Beautiful You Blog Tour;Book Review, Interview with Rosie Molinary & Book Giveaway

Beautiful You is a book that encourages women to feel better about your self and find your own beauty.
The book is very practical to use: Rosie motivates you to learn more about your inner beauty through jorunaling and daily actions. Through simple routines which truly everybody can do and are easy to perform, you can look in another way about yourself on this topic.
Rosie tells about her own experiences in every chapter, gives great examples and  teaches you how to live large, and gets you on the path to learning to love yourself and others.
This is not a book to read one time and then never look back at again: you can use it 365 days a year, because there are 365 ways and actions described.

Beautiful You is a practical, candid, and accessible handbook that will strike a chord with every woman who has ever faltered in her self-confidence or lost her personal brilliance—and it will make sure she never lets it happen again.

Speaking for me personally(here is speaking a young woman dealing with self-confidence issues) I think this is a brilliant book that is very practical and easy to use. I hope many more women who have trouble with self -confidence and acceptance  will read Beautiful You. I loved Rosie's previous book Hijas Americanas, which was just a very unique book about a topic you hardly find books about that are so good. The same unique-ness is up for Beautiful You!
                                               

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INTERVIEW WITH ROSIE MOLINARY, THE AUTHOR OF BEAUTIFUL YOU, AND GIVEAWAY!

How did the idea for the Beautiful You started?
After I wrote Hijas Americanas, which was about the coming of age experiences of Latinas, I was struck by how the conversation in the book about body image and beauty perception as well as the messages shared about those issues- that we are all enough, that our uniqueness is beautiful- were universally embraced by women. Women are really hungering for affirmation of what they inherently know to be true and guidance for how to let that truth shine out in them. I have always been particularly interested in journaling and in creating and taking actionable steps towards a larger goal and so the idea of putting together an action plan and empowerment guide for women where they could put together the pieces to their larger goal of loving and accepting themselves really resonated with me.


I can say from my own experience on this topic, that I think this kind of books are very, very helpful! What do you think is different about your book compared to other books in this genre?
There are great body image books out there. I use many of them in the university course I teach on body image. In this book, what I wanted to do was to take so much of the theory we know to be true about how to fall in love with yourself and offer yourself care and give women actionable steps that get them there. Each step is doable in a day, isn’t too overwhelming, and really motivates the reader to build on their process. Too often, we believe we will finally be content when our body changes in some way. Actually, we’ll be content only when our mind changes, when we give ourselves permission and the tools to be content and that takes some time. Beautiful You provides the tools- vision, passion, purpose, resilience, productivity- for every woman who wants to see beauty in a way that is true to who she is and not in the way the world hands it to her.


Beautiful You is also a workbook in the form of journaling. Explain to us what type of assignments you give?
The assignments really vary from journaling type of assignments where you look at beliefs you have about yourself, joys you have experienced or challenges to actionable steps like working on maintaining eye contact with others, watching what you say or think about yourself, or writing a loved one a letter to let them know how you feel. The steps are each doable in a day but I am hopeful that people will feel such satisfaction from some of them- like maintaining eye contact- that they will incorporate them into their everyday behaviors, further boosting their confidence and sense of self-acceptance.

What were your biggest challenges writing Beautiful You?
The book was such a joy to write and a labor of love that, truly, the greatest challenge really existed outside of the book. Last year, we brought home our first child and parenting is certainly intense. Writing a book in the midst of naps was a new way to work for me (as opposed to having big blocks of time to allow something to distill), but the book itself was always a joy to return to and it was so satisfying at the end of a session to think ‘I just wrote five days’ when parenting milestones and growth often took far more time to reach!


Is there anyone who has inspired, motivated, encouraged or supported your writing?
So many people. But I will boil it down to two people for brevity’s sake. My dad took me to the library every Saturday for years and allowed me to take as much time as I wanted selecting books and never told me that I had too many books when I approached him with my stack of 23 books. He also never made me stop when he would catch me in the middle of the night, with a flashlight under my comforter, reading. He made me hunger for books and what they can teach me. He taught me to believe in the power of a book.


My 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Patricia Grimes, once believed a very sad, shocking short story I wrote was true, but then gave me a B+ on the paper. I confronted her about that B+; after all, she had believed the story was true. She had these great ice blue eyes, and I remember her peering at me through her glasses and saying, “Oh, the story was great. It still could have been written better.” The story is not the same thing as the writing, I learned, and she made me want to master both. I am still a far way from that mastery, but I try everyday to “write better.”


What are the greatest obstacles you have experienced on your writing journey?
I started my career as a teacher and still teach some. Writing for me is another classroom—another way of being with people and learning from them and throwing out ideas. Because my writing career has been a bonus, I don’t often thing in obstacles but I have learned that sometimes the book you are most ready to write isn’t necessarily the book that the market will most support at the time. The other obstacle has been making the time for writing amidst everything else. I know that sounds crazy since I get to write as part of my vocation, but since it is part of my vocation, I dedicate my writing time to that work and not necessarily just sitting down and playing with the page. There is a lot to be said for playing with the page.


What was one of the most surprising things you learned while working on the book?
I had this moment where it crystallized for me that beauty standards can keep us so obsessed that we are truly oppressed. When we become consumed with our appearance, we are left with little room to think about much else. And when we are unable to become fully possessed of ourselves, when we are unable to recognize what makes us great or unique and instead wallow in what makes us—in our minds—“less than” or “different,” we are, in truth, oppressed, unable to access our own empowerment. The world is too rich and has too many needs. All of us- each one of us- need to be operating from a place of our own personal power.


Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?
The body and beauty revolution is ours to begin. It’s time to give ourselves, and the girls and women around us, a wider lens through which to consider our beauty and who we are beyond our beauty.
We have to champion all women. As long as one woman is crippled by feelings of inadequacy, then the world that we have created is inadequate. Supporting one another and freeing one another from the limiting messages that we internalize can be revolutionary. We make the choice whether to internalize these messages. We make the choice whether to build up or tear down. We can have power in our lives by not taking in negative messages, and we can empower other women by not sending out negative messages. When we begin to see women in all of their dimensions, we begin to eradicate confining stereotypes and worldviews. We start to see all women as complex individuals, and not just as part of a larger stereotypical whole.


We can choose to create a society that encourages women to be healthier and more whole, a society that unites us in our commonalities while acknowledging the depth of the individual. The more we challenge the limits we place on each other, the more open the world will be to all of us.

Many thanks Rosie!

You can WIN a copy of Beautiful You: A radical guide for self acceptance. Comment on the interview to be entered and include your email so I can contact you if you win.
+1 extra entry if you become a follower of my blog and +2 extra entries if you post about this contest on your blog/facebook/twitter. Open international and the giveaway closes november 5.