Join Stacy Yardley on a raw and honest exploration of the impact of body image expectations in women's lives in this enlightening episode of "Life is a Circus." Listen as Stacy shares her personal experiences with body image issues, self-esteem, and the power of grace. From her time as a circus performer to battling cancer, Stacy's story resonates with authenticity and resilience. Join her on a transformative exploration of self mastery, where kindness, compassion, and embracing worth beyond societal standards take center stage. Tune in to discover how offering yourself grace can lead to profound personal growth and empowerment. Don't miss this insightful episode on embracing self-worth and finding inner peace. 

Stacy Yardley is a Certified Life Coach and Transformation Catalyst specializing in guiding women in business to create more joy, self fulfillment, and satisfied life. Her work includes working with high performance women to create better boundaries, release perfectionism and breakthrough imposter syndrome through self mastery. Drawing from her experience as a former professional circus showgirl, Stacy is passionate about empowering individuals to realize their dreams and unlock their inner potential. Through empathy and intuitive guidance, Stacy helps women harness their personal power to achieve greater well-being and thrive in all aspects of their lives. Based in Vancouver, WA, Stacy enjoys exploring hiking trails, preparing fresh vegan meals, and cherishing moments with loved ones in her free time.  

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Today's show is going to be a little bit different. I've decided to take a different approach with this episode mainly because this episode is talking about something that has impacted my entire life. It impacts women everywhere, I believe, and it's something we don't talk about much out loud. So, I hope today you'll join me as we step into grace, not only for each other, but for ourselves. Welcome to "Life is a Circus". So, let's step into self-mastery, where we explore the balancing act of unlocking your inner potential while navigating life's chaos. I'm Stacy Yardley, your host, a former Circus showgirl turned transformational life coach. If you're juggling multiple roles or responsibilities and feeling like life is a circus, you are in the right place.

Join me each week for captivating tales from my circus days and insights on realizing your dreams. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your guide to self-mastery. So, grab your top hat and let's step into the greatest show of all, the circus of life. Ready to embark on this transformative journey together? Let's begin. So, I wanted to tell my story just as though you were sitting in front of me. As though we were sitting over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine even though I don't drink, and really just share with you from my heart my experience on the show at this moment that I'm going to tell you about. And without divulging too much information as to far as how the story ends. I will tell you a little bit of a spoiler that it doesn't end well.

But what I want to do is take you back to day 3 of our rehearsals. And what happened was we were all called to a meeting, the dancers were, and called into the cafeteria. And upon our meeting, we were told, you know, we would go for fittings that day. They were designing the show so we would get to try on our costumes and be fitted specifically for our body and our measurements. And we would also be practicing in rounds based on, you know, where we were supposed to go that day, whether it was the elephant practice or a Spanish web. And before the day started, they told us that it was time for our weigh in. And yes, you heard that right, our weigh in, as in getting on a scale and weighing in. This is a requirement for all dancers to weigh is, and the way they went about it was basically they had us line up in a single file line.

And one by one, we would step on the bathroom scale. And note I said bathroom scale. This wasn't a doctor scale. It wasn't a digital scale. It was a regular old bathroom scale with a needle. And it was so janky, actually, that you could hold your breath or lean one way or put your weight towards one side or the other and sometimes potentially make the needle move if you really needed it. And sometimes you would need it. Because as I mentioned, we would get on the scale one by one and set our show weight.

So, when it was my turn to step up to the scale, so to speak, to say that I was nervous is putting it mildly. I was full of panic, angst, fear, shame, so many things I can't even describe. And I believe what happened was I kind of went into a fawn response because, you know, here I am being weighed in in front of all my peers and colleagues. In addition to that, it was two men, the performance director and his associate, that were running the weigh in. And we would step on the bathroom scale. They would look at the number. They would look us up and down. And if they didn't like what they saw as compared to the number, they would then encourage us to lower our weight and set our weight at whatever they felt was appropriate.

So, when it was my turn, I stepped on the bathroom scale, and the needle read 135. I'm a. And at the time, 135 looked pretty good on me. I was fit. I had a beautiful shape to me. I was a little bit more on the pear-shaped side, so I had a big butt and thick thighs, like a dancer. But overall, I was at a healthy weight. And there were no doctors present during this weigh in.

If we weren't within 2 pounds of our show weight, we would be fined financially. And if that didn't work, then we could be docked from performing. And if that didn't work, we could be fired because we were not at our show weight. There it was. Right? So we then were told every week we would be weighed in from that point on. Quite frankly, it was mortifying. I knew that I was gonna have a challenge to try to lose that 5 pounds, and I started doing whatever I could to make it happen within reason. Right? So you may be thinking, did I develop an eating disorder? Well, I definitely developed disordered eating then not in a quote unquote eating disorder way, right? So There was no anorexia.

There was no bulimia but there was Restrictive calorie intake. There was fasting before weigh ins and running stairs in rubber pants, trying to lose as much water weight as possible, drinking diuretic tea and eating a piece of toast. You know? There was lots of strategies that were attempted to lose the weight. The thing that really bothered me, or one of many things, but around this, is that it was only the dancers who had to weigh is, not the act people, the aerialist, not the female clowns, not the men, just the female dancers. So it felt very targeted, right, in a way and very patriarchal, if you put it that way, or misogynistic. So the thing about the weigh ins is that they were always on Saturday mornings after opening, like I'd mentioned. And the opening was when we did the Spanish web. So not only was I doing a dangerous act of going up 30 feet in the air, hanging by my ankle and my own body weight, I was doing it fasted, in a fasted state and without the proper fuel.

So now I'm adding danger to an already dangerous situation. And quite frankly, it was careless. The weigh ins, you know, continued throughout the year. And without giving too much away, like I said, it does not end well for me. What I wanna stress about this whole thing is the bigger picture, right, and how it impacted my life in such a way that put me on a trajectory of chronic dieting for the remainder of my life, pretty much. And it's only recently that things have changed for me in different ways, and I'll get to that in in a few moments. But I really wanted to talk on this episode heart to heart and talk about how our society and our culture create this type of thing over and over again in our own minds, like in our own selves. I served some time as a health coach for a very popular company here in the US, digital company.

And I saw hundreds, if not thousands of women complaining about the same things over and over and over again, and a relationship to the scale was probably one of the most popular complaints when women are trying to lose weight is hitting the number on the scale. Somewhere along the line, we made the scale like a god. Right? And that it has this power over us to dictate our happiness, to dictate our worth, and our own well-being. And I'm pretty passionate on this topic mostly because of what I've been through and my heart for women to be the best that they can be. And I think this topic of body image really does impact women at a deeper level more so than anything else. Because as we talk negatively about ourselves or think about ourselves in a negative way, when we're looking at ourselves in the mirror or in a window or in a reflection or in a photo or even just the thought of what we look like. Right? When we do these things and we condemn ourselves and ridicule ourselves and berate ourselves and deprecate on ourselves, all the things, we tear down our self-esteem, and we undermine our self-worth. And I think that bleeds out, so to speak, in every other area of our life, in our relationships, in our work, in our pursuit of our dreams and aspirations.

And I think it holds us back more than anything else when it comes to living a life of freedom and a life of inner peace, fulfillment, and satisfaction. So there's lots of stats. You can Google all kinds of stats around body image and body positivity and all the different things, and you'll see different numbers. Right? Anywhere from 76% to 83% to 91% of women are dissatisfied with their body in some way. And I think that's probably a more accurate number, at least all the women I know. No women that I know that that can say they're completely a 100% satisfied with their body, maybe 1 or 2. And they've done a lot of work on their self-love and their self-worth. So you know, how did this impact me in such a way? Well, it set the trajectory in my life, and I've been wanting to tell my story for 35 years, right, of what happened in the circus and how it impacted me.

Not from a victim place, though, more from a owning my story kind of place. And I don't wanna be a victim to this, you know, story, so to speak, and yet it has impacted my life in such a way that I really have given a lot of power over, not necessarily to it regarding the circus incident, but it being body image. And it's a fight. Right? It's literally a fight oftentimes internally with ourselves. So when I left the circus, I went and you know, I was in my twenties at this point. All throughout my twenties, I partied hard and had very low self-esteem, yet I was beautiful. Right? We all look back at pictures and think, what was I thinking? I was beautiful. Why was I so hard on myself? Yet my twenties were a time of a lot of self-destruction in a lot of ways because I did not love myself and did not value myself, and so I acted like it.

And knowing I was going to Southern California, a lot of bare skin was gonna be shown. So I was doing this diet and didn't do it correctly. Stopped and started, like I said, and kinda really messed up my system to the point that I passed out at work a night as a cocktail waitress and ended up actually meeting the man I would marry, who was a paramedic that came on the call. And in this whirlwind romance, I ended up marrying him and having a baby. And when I was 32 years old, I became a mom. And when I was told I was having a daughter, I was both thrilled and terrified because I knew that she was going to come into the world that would tell her she was never enough based on her physical looks. Right? Whether she was tall or thin or beautiful or not, she would still have the pressure to conform to society's standards of beauty, whatever the hell that even is anymore. Right? Is it the trim thin, or is it the big is beautiful? Like, it's all of it.

Right? All bodies are beautiful. And yet, you know, that underlying, like, tone in our society that it's about beauty and appearance. So when I became a mother, I knew that I had a huge responsibility on my shoulders, and I knew that I needed to learn to love myself. Because if I didn't, then how was I going to give it to her and teach her how to do it? So through my thirties, I started to really get more into church and religion and got really in a place where I was feeling content with who I was, and I was living the mom life. And I made a very strong effort to never force her to eat food. I made a strong effort to never talk poorly about my own body in front of her, to never go on diets in front of her, and to really just do my best to set an example of loving myself as I was. And it wasn't until I got divorced at age 40 that things really took a turn. This was a time when my daughter was 7 years old now.

So she's lived her first 7 years with me as a stay-at-home mom, and I had to find a way to make income as a single mom. So Zumba came into my life, and I became a fitness instructor, fell in love with it, and went all in at 110%. I went hard, so hard that I started teaching other fitness formats and got into the best shape of my life. It wasn't long after that that I ended up getting sick because I was pushing myself too hard. But while I was at that point, you know, I became a leader in the community. Women were turning to me for advice, for inspiration on fitness, and on nutrition. I was helping them get fit physically and then doing nutrition challenges, weight loss challenges, and did more and more work with myself on myself as I continued to heal. And so it got better.

Right? My relationship with myself got better over the years, and yet there were still times when I would trip a, and it was when my weight would go back up that I would feel crappy about myself again. And the negative self-talk would kick is, the disgust at looking at photos, you know, all of that. It's almost like a yo yo, literally. And even though I love myself, there were still parts of me I didn't like. Then I hit a lot of stress in my daughter's teen years, and I had actually been remarried and then redivorced. And so I really got into a place of a lot of stress. And this is also a time when I was in perimenopause, so in my forties, mid and late forties. And I started putting on weight again and again and again.

I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease about 5 years prior or maybe more like 10 years prior, psoriasis. So, you know, that's autoimmune, and it's a skin condition. So that in and of itself creates self-esteem issues at times or self-image issues at times or did not anymore is much anymore. And I didn't wanna fight, but I didn't wanna give up either. Like, I knew even though it was such a hard hit for me to be diagnosed, I knew that I was gonna be okay. So I had to decide how I wanted to move through it. And it was in that time that I realized that surrender and leaning into love and leaning into loving my body and trusting my body. So I decided to give it everything it needed in order to heal and to thrive, and that's exactly what I did.

In that time of going through the breast cancer, I decided to make health my number one priority, and I went head first into that process of making self-care number one, changing my diet I went vegan, so making my diet as clean as possible and anti-inflammatory as possible so that my body could, like I said, heal. And that's exactly what happened. I ended up losing 40 pounds the following year and felt like I was back, back to myself, back to feeling better in my body and feeling really good. And here's the thing. When we are in this pattern of this up and down cycle where things are good, then they're not, then they're good, then they're not. Your body and your brain kind of starts to remember that cycle. And I don't know if it's the stress of entrepreneurship or the fact that I have fallen off slightly here and there, right, of my normal routine and not walking as much, but my weight has started to climb back up. And not to where it was, but it's climbing up.

But I'd also hit menopause after that year myself, so a little over a year ago. So since I hit menopause, you know, I've heard women my entire life complain about menopause and how the weight changes and the body changes so much. And it's true. I never really, like, gave it as much credence as I deserved, but it truly does change things. And suddenly, I look at myself and think I'm a middle-aged woman and I look like one. Of course, I do. Right? I'm 54 years old. At the same time, you know, I'm looking at myself and loving Self, and I love my body, and I trust my body.

And then I have to ask myself, am I treating my body as kindly as I have in the past or as unkindly as I have in the past? Right? Am I starting to complain about it again? Am I starting to belittle it again or criticize it or question it or get frustrated with it because I have an ache or a pain or I don't bounce back as fast as I used to or, you know, things aren't as high as they used to be. There's a lot of reasons. Right? We can look in the mirror and not like what we see. Whether you're 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, or 80, and beyond. Now I did notice is I was doing some research that studies have shown that women, the more they age, the more comfortable they get with themselves. And I think part of that is probably fatigue of realizing, like, it's not worth it anymore. And part of it is coming to terms with who we are. And so I wanted to talk about that as well, because I think acceptance is a very important factor when it comes to self-mastery.

And I think that when we're hard on ourselves, we have to recognize the impact of that too. So this week, I was in my, I found myself in my naturopath's office talking about weight again, and he reminded me of a word that I had heard several times this last week. And when that happens and I get something shown to me over and over and over again, I know to pay attention. And the word was grace. He said, give yourself some grace. And I had someone else tell me, give yourself some grace. And grace had come up in several different conversations. The thing about grace is it's not something that I use very often as far as a word, but it is something I practice at times more than others.

So grace is showing ourselves understanding, forgiveness, kindness, compassion. Right? Those are words that I do use, but I never encapsulated them into the word grace before. And I think that if we show ourselves grace and offer ourselves grace, that is a part of self-mastery because we come to a place of accepting ourselves as we are. And when we accept ourselves as we are, we then open up space for awareness. And when we have awareness, we then have the ability to choose. And when we choose, that's when we can choose self-mastery. So I’d like to ask you, how can you offer yourself more grace today? Are you in a place lately where perfectionism is rearing its ugly head and causing you to be hard on yourself or causing you to procrastinate. You know? I found myself here once again in a place of awareness, And it's in those places of awareness that I can say, okay.

Who do I wanna be today? Who do I wanna be in this awareness? And that, again, is a part of self-mastery. So this conversation obviously could go on and on and on. I have so much more I wanna say around body image and how we treat ourselves in a whole arena, but what I wanna leave you with is this, just the thought that you're enough, and you're actually more than enough. Right? And your worth is not determined by the bathroom scale. It's not determined by your paycheck or your monthly income. It's not determined by even who loves you because it's already innate within you. Your worth is inescapable, and it's when you choose to agree with that, when you choose to agree and affirm your own worth from within a love yourself as someone who is worthy of their own love, that's when things start to change. So I wanna encourage you to just stay aware of the places that you criticize yourself this week.

And when you notice, give yourself some grace. Offer yourself some kindness, some compassion, and forgiveness as you continue on your path to self-mastery. I wanna thank you for being here today and listening to my story. Hopefully, it gave you some insight in knowing that you're not alone in your struggle with body image. And as I said, the conversation isn't over. I'd like to continue it, and so I want to invite you to join me on my social media pages on Instagram or on Facebook at iamstacyardley, and look for the post this week that discusses this topic, and share with me any takeaways you had from this episode, or anything else that's on your mind regarding this topic. I look forward to hearing from you. Have a great week.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of "Life is a Circus", though Let's step into self-mastery. I hope you found inspiration and valuable insights to carry with you on your journey. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with a friend and subscribe or follow wherever you're listening. Remember, in the circus of life, the greatest show is the one you create for yourself. Until next time, keep embracing your dreams and stepping into self-mastery. Take care and I'll see you next Tuesday.