3 Tools To Build Self Confidence in a World where People Make You Feel Insecure

What makes you feel confident about yourself? How do you build your confidence when it’s low? Today, Jay discusses a topic that's all too familiar - the constant barrage of unrealistic beauty standards. He challenges the notion of a singular "most beautiful woman in the world" and explores how societal expectations and media influence our perception of beauty. Jay breaks down the historical and cultural factors that shape beauty standards, from the ancient Greek ideals of symmetry and proportion to the modern-day obsession with youth and perfection. He highlights the role of social media in perpetuating unrealistic beauty ideals and encourages listeners to question these norms and embrace their individuality. In this episode, you'll learn: How to Embrace Individuality How to Build Self-Love How to Set Boundaries How to Appreciate Uniqueness How to Practice Mindfulness By understanding the forces that shape our perception of beauty and cultivating self-love, we can live authentic, fulfilling lives. Remember, true beauty radiates from within. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 03:21 Different Ways We Think About Beauty 07:32 Definition of Beauty Through History 13:49 Beauty Standards of the West 16:11 What Do We Believe to be Beautiful About Ourselves? 17:05 3 Ways to Build Self Love See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1. Are you feeling September reset too? Shorter days, longer to-do lists, earlier alarms, all those routines you promised yourself you'd pick back up. It can feel like your whole life is recalibrating. And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet,

• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:29Jay Shetty?

  AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose.

• 2:16Jay Shetty?

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• 3:00Jay Shetty?

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• 3:45Jay Shetty?

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• 4:29Jay Shetty?

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• 4:36Jay Shetty?

  So many of our perceptions of ourselves are based on other ideas that have made their way through time and lasted as almost generational curses. We're judging ourselves and the people around us based on standards that we didn't choose.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  The number one health and wellness podcast.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Jay Shetty.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Jay Shetty.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  The one, the only Jay Shetty.

• 5:01Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone and welcome back to On Purpose. I'm your host Jay Shetty and I'm so grateful that you're here and taking the time to spend the next 30 minutes with me. Now, in a moment when time and attention are the most valuable assets, you're choosing to come here to explore interesting questions, learn new habits and practices, and dive deep isn't something I ever take for granted. Now, if you're a long time listener to this show, you probably know that we've always followed a format of sorts where we dive into a topic and then I offer you tips, hacks, solutions, and suggestions of how best to navigate it. Recently though,

• 5:44Jay Shetty?

  I've been wanting to go a step deeper, to question the appearances of things some of us might take for granted. My intention being to figure out what's really going on, especially in the information age where most of us are bombarded all day with the same appearances. Now, think about it. If you're someone who spends any time on social media, and I'm guessing that includes most of you, no doubt you're overwhelmed with images and videos of beautiful people doing things that are incredible. Their faces are flawless, their hair's just right, everything's perfect. And usually they're on their way to a party or a city that you

• 6:26Jay Shetty?

  feel like you're missing out on. Now with all those images bombarding us on a daily basis, we may feel sure we experience insecurity, sure we may experience envy and jealousy, but there is conditioning and wiring happening right there and then. And for these reasons, today's episode is posed in the form of a question. I think so many of us are dealing with challenges with self-worth. We hear so many insights on self-confidence, self-love, self-care, but it doesn't seem to be breaking through. And I think that's partly because we don't even know how we're being conditioned. So I want to start off by asking you a question. And the question may seem broad and random,

• 7:11Jay Shetty?

  but I promise you there's a reason because we're going to investigate it. So the question I want to focus on today is, who is the most beautiful woman in the world? Now, when I first ask you that question, either you'll come up with an actual name of someone you know, or maybe it's a celebrity, or a model, or a well-known person. And sure, we could have gone down the lane of who's the most handsome man, or whatever it may be, but I want to stick with this for a second. Because this question led me to take an intensive dive into the ways we think about beauty from all different angles. Historical, cultural, philosophical, even mathematical.

• 7:54Jay Shetty?

  A quest that traces all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Has the definition of beauty changed over time? And how much is it influenced by where we grew up and the era in which we came of age? Are there certain constants or ground rules about beauty? Or do the qualities that come together to create the most beautiful woman in the world change from year to year, decade to decade? And if beauty itself changes, how much has to do with us? The innate preferences and biases that each of us is born with? And how much has to do with the big business of selling dreams, whether it's beauty, fashion, makeup, music, or film?

• 8:37Jay Shetty?

  The Greeks, I want you to know, were preoccupied with beauty. But more than intrigued by beauty as a concept, they were intent on figuring out, using logic, reason, and ideally measurement, what made someone or something beautiful. To them, beauty wasn't subjective or a person, and the definition of beautiful didn't vary depending on who you asked. For the Greeks, beauty had to be rational. Among the top characteristics, according to philosophers and mathematicians of that time, were order, symmetry, and definiteness. Meaning, for example, that a sculptor creating a statue of a Greek goddess should ensure

• 9:20Jay Shetty?

  that both her arms are the right length, that her hands should match those arms, that her head should balance on shoulders neither too big nor too small, and that if she is pictured running, or simply lounging around, that her every muscle and movement be portrayed in intricate detail. For the ancient Greeks, beauty was a function of math. Beauty was all about harmony and proportion. One other thing stands out, too. For Plato and other Greek philosophers, beauty was also linked to a person's goodness and morality, an idea that was later picked up in fairy tales and Disney films.

• 10:01Jay Shetty?

  In other words, if you were beautiful on the outside, you were probably beautiful on the inside, too, though it's hard to speculate which came first. Because they lived in ancient Greece and weren't inclined to calling something beautiful without taking a shot at figuring out why, Greek philosophers did everything in their power to determine if beauty could be measured using mathematical formulas, which is how mathematicians like Pythagoras produced a concept that many centuries later would come to be dubbed "the golden ratio." Ask him who was the most beautiful woman in the world back then, and odds were he

• 10:41Jay Shetty?

  would say Helen of Troy, a woman largely credited with precipitating the Trojan War. Why did they say that? Easy. Her face contained the same precise mathematical theorems they kept seeing in objects belonging to the natural world that were unanimously deemed to be beautiful. Things like nautilus shells, the leaves on trees, pinecones, and pinecone seeds. It took a few centuries for this theorem to be given a name, "the golden ratio," though looking back, it shows up in the face of Mona Lisa, in the Parthenon in Athens, and in the Great Pyramid of Giza, though no one can say for sure if they were created with the golden ratio in mind.

• 11:26Jay Shetty?

  But back to Helen of Troy. What role did the golden ratio play in the fact she was widely considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world? For Pythagoras and other Greek mathematicians, the number three had a special significance. By dividing the human face into three sections, or divisions, he and his colleagues could come that much closer to defining the ingredients of extraordinary beauty. The first measurement was from a woman's hairline down to the middle of the eyes. The second measurement started from those same eyes and ended at the bottom of the nose. The third and final measurement was from the bottom of the nose to the base of a woman's chin. The conclusion?

• 12:10Jay Shetty?

  The most beautiful faces on the planet were two-thirds as wide as they were long. What's more, if all three measurements were roughly equal, a woman's face was more likely than not to be universally seen as beautiful. The color of a beautiful woman's hair mattered too, confirming blond hair in ancient Greece was by far the preferred color. Rarely do you see any illustrations or all paintings of dark-haired or red Greek gods, either female or male. Why? Because as I mentioned earlier, beauty for the Greeks was also connected to inner goodness and a kind of moral purity.

• 12:50Jay Shetty?

  One's outward appearance, the purest possible reflection of the virtue contained inside. Great art and sculpture, in some ways the earliest form of media, also played a powerful part in how the definitions of female beauty evolved. Nearly 2,000 years after the end of the Greek Empire, Renaissance artists like Botticelli, Leonardo, Rubens, and Raphael portrayed women as a physical type: curvaceous, fleshy, maternal, and mysterious. This ideal, incidentally, has endured for centuries and across all cultures. Today, female beauty has no link to extreme thinness. Believe it or not, that idea has been around since the 1960s.

• 13:35Jay Shetty?

  But shapeliness, not to mention youth, since curviness and youth both communicate to suitors that she is the right age and healthy enough to conceive and raise children. In short, the media can prioritize certain looks and figures, all it weighs. But at the end of the day, some things are hardwired in us as animals and won't ever change. Evolution, it won't surprise you to learn, always has the final say. But I want to revisit the idea of symmetry and proportion, and the idea that everything from the face to the arms to the hands should exist in complete harmony. It's easy to dismiss this concept as old fashioned and even dated, but it still plays a part in how we look at beauty today.

• 14:19Jay Shetty?

  In fact, the ancient Greeks are largely responsible for the Western standards of beauty that appear in our media today. Think of Snow White or Cinderella, or Ariel in The Little Mermaid. Their beautiful appearance is inseparable from their goodness and innocence, whereas the witches and ogres and villains surrounding them, who are eager to do them harm, are seen as the opposite of beautiful, as if their evil dispositions have negatively affected the way they look. Another factor that's been linked to beauty: a woman's voice. In the 1980s, social scientists did a study hoping to show a connection between women's voices and their levels of beauty.

• 15:00Jay Shetty?

  They did this by having a team of male volunteers speak on the phone with a group of women. I should add, this was voice only. The men couldn't see the women, nor the women see the men. After the male volunteers were asked to assess the most beautiful voices with the faces of the most beautiful women, the researchers conclude that vocal attractiveness was indeed correlated to the beauty of the women in question. I might also add that the more youthful sounding voice, the more attractive it came across. Once again, blame evolution. Imagine you're visiting Ethiopia, where some tribes in the south still make use of the centuries-old practice of lip plates. These discs are inserted into a woman's bottom lip

• 15:45Jay Shetty?

  and are seen as signs of both beauty and status. Scars or scarification are also commonplace among such African ethnic groups. A knife or a razor is used to make cuts in the skin, and ash or clay or pastes are then rubbed into the cuts, which creates bumps and patterns on the skin that take anywhere from six months to a year to heal. These two are widely considered great emblems of beauty. In New Zealand, especially among the Maori tribes, facial tattoos serve an almost identical beautifying purpose. They also communicate to the world a woman's identity, her social status, her heritage, and her own professional achievements. It's quite literally like having your family tree and your place in it seared onto your skin.

• 16:30Jay Shetty?

  How do you feel about unibrows? The ancient Greeks loved them, probably because they were so symmetrical. Today, in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan, a unibrow is still considered a signature of great beauty, versus in the West, where a unibrow is often considered, well, not entirely desired or welcome. Tajikistan women who don't naturally have a unibrow stretching over their eyes can even buy products to enhance the brows they were born with. You can see that different cultures value different things, and our conditioning means the culture we were raised in, the culture we grew up in, defines what we see as beautiful and attractive. But think about this for a second.

• 17:12Jay Shetty?

  Consider, for example, the Japanese concept known as wabi-sabi, which emphasizes the beauty that is found in imperfection. I absolutely love this idea. A perfectly manicured back lawn is considered in Japan unacceptable and unnatural. No back lawn has ever looked like that. Perfection, this idea argues, may be symmetrical, but at the expense of what we love in the objects and people we loved most, namely their imperfection.

• 17:46Jay Shetty?

  Okay, I am so excited about this because we've got the first ever merch drop for On Purpose. It's finally here. And for World Mental Health Today, we're doing an exclusive, limited-edition drop with all the proceeds going to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI. So now you can wear your On Purpose merch, listen to the podcast, and know that you too are having an impact. I want to thank you so much in advance. I can't wait to see all of your pictures wearing the merch, their sweatshirts, a hat, t-shirts. Check it out on our website, jshettyshop.com. That's jshettyshop.com. And remember, 100% of the proceeds go to NAMI.

• 18:33Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need them most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications, or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast.

• 19:16Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected, and more engaged with your drive, so you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand.

• 20:01Jay Shetty?

  Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980. That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colors, high fructose corn syrup, and more, so you can shop with peace of mind.

• 20:46Jay Shetty?

  Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online.

• 20:50Jay Shetty?

  Let's return now to the beauty standards of the West, which as we see seem to change every decade or so. Until the 1920s, as we've seen in other cultures around the world, great beauty was marked by a full face and a curvy voluptuous body. Then the flapper showed up, a woman skinny as a boy, with short bobbed hair and an androgynous appearance. She was followed by Greta Garbo, lean, strong and enigmatic, a woman of few words. Two decades later, in the 1950s, beauty standards changed again, with the media serving up two female options: the girl next door, embodied by Doris Day, and Debbie Reynolds, and another kind of girl represented by Marilyn Monroe.

• 21:33Jay Shetty?

  In the 1960s, beauty standards changed again with the arrival of Twiggy, an English supermodel weighing 91 pounds who became a cultural icon in London, introducing, or should I say reintroducing, the world to the concept of androgyny. In the 1970s, the pendulum swung back again, with the TV show Charlie's Angels and Farrah Fawcett posters plastering the bedroom walls of every teenage boy in America. Suddenly, it seemed good health and athleticism was in vogue, though this look was soon swapped out by the pale skinny women who began to appear in fashion magazines in the 1990s. Now, I have no judgment over which is more attractive or not, it's what's interesting is how it's being presented to us.

• 22:18Jay Shetty?

  Now, as I've walked you through this journey of history, of culture, we can just see that when we try to answer who's the most beautiful woman in the world, it almost feels like it changes every decade. And today, it may change every week. And what becomes interesting is that our bubble...

• 22:40Jay Shetty?

  Becomes our truth. So if you go online and ask who's the most beautiful woman in the world, and AI will come up with its own semi-scientific assessments. And among the names that come up, you'll see Jodi Cromer, Zendaya, Bella Hadid, Beyonce, Simone Biles, Janelle Monae, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Margot Robbie. But what's really interesting about all of this, we would say, well, they're all beautiful in different ways. So the question that we really have to ask, as opposed to who's the most beautiful woman in the world? What do we count as our beauty? And what do we believe to be beautiful about ourselves? Are we choosing the same things that society, culture, and history changes and updates,

• 23:24Jay Shetty?

  like fashion, every so often, to be our definition? When I first saw Radhi, I genuinely was very attracted to her. I thought she was beautiful from the moment I saw her. And I still believe she's absolutely beautiful and gorgeous today. But so much of what I've learned today is learning to love her for all the nuances, the subtleties that I never knew before, the quirks, the curious parts of her, the parts of her that, you know, that surprised me. And so I want to talk to you about what it really means to build self-love and self-worth.

• 24:05Jay Shetty?

  The first is, understanding the parts of yourself you don't like, and recognizing whether you don't like them because you don't like them, or you don't like them because someone else told you not to like them. Because someone in history, culture, art, somehow got through to you from all of these decades ago. And you're carrying around an old idea about the way you feel about yourself. So many of our perceptions of ourselves are based on other ideas, like the ones I've shared today, that have made their way through time and lasted as almost generational curses. We're judging ourselves and the people around us based on standards that we didn't choose,

• 24:51Jay Shetty?

  values that we didn't create, and symbols that we didn't select.

• 24:57Jay Shetty?

  The second thing I'll say to you is find out what makes you feel confident. It may be developing a new skill. I think what people don't realize is that until you develop skills, the skill of communication, the skill of knowing how to present yourself, preparing to have the skill of knowing how to introduce yourself in a room. Without those skills, no matter what you do, it's very hard to feel confident. Because you could dress however you want, you could show up however you want, you could be invited to something incredible, and you'll still feel like an imposter. You'll still feel out of your depths or out of your comfort zone without a set of skills. Identify the skills that you haven't invested in,

• 25:40Jay Shetty?

  skills that you've missed out on, skills that you haven't prioritized, that can make a big difference in how you feel about yourself. The other thing I want you to do is take a look at how this is an ever-evolving, ever-changing conversation. And notice how through times you've seen updates, and how you've seen updates and upgrades on what is seen as beautiful and how it keeps changing and keeps you on your toes. It supports industries, it builds industries, it allows for industries to actually exist just because we believe we're not beautiful enough, we're not fit enough, we're not strong enough. And start writing down your own definition. Start writing down your own description.

• 26:23Jay Shetty?

  Start writing down your own perception. And start disconnecting from the others. If you need to unfollow, unsubscribe on social media, if you need to change your algorithm, if you need to just switch off from social media in order to create your own views of beauty, to create your own ideals of attraction, that may be the best thing you ever do, because otherwise you'll be chasing something that was defined decades ago. So many of us are pursuing a version of ourself that we don't even know we'll like. But we believe because others may like it, that hopefully we will too. And the truth is, when we try to become who we think other people will like, even if someone likes us, we may not like ourself.

• 27:08Jay Shetty?

  And liking yourself is worth so much more than however many likes you receive on a post on social media. I want to thank you for listening today. I hope that it's been an education. I hope it's been enlightening. I hope that it's given you insight into recognizing that when you try and answer these questions, when you try and chase a version of beauty, you could chase any definition for any decade and you'd still be behind. Thank you so much for listening. Remember, I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you. I'll see you soon. If you loved this episode, you will enjoy my conversation with Meghan Trainor on breaking generational trauma and how to be confident from the inside out.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  My therapist told me stand in the mirror naked for five minutes. It was already tough for me to love my body, but after the C-section scar with all the stretch marks, now I'm looking at myself like I've been hacked. But day three, when I did it, I was like, you know what? Her thighs are cute.

• 28:05Speaker 04

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• 28:35Speaker 01

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• 28:42Jay Shetty?

  They all heap the blame on me.

• 28:44Speaker 01

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• 28:51Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze in there. That's what...

• 28:56Speaker 01

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• 28:59Speaker 02

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 not a minute without parent.