Your Messy Brilliance:
7 Tools for the Perfectly Imperfect Woman

by Author Kelly McNelis

Your Messy Brilliance overturns one of the most harmful myths in our culture: that there is a recipe for perfection.

Author Kelly McNelis

In truth, our lives are messy, and that’s a good thing! With a combination of personal experience, relatable stories from everyday women, and practical wisdom, this engaging, customizable roadmap to the authentic you from Women For One founder Kelly McNelis, will guide you into the most important journey you will ever take: the journey back home to your messy brilliance!

McNelis’ book offers a series of groundbreaking tools that will effectively address issues from the individual to the global. But getting real with our messiness is the prerequisite. When we do this, we can finally connect our awareness with tangible action—the only thing that leads to true progress and fulfillment.

Women have been around the block more than once – from fighting for our rights in the 60s and 70s, to being told we need to be like men to succeed in the 80s, to finding ourselves in a new era where we have infinite power to make life happen on our own terms. Simply put, we are too smart to be fooled. Deep down, we already know we have the tools we need and the answers we seek; they’re just hidden beneath the weight of all that stuff people have been telling us we need to change.

“Embracing your messy brilliance is about owning all of your stories, experiences, strengths, and weaknesses.” – Kelly McNelis

Embracing your messy brilliance is about owning all of your stories, experiences, strengths, and weaknesses – and treating them with an enormous amount of compassion, and sometimes even a healthy dose of humor. The book relates the journey from victimhood to embracing our power as women, which is a cornerstone of stepping into your messy brilliance.

As Kelly McNelis writes:

“The victim mentality is pervasive in our world. Whether we were raised on the streets or with a silver spoon in our mouth, our culture lives and breathes the notion that we are the prey of circumstances that are beyond our control. Most of us are indoctrinated with the notion that life is hard. Even when things are going well, we might find ourselves waiting for the other shoe to drop. Our media is clogged with trauma drama and stories that feed into our collective fear and paranoia that something or someone (e.g., the government, criminals, anyone with values different from ours) is out to get us. Politicians build their platforms on blaming and shaming their opponents, and on tearing down the dissenting party. We separate the world into simplistic caricatures of good guys and bad guys, victims and villains. Even though these are archetypes that each of us internally harbors, we use them as a way to create more separation, suspicion, pain, and conflict in our lives.

The fact that we live in a world that has been at war with itself for time immemorial reveals the huge divide that we are facing – one that is not only displayed in our tendency to split ourselves into factions, religions, races, political parties, and nations, but that is also a reflection of the sense of division we feel within ourselves. In addition to splitting the world into good and bad guys, we are taught to compartmentalize, to differentiate, to deem certain aspects of ourselves “good” and to stomp out the ones we perceive as “bad.” Essentially, we are at war with ourselves, and only when we decide to stop perpetuating the vicious victim cycle will we be able to join together the parts of us that are at odds and stop projecting our conflict onto the world. 

When I talk about victimhood, I am not denying the many horrific things that happen on a daily basis – from rape to war to genocide and other forms of injustice. There are instances in which oppression and exploitation create clear perpetrators and victims. Terrible things happen to good people, and it’s important to hold compassion for the wounds and battle scars that so many of us have picked up along the way.

We are not here to be the general managers of the universe or to bear the brunt of responsibility for every little thing that goes wrong in our lives. It is simply not humane to imagine that karma is to blame for all the bad things that happen to good people. A baby does not choose to be abused, and an ethnic group does not choose to be wiped out by genocide. In fact, other people’s unconscious choices can wreak untold havoc on innocent lives – which is why we must never succumb to explaining away the crazy shit that happens on a daily basis with blame or quasi-spiritual justifications.

There are some things that we will perhaps never understand about the nature of the world, and that’s OK. Awful things happen, and although we may wish to make sense of them, it is seldom easy to do so. And the truth is, we don’t need pithy, prepackaged explanations for why things are the way we are. When we focus instead on transforming our lives and serving humanity through genuine compassion, we do our part to end the cycle of victimization and terror that has so many people in its clutches.” – Kelly McNelis, Your Messy Brilliance

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• More on Kelly McNelis HERE
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