Prioritizing Our Minds Over Our Appearance

I’ve been noticing how much women complement each other on looks. When someone loses weight we say “wow, you look great!” Shopping with women you’ll hear, “that shirt brings out the color of your eyes” or “those pants make your thighs look slimmer.”

I’ve watched my 4-year-old neighbor girl get complimented on how pretty she looks in her princess dress.

I see friends posting pictures of their daughters and mentioning what beautiful women they’re becoming.

I witnessed my teenage cousin scroll through Instagram and carefully study the various exercise videos that showed up on her feed. Was she studying the bodies? Was she studying the videos because she was seeking workouts to help change her body?

When I was personal training my female client’s goals always centered on appearance. They wanted their bodies to be more toned, they wanted to get rid of their belly fat. It didn’t matter how their body functioned, it mattered how their bodies looked.

We live in a society where we have stores like Sephora and Ulta and medical spa services devoted to improving women’s appearance and they’re in high demand. What does that say about our culture and how much we value a woman’s appearance?

I’m no stranger to it. I’ve paid to have spider veins treated. I’ve spent as much as $50 on make-up primer. I’ve used self-tanning lotions. I workout to keep my body in shape. This isn’t a righteous call to stop improving our appearance but to start noticing how much effort we put into our looks.

What if the portion of time, energy, and money spent on improving our appearance was spent on improving our minds by learning new skills or having new experiences?

What if instead of talking about our bodies or our skincare treatment we talked about our ideas, our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations, or what brings us joy?

Girls are watching the women that surround them. Your niece, your daughter, the neighbor girl, they are learning what’s important, what’s meaningful, and what matters from us. When we spend an enormous amount of time and money on enhancing our looks and complimenting each other on our appearance it sends the message that appearance is what society values. Let’s start talking about more meaningful things. Let’s start complimenting girls and women on things besides their looks. Let’s take some of the time and attention spent on our enhancing our appearance and redirect it to developing our minds.