LOVE Yourself: Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch

I met Kate a few years ago and instantly knew she was an original.  As a wardrobe consultant, I come across all kinds of women with various levels of confidence within their own individual style.  Kate is someone that knows her very own unique individual creative style and she owns it.  She has chosen yellow as her power color and it 100% aligns with her personal brand.  Women who wear yellow I find are comfortable in their own skin, they aren’t afraid to SHINE, have strong personalities and have important work to be done in the world.  This is all true for my friend Kate who owns an immigration & bankruptcy law firm, Lincoln-Goldfinch Law.  Not only do I truly appreciate Kate’s creativity in her style, but she is one of the most authentic and genuinely kind human beings.  I’m thrilled to share Kate’s LOVE Yourself story with you all!

What does “love yourself” mean to you? 

This question changes daily for me, depending on where I am and what I am working through as a woman with what phase I am in in my life. But right now, the Love Yourself to me really the first thing that comes to mind is the gift of non comparison. It is just the kindest thing you can do for yourself is not compare, really in either direction. Because the reality is, somebody may have a lot of similarities to you. They may have grown up in the same town, maybe even the same family. They may have the same profession or same family structure. It would be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking “my journey looks like that person's journey so why doesn’t my outcome or my circumstances look just like that persons?” But the reality is we are all here on our own independent pathway and journey in our own bodies and in our own timeline and in our own set of facts and circumstances and outcomes. And it just doesn’t matter. It really doesn't matter what someone else’s journey looks like, whether or not it seems similar to yours. So for me that is what I am focusing on in the ear of life. Love Yourself is me. Kate. This is my journey, and it doesn’t matter what other people around me’s journey looks like. Or if they have something I think I would like for myself, then using that as inspiration rather than a way to put myself down. 

Did you have a positive body image role model growing up?

For sure, yes! My mom. My mom is such a confident, spicy, deep, interesting, wise woman. And always has been. Even when she was a young woman, when she was raising me, I remember my mom was always such a great dancer. She was a musician, and my step dad was a musician, so we would go out and my mom would just dance wildly and everybody would watch her because it was just captivating. Always gave me the message of body positivity, and also demonstrated it. It wasn’t just words that were said and then she would do crash dieting or behave in ways that didn’t match the messaging. My mom really lived out body positivity in the walk and the talk. So thank God for that because I have struggled so much throughout my young life with body image issues and had I had a mom who also laid that pressure on me it would have been so much harder. I grew up in the 90’s as a teenager and was on the drill team and I remember I got weighed at practice every week, and if I had gained a few pounds my coach would say something to me about it. That was just the culture of my young life, and so thank God at home I didn’t receive the same kind of messaging. 

Are you working to improve my mindset around body image?

I think I’ve been there, done that. I am 43 now and I am more focused at this point when I work out and make food choices, I’m more focused on what this does for my health and longevity than how is this going to make me look? I don’t work out to look a certain way. I like the feeling of feeling really strong when I am regularly lifting weights, and I like the feeling of my body when I am not regularly eating sugar. I don’t drink alcohol because of how it makes me feel inside. So the choices that I make now are less about the image I project and more about the way that it makes me feel. And I think about THAT all the time. 

Who are you trying to set an example for?

Hands down my kiddos! I have two daughters, the older one is non binary, and I see them struggle with the same things I did, which is an addiction and an attraction to sugar. A desire to be sedentary a lot of the time, and a lack of connection between the way that we treat our body and the way that it feels. It took me decades to really draw that connection. It is not an immediate connection for a lot of people, I think sometimes people who are allergic to certain things or feel terrible when they don’t work out, or have this immediate impact of failure to take care of their bodies are benefited by that. But the people like me who would only notice the long term impacts of that, throughout childhood I think in life would take a long time to put those things together and I notice that in my kiddos. So helping my children make healthy choices while also knowing they are getting heat from society about the way we are supposed to look, and not connecting those two. So my guidance is coming from loving not shaming and role modeling is the best way to do it. It;s a journey, but I for sure hope I can give my kiddos a lot of self love and infusion of it as they grow.