Episode #20 – Handling Yourself Like A Diamond

Transcript:

hi everyone! Welcome back on another podcast. This is Glennvelle Manarang your hostess for today and welcome back on my podcast titled Soulish Femme, Real Talk. Today’s episode I’m going to title it as handling ourselves like diamonds, okay. So, diamond is derived from an ancient Greek. According to wikipedia.org, it’s proper unalterable, unbreakable and untamed. From an ancient Greek:damau (to over power, tame) Diamonds are thought to have been first recognized and mined in India. The stone could be found many centuries ago along the rivers and diamonds have been treasured as gemstones. So we live in a world where there are too much struggles as a woman. We have a lot of a things going on in our lives. So, this is why I’m going to continue this series of the evolution of womanhood and what it feels like to be a woman in this generation today in the 21st century and there’s a lot of stressors in our lives. If you’re a family woman, if you have a husband and raising children at the same time and have your own business and being a housemaid too at the same time, we sometimes become too overly stressed.

#1. Respect Yourself

Number one is because to handle yourself like a diamond is respect yourself. Respect starts in how you treat yourself which includes self-care, taking the time to rest, turning off your cellphone once a week, go for a walk, doing a Pilates, yoga, go to a spa if you can afford it and getting your hair done. These are the things of self-respect. I know that sometimes we think that self-care is selfish. Although it is contrary from the truth because if you do not take care of yourself, there’s really nothing that you can give. Just today because of the stress in my family and some people in our lives. The more you’re available, they don’t really pay attention to you and the more we are here for our children or family, sometimes they just ignore you.

So, sometimes to show you respect, you have to remove yourself, gently and kindly. You are allowed to be absent sometimes from your family’s life and maybe you want to go out shopping by yourself and maybe you should just meander somewhere and do whatever that you please. Because as I said, many of us as women, we are too available and constantly going to supervise the people around us and we cater to their needs if we do not take care of ourselves, we will run rampant and haggard and next thing you know we will be so aggravated of why we’re giving too much of our time and we never get back in return.

#2. Placing an encasement around yourself.

And another thing that you can also learn in handling yourself like a diamond is placing an encasement around yourself like a velvet rope or such as unbreakable glass. Have you walked into a jewelry store and you see beautiful diamonds? They’re actually encased in this beautiful glass and you watch it from the distance and it will have this brilliance in them. When you look at it closer, it comes with different sizes and different shapes and this is exactly what we do with our lives. When we treat ourselves like diamonds or like a diamond, we must place boundaries that cannot be break that cannot be broken. We must be selective of who we allow and tolerate in our circles. I used to invite everybody else. I used to make lots of friends way back when I was younger because I was a people pleaser. I want everybody to like me. I want everybody to love me. I want everybody to just think I’m the coolest girl and the coolest and the latest woman. The greatest and the latest invention since Sputnik and though I thought that was great and then eventually later on in life not everybody really your true friends.

Some people just come into your life because they want something from you or they just want to use you. Or maybe they just want to I don’t know spy in your life and copy who you are. So, when you grow up and you learn that people are not always who they appear to be. You realize that not everybody has a good intention at heart. Not everybody can be your friends. Some are really hypocrites and fake and that’s very harsh thing to realize but that’s exactly what boundaries are. When you don’t have boundaries, people will take advantage of you, people can just really take your niceness of being a doormat. People will usually think that you’re being nice, therefore; I can just do whatever I want. That’s a problem of being nice because you’re too blinded and you always think highly about people because we live in a society that we are not really taught that there are people out there, even in our own family that are actually demonically possessed and influenced by the devil.

In this world that they can do harm to you that they don’t really have the best intention at heart and they don’t really love you per se. So, we have to know between what it feels like to have healthy boundaries and saying no when you have to say no. Firmly say no and do not budge and just like a queen or a VIP that is not easily readily available to everyone. You meet them by an appointment. So, the same thing with our lives, you cannot just allow people to come into your life without really knowing who they are first and you might be asking how can I make friends like this. I mean you can but at the same time you have to have discernment and you know exactly the kind of people. I talk so much about the vibration, the energy that you feel when people really are true or not or maybe they’re just coming around because they want something out of you.

#3. Create the life you want

Then number three of course, if you’re keeping notes is that create the life you want envision, plan and execute. No one can create the life for you. No one will knock at your door and tell you how exactly you want to live your life. A vision is something that you must picture in your mind and in your imagination of what kind of life you would like to achieve in this world. And then you have to plan of course, because without a plan, you’re just wishing per say. You need to have a strategic plan, a smart plan of how you can achieve one specific goal and then you can execute because if you take no action you’re just going to waste your time and energy by only writing it down without execution. So, it’s important that when you want to deal or handle yourself like a diamond you must create the life that you want. Stop copying everybody else life. You stop trying to imitate people’s life and wishing that you have their family and you have their children’s or husband or you’re living in same neighborhood or driving the same car. Just stop all of that. Because at the end of the day, you’re just going to miss out of what’s in front of you.

You must be mindful of the things that God had given you in this lifetime. You are a steward. God had given you these people in your life and your family. At the same time, if you are not happy with the life that you have now then do something with about it. If you are not happy of your marriage, work on your marriage. Perhaps, with communication and if you’re not happy of your money. Perhaps, you should be literate of how to create more income and save and budget and stop going into debt. So these are the things that you can learn in creating your life. Creating your life is really something about being aware of what’s in front of you. You can assess of what is my current situation right now. If you’re not happy and I actually put it down recently a few months ago, I have been saying to myself get your house in order and the three main categories are very important to me that I put on my wall is that: relationship is number one and then of course health and wealth.

Or they could be interchangeable but at the same time, you really have to know the kind of life that you want. Your priorities do matter because when you want to create a life that is harmonious especially in yourmarriage then you should know exactly your priority which is God, of course and then your family, your relationship with your husband and your children and of course your health because if you’re not healthy then you cannot possibly take care of yourself and the people around you.

So health is also one of the things that I want to have a life that I can create healthily where I can move my body, eat healthy food, drink lots of water and sleep more and avoid stress as much as I can. And then of course, when you want to create a life, wealth is something to do with having a financial goal not necessarily be rich. Because there’s a difference between wealthy and being rich. Wealthy people and being rich. We can be rich with tons of money but you’re not really wealthy when you don’t have the kind of relationship that you want and you might be living in a big mansion but you’re all alone and you could not really keep a healthy marriage or nobody really is there for you.

For me that is not a wealthy person, you could be rich and have all the billions of dollars but at the end of the day, you’re just coop up in one room and you know unfriendly, unapproachable and you have no companion at the end of the day. So wealth for me is very subjective. It’s actually it depends on the person how you define wealth. So you can create a life that is wealthy. You are happy with what you have right now but simultaneously working towards your goal or getting out of debt so that you can become financially independent someday and building your business and being able to help other people. Wealth is also something to do with helping others to those who are unable to help themselves.

#4. Don’t diminish your light

And of course another thing that you can do is to never allow someone to diminish your light or diminish you which include yourself. There are people in our lives unfortunately that will not see our value especially when we are conditioned to just stick to the status quo, “You must not dream big. You must just do like everybody else in your family. If everyone else is a nurse then you must be a nurse. If everyone else in your family is a lawyer, a doctor and whatever the kind of standard our society have set before us. Then you must follow this route but unfortunately, we are not really taught to move past that kind of status quo. We are never conditioned to do what we want to do with our lives or the kind of job or career that we want to follow and the passion. And then of course, whatever God has called us to do. According to Romans 14:22 , “Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves.”

Self-condemnation is one of the reasons why you can’t move forward in life when you condemn yourself as an awful person that can’t do it. I don’t have what it takes your confidence will falter. Condemnation of self debilitates your true essence to shine. Others will condemn you to diminish and extinguish the light that you carry. A light must be displayed for others to see and not be hidden inside a basket. (Matthew 7:6) However, for so many of us, our light is diminished because of jealousy and sometimes our family may not support us because they don’t understand. They don’t understand what’s the point to do all of it: podcasting or YouTube or writing a book or whatever it is that you want to do with your life. I don’t understand why you want to be a chef, you know, you have a stable job. I don’t understand why you have to travel the world. I don’t understand why you have to be an influencer. So there could be a myriad of questions asking us why did you pick this route and not just follow the crowd. And of course you can always tell them that this is my life and not yours.

#5. Own your past

And number five is to handle yourself like a gem a diamond is to take ownership of your past and make use of it. One of the definition as I read about a diamond is unaltered right. You cannot change your past. Taking ownership of your past is making sure that you’re healing from your past that you’re going to use your past. Not to victimize you but to move past a victimhood mindset. If you’re familiar with my podcast. If you’ve been here too many times I’ve always discussed about get rid of this mindset of woe is me. I’m so bad. I am so pathetic. My life is no good. Everybody was you know victimizing me. My life was never perfect and I had a very bad childhood, we can go on on our list of how awful our lives is and if you do not really take care of that past is going to haunt you eventually and you’re going to be a miserable person. Taking ownership is dealing with your traumas and dealing with your triggers and do not hide or runaway from them. You must be able to sit being uncomfortable as I always like to say. Sit with your demons. Take out the skeleton out of your closet and do not hide and run away from them because next thing you know it’s going to just haunt you whether you like it or not.

Jesus said, “The truth will set you free.” You will never be set free unless you’re hiding and trying to pretend that your life is not messed up or you have not been messed up by your parents or you didn’t have any childhood trauma because as I said, majority of our trauma originated from our mom and our dad. They are not perfect people unfortunately, it’s been passed down from one generation to the next. It’s up to us to really learn from them and not copy by their bad examples and not copy and passdown the behavior to our children. It’s up to us to really be the bigger person in the room and start to realize that Iam not going to do what my mom did or my dad did. I’m going to be a better version of myself. So this is why when you handle yourself like a diamond, you must be rare. It is something that you cannot just copy and the diamond’s value is actually depends on of course the market and the cut and the the size of it that it becomes what do you call this, priceless. And the same way with our lives, when we know exactly who we are and what we stand up for and we what we stood for is that something that we have to really value ourselves and by accepting our mistakes and our flaws, and be accepting our past. Because we cannot allow our past mistakes to dictate our future.

I’m pretty sure you have heard this many times that your past is the ending. It’s already done. You cannot go back to your past. The past is the past, it’s already been done with. You cannot really do a rewind. So you must be able to just dust off your feet and start all over again. The reason why people don’t want to really move forward because they get stuck in this constantly ruminating of the past. They’re stuck, replaying of the past recorder in their head and they cannot really move past the things that they have to done in their life and that is very waste of time. As I said, I used to do that too. I used to sit before and try to replay in my head o f what people did to me and rehearse that in my memory and then I get so bitter and resentful and the next thing you know I become so vindictive but God would always tell me to just release it and let it go and pray for those people who persecuted you and do not curse them. But bless those who have you used you and misuse you because Jesus said, He is the God, the father is the God who will vindicate us and we just have to rely that God is the one who is going to avenge us from every bad things that happened to us in our lives.

#6. Reinvent yourself

And of course another thing is that you must always try to reinvent yourself. if you are going to handle yourself like a diamond, if you want to be rare gem then you must reinvent yourself. No, I’m not only talking about the physical appearance although that is one thing you can do . Change your fashion. Change the way you dress. Change your hair, perhaps. These can help but these are just icing on the cake. When I say reinvent yourself, you have to embody the kind of a woman you would like to become. You cannot just reinvent coming out of you know physicality but not healing from within. It has to be the beauty from within whatever it’s going on the inside, it’s always about the issues of the heart. That’s why the Bible is clear, keep your heart with all diligence for out of it comes the issues of life. So you have to sit down one day and ask yourself the question, what are the issues of my life? Where does this come from? Why do I believe what I believe? Where did this originate from?

Because there’s always a source in every belief system that we have. You have to figure it out. So it has to come down with reinvention. As I said, reinventing is your self-image in how you view yourself in the mirror. I have talked about this on my last podcast about how you talk to yourself matters. What you say to yourself matters because subconsciously the more and more you tell yourself that you’re beautiful, you’re capable your subconscious mind is going to be programmed and pick up on that. Vice versa if you’re going to keep telling yourself that you’re fat, ugly, miserable, unhappy you’re a loser, you’re also going to be programmed with that kind of mindset. So, inventing yourself is something to do with your self-image and how you truly accept yourself you know perfect and all and flawed and all. Matthew 7:6 says that do not throw yourself to pigs. Instead of allowing others to take ownership of who you are by ruminating your life and cause you pain because we sometimes wallow in self-pity and thinking about what people did do to us. So do not even bother to allow these people to really ruin yourself and your future.

Embody the woman you desire

Your future is still waiting to be embodied. Your future is still waiting for you, however; you must plant something today so that you will reap the harvest of tomorrow. You cannot just expect a good future without planting a good seed right now. Think of your life as a seed. Every choices. Every decisions you’re making whether it’s significant or not, it will have an impact in the future. The things that you have today and the life that you have now is because of the seeds and the sewing that you have done in the past. That’s why you have your life now. It is the law of sowing and reaping. If you are going to sow thorns and thistles which are bad. You’re going to reap thorns and thistles. If you’re going to sow good seeds in the ground, you’re going to get a harvest. Your life is yours to plant. It is for you to design although God also guide us but God doesn’t want people who are unmotivated, lazy, and complacent. God cannot do anything for you unless you’re willing to do it yourself.

This is why in the Bible God wants a partnership. He wants someone that he can use whether he is Moses, Abraham. He used David, the shepherd boy. He also used Esther the woman who was an orphan girl who became the queen but eventually when you’re willing enough to do your part. God is going to do the rest. He’s going to give you the strength, the focus, the the determination and the courage to follow through and to finish the race. That’s why, if you want to reinvent yourself, you cannot just wait around for someone to say, “It’s your time. It’s now, take the action.” Because as I said, no one is going to show up at the front door and tell you to do something better with your life because that’s just not reality and I’m going to leave you with this. According to the Captivating book it says “Be careful that you do not give something precious to someone who at best cannot recognize its beauty or I can’t even read my own hand writing or waste or will just trample on it. Consider your feminine heart and beauty, your treasure, your pearls.” Okay so this is from the book that I’ve read a long time ago that says,

“Be careful that you do not give something precious to someone who at best cannot recognize its beauty or at best who is going to trample on it or at worst who will trample on it.” Consider your feminine heart and beauty, your treasure, your pearl.”

So your treasure and your pearl is your divinity which is your feminine side and we cannot just be a diamond without being a feminine. If you want to be a rare gem, you must be able to tap into your femininity and cultivating them. I also talk about them. Go back to my playlist of the feminine attributes and the characteristics of being a feminine is that being able to go back to her Maker, aligning with God vertically and aligning with yourself horizontally. If you want to be like a diamond, you also be willing to be put on the ground. When God is working in you, do not be surprised that he’s going to put you in the soil, buried 6 ft under. Sometimes you will have the season of wilderness. In the season of wilderness, this is where God wants you to mature. This is where God wants you to grow, to mold you, to break you, to change you from the image based on people’s validation, approval and standard.

When God had to break me a long time ago and he’s still breaking me even to this day, he would always bring me back to the same issues over and over again. If you want to be handled like diamond and come out as a perfect brilliant diamond and a gemstone that is very rare, you must be willing to allow God to break your heart and to mold your character. Because God is not after our comfort. God is not only after our own happiness in this world. He wants us to mature in our walk with him. He wants us to really become as C.S. Lewis said God wants us to have a child-like spirit. To be creative, to be curious but at the same time he wants us to have a grown-up’s head. To be mature in the head. Corinthians says, I when I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child but when I become a grown woman, I put away childish things. I used to write down one of those journal before and I asked myself, What are the childish things that I used to do before that I’m still doing it now?

One, complaining all the time. Have you not noticed your own child complain sa lot because that’s a childish behavior. Number two, entitlement and kids can also be entitled but if you are a woman of God, you learn how to be grateful of what you have and instead of complaining you can create a solution and instead of grumbling because you don’t love your life and you do not like what’s going on in your surroundings or the things that you’re doing. Maybe the choices that you’re making that you have to pivot and change them because the more and more you complain, there’s a lot of things to complain about, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong in the world. I know today our world is not the most peaceful. We live in uncertainty. There is a rumor of war or whatever is happening but at the end of the day, you cannot control those. The only thing you can control is yourself and your life and the choices that you’re making today. Therefore, if you want to be able to live and to grow and mature and be handled like diamond then you must be able to be buried and you must be able to grow in the dark, in the wilderness, in the pain, in the suffering and allow God to really just teach you about life lessons.

I had done this a while ago and it was really hurtful because God had to show me every negative things about what I’ve been doing wrong, every mindset, belief system that has been buried deep down in my heart that I did not know that was sitting there for a longest time because as I said, if you’re not willing to be honest with yourself then there’s really nothing that God can do for you. You can drink you know green tea all day long and go to the gym all day long and go to a spa all day long but at the end of the day, if your heart is not pure. If your heart is not truthful. If you’re not really coming from a place of authenticity then you cannot really impress God and you still are wounded and broken on the inside and on this channel I am always going to emphasize on prospering body, spirit, and soul.

Because you cannot possibly get rid of those three: you are not just a physical woman, you also have a soul and you havea spirit. You are not just physical. We are embodied with three different persona in us or whatever you want to call it uh three different aspects: the body, whatever people can look at you that’s a physicality and of your soul is between the intellect and your emotion and the spirit of God of course is the spirit of either you’re governed by the good or the bad or the lightness or the darkness. So that is all that I would like for youto think about in today’s podcast and I hope that you’re blessed with this message. Be bold, be brave and be courageous and I’ll hope to see you on my next podcast. Have a wonderful day ahead of you!