Practicing Assent: The Stoic Woman’s First Step Toward Self-Love

This February we are embracing self-love —Stoic Style!

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HELLO FEBRUARY! AND HELLO YOU!

I wonder if you have been seeing this too? Lately, my Instagram feed has been flooded with reels of the 80s and 90s movie bad-boy characters with captions like:

“The reason why I’m attracted to red flags ” and “This is how I got my red flags ”.

And listen… I tapped like and laughed, because yep—some of those characters (Marky Mark in 1996—hubba hubba) were my younger self’s crushes too.

Back then? Didn’t see the red flags at all.

Now? They’re practically neon billboards.

Which is why, after reading Colleen Hoover’s "It Ends With Us", I almost started a protest march over the movie adaptation… until I caved and saw it.

Turns out, they spun the story a little—but I still recognize what’s happening with stories like that at my finer age.

Because it’s not just about fictional bad boys, it’s about the messages in these stories.

The messages in stories we absorbed growing up—messages we never even thought to question.

We were taught that love was something to chase, earn, compete for, and secure from the outside. Whether it was Disney princesses waiting for their prince or movies romanticizing toxic dynamics, the message was loud and clear:

Love was something external.

Something to chase.

And in the case of teenage films, the more messed up the guy, the better—because only the "right woman" was worthy enough to fix him.

Where were the movies that taught us:
Love starts within.
Self-worth isn’t up for debate.
You don’t need to prove your value to anyone.

Those movies didn’t exist during our youth.

So many of us grew up believing that if we just did more, looked better, or were easier to love, we’d finally be enough.

This is why self-love feels so hard.
This is why boundaries feel selfish.
This is why we shrink ourselves to fit into spaces that weren’t even built for us.

But this month? That changes.

For the month of February, instead of focusing on romance and love, we’re focusing on one person and one person only: YOU.

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be rebuilding from the ground up, exploring four transformative Stoic concepts to help you filter out the noise, reclaim your self-worth, and rebuild your foundation.

This month is all about self-love. Stoic Style.

And this week? We start at the bottom.

No quick fixes. No affirmations slapped over self-doubt.

Just one powerful Stoic practice.

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️Stoic Topic of Week: Assent

The Stoics understood something crucial: You don’t have to believe every thought that enters your mind. You just happen to choose to.

Loooooooong before modern psychology explored cognitive awareness, the ancient philosophers (we’re talking 2,000 years ago!) were already ahead of their time.

They recognized something profound: Humans aren’t just meant to react—we are meant to pay attention to our impressions before accepting them as truth.

Unlike animals, who instinctively act on impulse, we have the unique ability to pause, examine, and decide which thoughts are worth keeping.

In other words? Your mind is not a dumping ground for every belief, expectation, or criticism society hands you.

You have the power to pause, question, and decide what you allow to shape you.

That’s Assent.

So what does this mean for you in your life right now?

Much of what you believe about yourself—your worth, capabilities, and role in the world—didn’t even start with you.

The idea that you’re only valuable if you’re productive? Given to you.
The belief that saying “no” makes you selfish”? Handed to you.
The pressure to be attractive, agreeable, and accommodating? Conditioned into you.

Assent gives you the power to stop carrying what was never yours.

That’s why we start here.

Because before you can build self-love, you have to unlearn everything that you think you know about yourself.

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Food for Thought

You may not know her name, but you might know her story.

What began as the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, later became an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon.

It’s the story of 26-year-old Cheryl Strayed, a woman at her breaking point.

She had lost someone she loved deeply.
She was drowning in grief, self-destruction, and regret.
She didn’t know how to move forward—only that she couldn’t stay where she was.

So she made a radical decision.

She walked.

Over 1,000 miles, alone. (That’s a lot of time to be with yourself—in your head!)

Not to “find herself,” but to strip everything down to survival—to see what was left beneath the pain.

Along the way, Cheryl learned something powerful: Healing isn’t just about moving forward—it’s about deciding what you no longer want to carry.

She let go of a lot on the trail—both physically and emotionally.

The physical weight she shed on the trail—supplies from her overpacked backpack—was symbolic of shedding the emotional weight she had carried for years. The solitude she couldn’t escape forced her to hear her own voice, instead of everyone else’s expectations. The process of endurance made her realize that she was stronger than the stories she had once believed about herself.

Her journey wasn’t neat, and it wasn’t easy.

But by the end, she understood something most of us don’t realize until we’re deep in it:

Not every belief you’ve inherited is true.
Not every expectation placed on you is yours to accept.
Not every version of you has to be carried forward.

Most of us don’t wake up one day and think, “I need to unlearn my conditioning.” Just like most of us don’t wake up and think, “I am conditioned in the first place.”

Instead, we move through life on autopilot, carrying inherited beliefs about love, worth, and identity—until something cracks.

For Cheryl, that crack was loss.

For someone else, it might be a toxic relationship, burnout, a breakup, or just a moment of exhaustion.

But the realization is always the same:
"I don’t want to keep living like this anymore."

That’s when the unlearning begins.

But here’s what Cheryl’s story teaches us—

• We don’t have to wait for loss to get started.

• We don’t have to wait for the breakdown before we choose the breakthrough.

• We can begin the unlearning right now.

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Turning Wisdom Into Action

This week, let’s put Assent into Action!

These exercises are designed to help you apply Stoic wisdom in real life, but how many you do—and which ones you choose—is entirely up to you. Each one offers a different approach to integrating self-awareness and personal growth:

🔹 Engage → Hands-on practice through real-world experience. Take action and test Stoicism in motion.
🔹 Reframe → Thought-shifting exercises to challenge and reshape beliefs through journaling, self-inquiry, and cognitive shifts.
🔹 Anchor → Inner steadiness practices for emotional resilience, presence, and self-command.

Choose one, mix and match, or try all three—whatever feels right for you! The goal