Discovering My True Self and Setting Boundaries

All it took was a client complimenting me, by saying his family that just started coming to my studio loved my personality. That made me go into deep thinking. I still had my thinking that I need to so much work to do in that area on myself. 

I finally realized how all my hard work has appeared with out realizing it! The difference is from finally finding myself, setting boundaries for family and clients, and knowing I was worth holding myself accountable with staying with my new limits.

I went from faking it until I made it, To understand my true self is enough. I don't need to be someone else to have a great business and life. Small changes and being honest with myself over where I need to improve is the key.

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Send an email with questions to skahrhoff@live.com.

Transcript

Shannon Kahrhoff: 0:00

This is Decoding Yourself as a Stylist. I'm Shannon Kahrhoff here to go over some ideas going on in my head. It is been a few weeks since I recorded, so I'm hoping I remember how to do this. I was a little overwhelmed with everything going on in my life right now, and I just needed to take a break to get through the training I was doing and to get my life back in order. So today I want to talk about figuring out who you are. Who I am has always been a struggle for me because I felt like I grew up trying to fit into the whole people wanted me to be. So I never really understood who I was because I felt like I shifted depending on what people wanted me to be and what they needed me to be, and that's not a good, solid footing to understand yourself. So back in the original days when I was doing Personality Plus as the test, trying to figure out where I ranked with different types of who I was, I was so confused because I acted this way with this person and I acted that way with that person. So it's very hard to have the confidence in understanding who you are to understand your strengths, your weaknesses, and where you need to grow. The other week a customer, we were just talking, I've cut his hair for a super long time. I used to cut his wife's hair, but she's now passed and he was talking to me about how many years I've known him. And his ex-wife and his daughter started coming to me, a year or two ago. It's, interesting hearing about what he is talking about, and he said it's no wonder that they keep coming back. They loved how nice you were and how your personality, and you're so easygoing and it's just, they just loved you. So it's. It kind of took me aback because for me, my personality and who I am has always been a struggle. I felt like that was my worst attribute because I was angry a lot for a long time. I had to work through the anger and the mindset that I was never good enough to be who I was. I always felt like I had to put on a persona with my clients. I had to act professional. I had to watch what I said. I had to become the epitome of what a hairstylist was. Well, somewhere along the road of me learning so many different things about myself with all the skills I've focused on throughout these years. It has not always been easy. I'm very, very hard on myself. If I don't feel like I am putting in enough effort or mindset, then I usually beat myself up. That's just how I am. I expect full effort out of myself and I work at it until I feel like I am mediocre and then I can slowly fine tune it to become even more. Not the easiest way or the nicest way to learn something. Through the years I've realized that it's okay to not be perfect. It's okay not to be fantastic the first time you do it. I have relaxed a lot of my mindset to become easier to accept my faults and to become better. And honestly, I didn't even realize how far I've come in who I am and understanding my strengths, my weaknesses, and I will say this podcast has helped a lot. I am trying to teach through the podcast how I overcame my faults and my missteps and help others maybe identify something in themselves to be able to understand. Look, she wasn't perfect. She didn't do this, but she's become a better person, learn so many different things by understanding and tearing apart and starting over and becoming who I really am meant to be, to be able to help others, I believe. Because if I could have understood who I was, and it's okay to be who I am, I don't have to fill in the holes that other people want me to be. It's okay for me to speak up and not accept other people's expectations of me. So when my client told me this, it made me really think hard about a lot of things that I didn't realize how far I had come, if that makes sense. Okay, I, I'll say it this way, I don't realize how far I've come from where I was. I don't feel like I'm play acting anymore to become the professional hairstylist. I feel like I lead from the heart. I really care about people and I want to make them as happy as I can with their appearance, with their time with me. I feel like. I like pouring attention and everything into other people because I want them to feel seen, heard, and to be able to take off their burdens if they want to. I have come a long way. I've realized that knowing where I was and talking to anyone that knew me in my twenties would probably not even understand where I am right now because I have totally changed with my perspective with where I am. How I handle things and speak to others. Now, I will say not everyone's gonna think I'm the most wonderful, caring person, and I have a good personality because the people that have treated me wrong, expected, the world from me and thinking they deserve free services, discounted services, and. Only wanted stuff from me thinking that they deserved this because it's my own business. I can, I can discount however I want, not thinking about all the bills I have to pay. So I will say, if someone is trying to manipulate me and guilt me into things. I will say I have learned through the years that I have put my foot down. I have boundaries, and when they overstep continuously my boundary, that's when I get a little angry and offputting because it's not okay for me to let people have something that I financially don't have. That I should not be discounting their services because that is a bill for me to pay. And for so many years I was sacrificing making other people feel better, saving them some money. Sometimes they didn't even realize they were saving money, but I felt like I was helping them. But I was sacrificing my own financial wellbeing all these years to give a discount to help them out a little bit. Now I've realized that it's not really helping anyone. It's hurting me. Last year I was doing this this education and I realized how much money I was actually discounting from people and taking away from my financial abilities. Now I could have saved that money and put it towards something that I needed in my life. But I think I went back a month, six weeks, something like that in my books to realize how much money I had cheated myself out of. And it was a big chunk that could have paid for something important and quite a few bills in my life, but I felt like I owed it to them because there's the self-confidence part of understanding that this is what you charge and this is what you need to charge. There's no reason that you have to discount because they're expecting to pay this amount. So why am I cheating myself with this stuff? Because I was on a journey. I was learning last year how to put up my boundaries, how to understand my mindset that I need to protect myself, and it's their free will to go to somewhere else. To have a service done where they charge a little bit less. It's okay. I've had people who have backed away because I'm raising prices again. It is okay. I've realized along this journey that I've hit the gas pedal on learning and implementing into my life before I'd learned something and I'd slowly had to think about it and then maybe, baby step into it and then implement it. Well, within the last year, it feels like it's happening a lot faster. I'm okay with it because. I am not acting anymore. I'm actually doing what is best for me and creating this boundary that I needed, and it all lines up with what my customer told me. It's because I'm comfortable in my own skin. I know I'm worthy. I know that my prices are set because I've been overwhelmed with so many new clients. I love it. It's a huge blessing. It's fantastic. But with everything else in my life and on my plate at the time, I have been full on overwhelmed. I wasn't sure how to, to balance it, to understand it and process it. So that's why I took a break from podcasting because I needed that extra time and mindset to work my mind through. This is good. This is a blessing, but it's a time to put myself into the right thinking, the right mindset, to not drain myself. Because it's not okay for me to wear myself out to put everything in a hundred percent to not have the energy to live my life. My life is important to me, but work, yes, I love it, but I have to make sure there's a little bit of a balance, so it doesn't wear me totally out. I have to make sure that I follow the hours I wanna schedule for myself, that I don't go overboard with squeezing people in because it's okay. They have to understand that my schedule is changing, I'm changing, and it's okay. They can survive waiting in the week or two, or they'll figure something out. I have to not live my life for other people. That was a hard fought lesson for me, and I can't really say, it wasn't long ago that I actually figured that out because whenever I was struggling, I was wearing myself out. I was stressing constantly. I felt like I couldn't even put my head down and actually rest because I was trying to figure out where the boundary was that I needed to put into my life. I think I found it, but I still misstep every so often, but it's okay. Knowing who I am now is incredible because I don't have to feel like I need to play act in my life. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I learned a long time ago. It's okay. You just fake it till you make it, and eventually you'll become the person that you're pretending to be and it's fantastic. Well, no, that's not really how it worked for me. I did it, but it never felt comfortable to me because I was trying to become the image of what I thought I should be and not who I really am. You can't try to be someone else. You have to figure out where your strengths lie, where your weaknesses lie, and you need to figure out how to decrease the deficit in your life. Your faults, smooth the edges. Try to strengthen those faults. Become the person who you are. By learning different things, your strengths, you have to really lean into that and figure out how you could become whatever you wanna be with your strengths, and then work on your faults, become whatever you're lacking in It's paperwork details and those kind of things. So I have to, I have had to make an effort. To work on my paperwork, my finances, everything, because when I get busy, I push it off. Oh, I'll do it later. I'll do it later. I don't have the mindset. I don't have the energy to deal with my paperwork. It'll be okay. Wrong, because then when I do have time, I don't wanna do it because it's so far behind. I'm struggling to actually get it done. So it's about my least favorite thing of setting schedules. I have to make a list. I have to find a day that I can actually get this stuff done and make an effort to do this when it's scheduled in my book. So that's my huge thing that I'm working on now, it's a major fault. It's not good for a business person to not be on top of everything, to know where my money is going to watch my expenses, to watch my budget, to get the financial setting in my life figured out and taken care of so it can grow and change and take care of me in my old age and do as much as I need to with it. Now through the years, I, I told you earlier that I was a very angry person in my twenties. I had a lot of stuff going on. It was not pretty, it was not nice. But through so many life lessons and putting the effort in to become different. I didn't like being depressed. I didn't like being angry. I did not like feeling less than because I wanted to be that happy, carefree person, that is not in my personality code at all. I am more of the deep thinker, processor, overthinking, problematic person. But I started at the basics. Everything I could find on how to not live in my fear and how to let go of things that happened to me. And go from there. It was one step at a time, one reach at a time. I mean, I, I watched an Oprah show and I counted my blessing. So many blessings a day for so long, and I, over time I didn't even realize what I was doing anymore, but I was counting my blessings and I realized I have a lot of blessings. But you take'em for granted whenever you're only focusing on the dark, negative things happening. What, I don't have, what I wish I had the envy of someone else because they have better clothes, better shoes, better car, better opportunities. But I believe that everything is given to you to help you grow and become a bigger, stronger person because every bump in the road helps shape you who you are, what you think. How. What direction you head in your life and I have finally become the person where if something bad happens to me, I try to look at it as how to learn from it. How did I react? Okay. I went into the fear mode, I went into the analysis paralysis mindset. Over a while, I start realizing that, okay. I could get through this. It's okay. What is the lesson I was supposed to learn from this experience? Now with the whole cancer thing, that's a different realm of fear and I'm still working on how to not totally take a misstep, fall to my knees and try to fight to get back up. I will say when I have a biopsy taken most of the time, my week is very hard. My daughter knows not to come to me with major problems through those weeks because I can't handle it mentally. Sorry for her. But that's, that's where I'm at. But it's understanding that just because something broke or this struggle is here or that struggle, it's okay because when you get through it. And that's a big step. I try to get through it as fast as I can, deal with it, don't ignore it, keep moving. And then when I feel like I'm, I'm, I'm past it, I can look back and say, okay, because this happened, what changed my life? What lesson did I learn and how did I become better at processing it? Because I didn't ignore it. I didn't try to push it outta my brain, and I actually processed it as it went. This is a huge thing for me that I wasn't able to do years ago. I would act like it wasn't happening or I would just collapse mentally, emotionally, and figure out how to get through it. And at that point I was probably crawling on all like an army crawl, just dragging my body along with trying to live my life. Now I feel like I might be crawling on my knees those weeks, but I'm still moving. I'm still growing, I'm still learning. So everyone has to go through it their own way, but by processing it, dealing with it head on, it makes it for me a lot better. But. You have to figure out, pay attention to where you are emotionally and mentally when you're going through something, when you're trying to become better. Pay attention to yourself and how you feel, why you're doing it. Keep the motivation in front of you of why you're trying to stay more positive. Why? You are moving through your week like normal, even though the back of your head you're thinking and processing and planning for the worst case scenario, which is what I do. Because if you think the worst case scenario is not gonna happen that bad, so you'll be prepared for anything. That's my thinking process. The analysis paralysis mindset. It has gotten better, but it's still a work in progress. So what I'm trying to say, sorry, I'm like rambling and all over the place, but it's, you don't realize how far you've come, how much you have changed in those months or weeks or years that you've been working on this. It's a never ending project. For me, I always want to learn. I want to improve and expect no less than stellar out of myself. And I know I'm always gonna be a work in progress because I want the most outta myself One day. I wanna be able to. Have a struggle and just mentally it's like, okay, I can handle this. This is no problem. I'm good and my week doesn't have speed bumps all the way through it. Of the struggles of my thinking and my behavior. I wanna keep it a status quo of survival. So pretty much what I'm trying to explain to you is. Work on yourself. Understand like deep, think about who you are, what you stand for, and what you want to improve in your life. And it will probably be something you don't even realize is changing in you until someone notices or all of a sudden you behave different than you used to. You don't get angry you don't get triggered by what someone says about something. You know where you are, where you stand with that belief and that behavior, and you're okay. You feel a weight lifted off your shoulder because it was supposed to be done. You're not supposed to have them in your life. You don't have to suffer through their negative behavior anymore. And one day you'll wake up and you'll realize you're like, oh my gosh, that is fantastic. This is great. Look at that. I have become a whole different person. I have different behaviors and different thinking process, and that's what growth and change is all about. It's not a miraculous. Bing. I'm great. I learned all of this stuff. It's all in my head. I don't have to work at it anymore. Yeah, that's not legit. It's slow and steady wins the race and slow process. Keep reading those books. Keep listening to people that have been there, done that. Listen to how they do it. You don't have to expect yourself to be the exact same, the same timing, the same maneuvers. You figure it out as you go. Because I read a lot of books. I looked at it and I was like, I don't know if I got anything out of this book, but. I can say later down the road, it clicked, it retained in my brain, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, that's what that book meant. Okay, I, I understand it now. And the lesson was in there. It was just waiting for the right time for it to be needed. So go listen, learn, figure out who you are, what you wanna get better at, and work it. Have a great week. I'll see you later.