Ep 75 - Letting Go Of Negative Thoughts So You Can Be Your Authentic Self

Last week I finally had some new pictures taken to use on my website and in my social media posts. I had been wanting to do this for a long time but always found an excuse not to get the pictures done.  I'm so glad I went but let me tell you, I was nervous!

I did the full spectrum of anxious thinking.
I overthought what to wear and how to be, shopping, Googling and changing clothes for hours.
I kept wondering what I looked like or what other people would think.
I criticized myself because I don't look 17 anymore and pictured my face looking like Quasimodo.
And made myself more awkward by shaming myself for not knowing how to pose or where the heck to put my arms.

All of that worrying and I love my new photos and had so much fun!

In this episode, I'm showing how jumping into something as simple as a photo shoot can bring up all the anxious feelings and reactions, have you repeating  negative things you say or think about yourself, and how you can let go and HAVE  FUN, even when you feel awkward and uncomfortable.

And, when you pay attention to how you handle the little things that make you feel anxious, you have a better handle on how to deal with the bigger situations that cause bigger anxiety because you handle them the same way.

To connect with Derek to learn more about personal branding, brand photos, marketing, and social media, CLICK HERE.

Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.

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Transcript

Megan Devito: 0:03

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm MeganDevito and I'm the life coach for stressed out and anxious women who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a lighthearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm Megan. Before we get started on this week's episode, I want to ask for your help in helping me reach as many people as possible with this podcast. There are so many brilliant and anxious women out there who are hiding themselves away, telling themselves they're too much or not enough, or that they're not good enough, maybe that they don't know how to do anything, or even just feeling that they get so anxious that they can't think clearly. They miss out on so many opportunities for fun and success because they can't find the help they need to stop believing their anxious stories and to go after what they want and what they love to do. If you have benefited from this podcast, you can help more people find me and this resource by leaving a five-star review and then comment. Starting today, february 13th of 2024, when this podcast airs through February 27th 2024, every person who leaves a five-star review and shares this episode with somebody else will be entered to win a Starbucks gift card on February 28th. All you have to do is leave the review wherever you listen. Then message me on Instagram or Facebook I'm @Coac Megan Devito in both places and tell me hey, I left a review, I sent this on and I will put your name into the hopper to see who wins the gift card. You guys rock, and thank you for taking that two minutes to do this. This could literally change somebody else's life. I appreciate it, and that is my shameless ask for the week.

Megan Devito: 2:06

Let's go ahead and get started with the story, because this week's episode is going to be all about what I learned from a photo shoot. Stick with me here. I have wanted to go get professional pictures or pictures taken from my website and from my social media done for a really long time. I mean, I've had it in the back of my mind for a really long time. Anyway. I'm always checking out what other people are doing on Instagram and things like that. I have this thought in my head about getting these pictures. In my imagination, it's going to be fantastic and I am going to be like amazing, looking like a rock star. I'm going to have this cute hat and I'm going to do these poses and wear these bright colors. And none of this is me and, oh my gosh, I can't even put a hat on these curls because I Bozo like the clown. But I have this vision of going to do this and I finally got the opportunity to do it.

Megan Devito: 3:01

I started working recently with someone who's helping me with my personal branding, but really I talked with him about helping me figure out how in the world to navigate LinkedIn, because I have this thought about LinkedIn where I'm not quite professional enough to be on LinkedIn. I like to have fun. I'm definitely not the buttoned up kind of girl, so sometimes LinkedIn feels like the spot where I'm not supposed to be hanging out. I've always kind of joked and called it anti social media. It's just like a little too serious maybe, but one of my goals for 2024 is to figure out how to be on LinkedIn and to use it properly, because so many of the people who I help hang out there and I need to figure out how to navigate the place so that I feel comfortable there while I'm still on Instagram and Facebook and other places as well.

Megan Devito: 3:52

Anyway, I have a friend who lives in the same town as me and he is a rock star at this stuff. He does personal branding and marketing and it's totally different and amazing than other people and he does all of this really incredible work on social media. So I reached out to him and said, hey, can we meet for coffee? So we did. We met for coffee here in town and again I'm thinking, just please, sell me something. Just sell me something. I want to buy something from you, I want your help and I was really just going to buy whatever he told me I needed to get. So I ended up buying his course and I learned so much in just that hour about how to be on LinkedIn and his course is phenomenal and things like how to improve my website, all of it. He gave me so much help in just that one hour of coffee and I was so appreciative.

Megan Devito: 4:43

And then he said, hey, let's do a photo shoot. And I was like, yeah, let's do a photo shoot. I mean, I was really excited because this was finally my chance to say yes and to be able to do this thing. And I waited a few days and I didn't really say anything. And he said, hey, let's set a time. So we did, and we set a time to go take these pictures and, honestly, I was just waiting for myself to freaking back out. I just really wondered if I would follow through. You've done this before, right. You've given yourself that wiggle room to see if you're really going to do the thing. Yeah, I did that once I had the date scheduled and my first thought was oh my gosh, what am I going to wear to this photo shoot? I don't know what I'm doing at all. So just notice how my brain immediately started creating drama.

Megan Devito: 5:33

I went into this crazy spiral of trying to shop, trying to think of things that were cute or unique, trying to come up with all these amazing outfits in my head, and I'm picturing other people in these outfits, which is really funny, because isn't the point of a personal branding photo shoot to be yourself? But that's not what I was doing. Everyone I pictured was not me. Everything that I was looking at or looking for were things that were so cute in other people's photo shoots and I'm getting totally excited but also totally nervous at the same time, trying to find the perfect outfit Outfit.

Megan Devito: 6:14

So I decided I had to go shopping because I had nothing in my closet to wear, which is usually an anxiety red flag for me. So, for example, on days when I get up and I change my clothes several times, it's usually a day where I realize that I'm actually just a little bit keyed up or a little bit stressed out or anxious. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? When there's that day where everything in your closet feels weird and you don't want to wear anything. So I was having one of those days on repeats. This won't work, this outfit won't work, oh my gosh, I have nothing.

Megan Devito: 6:48

So I go shopping and I'm not a very good shopper, to be honest with you, because I usually end up buying just another black shirt or a white shirt and I have a very limited range of colors in between, I wear a lot of black and a lot of white. It makes it easy, but it's not what I think that I should be wearing for this photo shooter, for these pictures, because the picture in my head for this photo shoot wasn't anything that I had in my closet because it wasn't anything I would normally wear. So I start Googling and I'm really spiraling into this, you guys. Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? And everything said wear something simple, take a nice accessory to put on, like reading glasses or a hat - Again with the hat. But I also noticed that most of the photos for a lot of personal branding shoots were inside someone's kitchen, and I'm not having photos in my kitchen or in my house, so I'm going out to take these great pictures that I'm totally stoked about. And I finally just ended up wearing a black shirt, which was fine, it's what I feel confident in and I put on some jeans that I read her in style again, which is great because I've had them for a long time, and it all came together. So here we go, right, I head out and I go to meet this friend of mine who I'm going to tag in the show new show notes. His name is Derek, his brand is Disruptor and you can find him on Instagram at @be ad isruptur, and it's Disruptor with a U, not an O are at the end. So I will tag him in this.

Megan Devito: 8:16

But I've been thinking about this for two weeks and I'm excited, like what am I going to do? This is going to be so great and holy crap Again picturing other people and how this is going to go. And this is not at all the way that it went. You guys, not at all. So we go and we're standing on this sidewalk next to this bar in this city, not very far from us. Outside of this bar, it is painted bright pink and the top of these walls are these gold painted stars and there's these two light poles with stickers all over them and I love it. The wall is fantastic. So picture bubblegum or pep-to-bismol pink. And I'm like, well, this is going to be awesome. So we're taking the pictures and in my brain I went full on middle school Megan like this is going to be awesome to Holy crap.

Megan Devito: 9:13

When I'm having fun like I'm really having fun but I'm also thinking I'm really not cool enough to be doing this. Oh my gosh, I'm going to look so ridiculous. Is my body even doing this? Right? I don't have any idea where I'm supposed to look. Do I look at the camera? Do I look beyond the camera? Do I make some face like an influencer? Am I supposed to smile or am I supposed to look serious? What do I do? Oh, wait a second. Maybe I'm supposed to be silly. Or am I supposed to turn around and look over my shoulder? So many thoughts.

Megan Devito: 9:49

I was the most awkward thing ever in my head that you could ever picture, and I'm positive that he noticed too, because he even said you seem kind of uncomfortable and for sure I was. It was just all of these insecurities that I've had about myself that I can remember specifically where I picked them up Some of them, not all of them. So when I was little, when I would turn my head, sometimes in pictures you know how you have school pictures or your parents take you to get little kid pictures when I would turn my head, one of my eyes would pull in. And I remember being on the school bus when I was a little girl and someone saying to me do you have crossed eyes? And I remember how I felt. I can tell you where I was sitting. I have no idea who said it to me, but I was like no, and my little heart was broken. It was so embarrassed.

Megan Devito: 10:39

But this whole memory came back to me while I'm getting these pictures taken outside of this amazing pink wall, and this is the experience that I had been wanting to do forever that I suddenly was like okay, Megan, what are we gonna do with this? So I started thinking Before I caught myself. I started thinking oh my God, are my eyes gonna look so funny and my face is gonna look weird. Like what do I look like? I over thought everything you can imagine. Am I doing this right? Why are my arms so long and weird and why are they in the way? Where are you supposed to put these arm things?

Megan Devito: 11:21

All of that happened to me during this really fun thing that I had been wanting to do. So I noticed that in the middle of this, the more that I noticed my arms, the more I didn't know what to do with my arms. This is just like when you're anxious the more that you notice that you're anxious, the more that you're anxious, and the more that I noticed that I was judging myself, the more nervous I got and the more I was missing out on just being in the middle of this fun time doing what I had wanted to do and getting the pictures that were just me being me, which was really what the whole experience was supposed to be about, and thank goodness that he knew what he was doing and he knows how to work the camera, because he caught both the nervous me and the me who has fun and likes to be a dork one minute and serious the next, and I ended up with amazing photos, really and truly. But it was a lot of work inside my head just to get to the point where I felt comfortable enough to be myself. And I wonder if this sounds familiar to you, because in this process of trying not to get so up in my head where, as if somebody was driving by and they would look at me, I started guessing what they were thinking. Things like she is way to be able to be doing that. Who does she think she is?

Megan Devito: 12:41

By the end of it, we moved to this different location where there were these really cool murals and there were people on bikes and people watching, and I ended up actually focusing on the people who were watching and smiling at them, because it was easy for me to smile at people and I really didn't care what they thought at all anymore because I realized that I was just being silly. But in the process of it it's important because, even though this isn't necessarily the same kind of anxiety that you might think of when you're in some really big emotions. I think it's helpful to be able to zoom out and see how we handle those smaller anxious parts of our lives, because how you handle the little things is the same way that you're going to handle the bigger things. And in no way am I diminishing how big that anxiety can feel, because I've been there and I know it's overwhelming. If you've listened to other episodes, you know my backstory with health anxiety that went on for years and years. This anxiety and that anxiety are not the same thing. But the truth is that even when I would fall into that cavern of really overwhelming anxiety in the past, those feelings always started out small and they grew sometimes really quickly to bigger and scarier anxious stories that felt more threatening or more true, but they always started small.

Megan Devito: 14:08

The thoughts that you might have in some bigger situations, where you're super anxious about something that's bigger than having your picture taken for sure, are the same kind of things. The story that you're telling yourself in the anxious time isn't true and it can't hurt you. It's going to make you overthink. It's gonna make you try to be perfect, to try to say no when you really wanna say yes or make you completely self-conscious so you miss out on the things that you wanna do. The same is true for the little stuff like just deciding to get pictures, which was not a five alarm fire anxiety experience. I wasn't gonna die of embarrassment from not knowing what to do with my arms, and you won't die from the thoughts that you have either, but it definitely might feel like you could. So when you zoom out and you look at what the real problem is, then you can start picking at it and figuring out how to handle it. I just wanna tell you that when you stand back and you look at yourself from a different perspective on how you handle things after the fact, it actually went really well and I ended up loving the photo shoot and wanting to do it again After I practice, of course, because I got to figure out how to pose and what to do with myself, because I definitely was like just tell me what to do. I want to have more ownership in it next time.

Megan Devito: 15:35

But really the first thing to do is just acknowledge that you feel awkward, or acknowledge that you feel anxious and own it as a moment and a feeling. I even said out loud I feel really awkward right now, like I have no idea how to do this. So his response was well, just pretend like you're having your senior pictures taken. And I kind of laughed and was like, no, I really sucked at senior pictures Because, remember, I've always thought that I looked horrible in pictures. Senior pictures were incredibly awkward for me. I always just had this thought that looked like Quasimodo, which is so not true at all. But when you've thought that for so long, it just pops right back out of habit. So the first thing with being so mean to myself was let's just own this Right now. I feel incredibly awkward, but in your case it might have been. I feel really anxious, I feel really intimidated, I feel really incapable or really stupid or really less than someone else. Just own it and say this is how I feel, because how you feel is only an emotion. It's not the truth. I felt all kinds of different ways of awkward. Was I being awkward? Ok, honestly, probably a little. Definitely because I was. But the more I thought about it, the more awkward I got, and once I relaxed, it was easier for me just to do whatever.

Megan Devito: 16:59

Once you notice what you're thinking about yourself, you can change the story. You can ask yourself if that's actually true, and by actually true I mean 100% true, with no exceptions, kind of true. So was it actually true that my arms were just flailing out to the side and floating in space like one of those balloon men outside of an auto to like an auto dealership or a pizza place that they used to get your attention? No, I put them on my hips or I had them hanging down. Did I look like a professional model? No, because I'm not one. I'm a life coach and a mom and a former teacher and all those things. But the same is true when you're anxious. So if the thought is for you, maybe I'm going to fail at this presentation. Is that actually true? Because unless you can prove it 100% in a court of law with evidence, it's not. It's just a fear or a thought that you have. And when you start asking yourself if it's true, you can figure out what it means. What would it mean for you to be true? Does it mean that you failed at the presentation because everybody walked out in the middle? Does it mean that nobody agreed with you? Does it mean that nobody was picking up what you were handing out at the convention. What does true mean to you? Look for evidence to support that it's not true. I know that I've taken some great pictures in the past. I know I don't look like Quasimodo. I know I don't have cross-ties.

Megan Devito: 18:31

Your brain is going to tell you all of the things that you don't want to hear. It's going to try to get you not to do things. If you say you're going to fail and that you'll be fired, come up with a list of other times that you thought that you'd be fail and you didn't get fired, or times when you were promoted or your idea was complemented. You get to choose your thoughts and what you focus on, and when you choose a different thought, you create a different emotion. These are all just ways for you to process how you're feeling and to notice that this is just a thought that I have about myself.

Megan Devito: 19:06

That's not kind or true. This is what I help people do. I help you notice your thoughts. That's part of what coaching is about. It's to help you notice what you think and notice how you feel, because when you feel embarrassed or anxious or less than or uncomfortable, it keeps you from doing what you want, keeps you from feeling confident. It keeps your anxiety going, and when you can notice the thought, you can change the thought. So what evidence do you have for what you want? Use that evidence to boost what you want to believe, instead of what you're afraid or what that old dialogue is inside your head. So for me, fearing that my pictures were going to look horrible, or for you, fearing that you were going to fail a presentation none of that has to be true, but dang, I was thinking it at the time and you were probably believing your story too.

Megan Devito: 20:03

The next thing I want to say is I want you to think about how you would act if none of that was true at all. What would you do if the thoughts that you were thinking were the opposite? Like, what if I really did look like a model? What if I like? What if I look like Gigi Hadid or someone? Because so often this idea of wanting to feel like yourself can mean feeling like someone else, and what we're looking at here again go back to this was me pictures of me for my business, about me and how I can help other people.

Megan Devito: 20:36

So I didn't want to be somebody else, I wanted to be myself, and I coached somebody a while back and she said, like one of the things we worked on a lot was she said I want to be authentic and we came up with this whole plan on how she could be her authentic self. We asked things like what would your most authentic self do? What would she wear? Who would she spend time with? What would she say in that situation? These were questions that we asked on repeat. If the authentic you was showing up, what would happen? And then we said we were going to go and be that authentic version of yourself, like this is what I do. If it was just me myself and I and no one else could see me, and if nothing mattered and we just practiced being that person.

Megan Devito: 21:23

This photo shoot was a really good reminder for me to say screw it, I'm just going to go be who I am. This is me. I'm not a professional model. I don't really know how to do photo shoots or poses. I haven't done anything like this since I was 17 or 18 years old. No, I don't have a clue. Let's just go have fun. And as crazy as that might sound to compare a photo shoot to feeling anxious, it's really the same response. That's what I want you guys to get out of this episode that you have the knowledge that you can feel anxious and still do things and you have help to get through it. You can reach out to me on social media through the link in this podcast episode to talk about.

Megan Devito: 22:05

I really want to have the confidence to do this stuff. I don't. I'm tired of feeling anxious and stopping myself. I'm sick of overthinking it. I just want to have fun. I just want to feel like myself. I can help you with this.

Megan Devito: 22:19

So when you learn how to get calm and then think about you want, what you want and what is true, you get to start doing the things that you've never done before or that you've wanted to do for a really long time. Like I said, I've wanted to do this photo shoot for years and I just kept putting it off. I'm so glad that I went. You get to find new ways of thinking about yourself. I just decided that this is me and I've been living in this body for a very long time. I'm pretty much sick of listening to the kid on the school bus that asked me if my eyes were crossed when I was eight. I don't even know who that kid was. I'm about done letting an eight or nine or 10 year old kid like throw me under the bus forever.

Megan Devito: 22:59

But you guys have to decide, because I don't know who's listening to this podcast. You have to decide. You have to reach out to me because I can't help you unless you ask Contact me. Let me know what you want. Let me help you.

Megan Devito: 23:11

Come up with a plan to feel really fantastic about yourself. It's super simple you go to the show notes, you click the link or you go to my social media and you send me a message. Let's get you to a point where you're feeling confident so that you can go after the promotion you want at work, so you can have incredible photos, so you can have new experiences or quit your job or start a business or choose to stay home with your kids, so that you can put up boundaries, so that you only work at work and when you get home you spend time with your partner or your kids or your dog. You get to learn how to do more new things in the future that you've been wanting to do but you've been afraid to go after. Maybe it's getting on a plane and going on vacation. Maybe it's a bodybuilding show. Maybe it's applying to the College of your dreams. I've helped people do all of those things and they've all been successful and it's amazing. So again, remember, I'm asking for your help.

Megan Devito: 24:09

This week you can be entered to get that Starbucks gift card. You got two weeks to do it. If you're listening to this one at First Airs and if I don't talk to you on a phone call before I will be back again next week. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel more relaxed, have more energy, more confidence and a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. Talk to you soon.