Glennon Doyle (formerly Glennon Doyle Melton) has an incredible personal story. It is one of overcoming adversity, embracing her true self, learning about self-love, and intriguingly, leading a revolution as a result of these experiences.
Despite growing up wildly loved by her family, society’s messaging of misogyny, body shaming, and religious doctrine gradually took a grip on her young mind.
As a little girl, Glennon (unsurprisingly) internalized society’s messages about what a girl’s body “should” look like— small, quiet, and shrinking. Gradually freeing herself from these beliefs, Glennon shares her processing of shedding society’s burdens in her three epic books: Carry On, Warrior, Love Warrior, and Untamed.
If you pick them up, be prepared for a mindset shift, because her books come packed with life-altering lessons. After all, there’s a reason she has risen to be a renowned-thought leader with 2 million followers on Instagram.
Life Lessons from Glennon Doyle Melton
Here’s a look into several of the breakthrough insights contained in her books and what you can expect when you pick them up.
1. Understanding the Essence of Your Pain
Pain is natural. Everyone experiences it, and if you live long enough, then you’ll undergo several life-altering forms of pain.
The strongest of people are able to embrace that because they understand where the actual damage stems from.
In her book Love Warrior, Glennon Doyle points out that the pain you’ve experienced in your life isn’t the poison that’s holding you back. It’s the lies about the pain that set you back.
For example, one of the biggest lies in modern society is that you’re supposed to be happy at all times or no one will like you.
As Glennon reminds us, pain— just like joy— is meant to be felt. And as a mentor of mine once told me, “A feeling fully felt dissipates.”
2. Life is Messy, Embrace It
One of the biggest struggles that people experience is trying to chase perfection, because we are raised to think in terms of faults.
However, there’s beauty in the faults of your life. A messy life is more beautiful than a life where you’re all dolled-up and have a picture-perfect family, because it’s real. Real is beautiful.
No one in this world has a picture-perfect life. Those that chase it end up unhappier than the ones who embrace their crazy life and love it for what it is.
The front page of Glennon Doyle’s book Carry On, Warrior, says in bold letters to find “the power of embracing your messy, beautiful life.”
3. You Probably Lost Yourself at an Early Age
Glennon Doyle argues that everyone, not just women, begins to lose themselves at a very early stage of life.
As soon as the formative years kick in around age 8 to 10, we become brainwashed on how to be the perfect citizen. How to become a good child, how to behave in school and how to grow up to become a good spouse.
The fact is that we can still become who we were meant to be, while freeing ourselves of society’s expectations.
One of Glennon’s regrets is that she didn’t embrace who she was until later in life than she wanted. She was unhappily married for many years and finally found her voice after realizing that voice inside her head was actually her own, not someone else’s.
Don’t follow a path just because society tells you that it will make you happy. Society doesn’t know you.
Follow the path that your wise inner voice is telling you to follow. It’s the only voice that knows and it’s the only one that matters.
4. You’re Only Sexy When You’re Yourself
Sexy comes in many different forms. There isn’t one standard form that everyone finds attractive, even though society wants you to think that.
Abiding by the sexiness you see on modern media is going to hide your true self under layers of makeup, clothes, and accessories. As Glennon experienced beginning as early as age eigth, it can also lead to bulimia and disordered eating.
True sexiness, as Glennon Doyle points out in Love Warrior, is exuded when you opt to be the truest form of yourself.
5. Learning from Her Marriage
Glennon Doyle has been, and continues to be, very open about the lessons that she learned in her first marriage to Craig Melton.
In her book Untamed, she points out that she “had a bad marriage to a good man”.
Why? because she wasn’t happy and was only living out the lie that she had been fed from an all too early age.
Glennon uses the story of Eve as a point of reference. Many women take that story as a lesson that if you want more, you’re going to pay the price for it.
The story of Eve isn’t a lesson in staying in your lane. It’s a lesson to make the right choices for yourself, not by the lies someone else (like the serpent) tells you to.
Since May 2017, Glennon has been blissfully married to soccer icon, Abby Wambach.
Glennon Doyle Melton on Embracing Your Messy Truth
Glennon has emerged over the years as the informal leader of an army of women who are embracing their truth, regardless of how the world (and the people closest to them) respond.
What have you learned from Glennon? Let me know in the comments below.