Business Book Review: Buy Yourself the Damn Flowers by Tam Kaur

She is the social media star who built a thriving community of the ‘self-obsessed’ from her bedroom of her grandparents’ home. Learn how Tam Kaur turned heartache into self-confidence.

My Rating: ★★★★★
Length: 288 pages
Publisher: Lagom
Released: 2024

Key Takeaways for Personal Branding

Tam Kaur is the introvert and once self-identified shy girl turned social media sensation. Embracing what she has been criticised for, Kaur named her podcast Self Obsessed and built her ‘self-obsessed’ community of millions worldwide.

Buy Yourself the Damn Flowers is her self-love guide to healing and putting yourself first.

Kaur will have you questioning your default setting to denounce self-confidence and self-love. What if it is really that culture has conditioned you to believe that these traits are distasteful when displayed in excess?

Critiques of personal branding mostly centre around appearing too self-obsessed and self-indulgent. But, is a bit more self-love the secret to your success and happiness, as psychology would suggest?

Be Humble

Kaur makes her criticism of society’s calls for humility clear:

“Insecure society is easier to control. We have been conditioned to believe that having a high self-importance and being obsessed with yourself is narcissistic and selfish. We’re taught to value being ‘humble’, the definition of which is to have a low sense of one’s own importance. The truth is that most people don’t want to see you thrive and a lot of them are threatened by confidence and certainty. So, people with those qualities are labelled as ‘vain’ and ‘full of themselves’. But this is completely false."

So, as Kaur has you considering, do those who critique the self-obsessed actually envy their confidence in being the ultimate version of themselves? This version of themselves, Kaur points out, is simply them finding the courage to overcome the limiting beliefs we all feel.

Exposure Therapy

Most of the self-confident people you likely know didn’t roll out of bed that way. They felt the fear and did it anyway. This is where, as Kaur suggests, ‘exposure therapy’ might be helpful:

“Exposure therapy is useful for practising the art of validating yourself. You have to do something you know will be subject to judgement and while you are experiencing all the cringe and embarrassment that comes with it, you change the narrative of those negative opinions into positive ones.”

"Instead, if your limiting belief is that you’re too shy to post on social media, but you carry out the habit of your desired self-concept – in this case to post as if it’s a skill that comes to you naturally – you embody the traits that would empower you until they naturally become a part of who you are.”

Identity Shifting

Rather than feeling like a fraud in the new version of yourself, consider changing the narrative from inauthentic to ‘identity shifting’:

“Let’s talk about the importance of shifting your identity. The goal of this is to positively change your self-concept. It starts with releasing the limited perceptions you may have of the world and yourself.”

"Identity shifting is done through implementing habits that you imagine your ideal self would have."

"It can be something as small as changing the way you dress, which makes you feel like a brand new person and allows you to practise new thought patterns more confidently.”

People-pleasing

Kaur addressed the perils of people-pleasing and why it can be so difficult to be a newer version of yourself among your existing social circles:

"They’ve been in your life for a long time and naturally they’ve formed a certain perception of you and placed you in a neat box in their mind to categorise you, alongside all the other people in their life. The second you decide to grow and change and experiment, you step out of that box and therefore risk looking ‘cringey’ to the people who have always known you because you are going against their expectations and what is familiar about you.”

“When you focus on pleasing others, your entire life becomes a performance in which you must trade your authenticity for approval that is never guaranteed and will never bring you happiness, only temporary external validation, which becomes an addictive cycle as you place others’ opinions above your own.When you give this power away, becoming overjoyed at someone’s praise, you are inevitably made miserable the second you are insulted. Accepting compliments is important, you deserve them, but using them to define yourself and decipher your value is what leads to changing yourself for everyone else.”

To curb any people-pleasing tendencies, Kaur recommends culling your social media following list on every platform, keeping only the accounts that positively encourage you. To take it one step further, then train the algorithm to understand what you need more of. Proactively tell it what you’re ‘not interested’ in and actively engage with content you need.

Kaur backs up her bold ideas with well-researched references to the science that supports her assertions. She brings a beautiful balance of confidence yet calm to her writing. Kaur writes with the bold masculine energy that bursts off the screen in the education-style videos that made her a YouTube star, while also adding the feminine energy more visible in her vlogs. The combination creates a relatable read to build self-confidence and self-love. Because, if you don’t love yourself, who else will?

Favourite Quote

“Remember that you are the main character, your life is like a movie, and if things stayed the same with zero plot twists – well . . . who would want to watch that?”

Buy Yourself the Damn Flowers by Tam Kaur Available on Amazon.