Creating A Life That Looks Good And Feels Even Better

Have you lost your inner glow? ?? Perhaps the ups and downs of life making you feel like you’re getting more than your fair share of adversity? 

We all know that life and business won’t always be smooth sailing… and it is in those more difficult moments that we grow resilience. ?? Yet, it is often very hard to retain, or even find the strength to persevere through these moments. What's the trick?

I recently sat down with Katie DePaola, an entrepreneur, author and Founder of Inner Glow Circle, an accredited training and certification company for women, coaches, leaders and entrepreneurs. We discussed the concept of finding your "inner glow" and using it to shine even through adversity. Her own story exemplifies the process of resilience, learning to feel good, and achieving an inner glow that has people saying, “I want that too!”

 Off To A Rough Start

Right after starting IGC, Katie lost her brother to an accidental overdose. She was also struggling with Lyme disease at the time, and it was taking a heavy toll on her mental and physical well-being. There’s no doubt that she’s a survivor because when life forced her to slow down, she continued building her business from her bathtub. She grew IGC from a self-funded startup to a $1 million business and from there has continued turning her greatest challenges into her greatest opportunities. 

 “My business saved my life, which is counterintuitive. A lot of entrepreneurs feel as though their business is killing them. So I teach a lot about how to glow through what you grow through and finding power in your struggles.” -Katie DePaola

 Life Is Always A Journey

We are constantly pivoting, starting new things, ending old things, meeting new people, building new relationships… and because we put ourselves out there so much, we’re really creating opportunities for things to go a million different directions. What we have to learn is this: just because the direction is different or difficult, doesn’t mean the direction is damned. I talk about resilience so much because we live in a society where our struggles are often labeled as failures. And I know it to be true that those difficult moments grow us and shape us and allow us to come back stronger, with a brighter inner glow as Katie would say. 

At Least You Look Good

At the peak of her pain in dealing with illness and grief, Katie recalls how many times people would mistake her self-care for her being okay. This inspired the title of her book At Least You Look Good. “The title of the book is quite telling. Most women resonate with this, but I’m interested to hear what you think, Adam. The period that I was going through and all of this, people would say to me like, “You don’t look sick,” or, “You look really good,” or, “I can’t believe your brother died.” I still took care of myself and some days, not every day, and the days when I would leave the house, which was not that often when I was going through it, but I would still look good. In a way, it’s this deeper, feminist commentary on the fact that we, as women, are judged by our looks and for our looks. We were constantly judging ourselves and everyone around us like we judge the book by its cover. That’s not always a terrible thing, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.”

Looking Good vs. Feeling Good

There’s a definite relationship between feeling good and looking good. We all know what someone looks like when they are glowing from the inside out. But sometimes, there isn’t always alignment in these two things, and we need one to drive the other. It’s like when we go to the gym even when we feel like crap. We are wanting our bodies to reflect how we want to feel so we push through it. Or sometimes when we get up and get dressed and go out into the world even when we feel like crying or staying home and having an entire quart of ice cream. 

 It is so important to create a life that looks good but feels better. We don’t always learn how to feel, especially in a culture where looks and image often supercede everything else.  Ultimately we want to look the way we feel on the inside. Finding that inner glow, building up resilience, leaning into PIVOTS, these are the changes that have the potential to build up the foundation for any life you want- based on what looks and feels good to you. 

 Creating A Space Where You HAVE to Show Up

Especially in the world of coaching, there is so often this rhetoric where everyone talks about creating reality and manifesting… and sometimes that can be damaging. Trying to control every detail of life is never going to work. But what does work is to build an environment, a space, where we have to show up and one that doesn’t crumble at the sight of difficulties. 

 “I didn’t choose to have my brother pass away. I didn’t choose to get bitten by a tick. This whole rhetoric in our industry about you creating your life, you creating your reality, manifestation, attracting what you are and thoughts become things... Some of that is true, but it’s also true that we live in a world that has a lot of toxicity and turmoil. I don’t think that we can say that we’re responsible for creating all of that.”

We ARE responsible for what we do with it, and we also have the opportunity to recognize that it takes time to get there, and during that time we are building resilience.

Share your insights by commenting below about your own inner glow and how you take responsibility for letting it shine!