Part 3: The One Thing: How to Straighten Your Crown - 287
For so many women, the search for worth takes us outside of ourselves. We chase the perfect body, the perfect career, the perfect relationship, or the next achievement that will finally make us feel whole. But what if the crown you’re looking for has been there all along?
In this episode, I’m discussing what it means to truly straighten your crown, break free from the invisible corset of expectations, and start making decisions from a place of self-trust, alignment, and love.
I share stories about my daughter Grace, the parable of “diamonds on your own land," and the acorn-to-oak story to show how our identity is shaped by the stories we believe. When we stop trying to polish the corset and instead recognize the crown we were born with, we can begin making choices from alignment instead of approval.
Conclusion:
The crown was never lost. It was simply buried beneath years of expectations, conditioning, and the pressure to prove that we are enough. Straightening your crown is about returning to the person you were before the world taught you that you needed to earn your worth.
In This Episode:
00:00 Introduction: Straightening your crown
03:02 Understanding the corset and how it shapes our beliefs
08:25 The diamonds you’re searching for are already within you
11:33 Changing the stories that keep you stuck
16:03 Choosing alignment over approval
20:44 The moment Grace learned she was worthy
26:16 A daily practice to straighten your crown
28:06 Returning to your true self
31:55 Crowns are contagious
Mentioned in the Episode:
The Story of You by Ian Morgan Cron: https://www.amazon.com/dp/006282581X
Join the BS Club:
https://www.disruptivenutrition.com/bsclub
Pre-Order Carrie’s Book, From Corset to Crown!
Get your copy of "From Corset to Crown" and a ton of awesome bonuses to make the learning really stick at: https://www.carrielupoli.com/corsettocrown
Carrie’s From Corset to Crown Live Event in Nashville on October 2-4, 2026:
The ultimate girls' trip is on! Get your tickets here (special group rate for 2 or more!) https://www.disruptivenutrition.com/liveevent2026
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Other Related Episodes:
Looking for more tips to optimize your health? Listen to these episodes:
- Part 2: The One Thing You Need to Do Before You Say Yes to Anything
- Part 1: The One Thing That Explains Why You're Always Exhausted
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Carrie Lupoli: So just picture the fact that my daughters at five and six years old were already talking about calories in food, and I was appalled at myself because everything I did was from the corset. But 10 years after my six-year-old talked about calories, at 16, we got an Amazon delivery, and I opened the box and I was shocked.
[00:00:21] Carrie Lupoli: It was a crown. And I'm like, "Who bought themselves a crown?" And Grace came up to me and she said, "I did." "Why did you do that?" And she goes, "Because I am royalty." And it was like this moment where she decided she was worthy, but it wasn't the crown that she bought for $6.99 on Amazon that made her worthy. She already was.
[00:00:42] Carrie Lupoli: Crowns are contagious.
[00:00:50] Carrie Lupoli: Well, hey there, Crown Straighteners. Whatever is tightening your corset today, welcome. You're in the right place. So welcome to episode three of this three-part [00:01:00] series I've done really introducing the concept of going from corset to crown now that this podcast has been rebranded. I mean, for those of you that are new here, I had a top-rated podcast called "Diet Disruptors" for the past six years, and just recently we decided to just blow the whole thing up.
[00:01:19] Carrie Lupoli: Why? Well, "Diet Disruptors" podcast was amazing, and I love the idea of disrupting the diet industry because it needs to be disrupted. And as what I call an untraditional nutritionist, I have really seen all of the shenanigans that our weight loss industry, our diet industry, that they've all been attacking us with, making us feel like not being successful at their diets, at their attempts to lose weight, and then their false promises of that being sort of the pot at the end of the rainbow that's gonna just get us all the happiness and balance and joy and confidence in the world, how that doesn't work.
[00:01:58] Carrie Lupoli: Uh, and when [00:02:00] it doesn't, it's our fault. I am over it. And so for six years, I really dug into the truth about what our bodies need, the BS that actually matters instead of the BS of the diet industry, belief systems, behavioral science, and blood sugar. And I will stand by that all day long And I have learned in the more than a decade I've been doing this work, in the m- three decades I have been a behavior specialist, that nutrition was the doorway.
[00:02:27] Carrie Lupoli: And what my clients have said to me over, and over, and over again was that once they really understood their bodies and how blood sugar stabilization actually works, how we can use food as fuel, how we can look at food differently and understand it better, that's actually the easy part. What we unveil underneath all of our attempts at losing weight is truly ourselves, understanding ourselves, understanding what keeps us stuck, understanding that the corset has been driving our decisions [00:03:00] for just about ever.
[00:03:02] Carrie Lupoli: What is the corset? Well, the corset is this metaphorical piece of clothing, right? If you think about what a corset is, you actually, back in the day, somebody put the corset on you, and they had to actually tighten it from the back. That means somebody who put the corset on you loved you. They cared about you.
[00:03:22] Carrie Lupoli: It wasn't done in a way to punish you or to tell you that you weren't enough. However, this metaphorical corset that we've all been given was given to us because the person that likely gave it to us was wearing it, too. And for so long, it feels so natural and normal that we don't even realize it's not supposed to be there.
[00:03:44] Carrie Lupoli: And that corset really for so many people, especially women, but men, too, really feels like the idea that smaller is better, right? When someone says, "You look great," that's actually code for, "You look smaller." And we are on this never-ending journey of trying to fix [00:04:00] ourselves, fix our bodies. But what we don't realize is that the corset evolves as we get older.
[00:04:05] Carrie Lupoli: The first is the knowledge when we're about seven or eight years old that we aren't enough as we are. We have to actually look like a certain You know, like vision of beauty. And th- the, the goalposts keep changing, right? Every decade there's another set of beauty standards we're supposed to, uh, just try to go and be like.
[00:04:27] Carrie Lupoli: And, and recognizing that we are unique and our goal to be truly the healthiest version of ourselves gets completely ignored with the idea that we have to shrink in order to be more. But that corset continues to evolve. It continues to tighten in all new ways as we get older. And it goes from how you look, and that never goes away, that just continues to multiply over the years, to how you perform, how successful you are.
[00:04:54] Carrie Lupoli: I mean, in, in social media days, right, it's how many likes you can get on a post. I remember many [00:05:00] conversations I've had with my daughters around them deleting posts when they didn't get enough likes. All of that is the corset. When we think about, uh, motherhood and being the best mother we can, there's a whole lot of pressure that comes with that, and the pressure to do it all and to act like you've got it all under control.
[00:05:21] Carrie Lupoli: The corset is what we continuously tighten to really seek approval, to prove our worth. And we get to the point when someone starts to tell us that this corset is not actually supposed to be there, that we're like, "Oh my gosh." And that's what my book "From Corset to Crown" has started to reveal to so many women.
[00:05:44] Carrie Lupoli: But it's something that my clients knew and realized so long ago, uh, when I started doing this work that, oh my gosh, like this isn't really about the food. This is about my relationship with myself, how I view myself, how I handle stress, how I show up for myself. It is about self-leadership and self-love [00:06:00] and recognizing that we were all born with the crown.
[00:06:03] Carrie Lupoli: I mean, when you think about a baby, my marketing director for my private practice just had a baby and she sh- sent me a picture of him like four minutes old, and he was so perfect and so worthy just because he existed. And that is true for all of us. We just have forgotten it because that corset has squeezed us so tight and it's been on for so long, it feels normal.
[00:06:24] Carrie Lupoli: So rebranding the podcast was really about going bigger. It's not about not talking about our bodies and the diet industry and what we really need to be doing for it. I have not worked for the last 12 years as a nutritionist in the way that I have to throw that away. That is key in so many ways. I want all of us to be the healthiest version of ourselves, and it's so much more than that.
[00:06:47] Carrie Lupoli: And the rebranding the podcast just really got us to a place of saying, "Okay, we gotta go bigger with this." I don't want this to be just down the line of wellness, health, body image. This [00:07:00] corset perseverates every aspect of our life. When we make decisions, we can start to see are we making them from the corset or from the crown?
[00:07:07] Carrie Lupoli: You may end up making the same exact decision But it's why you're doing it. I always say this, let's say you've got 100 people at the gym, and they're working out, and they're, and they are there consistently, but some are there because of the corset and some are there because of the crown, and there's a difference.
[00:07:23] Carrie Lupoli: So in the first two episodes of this little miniseries that I've been doing, I talked about the corset, and then I talked about going the path from the corset to the crown, and there's this bridge that happens where we're in the center and we start to realize the corset is there, and start to pivot and shift towards the crown.
[00:07:40] Carrie Lupoli: And so if you haven't listened to those two episodes, I want you, I encourage you to go back and do that. But it's all been about one journey, this invisible pressure that has been shaping our decisions since we were little. The belief underneath it all that I am not enough, that we are deficient in some way And so in episode one, [00:08:00] we really talked about that.
[00:08:00] Carrie Lupoli: In episode two, we found the center and this pause between the pressure and the decision to straighten your crown, and it really interrupts the messaging and the narrative that has just sort of been like truth, although I call it truthiness, for so long. And today we're gonna tap into the crown, what it is, where it's been, how to straighten it.
[00:08:21] Carrie Lupoli: But first I wanna tell you a story. I'm actually gonna tell you a couple of stories today. I was reading a book, and there was this whole story, um, about... It, it's, it's not a real story, but it draws a really important point. Supposedly, again, it's not really real, but there's some truth behind some of the, um, results of this story.
[00:08:44] Carrie Lupoli: But there is this man named Ali Hafed, okay? And he had a pretty decent life. He had some land. He had a family. Pretty good. Well, he was told that there were diamonds [00:09:00] in the hills around his farm, around his property, and that if he could go find them, he would be immensely rich for generations, like just a- absolutely insane.
[00:09:11] Carrie Lupoli: So he was like, "I am in." So he literally left everything and spent all of his time and energy looking for these diamonds. He looked for decades, leaving his entire family and farm behind. He never ended up finding the diamonds. And then we go back to his farm after it had been sold off and a brand new owner was there, and he is now doing his thing around the farm, and he start-- he sees something as he was digging, and it was this shiny object.
[00:09:46] Carrie Lupoli: And don't you know, it was one of the rarest diamonds in the world. And the parable goes that he ended up uncovering on this very farm the world's largest [00:10:00] diamond, whatever it is, cave area, whatever, and the rarest diamonds in the world. And the story goes that had Ali Hafed actually just looked in his own farm, in his own land, he would've found all the diamonds.
[00:10:17] Carrie Lupoli: And it goes along with really recognizing our worth. The idea that we are broken and need to be fixed, the idea that we need to go outside of ourselves and look for, uh, the perfect diet or the weight loss shot or something else outside of us to fix us. In fact, Ali Hafed, he never lost the diamonds. He literally never found them.
[00:10:43] Carrie Lupoli: He abandoned himself in the search outside of himself. And we do the same thing every single time. We go looking outside of ourselves for the worth, for the peace, for the confidence that was literally already on our land. And I think this is what we keep thinking. If I could [00:11:00] weigh a certain amount, if I can get a certain amount of money, if I can just, like, get more time, then I can be balanced, then I can have peace, then I can have confidence.
[00:11:08] Carrie Lupoli: But it all comes from inside. And I just love that story because it just reminds us in the, in the acres of diamonds exist already inside of you We have to know that in order to recognize that the crown has always been there. We don't need somebody to put it on us. We don't need to actually put it on ourselves.
[00:11:27] Carrie Lupoli: It's there, it's just like, I always joke that it sh- it was just, like, lost in my big head of hair. There's another book that I am reading right now, and I'm loving it. It's called The Story of You, and it's written by Ian Morgan Cron. It is, uh, a journey into the Enneagram. If you know the Enneagram, it, it's just an incredible tool.
[00:11:45] Carrie Lupoli: I use it with my clients. It's a way to understand our personality, our triggers, and truly understand what the healthiest version of us does and says and thinks and believes. And, and so if you're new to the Enneagram, I wouldn't suggest this as your first book. His other book, The Road [00:12:00] Back to You, is one that I, I would definitely suggest.
[00:12:02] Carrie Lupoli: But I wanna read an excerpt out of his book about an acorn, because his whole premise of this book are the stories we tell ourselves that, hmm, might not be serving us anymore. Okay. So I'm gonna read to you this story that he writes about in here. "Once upon a time, in a not so far away land, there was a kingdom of acorns nestled at the foot of a grand oak tree.
[00:12:26] Carrie Lupoli: S- since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy, and since they were midlife, baby boomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called Getting All You Can Out of Your Shell. There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree.
[00:12:47] Carrie Lupoli: There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells, and various acorn-opathic therapies to enhance longevity and wellbeing. One day in the midst of this kingdom, there was suddenly appeared... or [00:13:00] there suddenly appeared a naughty little stranger, apparently dropped out of the blue by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns, and crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale.
[00:13:16] Carrie Lupoli: Pointing upward at the tree, he said, 'We are that.' Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation. 'So tell us, how would we become that tree?' 'Well,' he said, pointing downward, 'it has something to do with going into the ground and cracking open the shell.'
[00:13:39] Carrie Lupoli: 'Insane,' they responded. 'Totally morbid. Why, we wouldn't be acorns anymore.'" He goes on to say, after telling that story, "As long as your old shell remains in place, you will never become who you were intended to be, an oak tree. Your old story is to crack open so the seed of your authentic self can grow." That is what it [00:14:00] means by straightening the crown, understanding that the story you have been telling yourself was one from the corset, and it hasn't really been serving you.
[00:14:09] Carrie Lupoli: But when you show up knowing who you are, knowing your worth, remembering that you were born worthy It changes everything in the way we show up for ourselves and for others. This matters because when we make decisions from the corset, there are so many things that end up happening inside and outside of us that never actually sit well, sit right, sit in alignment.
[00:14:39] Carrie Lupoli: Well, howdy. Let's go on a trip together, shall we? How about Nashville, Tennessee? October 2nd through the 4th, I am bringing my concept, my approach, and my heart to you in Nashville with my live event, From Corset to Crown. It's gonna be three days of being in person with all sorts of amazing speakers, but here's what's really gonna happen.
[00:14:59] Carrie Lupoli: Friday, you're [00:15:00] gonna show up wearing the corset. We all will, and that's right where you're supposed to be because we're gonna start to recognize all the things that are just keeping us stuck. We're gonna name them. We're gonna sign a peace treaty with ourselves, and then on Saturday, I am going to disrupt everything you've been told about weight loss, confidence, and self-worth in a room full of women doing the same hard, honest, amazing work.
[00:15:20] Carrie Lupoli: I'm gonna teach you the last nutritional advice you will ever need. I'm going to teach you the tools I use with my clients and the things that have worked with tens of thousands of women. And then on Sunday, we're gonna get real and dig in and bring it all together with true centeredness, self-love, empowerment.
[00:15:37] Carrie Lupoli: I cannot wait for you not just to be inspired, but to learn so much information and leave with a complete and total transformation. So for a limited time, I am offering our general admission tickets for $50 off. We've already sold out of platinum and VIP, but every single person in that room, I'm going to hug, I'm going to greet.
[00:15:54] Carrie Lupoli: It's gonna be incredible. So go get your ticket now. I can't wait to see you in Nashville.[00:16:00]
[00:16:03] Carrie Lupoli: I was actually just having this conversation with my sister-in-law the other day, because she ended up losing her job, and she was super, super busy, and then she lost her job, and then she was super, super busy trying to find a job without any pay coming in, and the stress became just so much. And she realized she kept looking for a job that she actually didn't even like, but she needed money, and she needed to provide, and she needed security.
[00:16:31] Carrie Lupoli: But she hated the job, and she got a job in that field doing the same thing, and she was miserable, absolutely miserable. And then an opportunity came in front of her, and it was going to be more work, and it was going to be new, and it was going to force her to have to move to the other side of the country.
[00:16:49] Carrie Lupoli: But it was in alignment with who she was and what she wanted. So was she working more? Yes. Is she, uh, did she pick up her whole life [00:17:00] and relocate? Yes. But for some reason, she said to me, "It doesn't feel so hard. It doesn't feel like so much pressure." And I said to her, "That is because you made a decision from the crown instead of from the corset."
[00:17:15] Carrie Lupoli: Believe it or not, this new opportunity isn't paying even half as much as what she was making before. But when you're in alignment with the crown, somehow it all works. That acorn story is so important because that shell that, w- that they were talking about, that they were stuck in, that defined them, that's the corset.
[00:17:37] Carrie Lupoli: You can't polish the corset. You can't optimize the corset. You actually have to crack it open You were never meant to stay an acorn. You were always meant to be the oak tree, but you can't be the oak tree unless you get in the ground and crack open the corset and actually see the crown. And so Ian [00:18:00] Morgan Cron says, like, knowing your story means you can change it, and that's part of what we talked about when it came to that centering activity, actually centering and pausing and recognizing where you could go if you decide from the corset or where you could be if you go in alignment with the crown.
[00:18:17] Carrie Lupoli: When I teach women about food and their bodies, I'm showing them how to eat in a way that serves their body. I, I mean, for the most part, although I will say most of us don't know what we need to be doing, but for the most part, most of us know we need to move our body more, we need to probably eat more clean, whole, unprocessed foods, right?
[00:18:35] Carrie Lupoli: We need to probably have a better routine at night for sleep. Like, we know this, but we don't do it. Why? Because so many of us are functioning from the corset. Our goals are really to be approved by other people, to look a certain way so other people might look at us and actually have, like, good things to say or look at us in a way that is approving, [00:19:00] that is giving us our worthiness.
[00:19:02] Carrie Lupoli: But when you actually know who you are and you are confident in that person that was born a baby worthy, and you start to make decisions not for other people, but for yourself, from the place of the heart versus the ego, it's amazing how you start to move your body. You start to eat in a way that serves your body.
[00:19:21] Carrie Lupoli: You start to show up for yourself. Because when you make decisions from the crown, you love yourself. You love yourself too much not to show up for yourself. Very different when you walk into a, a new approach, a new diet, a new thing frustrated and angry with yourself. You show up differently for people you like than people you don't like, and that right there is a difference between making decisions from the crown or making decisions from the corset.
[00:19:49] Carrie Lupoli: When you are so frustrated with yourself or with your life, when you actually use the word just in your statements, "I just need more time. I just need to lose weight. I just need to make [00:20:00] more money," that is your key right there that the decision is coming from the corset versus alignment from the crown, knowing you are doing the things that you are meant to be doing right now.
[00:20:09] Carrie Lupoli: Now, it doesn't always mean it's gonna be easy. Some of you can be in a season of your life where you're caring for a loved one, like an, uh, like a parent, or you're in the thick of it with little kids, like my, my little brother is. And it can still feel hard, but when you know and you sit back and you look at why you are there and that you are in alignment with who you are and y- you're not doing it for approval or worthiness, well, it changes everything.
[00:20:36] Carrie Lupoli: You have more energy, and you have more consistency We can control the story we tell ourselves about who we are. I have to tell you one more story. I'm like a storyteller today, and I've told this story many times before. I write this in my book, and I think it's one that just needs to be restated because it's true and astonishing, and something we can all [00:21:00] learn from.
[00:21:00] Carrie Lupoli: So just picture the fact that my daughters at five and six years old were already talking about calories and food, and I was appalled at myself because everything I did was from the corset. If you looked at my life on the surface, you would think, "Oh, she's so successful." I had lived in Asia and Europe. I was a national educational consultant.
[00:21:21] Carrie Lupoli: I was traveling the world, and I was doing all sorts of things, and yet I had this horrible relationship with food and my body, believing that how I looked was a direct correlation to my worth on the job. And I struggled to be able to see myself as anything other than this physical commodity that needed to look a certain way in order to be worthy.
[00:21:42] Carrie Lupoli: And it's so clear to me now that I was doing it, but when I was in it, I didn't know until when my daughter started talking about calories, that shook me to my core. I went on a really deep dive, journey of self-discovery, and I didn't know. And when you're in it, you don't know. Am I doing the [00:22:00] things that I'm supposed to be doing?
[00:22:01] Carrie Lupoli: I, I don't know. But 10 years after my six-year-old talked about calories, at 16 We got an Amazon delivery, and I opened the box and I was shocked. It was a crown. And I'm like, "Who bought themselves a crown?" And Grace came up to me and she said, "I did." I literally-- It was so shocking to me. I had no idea you could buy yourself a crown on Amazon.
[00:22:24] Carrie Lupoli: I know you can buy anything on Amazon. I know it. But at the time, it just never hit me. It was $6.99. And I said to her, "You can buy yourself a crown?" She's like, "Yeah." And I go, "Why? Why did you do that?" And she goes, "Because I am royalty. I've always wanted to be a princess, and now I can be, and this will remind me of that."
[00:22:43] Carrie Lupoli: This is the same girl who literally had no friends at her 14th birthday party. She, sh-- But the, the pl- the seeds that I had been planting, the work that we had been doing together, it started to click, and it was like this moment where she decided she was worthy. And [00:23:00] while she bought herself a crown, the truth is we don't have to buy it.
[00:23:03] Carrie Lupoli: It's already there. She used it as a physical memory or a physical reminder of it, but it wasn't the crown that she bought for $6.99 on Amazon that made her worthy. She already was. And once she decided to actually straighten her crown, buying one was just a physical representation of what was already there.
[00:23:26] Carrie Lupoli: She started acting differently. She started showing up as somebody who loved herself, who was confident in herself, even though this was a girl who sang, had a sweet voice, but never sang in front of anybody. But when she decided that she was worthy, she started auditioning for all sorts of things. Now, you can audition for things from the corset or from the crown, but when you do it from the crown and you get rejected, which she did many times, you can handle it, because your value is not in that part.
[00:23:57] Carrie Lupoli: It's not in getting that role. It is not in [00:24:00] getting a certain job. It's not in getting a certain weight on the scale. She taught me that, and That changed everything because while I understood the concept of the corset, and I had been helping thousands of women by that point, I didn't have a name to actually help us see, visualize, live, and, and focus on straightening the corset.
[00:24:23] Carrie Lupoli: So I'm in so much gratitude to my daughter, Grace, and she ended up going on to get a killer role as Belle in Beauty and the Beast, won all sorts of awards, ended up performing on Broadway, is now studying musical theater at a small, amazing conservatory, and all because she made the decision to straighten her crown.
[00:24:43] Carrie Lupoli: And that's what it means. It's not luck. It's not that some people have it and some people don't. We all do. And as Ian Morgan Cron in his book says, "All transformation begins with story transformation." The corset was a story you were handed. The [00:25:00] crown is a story you were born with, and now that you know the difference, you get to make the choice.
[00:25:08] Carrie Lupoli: The framework is really clear. The crown is not something you earn. It's not a destination. It's not reserved for the especially disciplined, the especially accomplished, or the especially worthy. You have the crown. You just have to see it, because you can't actually change what you can't see. And until you see the corset and recognize the crown, you're not gonna be able to make decisions that are aligned, 'cause what are you aligning it with if you're not aware of it?
[00:25:37] Carrie Lupoli: It's one of the reasons why morning time is so important to me. It's a chance for us to every single day reflect on our decisions from the day before. Was I making decisions from the corset or was I making decisions from the crown? And then look ahead at your day in front of you, knowing what's planned, but knowing that because you have the crown, you can respond [00:26:00] instead of react.
[00:26:01] Carrie Lupoli: Stuff's gonna happen. Curve balls are gonna be thrown at you. But when you live with the crown on your head and straight, it's amazing how you can handle them so much better than when everything has to be perfect and you can't breathe in the corset. So I want you to go back to your five-year-old self before the corset was put on you.
[00:26:22] Carrie Lupoli: I remember for me, I was seven and my mom was... Well, my mom had been brushing my hair straight forever, but at seven I really remember saying to her, "Mom, it hurts when you brush my hair." She took a brush to a dry head of hair like this, and then just brushed it, and she said, "Honey, beauty hurts." And that was the moment I realized I was not okay the way I was.
[00:26:42] Carrie Lupoli: My hair was something to change and to fix and to contend with. And I, until I was 40, I fought so hard to fix my hair. I, I, I can't even tell you. I was trying to fix my body, I was trying to fix my hair, all because I felt like it [00:27:00] was not good enough. It was not right. At 40, I heard about a curly hair salon, and I was like, "A curly hair salon?
[00:27:07] Carrie Lupoli: Like, there's a thing?" And it was the first time I had gone to a salon and they didn't blow dry my hair straight at the end. They embraced my curls. They embraced my natural beauty. They embraced who I was. And that may seem like a small thing, but it was the very first time at 40 years old I realized I actually am okay as I am.
[00:27:28] Carrie Lupoli: I don't have to fight to look a certain way that's not natural to who I am. So I want you to think about maybe yourself around five years old and what your five-year-old self would tell you that you've forgotten, because the corset was likely put on you a couple years later. That's the crown. That's what you're returning to.
[00:27:49] Carrie Lupoli: When I was, uh, traveling a few weeks ago, I saw a little girl at an airport, and she had this sparkly bomber jacket, like, you know, one of those little zip-up jackets. It was all rainbow glitter. She [00:28:00] actually had a crown on her head, totally unapologetic. She had not yet been taught that she has to look a certain way.
[00:28:07] Carrie Lupoli: Now, I know she's gonna outgrow wearing a crown on a regular basis, but it's why she doesn't wanna wear the crown anymore that bothers me, that I want to shift, because she will believe the corset that will inevitably get put on her. And at some point, I know you can remember when the corset was put on you, but the crown truly has always been there.
[00:28:31] Carrie Lupoli: It just got buried under the corset, under the conditioning, under the years of proving yourself. So straightening your crown isn't finding something, it's returning to something that is the actual truth. So remember when I said the signals of how you talk to yourself, re- just remember that when you're making decisions from the corset, what I've seen in the women that I've worked with is the j- word just, I just [00:29:00] want.
[00:29:00] Carrie Lupoli: And when you're looking for something out of this desperation or a lack, that is your key that you are looking for worth, approval. and peace from the corset. "I just wanna lose 25 pounds. I just wanna make s- more money." But if you can shift your language to what you desire, going after something that you desire means you're going after something out of abundance, not out of a lack.
[00:29:31] Carrie Lupoli: I desire to be the healthiest version of myself because I wanna be fully present for my life at 80. It might look like the same exact behavior as someone that just says, "I, I just wanna lose 25 pounds," but why we're doing it is completely different. So when we think about what we want and why we want it, focusing on what your five-year-old self would tell you about yourself, and really looking into who you are.
[00:29:58] Carrie Lupoli: This isn't about [00:30:00] polishing the corset. It's about literally recognizing what Ali Hafed did not realize at all, that the diamonds are right here inside of you. The answer is not somewhere that you haven't been yet, something you have to go find, something that you have to go earn. It is here right now. So making decisions from the corset gives you a completely different freedom than anything you've experienced before, and I love remembering the corset because it gives me hope and it gives me a little bit of a check.
[00:30:34] Carrie Lupoli: Like, it's like, you know, when you're driving in a GPS and they're like, uh, recalculating, no judgment. It's just like, hey, we're off the path a little bit. We need to recalculate. So the way that I do this little recalculating is li- listen, removing the corset is something that we have to do every single day.
[00:30:50] Carrie Lupoli: Every single day, there is something that's gonna bring us back to really believing that we need the approval, that we need to prove our worth, whatever it is. And so a little gesture of just your [00:31:00] hands around your waist being like, "Okay, I see you corset. I see you there and I'm gonna take you off." I'm gonna get centered for a second, put my hands together right by my heart and just pause and ask myself, "Am I making this decision from the corset?"
[00:31:15] Carrie Lupoli: And I'm gonna go right up to my head and I'm gonna straighten my crown and remind myself who I am, whose I am, and that my worthiness does not have to be bought. And I can then make a decision based on alignment with the person with the crown versus in alignment with the person wearing the corset.
[00:31:32] Carrie Lupoli: Totally different approach, even if the answer ends up being the same. So crowns are contagious, and that's one of the things to remember because when you start straightening your crown, when you start having this language, when you start seeing yourself in this way, the women around you start looking for their crowns too and straighten theirs.
[00:31:53] Carrie Lupoli: And as a friend, as a mother, as a grandmother, as a daughter, it's so [00:32:00] important that when you see a woman that you love operating from the corset, you go right up to her and be like, "Come, come, come here for a second," and you just tilt that crown so it's straight on her head and it's a little reminder between you and them that I see you and I want you to see yourself the way I see you.
[00:32:19] Carrie Lupoli: It makes a huge difference. So let's get yourself into this space of seeing the corset, getting centered, and then operating from the crown because it was always yours. So remember, pressure is not proof of purpose. Go straighten your crown today, and if you've got a minute, go straighten someone else's too.
[00:32:43] Carrie Lupoli: We'll see you next time