MAKEOVER FOR LIFE Women Triumphing over Circumstances
	DECEMBER 2004

by Nicole Sorina

I did not have a happy childhood. I was 60 lbs overweight with a terrible self-image. Kids are judged by the way they look and, by that standard, I was judged pretty harshly. Even worse, my dad beat up my mom on a regular basis for more than two decades.

My mom’s own insecurities caused her to make terrible choices about men. Nevertheless, she understood the nature of her problems — that a woman gets herself into these dysfunctional relationships if she lacks sufficient self-esteem to stand up to the psychological, verbal, and finally physical battering by some man who’s own broken self-image has turned him into a monster.

Remaking Myself
One of the terrible realities in my world is that my mom’s insight into her problem never led her to find the source of her own deliverance. But she used her insight as the basis of the next best thing — helping me find the ways to liberate myself from the terrible results that were sure to follow on the heels of my own self-loathing.

My mom made up her mind to help me change. One of the things she did was to begin clueing me in on the essential need for making a change. “Nicole, one thing you must realize,” she said, “is that what you see going on in our home is not normal. This is not the way life is supposed to be! As soon as you get away from here you can have any life you choose!”

Another thing she did was to begin giving me a lot of positive messages — scripts that could get into my mind and heart in order to change the patterns of how I was thinking about myself. Mom would describe for me how good I was. She would tell me how there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t become if I just made up my mind.

“You can do anything, honey,” she said. “You can get any job you want.” “Don’t be afraid to reach for the stars,” she would say, “and you will at least touch the sky.”

One of the things my mom convinced me of was that I could do something about my appearance. She said I could lose weight. She told me I could become a beautiful person on the outside, as well as on the inside. Children are inclined to believe their parents, I think. I believed my mom’s wonderful messages about me.

My mother was more than talk. She got me into training and fitness activities. She cleaned out the house, throwing away the potato chips and ice cream, and began preparing nutritional meals for our dinner table.

I ended up losing weight and getting into shape. Along with that, I did some things with my hair and with makeup that changed my image completely. The results were startling to everyone, especially to myself. I had done the ugly-duckling thing with great success and, as a result, the quality of my life changed completely.

Getting Ready to Show, Tell, and Help
The desire to help others in the way that my mom helped me has become the focus of my life. My own self-transformation gave me a passion to help other people change their own lives.

I’m trying to provide a living illustration for other women who feel that they are being held back by their appearance. I want to demonstrate that a woman doesn’t ever have to simply accept the way she looks. She can change the things she doesn’t like about herself, just as I changed the things I didn’t like about myself.

I started doing nails when I was only twelve years old. I loved it, and actually made money. I would go to people’s homes and do their nails for ten dollars. When I was 13 years old, I told my mom that someday I wanted to open up my own beauty salon.

My classmates and others never believed that I would achieve anything noteworthy by my ambition. “You can’t accomplish anything by doing nails,” they said.

I went to my ten-year high school reunion and it was like a scene from a Hollywood movie. I was 60 pounds lighter then they remembered and drove up in a loaded black Corvette. They had to admit that they were wrong about me!

I started my business almost two decades ago and I’m still taking care of myself and of others as a joyful activity. I’m living out my dream and continue to derive satisfaction and happiness from what I do.

I’m thirty-eight and still sometimes get carded in grocery stores when I’m trying to buy wine. It really makes me laugh to have to prove that I’m over 21 to some kid who wasn’t even born yet when I opened my first salon!

I’m not a one-woman show. I’m trying to juggle two businesses and still be mom to my son. In my salon I work with a team of people who support me every day to accomplish my dreams. They are patient with me, kind, and hard-working. I’m so grateful for the wonderful team of people who surround me and help me to succeed!

Transformations From the Outside In
“I’m sick of the way I look,” is a line that I hear quite often. I’m helping people find the cure to that particular sickness. I tell potential clients that we do “mini-extreme makeovers,” including anti-aging skin care, cosmetics, make-up, hair styling, and custom color.

It is not unusual for me to have clients look at themselves in a mirror after we finish and quietly shed tears about what has happened. Once in a while I even cry with them. Sometimes we laugh. In both cases, they are delighted with what their appearance has become through our services.

In my own experience, the greatest gift of any outward transformation lies in its becoming a powerful resource for the client to use in clearing up the spiritual weather going on in her own soul.

I believe that mere external changes are superficial and sometimes even detrimental unless some connection can be made between the outer and the inner person. Because of that, I’m not content with simply doing makeovers for my clients.

Making outward changes might simply produce feelings of vanity in one woman and leave another believing on the inside that she remains ugly. In both cases, the person is wasting a resource that she might use in making a fundamental inward change, if she can only be encouraged to make the required attitude adjustment.

So I spend a lot of time and energy with my clients in helping them to become as lovely on the inside as we make them look on the outside.

I also try to mentor them through the other parts of the transformation process by helping them with decisions they need to make about their physical fitness, well-being, dental issues, medical/surgical needs, etc.

I can’t help them directly with these things, of course, but I provide encouragement and referrals when my clients need them in any of these areas.

I continue to struggle with my own self-image. I don’t like to see pictures of myself and on some level I still think of myself as the unattractive fat-girl I used to be and continually fight against that debilitating self-image.

So part of the service I can give to my clients is to come along side of them as a person who is right with them in the midst of their struggles. I meet them on the basis of our shared vulnerability as much as on the basis of sharing my strength with them. When they tell me how awful they feel about themselves, I can sympathize with them.

At the level of our mutual weaknesses, a client and I can help each other. I sometimes think that my clients encourage me as much as I encourage them.

Developing the Resources to Leave
My most wonderful results in improving self-image have been with battered women. Like my mom, each of these poor victims has gotten themselves into a relationship with a loathsome man because of a bad self-image. Their normal, healthy psychological boundaries have broken down completely; they believe on some level that they deserve the abuse they receive.

Makeovers can be part of a solution for some of these people, because after we are finished with them, clients who have suffered abuse might be able to look at themselves in the mirror and, with conviction, tell the person looking back at them that anybody who looks like she does deserves to be cherished rather than battered.

Of course, people should be loved and not abused no matter how they look, but for some of my clients, the improvement in their appearance encourages a corresponding increase in self-worth.

Assisting people to repair broken self-images is only one part of my mission since most of my clients don’t have problems in this area, of course. My other purpose — the core of my mission — is in helping clients meet their personal goals, whatever they are.

I’ve had clients trying to further their careers, prepare for a reunion, or recover from a divorce. One of my makeovers isn’t a complete solution for any of these challenges, but it can play an important role in helping clients to succeed in whatever they’re trying to do.

A few years ago I began moonlighting by making over rooms for people. I do interior decorating, custom painting, and accessorizing people’s living spaces.

I could quit doing makeovers with people and begin doing interior decorating as a fulltime occupation. But as much fun as I have making over a room, the payoff isn’t the same. My clients in that business seem to be pleased with the results of my efforts, but the building itself is never happy because of what it has become.

A house can’t look at itself in the mirror and cry tears of delight. It can’t hug me and say, “Thanks so much! You’ve changed my life!”

That kind of experience is the greatest thing about Trés Jolie Salon. It is one of the greatest things of my life!

In my opinion, that’s what life is about — helping people feel good about themselves and building self-esteem.