In Conversation With - Jamie Varon, Author & Multi-Creative.

In Conversation With is a series to discuss the bits often left unsaid - personal and intimate topics such as self-acceptance, relationship with mind & body and the societal pressures + unrealistic standards of life with the internet. Through this series, I hope you feel a little less alone and a whole lot inspired.

In conversation with Jamie Varon - Jamie is somebody I've admired for a really long time. Besides being an uber creative soul who has the most impeccable way with words, Jamie is also devoted wife to hubby Hussein and the nicest, most humble, most sincere human ever. From us to you, we hope you enjoy this conversation …

EC. I truly believe Radically Content is a book that should be given to every single young woman approaching her adult years. This book brings up, stirs up, hurts and heals so much for anyone that reads it. In it, you mention the illusion that shame can be used as a great motivator to create change in your life. How can someone identify if they're currently using shame to try and change their ways?

JV. It's pretty simple but takes a bit of finessing. Ask yourself - why am I doing this?

Usually, it comes from a place of urgency because you either hate your body or you hate this “thing”. So, how can you approach change from a loving place? I always talk about going toward something, instead of running away from it because with shame, we like to keep it in the shadows. We feel shame about our shame and it’s this constant vicious cycle that we keep locked away. The whole point is to bring it to light.

Ask yourself - what do I want to change and what can I go toward rather than run away from?

A lot of people get motivated initially, then shame lessens that a little bit because what you were actually doing was running away from shame, instead of going toward a more positive approach. Once you outrun shame though, you’ll always go back to old ways and the cycle starts again because now you feel shame about that. I was in this for so long in so many ways …

I just said to myself - there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a way where I can make change happen from a place of love, instead of earning my love.

No matter how many changes I made, no matter how much I did, if it came from that place of trying to outrun shame, it never worked. There were always new things to feel ashamed about. Shame is like a cancer. It just spreads and the fallacy is that we can do enough, become enough, earn enough to outrun shame but I think a lot of people have woke to the fact that this doesn’t actually work.

EC. If not shame, then how can using truth be a more effective way to achieve consistency and change long term?

JV. Honestly, you’ve got to be a friend to yourself and understand your motivations. If you don't understand why you're doing things, why somethings in your schedule, why you even care, you're living on autopilot. You don't even know what’s motivating you. When you start being honest with yourself, what naturally happens is a lot of things you think you have to change, go away and you start to feel like you don’t need to change that anymore. You’ve got to recognise the truth of why you want to change something.

I wanted to change my writing practice so that I could actually write Radically Content, instead of half outlines that I hoped would turn into something. So I went about making that change from a place of being excited about what I'm building. I went toward something. When you approach change from a place of love, you set yourself up for success because there's no proving that you're doing something wrong or that you are wrong. That's the shame - you're wrong in some way.

We all know people who come New Years, put everything on their plate and that’s not realistic. They’re not going to be successful at that. It's not thinking of long term sustainability. When you come from a place of love for yourself, you might do one thing this week and commit to that one thing. Then you’ll do that one thing again and then you’ll do it again. This is how I got to the point where I can now sit down any day, any time and write no matter what because I started writing once a week consistently. I didn’t force myself to write 7 days a week and never miss a day. That's not the gentle loving approach that’s needed to build a habit. I said - Friday is my day and I'm going to teach myself to do that. Now I'm at a place where there's no questioning. I used to have constant stress about when and if I was going to write. No wonder my career as a writer wasn't taking off. I wasn't even in a place where I could withstand or sustain a career like that.

There is something that shifts when we can rely on ourselves. I don't think people recognise how much they can achieve and how they unknowingly make what they desire so much smaller because they don't have that sense of foundation with themselves. If you say you’re doing to do something, you’ve got to do it. When you say you're going to do something and you actually do it, you can think bigger. I'm not saying everybody has to have big lives but I know there are plenty of people who have unspent dreams within them, even if that dream is to get better at cooking or to spend more time in the garden. Our lives take on a total transformative approach when we are consistent.

Just on that too - I also feel that we've mistaken consistency. We think that consistency has to be every single day, all the time and it has to be intense. It really doesn't. If you're going from zero consistency, do 10 minutes once a week and do that every time. That's enough. You think it's not enough but do that 3 weeks in a row and you're going to feel so good about yourself. If you say to yourself though, I'm ashamed that I can't stick with anything, then you're going to keep repeating that story. Whenever I try to do something new, I make the stakes so low. I talk to myself like I’m a child, I’ll say - “Okay, Jamie, you don't have to do a lot, you just have to show up consistently! This always works because I’m not a jerk to myself. Being a jerk to yourself is not going to get you where you want to go.

EC. Coming from a place of love also takes away that urgency because if you're doing something from a place of love, you won't feel a sense of urgency because you won't feel the need to rush through it because you actually enjoy it and want to do it every single day …

JV. Exactly and I think this is something I didn't particularly realise until I did it. When I wasn't being consistent, I thought that the result was the reason you do things. Then I realised, you spend more time doing the thing and doing the process than you ever will spend in the result. The result is 2 seconds. If you're doing a marathon, the marathon itself is a lot longer than just experiencing the finish line. When I wanted everything to have already happened yesterday, that was that urgency and it wasn't coming from a place of really understanding how much confidence is built in the doing.

That's why instant gratification & quick fixes are problematic because you're missing the fruit. You're missing the gift of what it is to actually do something that you say you're going to do and build up that momentum, feel the confidence that comes from knowing that you can act on what you say you're going to do and feel the confidence that comes from progress. I feel like people are missing out on that.

I also think a lot of this conversation about consistency and discipline gets very overblown by men. It’s very aggressive and intense. It’s like push, push, push. Just calm down. Are you even happy? Are you enjoying this? Just relax! There's so much nourishment in the process. I just had a novel come out and the first thing I thought after all the hype and excitement of it launching was when do I get to write another one?

That's what I can't wait for, I love that. I spend way more time writing and editing each novel. It’s not just the release day, so you’ve got to love it. For so long, I was very results forward, wished I was already in the future and just so impatient. Now, I understand that so much of life is in the process of doing the thing. That's the gift more than the results. It's just so fulfilling.

EC. So many women think of discipline as strict, unenjoyable, and unrewarding. How do we flip this and create more of a positive definition of discipline?

JV. This is a great question because it's been framed as restriction. It's like control yourself and control this. In patriarchy capitalism, there is this idea that everything is within your control and it’s not. That’s insane. Life is not within our total control. The way I see discipline is that it allows me to honour the things within myself that I want to bring to fruition. So discipline, in this sense becomes very freeing because it allows me a container for those things to matter.

If you're doing discipline because of a fear of control, fear of feeling out of control or fear of gaining or losing, it's going to feel restrictive. The intention behind the thing is what defines the thing, right? So, with discipline, if the intention is to control every aspect of your life and make your life smaller because of it, then it's not going to be great because that's coming from a place of fear of losing control, whereas discipline for me allowed the spaces in my life to totally expand because I knew I had space for this thing that matters to me.

I don't overdo it either. I have discipline on certain things, not everything and that's a really important part - knowing where you have to have flexibility. Discipline with flexibility and consistency with flexibility. Granted, I think it’s OK at first to be a little strict with yourself. Sometimes we do need that tough love - eg. maybe don’t skip that thing because it won’t feel good to skip it but when it comes from a place of love and trust, we're able to sit with ourselves a bit more.

I think that's where it misses with a lot of the masculine talk about discipline. Hello, are we human beings? Are we robots? It's like don't have a feeling because you're not going to be productive if you have feelings. Instead of - I can be very disciplined, consistent and also honour my feelings.

There's a lot of talk about self love but telling yourself you're beautiful in the mirror isn’t love! How do we feel loved? When someone listens to us, right?! When someone listens to how we feel or what we say. We don't do that to ourselves though. If something comes up, it's not about shaming yourself into keeping the promise that you said you're going to do. You can still keep it and do it, but honouring and hearing yourself is okay too. We're so afraid of listening to our emotions, thinking that we’ll just spin out of control. I think you can be all of it. There is a softer approach to this.

We are very obsessed with extremes. Extremes “get the job done" because there's no room for anything else. For me though, I want to be productive, I want to be successful, happy, I want to work hard but also I don't want to work all the time and I'm just much more open to there being a balance and not living in those extremes, even though the extremes seem to be very tantalising because you don't have to know yourself. You don't have to listen to yourself and you definitely don't have to allow yourself to have any emotions because you're either completely neglecting or you're in the toxic discipline of never acknowledging that you are a human being. I feel like there's a middle ground.

EC. This is what it means to be an embodied female - a female that honours how they feel which is so incredibly powerful. I think more women should be tapping into this flexibility.

JV. We're so structured. What the pandemic showed a lot of people is how structured and overfilled their lives were because they never stopped for a second and questioned - do I even need to do this? Why is this my responsibility and why is this on my plate?

The moment these things got taken off our plate, so many people realised they didn’t miss it and felt glad to have an option to not do that thing. I always want to encourage women to not take everything that they're fed as truth. Think about it for a second and just acknowledge that you have autonomy and you're allowed to decide how you want your life to be. This is something we're not always told. We’re just expected to do everything for everyone else and I don't subscribe to that. I want my life to matter too. That's why a lot of this consistency talk is showing myself that I matter too and that’s true self-love.

Say you’re in a partnership with someone either in business or romantically - it's really hard to trust someone who is inconsistent. If they say they're going to do something, but then don't do it, it erodes at the trust. After a few years, you start to not believe anything they say because you can’t really trust them.

You can’t just sit in a bubble bath and say - this is self-love. Self care is beautiful but there’s more to it. In family, relationships, friendships - if you can't rely on them to do the one thing they say they're going to do, it erodes and actually stifles your ability to build anything together. You have to assume that's how it is with your own relationship with self too and you might not even be conscious of it.

EC. A lot of women struggle with trust issues, not necessarily with others, but more so with themselves. How is this lack of self trust limiting their ability to cultivate self love and self belief? Also, why must self trust come first - why can't someone just practice self belief long enough to develop self trust?

JV. I love this question because my whole philosophy is that self love is the wrong conversation to be having. Comparably to a romantic relationship (which is a great way of framing this) you do not love first. You trust first. We don't realise that the reason we start to fall in love is because we're falling in trust. We're feeling safer, calmer or we're feeling like they've got us. You can be safe to fall into this relationship and break your heart open for it. That's the exact same way we treat ourselves. The problem is when we don't have that foundation of trust and again, I think a lot of women probably feel shame that they don't feel that love for themselves.

Love is in the daily actions. If you're in a relationship with someone and one day they say “I love you” then years go by and they never say it again (yet still acted in loving ways), you're not going to remember that one time they said, “I love you”. It's a daily devotional act. You feel love in the little ways that you support each other. So then it's all about the little ways that you support yourself. You practice love on a daily basis which is why consistency and discipline are so important. It's saying that you matter that day and that is how you feel love. That's why we have the term ‘actions speak louder than words’ because someone treating you poorly and then saying, I love you, is not love. It’s in the action. We've done a disservice to a lot of people, especially women, in saying that love is just something you say to yourself. Actually, confidence is the same …

You have to build confidence too. Men know that confidence is in the doing. The more we do something, the more confident and competent we feel. So now, whenever I start procrastinating or I'm worried about how it's going to go, I just do it. The only answer is to do it. You're not going to get more confident by not doing it. You're not going to feel less anxious by avoiding it. That's never going to happen. In fact, it’s going to be the complete opposite. I’ve seen how much has been built through really honouring myself and the trust that I build with myself on a daily basis and noticing when I don't honour that, that trust starts to erode. That's something that is very important to me in building self trust - knowing that my words to myself matter but nothing matters more than actually acting on my words and I have to do that for myself. Self care and self love have been commercialised.

Self trust is a lot less sexy because it's not something sellable, you've actually got to do the work.

EC. Comparing ourselves to others on social media - how does this affect our ability to develop and improve the level of self trust that with ourselves?

JV. The whole point of social media is comparison. It's built to engage that part of ourselves. Why else are there so many ways to measure ourselves on there? How many likes does something get? How many followers do you have? How many of this, how many of that? It’s all meant to engage that primal sense of you want to be better and accepted. It's measuring our worth and value as human beings.

I do try to reframe social media though. I try to look at the good parts in that social media gets rid of the gatekeepers. I like that anyone anywhere can share their work creatively. There's a lot of businesses that would not have been possible without social media. Good businesses too that are adding good things to the world. So with anything, it's just going back to the intention in which you use it …

I curate my feed. I don't don't follow people who are trading in aspiration - people implying - don't you want to be like me?! Maybe that's inspiring to some people but not to me. I don't really use social media for that purpose because my intention in going on social media is not to feel like crap about myself. Unfortunately, some people don't realise that sometimes their intention might be to feel crap because of where they're at currently with themselves. There are people that know what sells and how to sell it. It's not about you not being a strong, jealous or envious person. It's that it's literally designed for you to feel that way. I have a friend who is a Nutritionist and she constantly tells people that chips are designed to be addictive. That's the whole point of chips. They’re made in a lab to be addictive.

What I find very fascinating is that women love to take the blame. They think - it's just me. I'm just an envious person or I must not measure up because I'm always feeling bad about myself when I'm on social media. When in reality, it’s the point! The point is for you to feel bad about yourself. That's how you stay there because if you opted out of feeling bad about yourself, you wouldn’t be scrolling that much or clicking the links. Everything goes back to intention. You can scroll but know what's being fed to you. Just know that some people on social media are dealing in your attention. They're trying to get you to compare so they can keep you there and therefore you're not engaged in your own life. There are people who have entire businesses built on you thinking their life is better than yours. In a way, I think that softens the blow.

You can do work on yourself to up your own worth but also know that you don’t come into this world, not thinking that you’re worthy. You’re told that too. That's a message you’ve consumed. We have to be aware of that and not take on everything ourselves yet everything on social media is put back on you - If you feel bad, that's your problem, not mine. You only feel bad though because of these standards and ideals that are designed to make you feel bad. I think that’s so important to illuminate, especially with something like social media, where a lot of women wonder why they can't just scroll and not feel bad about themselves. This is what social media wants. I like to make energetic intentions when I go on social media. I jump on and think - feed me insights, feed me inspiration, feed me the thing that's the missing key in something that I've been thinking about. When I approach it that way, it feeds me the most beautiful content!

EC. I really want to chat about the fear of ageing. Personally, I consider ageing a privilege that is sadly denied to so many people. We buy the creams, the potions, the lotions, the treatments, the promise of slowing down the ageing process but what is buying into all of this actually doing to our self-worth?

JV. It's a tricky subject because we're not supposed to look like we're ageing. There's a conversation that’s happening where ageing = bad. That's why we have anti-ageing. The way I approach ageing and the way that I approach anything that feels like “just conform”, is ask myself - is this true? Do I want to continue feeling that this is true?

I don't want to hate ageing. I don't want to see that as something I have to avoid. I'll still take care of my skin & drink water but only because that's how I like to feel. So often women and their value is judged on how they look and I think this is so sad. It’s something I've been sad about my whole life because we're so much more than how we look. I don't get treatments, but I think anyone who does, should have the heart to heart with themselves - what are you doing? What are you saying to yourself about this?

If you still want to proceed, if you still feel it would improve your life in some way, then do it but have a clear conscience with it. If you can't stand to think about ageing for a second, then you're not ready to challenge it. Be honest with yourself though about why there's that urgency to do it. Why and how does that affect your concept of yourself? Do you know that it's societal or do you really look in the mirror and think - I don't look good! I think it's so important to ask those questions, otherwise you're living under a trance. You don't know why you're doing the things that you're doing and that doesn't solve the problem because you don't know what the problem is. You think the problem is the wrinkles. The problem has never been the wrinkles or anything that represents ageing. It's always what society has made that mean for women and that's the thing to get honest with yourself about.

Even though it's an exhausting way to live, I think it's more exhausting to be constantly at the mercy of a culture that's telling you to fix everything at every stage and that you're never enough.

I think the mistake that we make a lot of time is that there is something we can do externally that doesn't affect our internal life but it's all connected. You can't hate your body into loving your body. You can't hate ageing to love how you're ageing. You can't make that external change and then expect this massive internal change. It's always the other way round, you have an internal change first - eg. you change how you feel about ageing.

The pressures to keep up with and the things to keep up with never end, so you do have to be vigilant or you're just under the spell. I think if we're doing something because we feel like we have no choice, that has power over you. Those wrinkles or grey hairs now have power over you. It's like you have no choice but to try to stop the ageing process. I wear my age like a badge of honour - I'm 38 and I like being older. I like being wiser. I always disliked anti-ageing as a concept. There's just so much money in us feeling bad about ourselves at any stage, it's tiring. I just can't give it the energy it needs. I can't feel bad about every little thing about myself. I can’t keep up with this invisible line that constantly changes. You just start to realise that you can’t do it anymore. It's an unwinnable game. So why play it?

Question From Previous Guest, Erin Deering-Keane - What is your perfect day from start to finish?
I'm in the South of France on the French Riviera. I get a coffee and croissant, then sit outside and I'm just loving the day. It's a beautiful day. I go to a beach club and I’m in my swimsuit. I'm there all day. I read a whole book in a day. That's my ultimate love. I love to read an entire novel in a day sitting on the beach. It is just my favourite to dip in and out of the water, have some food on the beach, have it all served to me as they do at the beach clubs which I love. I go back to my hotel, skin is a little crisp, I take a shower, put my hair up wet, then go out for an amazing fresh seafood dinner. I'm wearing a dress that I love and feeling so good. I've had this day a good amount of times and it is perfect so now I'm like, how do I get back? …