEF
I believe that a confident woman is someone who, irrespective of her age, social status, or achievement, is sure of herself and wears her scars and crowns proudly. She flaunts her strengths, not in an arrogant way, but in an assertive manner that exudes grace and class. She is honest with herself on the areas of her weaknesses, but this knowledge empowers rather than diminishes her, because she is a constantly evolving being. Confidence has nothing to do with feeling superior or inferior to others. It is a quiet inner knowledge that you're enough. You are kind enough to say Yes to the things that you can do but you also love yourself enough to say NO to the things that you cannot do.
Self esteem is the worth that one places on him/herself based on their personal evaluation of self.
A woman who has a high sense of self worth, has a healthy self esteem. And this shows in the way she relates with her family, friends, colleagues and especially with herself. I believe some persons have mastered the art of faking confidence, where they appear confident but deep within they are afraid and shaking at their prevailing circumstance. You can appear confident without having a healthy self esteem. In our society today, there is a heightened dependence on material things to boost one's confidence. But no matter how many expensive shoes and jewelry a woman owns, or the brand of makeup and lingerie she wears, or the calibre of men she dates, or even the part of the world she lives in and the number of cars and houses she owns, she may never really feel whole inside if she has a low self-image and worth. It is easy to lie to the audience and pretend like you are confident in public, hiding behind your designer glasses that shield everybody from looking into your eyes which can be the window to your soul. But it is almost impossible to lie to yourself when you're alone at night, having washed off the makeup and the mask you wear daily, that overwhelming feeling of emptiness and worthlessness comes from a place of being broken and not knowing how to heal the wounds in your heart and soul.
There was a time in my life when I was too uncomfortable to go anywhere without Make up. Even for casual runs like going to the bank or the farmer's market, I had to put on at least loose powder, draw on brows & wear lip gloss. It had started innocently in high school where almost all the girls wore colored lip gloss in a bid to glow and impress our teenage crushes. Granted, I went to school in a dry clime, and during the harmattan season, lip gloss and balms were essential to keep one's lips from cracking. But a number of us found the harmattan a worthy excuse to wear light make up, which were banned, at the time. We were just teenagers catching cruise and we got away with it.
Then I went on to university and would spend a large amount of time putting on makeup and sometimes appearing late to class. I remember one of my roommates in my first year at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, who took it upon herself to harass me for wearing makeup to class. She was almost sure I would give up make up after just one semester facing the rigour of THE DEN, as my school was called. I laugh when I wonder what she would have said if she saw me at my convocation ceremony, wearing my first full face of makeup. I had graduated from putting on makeup by myself to having an expert makeup artiste do it for me and so I wore my first professional make up on the day of my convocation.
Then I got a job as a TV presenter, and it became mandatory for me to wear makeup as I was required to look flawless on TV. I had to find a Makeup artist, who was really gracious and would come to our TV station every day to make me up. With time, I couldn't keep up with her payments because it was costing me a lot to pay her from my own salary and at this time my employers were gracious enough to intervene and have one of our production staff who was a Make Up artiste on the side volunteer to keep me flawless on TV.
When I resigned that job, it occurred to me how attached to face-beats I had become. I was rarely seen without Make Up and would rush to put on light make up in the restroom whenever I came to work, even when I wouldn't be on set for the day. It was a tough road deprogramming myself and getting back to thoroughly loving my natural face. But I did it eventually.
I recovered so well that I’d only wear makeup if I have to go on stage (as an event host) or go on TV as a presenter.
Plot twist, one day, my Make Up Artiste was running late & it was Day three of Lagos Comic Con, an international event I was hosting, I didn’t waste any moment to climb that stage without any make up & host the event beautifully.
Another time, I was producing a wedding event for my TV series, The Real of Bridesmaids of Africa, and I had planned a surprise for the bride so I was all over the place. My Make Up artiste had to chase me around just to draw on my eyebrows. It wasn’t until we were done with that day’s production that it occurred to me that I had gone on air without wearing full make up and had done a flawless job.
I loved the feeling of freedom that came with being me and basking in the imperfections that make me a truly remarkable and unique individual. Every quirky character, freckle and out-of-place dot, a deliberate design by an undisputed master creator in the impeccable work of Art called Me.
Sometimes I just ponder on how much conditioning we’re exposed to as a people and especially as women. We are made to desire seemingly perfect body figures, flawless skin, the perfect dentition, unimaginable hair lengths, impossible accents, impractical butt sizes etc.
I love to play dress up & look nice. I believe that the art of being fascinating is a mesmerizing tool for a woman; which is why I make a conscious and intentional effort to smell and look good. But now, I have enough common sense to realize that the moment I go from enjoying these adjustments to feeling like I desperately need them to be complete, whole or enough, then I am giving in to social conditioning and allowing peer pressure, sponsored campaigns and advertising to best me. And I absolutely do not want to be played like that.
We may need to stop chasing perfection and acknowledge that there is a bit of insecurity in every one of us, and that is just alright.
I think that if we identify it and are honest enough to acknowledge it, its powers over us begin to wane notably. And in that place of awareness and honesty, we are able to ask ourselves the questions that really matter. Why do I feel the need to conform to society's expectations of a woman? Why am I eager to please everyone even at my own detriment? Why am I so stressed working so hard just to afford the things that do not really matter to me? Why do I keep getting and getting and getting without ever feeling enough? Why am I so uncomfortable with how I look, what I do, where I'm from and who I am? Why do I feel so empty sometimes?
I can write about this so clearly and so intensely because it is a state where I lived in for so many years before I was rescued. My healing began when I consciously began to ask myself these important questions. I read so many different books and attended women conferences and listened to audio messages genuinely seeking answers to why my self esteem was so brittle and my confidence such a brave effort. To do the work I do in the way that I do it, with whom I do it, where I do it and in the time that I do it, a healthy self esteem and confidence are non-negotiable. So for me, wholeness was a matter of personal and professional urgency. And what I found to be at the heart of the battle was that my Personal Identity was scarred. I had no real sense of who I am and I depended on everybody else to define me. In my journey of self-discovery, I realized there are some factors that contributed to most of my issues with low self esteem and I find the same to be true with most people I have met who suffer the same fate. Issues surrounding family background, peer influence, and cultural identity contribute intensely to produce feelings that result in experiences of shame, pride, greed, jealousy, envy, and guilt which are all manifestations of an unhealthy self esteem. Interestingly, I found that my perceptions of my family background, peer influence and cultural identity were just instruments I was using to self sabotage. In reality, my perceptions were simply that. Perceptions.
It is so easy to miss it and yet I felt so silly when I finally realized that my Personal Identity and Self Esteem can be healthy irrespective of my past, present or future. This is one of the realizations that started me on my journey to freedom. And I hope that it will help you in some ways too.
Cultural Identity
We live in interesting times, where we have been able to successfully bridge the gap between tribes and continents, thanks to the Internet. However, I think that as technologically advanced as we have become as women, we are still largely influenced by our place of origin. Yes, we travel and live far away from our place of birth and yes, we have cut off our village people, but truly our cultural identity is most likely embedded deeply in our DNA. There has been studies recently that show that who we are, at our core, can be a reflection of the predominant culture and values of where we come from. Take for instance, the constant comparison between the Igbos of South Eastern Nigeria and the Jews, many people allege that the two nations must have been one at some point in history because of similarities in their traditional practices like the circumcision of male children eight days after birth, identification of certain foods as unclean and unfit for consumption, and mourning the dead for seven days etc. Some anthropologists claim that the Igbos were practicing these customs before their exposure to the Bible and Christian missionaries.
According to a once trending CNN article, Daniel Lis, a researcher on Jewish identification among the Igbo from the Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland, says, there has been a clear continuity of Jewish identity among the Igbo. It's not just something that happened yesterday.
In 2018, I did a feature on the Alaba International Market in Lagos, West Africa, to highlight the Apprenticeship system of the Igbos known popularly as Igba boy, interviewing the key players in this entrepreneurship system. An entrepreneur, more commonly referred to as Oga, brings a young boy of common origins, to live with him, work with him and understudy him as an apprentice, with view of providing him capital and business mentorship for his own business after the agreed duration of service. During the apprenticeship training period, technical, management and interpersonal skills like market research, forecasting, book keeping, human relations, communication and negotiation, as well as diversification and business scaling are learned. The research was an episode of the Ebe Ngoli show, aired on Africa Magic Igbo. As a people, it would seem that entrepreneurship is largely ingrained in an Igbo woman's DNA and I have always found it fascinating, being a serial entrepreneur myself. It wasn't until I got married and started to relate closely with my husband's people that I caught a close glimpse of the sharp contrast between my culture and his own and how it influenced my behavior different from his.
Apart from the speculations of Jewish origin as an explanation of the entrepreneurial nature of the Igbos, I discovered that the The Nigerian Civil War, fought between 1967 and 1970 left a huge mark on the Igbos as a people. Academic, financial and social integration back into the Nigerian system as well as continued sustenance was met with a wall. For starters, Nigerian Government policies made sure that the richest Igbo man at that time had nothing more than 20 Pounds, No Igbo child had been to school in those three years, and the Igbo professional was viewed with suspicion in his Nigerian workplace. One can understand how this reality would drive the Igbos into an ambitious overdrive to work, work, and achieve.
My mother-in-law is a lovely woman who I have enjoyed many interesting conversations with over cocoa tea, and it is from her that I learned that my husband's Town of Issele-Mkpitime in Delta state did not experience the war.
My husband, my mother-in-law and I had that conversation one regular evening in my family house and it was as though my marriage and my husband made so much sense in that moment. You see, my husband is just as keen on rest as he is on work and it didn't make sense to me why he would take things as easy as he did sometimes, because I had an inexplicable desire to achieve all the time, which is generally a good thing, but I realized I may have been caught in over-drive once in a while in my entrepreneurship journey because of my cultural identity. I am from a generation of doers. It was on that day that I realized that even though I was not a part of the war, its effects had subconsciously trickled down from the generations before me and I had acquired some behaviours, both good and bad, from my ancestors who experienced the war. So, I made my peace with my history and from then on, began to consciously manifest only the aspects of my cultural identity that resonate with my present realities.
I am now deliberate to join my husband in an afternoon nap if my body feels tired, because there is no imminent war looming, and nobody is coming to take away the fruit of my hard work in the blink of an eye. I learned to really rest and began to deliberately pamper myself at every given opportunity. The result is that I am less anxious than I used to be, because I am less stressed or overworked. I used to shy away from my father's stories of our family history but now I listen with rapt attention, because in understanding where I'm from, I have begun to understand who I am and why I do what I do and therefore get closer to wholeness as a woman.
I am proud to come from a tribe of relentless achievers, who are known to thrive and excel in any country or situation we find ourselves. But now, even as I excel in my work, I am deliberate about rest and relaxation. Knowledge of my cultural identity is not an excuse to wallow in self pity but is empowering me to live my best life, as a doer and achiever who prioritizes rest and relaxation. In my home, I am doing my best to create an environment for my daughter to have a childhood highlighted by many happy moments of rest and relaxation. I share more on Work, as well as rest and relaxation in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book.
As women, we must be deliberate about rest and relaxation because our body does wonders from the age of puberty till menopause, and from our monthly menstrual cycle to childbirth, we give a lot of ourselves and so we definitely need to rest from time to time. For you, it may not be your attitude towards work and rest that your cultural identity affects, but I believe you may be better served if you can find out what aspects of yourself is consistent with your place of origin, and decide for yourself if you like the effect on you or not. That way, you can embrace what works and do your best to adjust the aspects that affect you negatively.
Another apt example is present in the cultural identity of the Ashanti women of Ghana. In 2016, I directed a stage play at the President Barack Obama's Young African Leaders Initiative program. The play was based on the story of Queen Mother Nana Yaa Asantewaa, who led an army of 5,000 in The Ashanti-British War of the Golden Stool. She was the first and only woman in Asante history chosen by a number of regional Asante kings to be the war-leader of the Asante fighting force in such a historically deciding war.
Yaa Asantewaa's dream for an Asante free of British rule was realized on 6 March 1957, when the Asante protectorate gained independence as part of Ghana. Ghana was the first African nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve this feat.
I find her story so inspiring and it made sense that the few Ashanti ladies I interacted with in my time in Ghana seemed quite bold and daring. I guess her story would have had a big impact on them.
In my Igbo culture, practices like the use of kitchen stools (oche ntukwu) and bathing stools foster mindfulness which help to curb anxiety. I smile when I think of this because it wasn't until I brought back stools to my bathrooms and kitchens to help me take things easy and rest systemically that I realized the wisdom of my ancestors. Today, psychology preaches mindfulness as a way to mitigate anxiety but I am proud that the women of my tribe had long figured out this life hack of taking things easy by sitting down while working amidst friendly conversation.