You are a Badass

Jen Sincero spent most of her thirties broke. She had two published books, a cream-puff Manhattan life, and a string of relationships she would describe as wobbly. From the outside, things looked fine. From the inside, she was furious. She knew there was a bigger version of her life she could be living, and she was watching herself refuse it.

So she did the embarrassing thing. She read every self-help book she could find. She hired coaches. She sat in seminars beating a pillow with a baseball bat, and at one ceremony she actually married herself. She wrote a love letter to her own uterus. She racked up credit card debt to unthinkable heights to keep paying for guidance. Then, within six months of working with her first proper coach, she tripled her income. She built an online coaching business for writers. She started traveling. She started speaking. She started playing music again.

You Are a Badass is what she wrote on the other side of that change. It is not a careful book. It swears, it jokes, it overshares, it mocks the self-help world Sincero now belongs to. And underneath all of that, it makes a single argument with the conviction of someone who has tested it on herself. The reason your life is smaller than you want it to be is not the economy, not your parents, not your bad luck. It is the gap between the life you say you want and the buried beliefs that quietly keep you from going to get it. Close that gap and everything moves. Leave it open and you can read every self-help book in the store without changing a thing.

How You Got Stuck

Sincero starts with the subconscious because that is where she thinks the trouble lives. The conscious mind, the analytical frontal-lobe machine that argues with itself all day, does not fully develop until puberty. The subconscious is online from birth and it has no filter. Every smile, frown, sigh, raised eyebrow, and frantic phone call you absorbed as a small child went straight in and got stored as truth. Your parents' beliefs about money, sex, work, bodies, love, and what good people do became your beliefs before you could weigh them. You inherited their blueprint the way you might inherit a family recipe for cornbread, except you can taste the cornbread and you cannot easily taste your operating system.