September 29, 2024 • 33 mins
Barbara McBean knows, she once competed in the glamorous Miss Universe Pageant. She did not win that crown, but today, Barbara is the founder and president of Eternal Beauty Institutes Clinical Esthetics Colleges, which features multiple schools and beauty brands across North America. Barbara's passion for all things beauty, once combined with her first love of teaching, became the foundation on which Eternal Beauty is founded. Her brand is built on the principle that education should be accessible to everyone with the spirit to learn and grow. Barbara shares a personal journey that exemplifies resilience and highlights the unique obstacles women face in leadership and entrepreneurship while burdened by society's unrealistic expectations of beauty. If you are navigating societal beauty expectations or seeking inner peace, this episode promises to inspire and empower. Tune in as we continue our quest to break down stereotypes and celebrate the eternal beauty that comes from within.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Virgin, Beauty, Bitch, Podcast, Inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share
(00:09):
unique life experiences without fear of being defiantly different.
Your hosts, Christopher and Heather, let's talk, shall we?
Beauty, it is natural and it is real.
We are all born with a natural appreciation for beauty, but we are also subject to social
(00:30):
constructs that tell us who is beautiful and in most cultures that burden falls on women
who are called on to fit a profile that we see every day on magazine covers, on the silver
screen, on television and pretty much every product that wants our attention or our money.
(00:50):
Many girls grow up wanting to fit that profile, including our guest, President and founder
of Eternal Beauty Institute, Barbara McBean.
Welcome back, Barbara, to Virgin Beauty, Bitch.
Thank you for having me.
Oh, it is absolutely deeply our pleasure.
Now, Barbara, we want to really thank you for joining us with Piga Bagthas, the layers
(01:11):
of this mystery we call beauty.
And serendipitously, I read a post recently that sounded like this, quote, "I want to apologize
to all the women I have called beautiful before I call them intelligent or brave.
I am sorry, I made it sound as though something as simple as what you're born with is all
(01:31):
you have to be proud of."
The author of that quote, "Barbara Lynn McBean."
Barbara, as a woman who I bet has heard the words "you are beautiful" more than a few
times, do you remember the first time you said that quote or used those words on your
self?
Yeah, absolutely.
(01:51):
I think once I really realized that the colleges that I had founded were starting to take
off and it was going to be a real thing.
I started to realize I had the ability to build something really spectacular, but previous
to that, you know, I had doubts.
(02:11):
I had self-doubtes and I think that everybody, it doesn't matter what their gender,
harbors these doubts inside and we were always searching for that value proposition.
What makes us valuable?
And I think as women, it is difficult because so much of what we've been taught from a very
(02:33):
young age is that you have to be a pretty little girl and in order to find a husband or in
order to get that great job or whatever it is, the big beautiful house that pick a fence,
you want to be an aesthetically pleasing looking woman.
And there's a lot of pressure that comes with that that I don't feel necessarily is pushed
(03:00):
onto the male gender as much.
As a male gender, I would agree 100,000%.
Yeah, I mean, if you guys can be cute, you can roll out of bed with scruffy hair and put
on whatever t-shirt was on the floor and rock that with your skateboard or whatever it is.
And as the female population will be, oh yeah, that guy's cute.
(03:25):
But I don't feel like from a women's standpoint that we have that same ease with the way that
we can enter into society at large.
I love that quote that Christopher just read, and the words, how powerful those words are.
Can you tell us a little bit more about how you've reconciled the pressure that women feel
(03:52):
like on a personal note with other pieces that are not things that you're born with, but
things like characteristic traits that are cultivated, like being brave and growing from
the inside out.
Absolutely.
One of the things that I've talked to my girlfriends and other women about as we age as
(04:13):
well, because of course, beauty and age, as we age further and further into the distance,
the beauty tends to, or society's perspective of beauty is that it lessens.
And I always say that's the only horse you're betting on.
You're betting on a losing horse because you want to be for your own reasons, not for
(04:36):
anybody else, but for your own reasons.
You want to be as dynamic as possible and really stretch the breadth of your own character
and soul.
And that means that don't look in the mirror so much, don't worry about it.
Do the things that fill your soul and make you proud of yourself.
(04:56):
And that takes a little bit of bravery because a lot of these things that we are doing as
women now aren't traditional female roles and actually have been shunned or we weren't
allowed to be in those roles.
So I often go back and I had a really amazing set of grandmothers growing up on both sides,
(05:16):
both very strong independent women who taught me a lot about women's rights and what women
had to go through.
So that would be their mothers had to go through just to be able to be a person.
And that because they continually drilled it into me that this is not a God-given right.
This is not a God-given right that you can have a job or you can go play soccer or whatever
(05:39):
it is.
This is something that women fought extremely hard for and you're now on this very small,
you know, or small, but you're on the precipice of this just opening up because it's so
new.
If we look at the whole span of history or recorded history, women have really only
had rights truly for the last kind of 100 years or so, right?
(06:01):
I'm curious.
You're a beautiful woman.
Do women resent the message coming from a beautiful woman that they don't necessarily
need to look beautiful to be their potential?
You know what, of course.
I mean, everybody's going to project whatever is inside of them.
So if they're not feeling that they are beautiful, they're going to project anger or
(06:27):
frustration or whatever judgment on others.
And the thing that I've learned about being in this human suit, you know, what it happens
to look good, I'm not frustrated with it, you know, like I like the way I look.
But I wasn't always super attractive.
So I've had that dichotomy of being both.
(06:49):
When I was younger, I had severe, severe acne, like cystic acne that was all over my
face, chest, and back.
And, you know, I was a little bit chubbier.
I was that proverbial, you know, geek or nerd in school for my entire span of my school
years.
And I wasn't attractive.
(07:12):
So I was like the opposite.
No guys would date me.
No guys would dance with me at the dance as those kind of things.
And so I understood life from that perspective.
And I understood not, you know, certainly having people make fun of me or say that I was
a detractive or I remember one particular time I was actually at, I think it was the, I
(07:33):
don't know what they call it now, the Talisman center, one of the pools in Calgary.
And these young boys that were in my grade, you know, were in the pool.
They happened to be there at the same time with their families.
I was there with my family.
And they were saying, oh my god, she's so ugly, you know, and I'd never really conception
to visualize that as a young person before.
Like, what does that mean that I'm ugly?
(07:54):
Like, you know, you get up in the morning, you're a young kid, you brush your hair, you're
a little chubby and pimply and whatever, but you're still fun, right?
You don't really dissect things too much.
And that was the first moment that I dissected.
What does it mean that they're saying I'm ugly?
And I remember kind of getting out of the pool and slopping my way back to the change
(08:16):
room and looking in the mirror and like, oh, you know, maybe I am ugly.
You know, like, it never occurred to me before.
And so I guess those early experiences shaped my understanding of, you know, we really decide.
And I think even thinking back to that moment, I had no conception of whether I was pretty
(08:38):
or ugly or what I was before that.
And it was that defining moment where I started to actually compartmentalized or shuffle things
around as, oh, well, that would be a pretty thing.
And that would be a not pretty thing.
And, you know, what have you?
And I think all human beings teach ourselves to do that or put things in different buckets
or categories.
(08:59):
And as I've aged, I realize that's really, it's not fruitful because everything in life,
every creation, every person, every creature is it intrinsically beautiful, just unique.
They have their own unique beauty.
Would you have died a little deeper into that for us, the intrinsically, you know, in essence
beautiful?
Can you expand on that a little for us?
(09:21):
That's so beautifully said.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I mean, so when we think of beauty or the reflection of beauty, because of course we
are the observer and we're looking out into the world and we are perceiving.
So we're perceiving what we feel is beautiful.
And usually beauty should be associated with what brings us joy or what is uplifting,
(09:45):
right?
High vibrational.
And so you can see that in everything if you choose to see it in everything.
If you look at your grandmother and, you know, see her smiling at her birthday cake or
you look at, you know, your dog and your dog is hairy and slobbery and everything else.
But you look at your dog and that is one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen.
(10:08):
And, you know, you go out and you look at a tree or you look at a park and it's beautiful.
So, we can find so many examples of what is beautiful, but when it comes to the masculine and
the feminine division of beauty or, I guess, human construction of what is accurately beauty,
(10:32):
I think we really confuse it.
Some of it's confused, obviously, with this idea of sexuality.
So what we find sexually enticing or whatever that is, then we've equated that to beauty.
But again, I think it comes back to using our God-given intelligence and starting to really
(10:55):
self-assess some of our beliefs, you know, why wouldn't we want to see a beautiful world?
And I think it's choice.
I think a lot of individuals, whether it's that they're into conspiracy theories or they're
into that, you know, like let's get jump on the negativity bandwagon or whatever, they
choose to see the world through the lens of ugliness.
(11:16):
And that's something that I've never done.
You know, I wake up in the morning and everything is beautiful and everybody is beautiful.
And, you know, back to sort of your question, I teach so many young people and there's such
a large number of young people coming through our colleges.
And a lot of them have, you know, very in that stage where self-esteem and they're not sure
(11:42):
of themselves and they don't feel beautiful or they're questioning their value through
the lens of, am I beautiful or am I not?
And they're all beautiful.
It doesn't matter, you know, which one I look at, especially when I'm teaching and I look
out into all of the sea of faces and, wow, you know, how beautiful is life, how beautiful
(12:04):
are these young individuals that are hungry for knowledge that are the bedrock of the next
generation?
It's just, it's so beautiful.
So, you know, that's kind of my perspective.
I want to reflect in echo what you just said with one of the greatest minds to ever live
on the planet Earth. It was Plato, the Greek philosopher who equated beauty with the virtues of truth
(12:30):
and goodness.
And maybe in nature, beauty is truth and maybe in our hearts beauty is good.
This is my words to his.
But have we perverted its purity with lust and greed?
I think absolutely there could be a connection with that.
And I think how we can really see that visually in our external world is look at social media.
(12:56):
You know, we have all of these apps and we have all of these avenues, you know, plastic surgery,
contort your body with this app, make yourself look different than you actually do.
Okay, fine, but what happens when you actually meet the person, if everything that you're doing
is filtering yourself out, you don't look like that.
(13:19):
And how is that cultivating real self-esteem, right?
And then also, you know, we have this society that is disconnecting, continually, continually
disconnecting.
And our consciousness is retreating into this virtual world.
(13:39):
And now, I'm not going to sit in judgment and say, that's a terrible thing because the foundation
of what I believe is no lesson or no path is terrible.
No lesson, lead or yield learning.
But sometimes the learning is a difficult lesson.
And I think what we're seeing right now in society is disconnection.
(13:59):
So because we've plugged into something else instead of human connection and truth and
purity, we're getting a lot of this more dark connection, which is a selfish connection.
It is vein connection and unrealistic connection because we're associating this
vanity with something that doesn't even exist.
(14:21):
So it's superfluous.
It's not real.
And so what happens is it actually doesn't help our self-esteem.
It lowers it because it's not real.
It's not based in truth.
And we will not be able to achieve some pixelated version of us.
It'll never be.
I mean, unless, and I mean, I'm in the beauty industry.
(14:42):
So I see myriads of women who have gone through extensive plastic surgery procedures, lots
of them to try to achieve this ideal.
And it doesn't look good in real life.
Like you can take a picture of it and you can filter it and everything else.
But when you are standing next to them and it's, and look, I've had a few things done.
(15:08):
I'm not going to sit there and say, you know, I have, I'm completely natural.
Because that would be bogus.
I've had, you know, breast augmentation.
But in mind you, I had it when I was 15.
I didn't do it with the mind that I had now had I waited and been a little bit more patient
with things.
(15:28):
I would not have had it done.
It is what it is now.
I'm not going to go messing around and having surgeries and backing my way out of it.
But I do know that when your focus or the focus of the female segment of the population
is only directed to what they look like, we have a very superficial society that isn't
(15:55):
based in the foundations of love or truth.
That is very powerful and I would be really remiss if I, we didn't explore that dark side
of beauty.
I recently read Naomi Wolff's The Beauty Myth.
Have you read that?
I haven't.
No.
So basically it's, she is speaking from the perspective of beauty being used to control
(16:20):
women.
I'll read you a quote from her book, "a woman's primary social value once defined as the attainment
of virtuous domesticity has been redefined by the beauty myth as an attachment to virtuous
beauty.
The beauty myth was created to check make power at every level in individual women's lives.
(16:41):
The contemporary ravages of beauty continue to destroy women physically and deplete them
psychologically."
Basically echoing what you just said.
And that's the thing and I've seen it.
So the women that, and I want to talk about aging, because we all, all women and men have
(17:04):
that sort of bubble phase in between, you know, 16 and 40 to 45, 50, depending on how you've
lived, if you haven't party too hard or whatever, where your body looks good.
You're in your prime and it almost feels like you can do no wrong.
That's also where a lot of individuals don't grow.
They become very stagnant.
(17:25):
They don't create new avenues to stretch themselves to grow themselves.
And those avenues create self love because when you're passionate about whether it's sports
or some sort of hobby, whatever it is, you feel, you feel, you feel your soul essentially,
(17:45):
right?
And so what you, what I've seen in society or, you know, just the human race as a whole,
you'll get to that certain stage.
And if individuals have not invested in themselves and created and cultivated a myriad of things
that makes them really love themselves and happy, you know, irregardless of who they're
(18:08):
with, their family dynamic, what's going on in their life, they end up feeling very personally
bankrupt.
And then unfortunately, those are a lot of the individuals that have spent their life
partying, you know, in the party scene with their friends, you know, not really too much
self development and really kind of floating on their looks or floating on their youth, because
(18:30):
I believe everyone's beautiful in their own way, but they're floating on that youthful,
you know, fun loving energy.
And then all of a sudden, like it's like a deer in the headlights, there's the wrinkles,
there's, you know, the body is not acting the same.
And they can't keep up with the 20 and 30 year olds that are the new era of youthful beauty.
(18:50):
And all of the sudden, they're looking in the mirror and they don't really like what they
see because they've wasted this time not really getting to know themselves, right?
And so I think again, part of this beauty myth or part of I think what has plagued women,
especially for so long as this idea that keep investing in your beauty, keep, you know,
(19:11):
you'll always have a great life if you look good, you know, keep a perky bosom and a nice
backside and make sure you look fresh for your husband or whatever that is, right?
But that's, it's not true.
I mean, just even look at infidelity, right? If you kind of go back to the early years where
women were truly domesticated and mostly stayed at home and you were the good girl that baked
(19:36):
the biscuits and, you know, put the dinner on the table for your husband that came home.
I mean, there was massive infidelity back then, you know, but it just was under the rug.
It was just like, well, you know, there's these boys clubs and this and that.
And one of the things that especially in my younger days, I did a lot of weight-tracing
or would you like sort of like serving girl kind of thing, but also for private events.
(20:01):
And this was another, you know, eye opening thing for myself because oil and gas was booming
in Calgary.
There's all these private men's clubs and of course what went on behind the scenes in these
clubs was ridiculous.
And I'm sure the wives didn't know about it.
And, you know, they're buying these young girls, these young girls are whether they're
topless, like I didn't do any of that type of work, but I worked with girls from the agency
(20:26):
that did that.
And I was blown away and I just thought, wow, you know, this stuff happens and this is
real like real life and these guys don't feel guilty about this.
Like, and you know, it was the whole gamut.
It was the young businessman all the way up to the old grandpa's, right?
So, you know, it's all kind of about educating ourselves.
And I think this brings kind of brings us up to an interesting point of with women's
(20:50):
liberation, we are really opening the doors to a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes
that probably wasn't so great before too.
So we're in that era of readjusting the pendulum, so to speak, in terms of morality, I think.
Would you mind also letting our viewers know maybe they're tuning in for the first time
and haven't watched our other show with you?
(21:12):
Can you let us know a little bit about your business and what it's all about?
Yeah, so I have the chain of colleges.
We teach aesthetics and medical aesthetics throughout Canada and we do have regional courses
or courses that are sort of summit based in the US as well.
(21:34):
And that chain of companies are eternal beauty institutes.
I also have several medical centers as of 2024 that are based on regenerative medicine.
So I've teamed up with a great group of medical professionals around North America to open
up these medical centers.
(21:54):
Again, it's all about being the best that you can be in having treatment plans where essentially
you come in to see our professionals once a month and we help you with the anti-aging
process internally, externally, mentally on an ongoing basis so that hopefully there is
(22:15):
no degeneration that is creeping up on you by surprise.
We treat joint pain arthritis, all of these different things.
So it is a collaborative medical approach.
Obviously, I'm not a doctor, but I've had blessings in terms of my corporate life and
now I'm joining with all of these fantastic medical minds to bring this new platform.
(22:40):
It's called Eternal Beauty Medical Centers and right now we do have four of them.
So Regina, Winnipeg, Calgary and Toronto is opening up shortly here.
Yeah, so that's basically the basis of my daily life.
I really love that in that you're not damning the way that a person wants to look, but you're
(23:05):
educating them that there are foundations to this, that you need to take care of, that
you need to be wary of, that add to that external expression.
I really love that whole structure.
A hundred percent and I think it all comes back to love because we deal with, and I don't
(23:25):
mean deal with, but we have the pleasure of learning from especially the students, okay, because
it's a different era for them.
There's non-binary, there's people that are transitioning.
I know that especially in terms of, I don't want to call it like the old dogma, but there's
(23:48):
a lot of sort of that old consciousness which resides in judgment.
And so when we reside in judgment, we're going to point fingers and we're going to say,
well, that's bad or that's, that's evil or whatever it is.
But if we can tilt our perception and almost, I'm always like, look, we are, we're a college,
(24:09):
we're, we're an educational facility and we have to open our doors.
We are honored to open our doors to every type of person, okay, no matter what their sexual
orientation, no matter where they're coming from, what they see.
And I cannot jump in another person's mind and tell you what they're going through, but
I can tell you that young people nowadays struggle.
(24:31):
And there's a lot of things that I see from our administrative end, you know, it's difficult
on them.
And then you layer all of this dogma and all of these pre-judgments and you have a little,
you know, you have a young person sitting in your office that's telling you they're suicidal.
They don't love themselves. They don't understand why, why their brain is feeling this way.
(24:55):
And you expect me to throw some book at them or tell them they need to be like this and
you know, stop that.
No, you can't do that.
You know, you have to come from a place of love.
And what I realize about beauty and about what we have constructed in terms of what's
(25:16):
right and what's wrong and beauty and this and that is, that is really just made up.
Everything is made up.
And when you understand that, that we used to be Neanderthals dragging our knuckles on
the ground and we made this whole world up, we can make it however we want.
And if the very foundational principles of what we are making are what we are seeing,
(25:41):
our projection is based on acceptance and love and that doesn't mean that, you know, that
if somebody is chopping the legs off a cat, that's okay.
You know, that isn't okay because that's not based in love, right?
If we are loving others, we are also elevating life to its highest pillar or highest standard
(26:05):
in the sense that we honor life as it's unfolding.
And so again, it is difficult and I try, I try to ride that middle road because I know that
you're always going to offend somebody, you know, and even when I'm at a dinner party
or what have you, I'm never going to be the person that says, this is the right way or,
(26:26):
you know, this is my opinion and it has to be this way because what I've learned in
my 40 years is that my opinion changes.
So what I might have thought was definite, you know, in my 20s is definitely not the same
definite in my 40s.
In
this episode, you know, we've talked about many, many different layers to the question
(26:46):
I'm going to ask you, but I like to ask this question specifically for the series that
we're doing right now.
And that question is, What Does Beauty Mean To You?
Beauty?
It's what the world should be.
The world that each and every human being, and I'm going to go beyond that each and every
(27:11):
life, should be able to experience is a beautiful existence.
And part of what makes the journey beautiful is each and every one of us has the ability
to contribute to that culmination of what beauty is.
And I think a really good indicator of being in beauty, being surrounded by beauty is joy.
(27:39):
If you are joyful, if you wake up every day and your heart is filled with love and you
are emanating this amazing life force, it's not a selfish thing.
It's not a prideful thing.
It is absolutely a purposeful thing because when you are joyful, you're also on purpose.
(28:01):
And I think any of the great minds or any of the really impactful people that have lived
will tell you that there is no greater feeling than knowing one's purpose.
And, you know, so I'm going to also tether that to beauty.
I quoted one of the greatest minds in human history earlier, Plato.
(28:26):
And I don't know.
What would you say is your title, your official title these days?
What is your title?
My official title is Jack of All Traits.
I don't know.
I feel I've reached a point in my career where I'm just in service.
I don't need money anymore.
(28:49):
I've achieved all of the benchmarks of that younger business, hungry individual that wants
all of the glamorous material things.
I have those things.
They're not terrible.
They don't make you happy either.
(29:09):
And I think it's great to have gone through this leg of the journey in the sense of you
really realize where the real is, you know, where that point of center for yourself is.
The reason I ask you the question is that I wanted to add philosopher to your title.
(29:29):
Oh, okay.
I don't know.
A lot of how you speak and the way that you see the world around you, it's philosophy.
It's not about judgment, it's not about value, this or value, that
it's about philosophy, it's about looking forward and seeing the greater in everything
(29:51):
and everyone, the universe in general.
And to me, that's how you speak.
Well, and I've always had that perspective from a young person.
And I don't know, you know, everybody, again, the consciousness of an individual, everybody
is different.
And I always had a very observant consciousness instead of jumping into speaking or jumping
(30:19):
into making a judgment, I would always sit back with a good level of discernment, even
as a young person and say, well, you know, why?
Why is this or why is that other person or this table of kids picking on me?
And I would start to kind of analyze them and put in a loving way, like, you know, well,
(30:39):
I do know that Becky's parents, you know, aren't very nice to her.
And I do know Jonathan, he lost his dad last year, whatever it is.
And so I always had this way of kind of deconstructing what was around me.
I think it also makes me a good teacher.
(30:59):
It's what I try to teach within our organizations is discernment, you know, taking, we all have
this ego reaction, that nerd, knee jerk reaction that this person's pissing me off or this person,
you know, their motivation is to hurt me or whatever it is.
(31:20):
But that's the ego's reaction.
And when we really start to realize that the world doesn't revolve around us, there is
lots going on for everybody else, you know, aside from ourselves, that not everything that
is projected at you has anything to do with you.
And when you can understand that, you can cultivate a real inner peace.
(31:43):
And you know, when we're talking about beauty earlier, your question, I would also say that
peacefulness and beauty, you know, are very closely linked as well.
I also want to dismantle another false.
I think history has been very cruel to women in that it has pitted them to say that you cannot
(32:05):
have beauty and brain.
You have to have one or the other.
If you are beautiful, we're going to subtract anything of value beyond that.
And I think you are the epitome that both exists in everyone, beauty, brain, philosophy and
love.
(32:26):
It's all there.
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.
You cannot, we cannot tell you enough how much we appreciate what you've said here today.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm going to spend an amazing experience sometimes just to talk about these things, right?
How often do you have meaningful conversations that hopefully will touch other people as
(32:53):
well?
Yes.
And we appreciate that you give us the time to explore that with us.
Yes, this particular lens to our beauty series has really just taken it up at the next
level.
So thank you for your time.
And you have been listening to the Virgin,
The Beauty, and the Bitch.
Find us like us, Share us.
(33:14):
The series continues.
So come on back and join in and we'd love to hear from you.
To become a partner in the VBB community, we invite you to find us at virginbeautybitch.com.
Like us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
And share us with people who are defiantly different like you.
(33:39):
Until next time, thanks for listening.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
Virgin, Beauty, Bitch, Podcast, Inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share
(00:09):
unique life experiences without fear of being defiantly different.
Your hosts, Christopher and Heather, let's talk, shall we?
Beauty, it is natural and it is real.
We are all born with a natural appreciation for beauty, but we are also subject to social
(00:30):
constructs that tell us who is beautiful and in most cultures that burden falls on women
who are called on to fit a profile that we see every day on magazine covers, on the silver
screen, on television and pretty much every product that wants our attention or our money.
(00:50):
Many girls grow up wanting to fit that profile, including our guest, President and founder
of Eternal Beauty Institute, Barbara McBean.
Welcome back, Barbara, to Virgin Beauty, Bitch.
Thank you for having me.
Oh, it is absolutely deeply our pleasure.
Now, Barbara, we want to really thank you for joining us with Piga Bagthas, the layers
(01:11):
of this mystery we call beauty.
And serendipitously, I read a post recently that sounded like this, quote, "I want to apologize
to all the women I have called beautiful before I call them intelligent or brave.
I am sorry, I made it sound as though something as simple as what you're born with is all
(01:31):
you have to be proud of."
The author of that quote, "Barbara Lynn McBean."
Barbara, as a woman who I bet has heard the words "you are beautiful" more than a few
times, do you remember the first time you said that quote or used those words on your
self?
Yeah, absolutely.
(01:51):
I think once I really realized that the colleges that I had founded were starting to take
off and it was going to be a real thing.
I started to realize I had the ability to build something really spectacular, but previous
to that, you know, I had doubts.
(02:11):
I had self-doubtes and I think that everybody, it doesn't matter what their gender,
harbors these doubts inside and we were always searching for that value proposition.
What makes us valuable?
And I think as women, it is difficult because so much of what we've been taught from a very
(02:33):
young age is that you have to be a pretty little girl and in order to find a husband or in
order to get that great job or whatever it is, the big beautiful house that pick a fence,
you want to be an aesthetically pleasing looking woman.
And there's a lot of pressure that comes with that that I don't feel necessarily is pushed
(03:00):
onto the male gender as much.
As a male gender, I would agree 100,000%.
Yeah, I mean, if you guys can be cute, you can roll out of bed with scruffy hair and put
on whatever t-shirt was on the floor and rock that with your skateboard or whatever it is.
And as the female population will be, oh yeah, that guy's cute.
(03:25):
But I don't feel like from a women's standpoint that we have that same ease with the way that
we can enter into society at large.
I love that quote that Christopher just read, and the words, how powerful those words are.
Can you tell us a little bit more about how you've reconciled the pressure that women feel
(03:52):
like on a personal note with other pieces that are not things that you're born with, but
things like characteristic traits that are cultivated, like being brave and growing from
the inside out.
Absolutely.
One of the things that I've talked to my girlfriends and other women about as we age as
(04:13):
well, because of course, beauty and age, as we age further and further into the distance,
the beauty tends to, or society's perspective of beauty is that it lessens.
And I always say that's the only horse you're betting on.
You're betting on a losing horse because you want to be for your own reasons, not for
(04:36):
anybody else, but for your own reasons.
You want to be as dynamic as possible and really stretch the breadth of your own character
and soul.
And that means that don't look in the mirror so much, don't worry about it.
Do the things that fill your soul and make you proud of yourself.
(04:56):
And that takes a little bit of bravery because a lot of these things that we are doing as
women now aren't traditional female roles and actually have been shunned or we weren't
allowed to be in those roles.
So I often go back and I had a really amazing set of grandmothers growing up on both sides,
(05:16):
both very strong independent women who taught me a lot about women's rights and what women
had to go through.
So that would be their mothers had to go through just to be able to be a person.
And that because they continually drilled it into me that this is not a God-given right.
This is not a God-given right that you can have a job or you can go play soccer or whatever
(05:39):
it is.
This is something that women fought extremely hard for and you're now on this very small,
you know, or small, but you're on the precipice of this just opening up because it's so
new.
If we look at the whole span of history or recorded history, women have really only
had rights truly for the last kind of 100 years or so, right?
(06:01):
I'm curious.
You're a beautiful woman.
Do women resent the message coming from a beautiful woman that they don't necessarily
need to look beautiful to be their potential?
You know what, of course.
I mean, everybody's going to project whatever is inside of them.
So if they're not feeling that they are beautiful, they're going to project anger or
(06:27):
frustration or whatever judgment on others.
And the thing that I've learned about being in this human suit, you know, what it happens
to look good, I'm not frustrated with it, you know, like I like the way I look.
But I wasn't always super attractive.
So I've had that dichotomy of being both.
(06:49):
When I was younger, I had severe, severe acne, like cystic acne that was all over my
face, chest, and back.
And, you know, I was a little bit chubbier.
I was that proverbial, you know, geek or nerd in school for my entire span of my school
years.
And I wasn't attractive.
(07:12):
So I was like the opposite.
No guys would date me.
No guys would dance with me at the dance as those kind of things.
And so I understood life from that perspective.
And I understood not, you know, certainly having people make fun of me or say that I was
a detractive or I remember one particular time I was actually at, I think it was the, I
(07:33):
don't know what they call it now, the Talisman center, one of the pools in Calgary.
And these young boys that were in my grade, you know, were in the pool.
They happened to be there at the same time with their families.
I was there with my family.
And they were saying, oh my god, she's so ugly, you know, and I'd never really conception
to visualize that as a young person before.
Like, what does that mean that I'm ugly?
(07:54):
Like, you know, you get up in the morning, you're a young kid, you brush your hair, you're
a little chubby and pimply and whatever, but you're still fun, right?
You don't really dissect things too much.
And that was the first moment that I dissected.
What does it mean that they're saying I'm ugly?
And I remember kind of getting out of the pool and slopping my way back to the change
(08:16):
room and looking in the mirror and like, oh, you know, maybe I am ugly.
You know, like, it never occurred to me before.
And so I guess those early experiences shaped my understanding of, you know, we really decide.
And I think even thinking back to that moment, I had no conception of whether I was pretty
(08:38):
or ugly or what I was before that.
And it was that defining moment where I started to actually compartmentalized or shuffle things
around as, oh, well, that would be a pretty thing.
And that would be a not pretty thing.
And, you know, what have you?
And I think all human beings teach ourselves to do that or put things in different buckets
or categories.
(08:59):
And as I've aged, I realize that's really, it's not fruitful because everything in life,
every creation, every person, every creature is it intrinsically beautiful, just unique.
They have their own unique beauty.
Would you have died a little deeper into that for us, the intrinsically, you know, in essence
beautiful?
Can you expand on that a little for us?
(09:21):
That's so beautifully said.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I mean, so when we think of beauty or the reflection of beauty, because of course we
are the observer and we're looking out into the world and we are perceiving.
So we're perceiving what we feel is beautiful.
And usually beauty should be associated with what brings us joy or what is uplifting,
(09:45):
right?
High vibrational.
And so you can see that in everything if you choose to see it in everything.
If you look at your grandmother and, you know, see her smiling at her birthday cake or
you look at, you know, your dog and your dog is hairy and slobbery and everything else.
But you look at your dog and that is one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen.
(10:08):
And, you know, you go out and you look at a tree or you look at a park and it's beautiful.
So, we can find so many examples of what is beautiful, but when it comes to the masculine and
the feminine division of beauty or, I guess, human construction of what is accurately beauty,
(10:32):
I think we really confuse it.
Some of it's confused, obviously, with this idea of sexuality.
So what we find sexually enticing or whatever that is, then we've equated that to beauty.
But again, I think it comes back to using our God-given intelligence and starting to really
(10:55):
self-assess some of our beliefs, you know, why wouldn't we want to see a beautiful world?
And I think it's choice.
I think a lot of individuals, whether it's that they're into conspiracy theories or they're
into that, you know, like let's get jump on the negativity bandwagon or whatever, they
choose to see the world through the lens of ugliness.
(11:16):
And that's something that I've never done.
You know, I wake up in the morning and everything is beautiful and everybody is beautiful.
And, you know, back to sort of your question, I teach so many young people and there's such
a large number of young people coming through our colleges.
And a lot of them have, you know, very in that stage where self-esteem and they're not sure
(11:42):
of themselves and they don't feel beautiful or they're questioning their value through
the lens of, am I beautiful or am I not?
And they're all beautiful.
It doesn't matter, you know, which one I look at, especially when I'm teaching and I look
out into all of the sea of faces and, wow, you know, how beautiful is life, how beautiful
(12:04):
are these young individuals that are hungry for knowledge that are the bedrock of the next
generation?
It's just, it's so beautiful.
So, you know, that's kind of my perspective.
I want to reflect in echo what you just said with one of the greatest minds to ever live
on the planet Earth. It was Plato, the Greek philosopher who equated beauty with the virtues of truth
(12:30):
and goodness.
And maybe in nature, beauty is truth and maybe in our hearts beauty is good.
This is my words to his.
But have we perverted its purity with lust and greed?
I think absolutely there could be a connection with that.
And I think how we can really see that visually in our external world is look at social media.
(12:56):
You know, we have all of these apps and we have all of these avenues, you know, plastic surgery,
contort your body with this app, make yourself look different than you actually do.
Okay, fine, but what happens when you actually meet the person, if everything that you're doing
is filtering yourself out, you don't look like that.
(13:19):
And how is that cultivating real self-esteem, right?
And then also, you know, we have this society that is disconnecting, continually, continually
disconnecting.
And our consciousness is retreating into this virtual world.
(13:39):
And now, I'm not going to sit in judgment and say, that's a terrible thing because the foundation
of what I believe is no lesson or no path is terrible.
No lesson, lead or yield learning.
But sometimes the learning is a difficult lesson.
And I think what we're seeing right now in society is disconnection.
(13:59):
So because we've plugged into something else instead of human connection and truth and
purity, we're getting a lot of this more dark connection, which is a selfish connection.
It is vein connection and unrealistic connection because we're associating this
vanity with something that doesn't even exist.
(14:21):
So it's superfluous.
It's not real.
And so what happens is it actually doesn't help our self-esteem.
It lowers it because it's not real.
It's not based in truth.
And we will not be able to achieve some pixelated version of us.
It'll never be.
I mean, unless, and I mean, I'm in the beauty industry.
(14:42):
So I see myriads of women who have gone through extensive plastic surgery procedures, lots
of them to try to achieve this ideal.
And it doesn't look good in real life.
Like you can take a picture of it and you can filter it and everything else.
But when you are standing next to them and it's, and look, I've had a few things done.
(15:08):
I'm not going to sit there and say, you know, I have, I'm completely natural.
Because that would be bogus.
I've had, you know, breast augmentation.
But in mind you, I had it when I was 15.
I didn't do it with the mind that I had now had I waited and been a little bit more patient
with things.
(15:28):
I would not have had it done.
It is what it is now.
I'm not going to go messing around and having surgeries and backing my way out of it.
But I do know that when your focus or the focus of the female segment of the population
is only directed to what they look like, we have a very superficial society that isn't
(15:55):
based in the foundations of love or truth.
That is very powerful and I would be really remiss if I, we didn't explore that dark side
of beauty.
I recently read Naomi Wolff's The Beauty Myth.
Have you read that?
I haven't.
No.
So basically it's, she is speaking from the perspective of beauty being used to control
(16:20):
women.
I'll read you a quote from her book, "a woman's primary social value once defined as the attainment
of virtuous domesticity has been redefined by the beauty myth as an attachment to virtuous
beauty.
The beauty myth was created to check make power at every level in individual women's lives.
(16:41):
The contemporary ravages of beauty continue to destroy women physically and deplete them
psychologically."
Basically echoing what you just said.
And that's the thing and I've seen it.
So the women that, and I want to talk about aging, because we all, all women and men have
(17:04):
that sort of bubble phase in between, you know, 16 and 40 to 45, 50, depending on how you've
lived, if you haven't party too hard or whatever, where your body looks good.
You're in your prime and it almost feels like you can do no wrong.
That's also where a lot of individuals don't grow.
They become very stagnant.
(17:25):
They don't create new avenues to stretch themselves to grow themselves.
And those avenues create self love because when you're passionate about whether it's sports
or some sort of hobby, whatever it is, you feel, you feel, you feel your soul essentially,
(17:45):
right?
And so what you, what I've seen in society or, you know, just the human race as a whole,
you'll get to that certain stage.
And if individuals have not invested in themselves and created and cultivated a myriad of things
that makes them really love themselves and happy, you know, irregardless of who they're
(18:08):
with, their family dynamic, what's going on in their life, they end up feeling very personally
bankrupt.
And then unfortunately, those are a lot of the individuals that have spent their life
partying, you know, in the party scene with their friends, you know, not really too much
self development and really kind of floating on their looks or floating on their youth, because
(18:30):
I believe everyone's beautiful in their own way, but they're floating on that youthful,
you know, fun loving energy.
And then all of a sudden, like it's like a deer in the headlights, there's the wrinkles,
there's, you know, the body is not acting the same.
And they can't keep up with the 20 and 30 year olds that are the new era of youthful beauty.
(18:50):
And all of the sudden, they're looking in the mirror and they don't really like what they
see because they've wasted this time not really getting to know themselves, right?
And so I think again, part of this beauty myth or part of I think what has plagued women,
especially for so long as this idea that keep investing in your beauty, keep, you know,
(19:11):
you'll always have a great life if you look good, you know, keep a perky bosom and a nice
backside and make sure you look fresh for your husband or whatever that is, right?
But that's, it's not true.
I mean, just even look at infidelity, right? If you kind of go back to the early years where
women were truly domesticated and mostly stayed at home and you were the good girl that baked
(19:36):
the biscuits and, you know, put the dinner on the table for your husband that came home.
I mean, there was massive infidelity back then, you know, but it just was under the rug.
It was just like, well, you know, there's these boys clubs and this and that.
And one of the things that especially in my younger days, I did a lot of weight-tracing
or would you like sort of like serving girl kind of thing, but also for private events.
(20:01):
And this was another, you know, eye opening thing for myself because oil and gas was booming
in Calgary.
There's all these private men's clubs and of course what went on behind the scenes in these
clubs was ridiculous.
And I'm sure the wives didn't know about it.
And, you know, they're buying these young girls, these young girls are whether they're
topless, like I didn't do any of that type of work, but I worked with girls from the agency
(20:26):
that did that.
And I was blown away and I just thought, wow, you know, this stuff happens and this is
real like real life and these guys don't feel guilty about this.
Like, and you know, it was the whole gamut.
It was the young businessman all the way up to the old grandpa's, right?
So, you know, it's all kind of about educating ourselves.
And I think this brings kind of brings us up to an interesting point of with women's
(20:50):
liberation, we are really opening the doors to a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes
that probably wasn't so great before too.
So we're in that era of readjusting the pendulum, so to speak, in terms of morality, I think.
Would you mind also letting our viewers know maybe they're tuning in for the first time
and haven't watched our other show with you?
(21:12):
Can you let us know a little bit about your business and what it's all about?
Yeah, so I have the chain of colleges.
We teach aesthetics and medical aesthetics throughout Canada and we do have regional courses
or courses that are sort of summit based in the US as well.
(21:34):
And that chain of companies are eternal beauty institutes.
I also have several medical centers as of 2024 that are based on regenerative medicine.
So I've teamed up with a great group of medical professionals around North America to open
up these medical centers.
(21:54):
Again, it's all about being the best that you can be in having treatment plans where essentially
you come in to see our professionals once a month and we help you with the anti-aging
process internally, externally, mentally on an ongoing basis so that hopefully there is
(22:15):
no degeneration that is creeping up on you by surprise.
We treat joint pain arthritis, all of these different things.
So it is a collaborative medical approach.
Obviously, I'm not a doctor, but I've had blessings in terms of my corporate life and
now I'm joining with all of these fantastic medical minds to bring this new platform.
(22:40):
It's called Eternal Beauty Medical Centers and right now we do have four of them.
So Regina, Winnipeg, Calgary and Toronto is opening up shortly here.
Yeah, so that's basically the basis of my daily life.
I really love that in that you're not damning the way that a person wants to look, but you're
(23:05):
educating them that there are foundations to this, that you need to take care of, that
you need to be wary of, that add to that external expression.
I really love that whole structure.
A hundred percent and I think it all comes back to love because we deal with, and I don't
(23:25):
mean deal with, but we have the pleasure of learning from especially the students, okay, because
it's a different era for them.
There's non-binary, there's people that are transitioning.
I know that especially in terms of, I don't want to call it like the old dogma, but there's
(23:48):
a lot of sort of that old consciousness which resides in judgment.
And so when we reside in judgment, we're going to point fingers and we're going to say,
well, that's bad or that's, that's evil or whatever it is.
But if we can tilt our perception and almost, I'm always like, look, we are, we're a college,
(24:09):
we're, we're an educational facility and we have to open our doors.
We are honored to open our doors to every type of person, okay, no matter what their sexual
orientation, no matter where they're coming from, what they see.
And I cannot jump in another person's mind and tell you what they're going through, but
I can tell you that young people nowadays struggle.
(24:31):
And there's a lot of things that I see from our administrative end, you know, it's difficult
on them.
And then you layer all of this dogma and all of these pre-judgments and you have a little,
you know, you have a young person sitting in your office that's telling you they're suicidal.
They don't love themselves. They don't understand why, why their brain is feeling this way.
(24:55):
And you expect me to throw some book at them or tell them they need to be like this and
you know, stop that.
No, you can't do that.
You know, you have to come from a place of love.
And what I realize about beauty and about what we have constructed in terms of what's
(25:16):
right and what's wrong and beauty and this and that is, that is really just made up.
Everything is made up.
And when you understand that, that we used to be Neanderthals dragging our knuckles on
the ground and we made this whole world up, we can make it however we want.
And if the very foundational principles of what we are making are what we are seeing,
(25:41):
our projection is based on acceptance and love and that doesn't mean that, you know, that
if somebody is chopping the legs off a cat, that's okay.
You know, that isn't okay because that's not based in love, right?
If we are loving others, we are also elevating life to its highest pillar or highest standard
(26:05):
in the sense that we honor life as it's unfolding.
And so again, it is difficult and I try, I try to ride that middle road because I know that
you're always going to offend somebody, you know, and even when I'm at a dinner party
or what have you, I'm never going to be the person that says, this is the right way or,
(26:26):
you know, this is my opinion and it has to be this way because what I've learned in
my 40 years is that my opinion changes.
So what I might have thought was definite, you know, in my 20s is definitely not the same
definite in my 40s.
In
this episode, you know, we've talked about many, many different layers to the question
(26:46):
I'm going to ask you, but I like to ask this question specifically for the series that
we're doing right now.
And that question is, What Does Beauty Mean To You?
Beauty?
It's what the world should be.
The world that each and every human being, and I'm going to go beyond that each and every
(27:11):
life, should be able to experience is a beautiful existence.
And part of what makes the journey beautiful is each and every one of us has the ability
to contribute to that culmination of what beauty is.
And I think a really good indicator of being in beauty, being surrounded by beauty is joy.
(27:39):
If you are joyful, if you wake up every day and your heart is filled with love and you
are emanating this amazing life force, it's not a selfish thing.
It's not a prideful thing.
It is absolutely a purposeful thing because when you are joyful, you're also on purpose.
(28:01):
And I think any of the great minds or any of the really impactful people that have lived
will tell you that there is no greater feeling than knowing one's purpose.
And, you know, so I'm going to also tether that to beauty.
I quoted one of the greatest minds in human history earlier, Plato.
(28:26):
And I don't know.
What would you say is your title, your official title these days?
What is your title?
My official title is Jack of All Traits.
I don't know.
I feel I've reached a point in my career where I'm just in service.
I don't need money anymore.
(28:49):
I've achieved all of the benchmarks of that younger business, hungry individual that wants
all of the glamorous material things.
I have those things.
They're not terrible.
They don't make you happy either.
(29:09):
And I think it's great to have gone through this leg of the journey in the sense of you
really realize where the real is, you know, where that point of center for yourself is.
The reason I ask you the question is that I wanted to add philosopher to your title.
(29:29):
Oh, okay.
I don't know.
A lot of how you speak and the way that you see the world around you, it's philosophy.
It's not about judgment, it's not about value, this or value, that
it's about philosophy, it's about looking forward and seeing the greater in everything
(29:51):
and everyone, the universe in general.
And to me, that's how you speak.
Well, and I've always had that perspective from a young person.
And I don't know, you know, everybody, again, the consciousness of an individual, everybody
is different.
And I always had a very observant consciousness instead of jumping into speaking or jumping
(30:19):
into making a judgment, I would always sit back with a good level of discernment, even
as a young person and say, well, you know, why?
Why is this or why is that other person or this table of kids picking on me?
And I would start to kind of analyze them and put in a loving way, like, you know, well,
(30:39):
I do know that Becky's parents, you know, aren't very nice to her.
And I do know Jonathan, he lost his dad last year, whatever it is.
And so I always had this way of kind of deconstructing what was around me.
I think it also makes me a good teacher.
(30:59):
It's what I try to teach within our organizations is discernment, you know, taking, we all have
this ego reaction, that nerd, knee jerk reaction that this person's pissing me off or this person,
you know, their motivation is to hurt me or whatever it is.
(31:20):
But that's the ego's reaction.
And when we really start to realize that the world doesn't revolve around us, there is
lots going on for everybody else, you know, aside from ourselves, that not everything that
is projected at you has anything to do with you.
And when you can understand that, you can cultivate a real inner peace.
(31:43):
And you know, when we're talking about beauty earlier, your question, I would also say that
peacefulness and beauty, you know, are very closely linked as well.
I also want to dismantle another false.
I think history has been very cruel to women in that it has pitted them to say that you cannot
(32:05):
have beauty and brain.
You have to have one or the other.
If you are beautiful, we're going to subtract anything of value beyond that.
And I think you are the epitome that both exists in everyone, beauty, brain, philosophy and
love.
(32:26):
It's all there.
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.
You cannot, we cannot tell you enough how much we appreciate what you've said here today.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm going to spend an amazing experience sometimes just to talk about these things, right?
How often do you have meaningful conversations that hopefully will touch other people as
(32:53):
well?
Yes.
And we appreciate that you give us the time to explore that with us.
Yes, this particular lens to our beauty series has really just taken it up at the next
level.
So thank you for your time.
And you have been listening to the Virgin,
The Beauty, and the Bitch.
Find us like us, Share us.
(33:14):
The series continues.
So come on back and join in and we'd love to hear from you.
To become a partner in the VBB community, we invite you to find us at virginbeautybitch.com.
Like us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
And share us with people who are defiantly different like you.
(33:39):
Until next time, thanks for listening.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.