The 1 Thing Every Type-A Woman Needs to Know About Self-Love

I recently sat down with MindBodyGreen’s Clean Beauty School podcast host and Beauty Director, Alex Engler. The one thing I loved about this podcast was that two Type-A New York women sat for a chat about beauty, brilliance, and balance.

As my mom always used to say, “Treat your skin like the most expensive silk on earth.” Can we treat ourselves like the most expensive silk through self-care and nourishment and still succeed in our careers and life?

Can you go after you want without pushing, pulling, and being so demanding on yourself? Can you actually succeed in your career through a gentler, kinder approach?

Listen to the entire podcast or start at the 20-minute mark for my answer. I’ve paraphrased it for you below!

PODCAST EXCERPT TRANSCRIPT:

Alex, you live in Brooklyn, I live in Manhattan. We've talked about the Savor Beauty West Village spa already, and we also have an Upper West Side location.

The downtown and uptown client bases are completely different; they live in the same city but I always say the Upper West Side woman is who the West Village girl wants to be in10-15 years.

The downtown crowd as a whole is younger. And they're so excited to be in our spa. They want to take care of themselves. They're so into wellness.

The Upper West Side client is also very concerned about the ingredients that are going on their faces. They're trying to live a lifestyle of holistic wellness, but they're tired or burnt out. To live in New York City and then to climb the ranks in your career—it's tiring, and now they have kids and significant others.

OUR CLIENTS SAY:

“I feel dried up, I feel stressed, overwhelmed.”

We want to get them looking and feeling radiant and juicy.

How do you succeed in life and not burn out and still feel and look gorgeous and glowing? So Radical Radiance is really about manifestation, which has always come very easy for me; my own personal story is that self-love has not come as easily.

I was one of those women in New York City hustling and gaining a lot of success but at the cost of my health, at the cost of my happiness until I began practicing self-love rituals.

I want to teach women (and my daughter) that you can be successful in life. You can go after what you want. But I want to give you a manual on how to do it through the lens of self-love and nourishment.

Self-love was something that I used to laugh at and think was so fluffy. And I would even make fun of people who were all about self-care and self-love.

But what I realized was that I didn't like spending time with myself because when I was alone, the only thoughts in the middle of the night would be, “You forgot to do this. You've got to do this. You have to do this.”

It's like living with somebody who's constantly hammering into your head, and it's tiring. So of course, I hated being alone. I would turn to social media or do work or start shopping online.

And then I asked myself, “Who am I? And do I even like who that is anymore? Do I know who that is?”

We have labels. I am a mom, I am a New Yorker. I am a businesswoman. But it would be so powerful to just say, “I am.” Period.

YOUR BEAUTY ESSENCE

In a beauty product, there’s always an essence, a concentration of a quality that solves a skincare issue. In the Savor Beauty Carrot Rose serum, for example, the essence or quality is natural retinol for cellular renewal.

We have an inner essence, too. We have an overwhelmingly beautiful quality, and if we can connect to it daily, it’s powerful, authentic, and magical.

The Inner Essence Ritual from Radical Radiance, page 56. I do this every morning to plug into my authentic power.

Start from here and then, to go deeper, do the following:

• Read more of my blog—I write weekly with the intention to help you access your gorgeous, juicy radiance.

• Read or listen to Radical Radiance for a deeper experience and the 12-week program

• Listen to podcasts that I’ve been on. I’m currently on a podcast tour and will be talking about different aspects of self-love, success, love, and life!

Edited excerpt from RADICAL RADIANCE: by Angela Jia Kim.

Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group.