Maye Musk

My advice is to be kind to others, listen to others, and be upbeat. Don’t start talking about your miserable life. Show confidence, respect, interest in others, and smile; that will make you fascinating. Everyone has a talent that they can share with other people.

If you want to look and feel more confident, start with better posture. Stand up straight. Put your shoulders back, have a pleasant expression on your face, and look at people when they talk to you; don’t look away. Call this your confidence game.

Her
advice was simple. She told me to spend half an hour every day remembering happy times and suggested that it would help me decide what to do next

I have started my life over many times, and as an adult I’ve lived in nine cities across three countries. I don’t recommend starting over again and again like I did, but if you have to, you must plan ahead. You can live a more exciting and happier life if you take chances. I took a lot of chances and struggled in the beginning, but I persisted until I found success in my personal and business lives. You don’t have to plan every detail of the changes in your life; you can sort out your problems as they come along. And there will be different problems, of course. But you just have to plan that first step.

I didn’t care, because I wasn’t there to be exciting. It was just work, and I needed to work. I kept modeling because it was fun, kept me looking good, and got me away from the office to explore different cities and to meet new people. In those years, they had to book me three weeks ahead of time to not disrupt my practice, and I wouldn’t model more than four days a month. It paid as much as my dietetics practice, which was my stable and basic income, and I wasn’t going to rock that boat—that would cover everyday expenses, rent, bus fare, school uniforms, gas, and car services. Modeling enabled me to buy a cheap flight to visit family, some clothes, or something we needed for the apartment. Sometimes I would get a dress. Modeling was the cherry on top.

Hopefully, as you get older, you lose your confidence for a shorter time. In my seventies, you would think I would have less confidence. But my confidence is better than ever, because I am not worried about rejection or insults. As a model, I get rejected nine times out of ten. If you are losing confidence, you have to find a reason why you are losing your confidence. Many women aren’t confident. They feel they have to be good at everything, they have been beaten down by people criticizing them, or they’re taking on too much and cannot succeed at everything. Practice doing what you’re good at, and don’t try to be the best at everything.

In Johannesburg I was still doing my nutrition work, and my practice had expanded so much that I was giving talks about healthy eating. At the same time, I was medically obese, and so I masked my feelings about it with humor. I tried to make it funny, so that I would appear to be more confident—but I wasn’t feeling very confident, and I was wearing large clothes to hide my body. Yet my clients were still coming to me and getting motivated. It made me feel like a fraud, because I was doing the opposite of what I was telling my clients to do. I had the information, but I wasn’t using it myself.

At forty-one, my cholesterol had increased, and my knees and back were hurting. That was frightening, because you have to stay in good health when you have three kids to support. I missed feeling good in my body.
So I started taking my own advice: eating only when hungry, eating healthy foods, not overeating. When I took my own advice, I lost weight. This time I’ve kept it off for thirty years.
I want you to know that I work at it every day. It is not easy.

er parents had immigrated to Canada from England, and my mother grew up in a town called Moose Jaw. My father’s family had emigrated from Switzerland to Philadelphia in 1727. He was born in Minnesota, and when he was four, his family moved to Waldeck, Saskatchewan, to live on a farm.
My parents met just after the Great Depression. The Canadian Depression was a terrible time, when people were lining up and begging for food and basic medical care for their children. Desperate to survive, they often leaned on the barter system. My dad had studied chiropractic medicine in Davenport, Iowa.

After the Depression, both of my parents moved to Regina, Saskatchewan, and opened businesses. My father opened a chiropractic practice. My mother started a dance school.