loves herself, regardless.

by Dr. LeAnna Majors

“Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else...We can give ourselves the unconditional love that is the grounding for sustained acceptance and affirmation. When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack.” -bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Liberatory power is the ability to create what we want. It is real power, related to abundance consciousness, the creative force of life. Liberatory power is about expanding our set of choices and fine-tuning our consciousness so that we can recognize decision points and choose intentionally…Liberatory power invites one to construct a story of oneself as powerful.” -Cindi Suarez, The Power Manual

Every day I am working on loving myself. It is hard, ongoing work, that I know is part of my Black Feminist praxis. About three years ago, I made a decision to leave a job without knowing what I was going to do next.  It was a time when I experienced deep grief, that in many ways, I am still not done processing.  Even though I was deeply saddened and also uncomfortable with not knowing what would happen next, I made the decision to leave out of a commitment to love myself.  

You see, I had spent one too many nights telling myself I wasn’t good enough, strong enough, capable enough.  All of the stories I told myself were not true. Over the years, I had worked myself into a pattern of behaviors that reinforced these narratives. I had worked within a system that wasn’t leaving me feeling affirmed or seen. The truth is I was always enough; powerful and whole.  

The distance was healing. I was able to get rest. I was able to care for myself. I was able to take the time to see the bigger picture, when I had been stuck in the weeds for too long.  I was able to remember all that I was and accept all the things that I wasn’t. It allowed me to see that while I was able to live out my purpose and experience success. I hadn’t yet figured out a way to do so while also loving myself, regardless. 

I am in a new position and still living my purpose.  I am thankful for that.  What is different now is that I have a strong commitment to living what I call, ‘Womanist Leadership’. You see, in my attempt to find healing, I also discovered that there is something distinctly powerful about being a Black woman and it is especially edifying when I think about that ‘something special’ through the lens of my leadership. I now use this framework when I reflect on my work and myself. When I am building and implementing systems. I use it as a way to guide my work with those I coach and lead. Defining myself, for myself, has made me a better leader. 

The Womanist Leadership framework I am referring to has five core attributes, and today I want to focus on the first one. The one that requires that Black women actively practice loving themselves, no matter what messages may say to the contrary.  Self-love is not a side note to leadership, it is the root of liberatory power. Black women, in life and in work, must be affirmed in our full humanity, complexity, and worth.

stories we tell ourselves vs. what we know.

Earlier I mentioned that there were times when I experienced sleepless nights where I would tell myself stories that I was not doing enough and that whatever I was doing was ineffective.  I did not feel like enough. I struggled with clearly defining ways that worked for me and insisted on fitting into a mold of leadership that I thought was what it took to be successful.  After many years of this being my reality, I became unraveled.  

Oftentimes Black women leaders receive messages, either directly or indirectly, that how we show up is not aligned with effective leadership. Patricia Hill Collins teaches us that these messages are part of the “controlling images”, deeply rooted stereotypes that shape how society views and values Black women, defining us through deficits rather than possibilities. These images do more than distort public perception; they can infiltrate our own thinking, causing us to question our abilities and conform to leadership models that erase our genius. The work, then, is to recognize these stories for what they are: tools of domination, and to return to what we know. We know that our leadership, grounded in collective liberation, is not a weakness to fix but a power to fiercely protect. 

self-love as a leadership act.

Examples of leadership that I have encountered in my over 20+ years of being a working person, success is measured by productivity, sacrifice, urgency, and an unyielding commitment to outcomes over community or humanity. There is an unspoken rule: effective leaders must push past exhaustion, detach from their emotional needs, and be willing to erase parts of themselves that don’t fit into the mold of “professionalism.” If this is the case, then for Black women, these expectations are compounded by racialized and gendered myths. Myths that our value comes from overperformance, that objectivity requires us to become disconnected from our own lived experiences, and that respectability will somehow protect us from harm. What has been particularly upsetting to me is that as we all internalize these myths and unspoken rules we are conditioned to believe that the humanity of Black women is a distraction from our leadership rather than its foundation.  And in doing so, they rob us of the clarity and confidence that comes from being rooted in love for ourselves.

Alice Walker’s definition of a womanist includes the phrase: “Loves herself. Regardless.” For me, those two words, regardless and herself, are revolutionary. They remind us that love is not contingent on achievement, someone else’s approval, or assimilation. It is an audacious, willful act to claim your own worth when the world demands proof. Cindi Suarez writes, “Liberatory power invites one to construct a story of oneself as powerful.” Self-love, then, is structural rather than sentimental. It reshapes the way we set priorities, the way we move through conflict, the way we imagine what’s possible. As a Womanist leader, I recognize that love is not something that comes after we’ve done the work, it’s the ground the work grows from.

Loving ourselves, regardless, becomes a political act because it interrupts the cycle of self-erasure. When love is our starting point, we lead with an abundance mindset, we create space for others to be whole, and we resist reproducing the very harms we’ve endured.