This Is Not About Your Body | Decolonizing "Worthiness" w/ Shirin Eskandani | S2E45

Jessi Kneeland (0:08)

Welcome to This Is Not About Your Body, a body neutrality podcast where we talk about all the real shit body image issues are actually about because they're never just about the way you look. I'm your host, Jessi Kneeland, and today I have with me Shirin Eskandani, who is a certified life coach, speaker, writer, and life alchemist who describes her business, Wholehearted Coaching, as a place where hustle meets heart. Like me, Shirin believes learning to trust yourself will change the whole world, and she helps her clients tune in to their intuition, tune out everyone else's expectations, and reach their goals with resilience and grace.

Shirin is the creator of the Wholehearted Coaching Podcast and the Wholehearted Coaching Certification, and she has a really wonderful gift for weaving the best parts of wellness and growth and healing and spirituality and liberation work all together while leaving behind the toxicity, the dogma and the bypassing, frankly, that's often seen in those spaces. So I'm really excited to have her on here today to talk about decolonizing wellness, worthiness and personal development. So welcome, Shirin.

Shirin Eskandani (1:15)

Oh, my goodness. First, I'm so excited to be here, so excited to be in conversation with you. And thank you for that beautiful, beautiful introduction.

You're welcome.

Jessi Kneeland (1:25)

I really enjoyed writing it. I was like, oh, this is so cool.

Okay, so I'm going to have you start with the basics and just tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your work, and maybe how you came to do what you do.

Shirin Eskandani (1:37)

So I am a life coach. I'm also a life coach trainer with my certification. However, I think, like with most coaches, this isn't where I ever thought I would be.

So I am originally from Iran. It's a big part of who I am. Being Iranian, very proud of that. Also, being an immigrant, that's a big part of my story. My family immigrated to Canada when I was quite young. We were leaving a very difficult situation at the time. Iran was going through a lot of upheaval. So that's also part of my story in that our immigration wasn't one that was really wanted, but one that we needed to make. So we moved to Canada and we moved to Vancouver, which is this beautiful city. If anyone's ever been there, it's stunning. However, especially when I was growing up there, it was a very white city, very, very white, pretty conservative. And that's also a big part of what has informed me, feeling very left out and not feeling like I belong, and also adding on top of that, just that whole immigrant experience. And there was also a lot of trauma there that we experienced kind of leaving the country and what we had experienced there and not being able to process that properly. And so I think from a very young age, this idea of belonging and worthiness was constantly at the forefront of my mind because I didn't feel like I belonged ever, which kind of makes you feel like you're not worthy or valuable. And so I think, you know, I'm sure we're going to talk more about this and get into this, but for me, it's like when you don't feel like you are worthy, you kind of try to make up for it in all these different ways, right?

And so for me, that was being a perfectionist, overachiever and a people pleaser, which I think a lot of folks who are listening, and I know you're nodding your head, Jessi, too. Those are ones we turn to.

And so, and I think, you know, I call these like coping mechanisms, but for a long time, I just thought they were who I was because I think also it's very insidious because they, while they are ultimately unhealthy ways of being, they're applauded in our society and they also get us really far. So I learned from a very young age when I did things really well, and I went above and beyond and I made, that's how I made other people happy. That's how I felt like I belonged and that's how I felt like I was seen.

And so for me, a lot of just navigating the world was through that lens. And so before I ever found coaching, the very first thing I found that I loved was singing. So I don't know if you know this, Jessi, but for 10 plus years, I was a professional opera singer. And it's actually the reason why I moved to New York. When I was a little girl, I discovered singing and it was like finding home. It was like finding myself again. And when I was on stage, it's where I felt the most, myself and free. It was like a total source of joy for me. And so I kind of threw myself into this love. And I would tell anyone who would listen that like, I was going to grow up and become an opera singer. And which is like a really weird dream for like a six-year-old, but I think I'd seen an opera and I loved it. So I was like, this is what I'm going to do. So my family was super supportive of that. However, right, I was pursuing the stream with like perfectionism, people pleasing and overachieving as my North Star.