This blog post (and the associated podcast episode) was inspired by the movie Encanto, which I absolutely loved. One of the top complaints that I’ve heard from people who reviewed the movie is that there’s no villain, there’s no conflict from antagonist who poses a threat to the clear hero of the story. I believe there is a villain in this movie, but the villain isn’t a person. The villain is a set of conditions that contaminate the confidence of the 3 characters and turn them into what I call the Performer, the Prover and the Perfect One.
Encanto is about a family, and in my experience as a Confidence Coach our families play a huge role in how we be we develop and turn into the women we are in adulthood. Family shapes us often times more than we realize – we learn habits & get programmed when we’re young and those patterns become our personality later on in our lives.
The confidence growth journey will require us to confront this conditioning and challenge us to ask questions that will make us uncomfortable, and in watching the movie it was hard for me to ignore the dynamics between the family members and how those familial relationships shaped the characters and their confidence.
Confidence feels like freedom, ease, lightness and rest – but the pressure from learned habits and the trained ways of being becomes a hinderance to our confidence and growth, like we see in the 3 Madrigal sisters in the movie.
Sister Luisa is the Performer. The strong one who does everything for everybody, and she struggles with knowing who she is when her strength begins to fade. That pressure she sings about? (If you learned how to be the “responsible” child growing up, I’m willing to be you felt seen….) Luisa comes to realize that her worth isn’t something that needs to be earned.
Sister Isabela is the Perfect One. The expectation of perfection causes her to stifle what she really thinks, feels and believes behind her smile. She begins to ask questions and discovers herself after making something unexpected, and decides that she wants the freedom to be imperfect and interesting
And finally, Sister Mirabel is the Prover. Even though everybody says she’s just like everyone else in the family, she recognizes that she’s low-key ostracized because she’s different…so she’s determined to prove herself. Everything she does is with the goal of making her family proud. In the end she realizes how exhausting that is and decides to see herself for who she is and appreciate everything about herself.
I saw these characters and immediately recognized the common threads among many of the women that I’ve worked with as clients, those who connect online & reply to my emails.
This is an animated movie with GEMS for days…listen to episode 211 of the Confident Women Glow podcast below:
If you see yourself in these characters, I hope you also see a blueprint for the evolution that you’ll experience throughout your confidence growth journey as you purge your life of these patterns.
Give yourself permission to let go of these learned behaviors and ways of being – the real you is in there, she just needs room to expand.
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