From the Editor's Desk

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Sterling P. Jones

As the holiday season has entered our lives, I am preparing to exit for my holiday vacation and rest. Before I go, I wanted to talk to you about your relationship to beauty from yourself, your environment, and your happiness.

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Beauty is a pillar of strength. It's more than purchasing, applying, and consuming products. I see beauty as a baseline for many things I do, commit to, and act on in my life. What do I mean by this?

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In my last email, I shared the message about being able to commit to things in your life. One of the ways I encourage you to start committing to your life is through beauty. As a pillar of strength, I have seen beauty help many people, especially women, make new goals for themselves, move up, and accomplish so much. In this pillar of strength, the message I have for you is to discover your baseline of beauty.

I encourage you today to write out the aspects of beauty you always do in taking care of yourself. Your body is your base. How do you take care of yourself? What are the actions that you do to elevate your base? I dive into this topic more thoroughly with this article on "How to Build Your Base of Beauty." Your baseline is associated with your emotions, feelings, and energy.

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When you are in a mood to feel better, do you get your hair done? Are your nails done? Any beauty ritual? Or buy a new beauty product? You are buying these things to receive a feeling inherited in you as an individual. It's the hit of dopamine that we want our bodies to release for us to feel good. I will not tell you to stop buying the product, the experience, or the things you want. I do it, too - all the time.

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Instead, I want to encourage you to move forward with it and turn your baseline of beauty towards your environment as well. You can change your environment to welcome more into your life.

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Your environment is a huge factor in your mood, perspective, and presence in the world. Let's say you decided to move to a new neighborhood. Before you move into that specific neighborhood, you choose the year before to do the following steps to change your environment. You decided to support an establishment in the area you want to move to. You chose to walk or drive around to familiarize yourself with the street names and landmarks. You decided to find beauty service providers that work in that area to invest in monthly. Even your favorite new restaurant is in that area, and you have started to get to know the staff there. That's the beauty of your environment.

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People are happy when they are surrounded by beauty. It is all about the environment, whether it be beautiful things, beautiful views, and beautiful people. Seeking beauty in your environment is an additional layer to one's elevation and practice of daily beauty commitment.
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Before the holidays, I ask you to reflect on a few things. Where are you in your base of beauty? Has your base been helpful to you this year? Is there anything in your environment that you love and want to change? Has your environment helped you provide yourself with a growth mindset? Does your current way of living make you happy? What ways or aspects of your life would you want to keep and change to make you happy?

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I wish you a happy holidays.

Sincerely,

Sterling

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