More Confidence From A Patch? Dove's Experiment Secret Revealed

On Wednesday, April 11, Dove launched a new beauty ad campaign designed to make women feel more beautiful.

A group of women were chosen to try out a new beauty product patch manufactured by Dove called RB-X. The volunteers were asked to wear the patch for two weeks and document their experience of wearing it, sharing how they felt in a video diary.

All the women were told that the patch would give them more confidence and make them feel more beautiful.

Here are some highlights of what happened:

• After wearing the patch for 12 hours, one woman named Tahnee said that, "I've been more comfortable in clothes I didn't wear before, more comfortable doing my hair differently, and showing off my face more."

• Tracey said that the patch helped her be more social.

• Brihtney wished that everybody could have the same change she had.

You may be asking yourself, "Could this patch really make me feel more confident?" The answer is "No."

The patch didn't actually have any ingredients. It was just a simple patch with no special powers. Yet the women really did have more confidence after wearing the patch.

Here's the reason why:

Basically it all comes down to the power of your beliefs. Your beliefs are a mix of everything you've ever been taught, experienced and learned from other people. And all those beliefs combined form the image that you have of yourself that you carry around in your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is not isolated to your brain. It is in every cell of your body. This is called your self-image. It becomes your identity. And it's the picture that you have of the person you are.

It determines how you feel about yourself: who you are, your body, your life and everything you believe to be possible. To be happy, really happy and to live a satisfying life, you have to be okay enough for you. Having a positive self-image will give you a good strong sense of self-esteem. Everything you do has to agree with your image of who you are and what you believe.

Many women have been raised to believe that as we age, we lose our beauty and value. Our society has also put a lot of emphasis on being thin. Youth and slenderness are the traditional standards of what is considered beautiful. Everything else is considered out of place. So women have spent countless amounts of money on surgeries, diets, exercise programs, beauty creams and treatments in pursuit of being considered more beautiful.

Because the women believed that they could only be more beautiful by using a product, their subconscious minds were open and willing to accept that wearing the patch could make them look more attractive. That gave them a boost of hope that made them feel better. As a result of feeling more positive and seeing new possibilities, their bodies picked up on those good vibes and they carried themselves more confidently.

But in many cases this jolt of confidence is short-lived at best because many women have a lot of conflicting beliefs about their value. They often don't believe that they are worthy of being loved and accepted as they are. They wind up feeling ashamed and embarrassed by their bodies.

In my opinion, that's why the ‘Love Your Body’ movement is progressing so slowly because after the initial excitement of feeling good wears off, most women go back to feeling horrible about themselves, keeping their focus on all their imperfections. Why?

If you grew up in an environment where your body was criticized, and everything you did was questioned, it's likely that eventually you learned to put yourself down and doubt yourself. Have you become your own worst critic?

When you do something enough times, it becomes a well-worn habit and it's not easy to change by just trying to use your will power and wanting it enough.

(Just experiment with this by doing the opposite of what you normally do. For example: If you always cross your legs, right over left, try left over right. And the next time you get dressed, put your pants on your opposite leg first. Change just feels weird and we tend to do what we've always done before.) Just like a broken record or a skipping CD, once our brains make the neural connections, and we get in a groove, our habits get hard wired in our bodies.

But the good news is that you can change the way you feel about yourself and your  body, tame your inner critic, and boost your confidence by using a simple do-it-yourself stress relief method called Emotional Freedom Technique. I teach my clients this.

Based on the science of Acupuncture, EFT is often considered to be it's emotional equivalent without the pain of needles. Anyone can use it any time to balance their energy, feel better and overcome negative emotions and fears in minutes.

In the final analysis, self-confidence can't be bought, borrowed or stolen. It's created moment to moment by doing the things that push us out of our comfort zone and stretch our imagination of who we believe ourselves to be so that we can expand the limits of possibilities.
If you want to know the secret of how to feel more beautiful at any size, and bust out of your body shame join me in my next upcoming teleseminar called, "Tap into the Power of Self-Acceptance."