You are born free, wild, open, curious. Utterly yourself. Beautifully whole.

Yet very few of us keep that wholeness as we pass through the journey of our lives.

You learn how to please for safety or validation. You learn how to perform for inclusion or gold stars. You learn how to harden yourself to others’ judgement and society’s critique of your messy body and your beginner’s navigation of companionship + sex, care of self + independence, competition + workplace politics, parenting + love.

All that pleasing, performing, and hardening takes you further away from the woman who knows she has everything she needs within her.

So what if you could go back to that wholeness?

What if you could find room for yourself—your true self—in the life you’ve created?

Here are 21 life skills that will support you in reconnecting to yourself, refocusing your efforts, and reclaiming your life.

21 Life Skills of the Reclaimed Woman

→ Show the fuck up for your life. Declare your values and your vision and your purpose, and live them out.

→ Trust your intuition. Because yes, you can have faith in your desires and you can believe the warning signs and you can source incredibly clear answers from within. You are your own power source.

→ Wanna resent everything? Here you go! Fulfill other people’s expectations of you. Attempt to control other people’s reactions to you and your choices. Become totally reliant on external validation. Obviously, it might be better to just release others’ expectations, reactions, and validation.

→ Practice personal sovereignty. It is both a responsibility and a privilege to take true ownership of your actions.

→ Life is messy. You need to know how to care for and comfort yourself through uncertainty, struggle, emotional dips, and the inevitable sucky stuff that we all face.

→ Recognize and respect your body’s wisdom. She is astonishingly wise…Respecting her is about giving her what she truly needs in any moment, not what society or the diet industry or your father or the memory of your controlling partner thinks she needs.

→ Prioritize your pleasure. Show me a magnetic, charismatic woman and I’ll show you a woman connected to her own pleasure.

→ Believe in your capability. Capable is totally an underrated word. Because when you build up enough self-trust and self-efficacy to know you are capable? You can handle anything that life throws at you. And that certainty is the definition of freedom.

→ Critically examine societal norms. Because honestly? We have some fucked-up standards and assumptions out there about what it means to be a woman right now.

→ Feel your feelings. Alllllll of them. Even the hard ones. Stop stuffing, stop distracting, stop living on the surface, stop numbing out—because the only way out is through.

→ Ask for what you want. In the bedroom, in the boardroom, with figures of authority, with those who take you for granted. Your needs will not get met if no one knows what your needs are! Also. Side note—you are totally allowed to ask for help.

→ Celebrate your juxtapositions. You don’t have to choose sides! You are full of contradictions because authentic humans are full of contradictions. Sexy and sweet. Selfish and selfless. Ambitious and seeking ease. Embrace the and.

→ This one goes both ways. Don’t waste time or energy on judgement. Judgement you pass on others or judgement you assume is passed on you—both are toxic to curiosity, creativity, kindness, self-expression, compassion…Basically everything good in this world withers under judgement.

→ Tell the truth, even when it’s hard. Have the scary conversation, hold the boundary, admit you made a mistake, take pride in your accomplishments, and change your mind if your mind has changed.

→ Allow for magic. You don’t have to rationally understand everything. Be open to the enchantment, safety, and wisdom that arrive when you connect to forces greater than yourself.

→ Cultivate belonging. No woman is an island! We don’t have to go it alone. Honest and loving and real relationships are worth all the effort they take.

→ Know how to begin again. Life and its continuous whirlwind of transition forces you to keep re-finding and re-focusing yourself. Every day is a chance to start over, to show up, to understand that you are worthy of your own devotion.

→ Love yourself forward. Shame and criticism and self-flagellation are not sustainable methods of motivation. They simply don’t work in the long run. Love—yes, love—fuels forward movement without making you feel like shit about yourself.

→ Speaking of forward movement, you must take and weather risks  in order to grow. Whether you succeed or fail really isn’t the point…You experiment with taking action right outside of your comfort zone, right on that scary edge, and you bolster your courage.

→ Embrace abundance. There is enough love, success, money, and seats at the table for everyone. Believing otherwise is the recipe for catty competition, thinking small, and pointless comparison.

→ Care for the world through the way your live your life. Your choices, your voice, your vote, your creativity, your purpose, your pleasure, your outrage, your contribution, your truth-telling ALL matter.

Welcome to the path of the Reclaimed Woman!

It’s not a way of living for the faint-hearted, as Reclamation requires reflection, action, and trust.

And practice!

But you? You’ve got this, sister.