The 3 Crown Jewels of Queen Energy

I've been studying women who I see as queens for a long time, and I've identified three ways of being, or three attitudes you can say that create queen energy. And that's what we're talking about in today's episode, the Three Crown Jewels of Queen Energy. So let's dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where personal development meets style. Here's your hostess, Master Life Coach Tonya Leigh.

Hello, my gorgeous friends. How are you doing? I've been up since 3:30 AM. I'm back from my trip and my body is confused as to where she is. So my sleep has definitely been off, but I got up this morning after just lying in bed hoping that I would go back to sleep and decided to put on a 20 minute yoga video of just deep stretching and it felt so good. And I thought about so many of you who, if you were just to do something as simple as stretch for 15 minutes, how much better you would feel. I want this community to be a community of women who treat themselves like a queen.

Queen energy is contagious, it's powerful, it's influential, it's confident, it's kind and loving and yet fierce, and it will change your life. If you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling as if you keep repeating the same patterns over and over. If you feel like you can't make progress, if you feel frustrated, if you feel hopeless, or maybe you just want a big dose of inspiration, maybe you want to hear a new perspective on how you can elevate the quality of your life.

If that sounds like you, I want to invite you to join me for my upcoming workshop called The Royal Treatment. We're going to spend five days together talking about how to step up as queen of your life. We're going to be talking about how you treat your body, how you treat your mind, how you treat your soul. I did this workshop last year and it is by far the most popular workshop we've ever done, and women have been asking when we're going to do it again. And so I think it's a beautiful time of the year as we think about spring cleaning, when we think about moving into the summer. This is such a beautiful foundation to support you during this season of your life and beyond. So come and join us. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/royal and I cannot wait to see you inside the workshop.

I'm going to be talking about Queen Energy a lot this month because of the workshop. And it's something that I've been thinking about a lot recently, what it means to be queen of your life. And so in this episode, I want to talk about the crown jewels of queen energy. There are three specific ways of being, three specific attitudes that when you adopt and you practice, you will step up into that elevated and powerful energy. So let's start with crown jewel number one, a queen takes her commitments to herself seriously. How many of you promise yourself that you are going to do something and then time and time again you don't do it and you let yourself down? I want you to think about you as being in a relationship with you. So let's picture that there's two of you. There's the you that wants to follow through on the thing.

There's the you that has the goals, the you, the part of you that said, hey, this is important to me, so I'm going to put it in my calendar. I'm going to commit to it. And then there's the you that decides if you're going to show up for that commitment or not. And the relationship between these two parts of yourself is so important. And every time you make a commitment to yourself and you don't show up for it, you are breaking trust with yourself. And when you think about a queen running her queendom, it's imperative that the people trust her. It's imperative that she has a high character, that she lives based on her values. Her character is everything. And so when you think about you being at the head of your life, sitting at the head of your table and your dreams and your goals and your desires and everything that you're creating, it's so important that you trust yourself because if you don't, you won't be able to create a powerful entity.

I think about all of those years that I would promise myself, I'll start tomorrow. I know some of y'all can relate. Knowing good and well that I was not going to start tomorrow. I wanted to believe it, but I had let myself down so many times and I kept focusing on all of the times I'd let myself down, I had very little trust with myself. And the solution in the beginning for me was simply to stop making promises. That's where I started because I was just so tired of feeling disappointed. I finally just said to myself, I'm not going to promise myself I'm going to start tomorrow because I know I'm not. Now, if I had had the tools and the coaching that I have now, I would have rather made the promises and figured out how to keep them to myself. But for me in that moment, I just knew that I had to stop lying to myself.

I had to stop breaking trust with myself. And so I just stopped making those promises to myself. And I started to feel a little bit better because at least I wasn't adding an extra layer of disappointment. And then I started to make tiny promises to myself that I felt like I would keep. Because it wasn't even about the action. It was about me fulfilling my promises to myself. It was about me rebuilding trust with myself. And every time I kept that small promise to myself, every time I followed through on a small commitment, I was gaining competence and trust. I was becoming a woman who has her own back and doesn't let herself down. And the irony in all of this is that I had no problems keeping promises to everybody else. You all know what that's like. You follow through on what you say you're going to do for your kids or at work or for your partner or for your friends.

You wouldn't dream of not showing up for them, but showing up for you is difficult. And why is that? Why is it so difficult to keep our commitments to ourselves? And that's the work that you must figure out because the answer is different for all of us. I know for me it was so much discomfort to follow through. I was having to let go of an old identity. And even though the result was going to be incredible, and I knew that, still letting go of an old identity is very hard. It's very difficult. I was so used to being that girl who was on a diet. I was so used to being that girl who let herself down. That identity was so familiar that to finally start showing up for myself was an identity shift. And so we have to be willing to feel the discomfort of taking our commitments to ourselves seriously and following through.

Because if you haven't been doing this, if you've been someone that's let yourself down over and over and over again, it is going to be unfamiliar. And anything that you do that's unfamiliar is difficult in the beginning. Our brain wants to fight the unfamiliar because the brain doesn't trust it. And so part of being a queen, and this is not even one of the crown jewels, but it encompasses all of this, is that you must be willing to feel discomfort in order to change and step up and be the powerful leader of your own life. So that is crown jewel number one, a queen takes her commitments to herself seriously. Crown jewel number two is a queen has a red velvet rope. What do I mean by that? Well, think about what a red velvet rope signifies. If you show up at an event and there's a red velvet rope and you're on one side of it and there's a gentleman or a lady standing there with a clipboard telling you who can and cannot come in, imagine that same principle applied to your life.

A lot of you all are letting anybody and everybody into your life acting any way they so choose. And you're feeling resentful, you're feeling helpless, you're feeling powerless. You're feeling like you are a doormat and you can't be a doormat. You can't allow everything and anything into your life and also be the queen of your life. You must have standards for yourself and for others. I think about the royal family. No matter what your opinion is of them, there are protocols and rules that they live by and others are expected to live by when they are in their presence. Now people can act a fool, but you can't do it in the home of the king or the queen. You will be removed. This month within the membership, we are focused on this one topic alone. I've been teaching about the red velvet rote policy for many, many years, but I've never devoted an entire month to discussing the boundaries in our lives.

I've never dedicated a whole month to really stepping back and asking ourselves, what are we tired of tolerating? Where are we allowing people just to walk into our lives and treat us however they want? How can you be a queen when you're allowing people to walk into your home and trash it? And that's why every single one of us needs a red velvet rope. We need to be courageous enough and powerful enough in ourselves that we have boundaries around what is allowed and what isn't. Now, you don't put up a red velvet rope to change people, and this is the mistake that I see a lot of people make. They're like, oh, I'm going to do this to change you. No. A queen allows people to be who they are, and she clearly states what's allowed in her world. And then people get to choose. Do I want to abide by her rules?

Does that fit into my value system? Does that feel good to me? I will tell you that this has been one of my hardest life lessons. Growing up in the environment that I grew up in, I learned early on to be a people pleaser, and I had very little boundaries because adults were always crossing them quite honestly. And so I didn't know what it was like to be an advocate for yourself, which is what having a red velvet rope is all about. It's about you championing for yourself. And so I remember when I first started setting boundaries, how uncomfortable it was, how afraid I was of people, and I had to be willing for people to be upset with me. I had to be willing for people to have temper tantrums and know that that was on them and my response was on me. But I promise you all, having a red velvet rope has made my life so much better.

And more importantly, it has strengthened the relationship that I have with myself because I see myself as important enough to protect. And a lot of us grew up without a lot of protection, and we've continued to allow our boundaries to be violated. And deep inside, there's like a little girl or a little boy in all of us that just wants someone to step up and say, this is not allowed. Enough is enough. And we have to be willing to do that for ourselves. We have to be willing to have our own backs. And to me, that is the epitome of queen energy. If this is something you struggle with and you are in the membership, I want you to really dive into this month's topic. This is what we are going to be diving into and working on, creating red velvet ropes in our lives so that we can advocate for ourselves, so that we can get our power back so that we can stop letting people violate our boundaries.

And the result of that is going to be this beautiful, powerful, queen energy that you're going to be stepping into. And so I'm so excited to go deeper into this work and the membership this month. And if you want to join us, let's go. Go to schoolofselfimage.com/join. Okay, crown jewel number three of queen energy is this. A queen accepts herself fully, 100%. You leak your power every time you are in battle with yourself. Here's a visual for you. I want you to imagine that you are sitting at the head of this big beautiful table and surrounding it is your queendom. All of the people that look up to you, depend on you, all of the people that you want to have an influence on. All of the people that you're having an impact on their lives, they are surrounding this table and you are at the head of the table arguing with yourself about yourself.

Now, think about that metaphor. Can you lead? Can you impact? Can you influence when you are at war with yourself? And the answer is no. You are going to slow down your progress, and we think that we have to beat ourselves up. We believe that we have to be super hard on ourselves to create results, but it doesn't work. Have you noticed it doesn't work? You might be able to create a result, but you're miserable at the end. And the reason why you wanted that result in the first place is because you wanted to feel better. And so you actually created the opposite of what you're actually after. I love the quote by Carl Rogers where he says, "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change." A lot of you all are trying to change by not accepting yourself and it doesn't work because you can't be aligned with yourself and you have to be aligned with yourself to change.

Plus, when you accept yourself 100%, it takes the power away from those people who may not accept you. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine sent me this thread on the internet about things being said about me, and they weren't nice. They were calling me a hillbilly from a trailer. They were saying that I couldn't speak proper English. They were saying that I was lying about my upbringing and my childhood. They were saying that I had no style, no class, just a redneck. Then they started talking about my relationships in the past, and it was just a lot of opinions about me and my life. And I read that. And because of the work I've done on myself, it did not bother me at all. And I just watched myself with amazement. I was like, oh my God, this stuff works that I teach.

As I was reading it, I laughed at a lot of it because it was true. I was like, yeah, I sort of am like a hillbilly from a trailer. That is true. And they are 100% correct that sometimes I say words improperly and it's a miracle that I speak the English that I do. When I think about where I grew up and the grammar and the dialect and the accent, I'm actually proud of my English, even though I get it wrong sometimes. I'm not perfect. And yes, I've had relationships that ended. They are thinking that as a failure. I think of it as a huge success. They don't like my style. That's okay. Not everybody's going to like my style. I like my style. That's what matters. And that's the other thing, and this is a bonus tip, but a queen values her opinion because she knows the whole world's going to have opinions about who she should be and what she should do and how she should think.

And so if she tries to gain the approval of everybody else, she's going to sacrifice herself. And she'll never ever do that. But in order to be that way, you have to accept yourself. You have to accept all of you. A lot of you all only want to accept the good parts, but you can't accept the good parts without also accepting maybe the not so great parts. I'm not perfect and neither is anyone else, right? Sometimes I'm annoying, sometimes I'm cranky. Sometimes I can be rude. And it's never intentional. It's never on purpose. I feel like everybody listening to this, we have good hearts. We mean well, but we're also very human. But if you can't accept your humanness, all of it, you can't move forward in your life. You're always going to be at battle with yourself. Can you accept yourself when you have felt, when you have screamed at your kids, when you've eaten the whole bag of Oreos, when you have made a big mistake, when you have let your friend down, because that's where you get your power.

If you can love and accept yourself at your worst, you will call forth your best. And that doesn't mean that we just do things and not learn from it. But the best way to learn is to accept that it happened and that you're human and you're still 100% lovable and worthy and amazing. And now what? What can you learn? How can you take that and grow yourself? Studies have shown that children, when put in certain environments with positive reinforcement, with kindness, with compassion, with love, they perform better on their test, behaviorally they're better versus the kids that are always being put down and the expectations are low.

And so we get to parent ourselves, so to speak, and hold space for our greatest selves to evolve, for our queens to evolve. But we can only do that if we accept ourselves as we are and that my friend is part of having queen energy. So to recap, the three jewels of queen energy are, number one, a queen takes her commitments to herself seriously. Number two, a queen has a red velvet rope around her life. And number three, a queen accepts herself fully, 100%.

If you want to dive deeper into being the queen of your life, come and join us for my upcoming five day workshop called The Royal Treatment. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/royal, and I cannot wait to see you there, and I'll see you on our next episode. Cheers. Cheers.

Hey, have you grabbed your free copy of the School of Self-Image Manifesto? If not, what in the world? Head over to schoolofselfimage.com/manifesto and get a copy that teaches you how to think and show up in the areas of mindset, style, and surroundings so that you can transform your self-image.