Is Toxic Positivity Blocking Your Next Level? Free Your Magic Challenge Day

Welcome to Day 1 of the Free Your Magic Challenge with Christine DeHerrera — your invitation to break free from what’s been keeping you stuck and step into your next level of creativity, clarity, and personal power. This isn’t just another motivational series. It’s a 5-day energetic reset designed to help you reconnect with your unique magic and take aligned action — even in the middle of chaos and collapse.

In this episode, we kick things off by setting a powerful intention and choosing the frequency you want to embody. Then we explore the sneaky saboteur that might be keeping you stuck in the old story: toxic positivity. Christine shares how her ability to “always look on the bright side” once kept her from making much-needed changes — and how recognizing this one pattern can unlock more freedom, authenticity, and momentum in your life and business.

✨ If you’ve been pretending things are fine when they’re not...
✨ If you’ve been stuck in old habits, rules, or relationships that no longer fit...
✨ If you’re ready to feel like you again...

This challenge is for you.
Tune in now and join Christine DeHerrera as the Free Your Magic Challenge begins.
Your next level is calling — and it starts today.

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Thank you for listening and just remember, you are the magic!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Free Your Magic Challenge
• 1:38 Setting Your Intention and Lens
• 4:51 Why Our Magic Needs Freeing
• 6:34 Toxic Positivity: The Hidden Magic Blocker
• 9:09 Identifying Toxic Positivity in Your Life
• 11:21 Challenge Wrap-Up and Tomorrow's Preview

Transcript

Christine DeHerrera: 0:00

Welcome to the Free Your Magic Challenge right here on the You Are the Magic podcast. I'm your host, Christine DeHerrera. I'm really excited to bring this challenge to you as we step into the month of September. 

What got me excited about doing a podcast challenge was I heard another podcast host talking about doing them and it sounded really, really fun. The idea is I give you good ideas that you can implement right away with a specific goal in mind. So the Free Your Magic Challenge is designed this week to help you step into that next level of energy and really see a difference in your day-to-day functioning as you are working towards your goals and all the fun things that you're trying to do in this very, very difficult time that we are in. 

Even though this is such a challenging time, there's so much work to be done on this planet and things that we're having to confront and deal with, and, at the same time, I feel like we've never been more poised to make such a great difference in the world and also have fun doing it. 

A big piece of what I've been missing is that sense of fun and joy, and to bring our magic into the world, we have to look at what's not actually working, which, if you're listening to this and you're an enthusiastic, positive person, it's easy to not want to look at those things. At least, that's the case for me. 

So for the next five days, we are going to look at different things that are holding our magic back, and just by becoming aware of them we can start to make positive changes. So let's get started with day one of our challenge. 

First things first. I want us to set an intention, the reason you want to do this challenge. What is your one big change you're looking to make in your life? Maybe it's a business goal you want to increase your revenue or increase your visibility, or maybe you want to ditch your entire offer suite and have brand new ways of working with your clients, or maybe you're ready to shift who you're working with. So, for this five-day challenge of bringing out your inner magic, what is your intention? My intention for this podcast challenge is that every day, you leave feeling excited and having learned one new idea that you can implement and start taking action, so that by the end of our five days together, you feel like you are starting to turn a corner and making progress towards your goals. So set an intention.

Christine DeHerrera: 2:36

Part two. I find it really useful to determine the lens you are looking through when you are setting a goal or, in this case, participating in this challenge. I like to use the words lens and value and frequency kind of interchangeably. So a lot of people historically have talked about values, work where you identify your core values, either for your life or for your business or in your relationships. You should do all of those things. That's really important and that is beyond the scope of what we're going to be doing here in this challenge. But I want you to think of a singular lens that you're looking through and that's where your value turns into the frequency. Do you want to be more joyful? Do you need to close a revenue gap in your business? What is the lens that you're looking through as you work through this program towards the intention that you've set?

Christine DeHerrera: 3:27

Using my example of creating this podcast challenge, I want this podcast challenge to be really fun. Then everything that I do on this podcast challenge needs to be through that lens. So if I decide I'm going to record these episodes by buckling down and sitting down and grinding them all out, I have lost the magic of the creative process because my lens was fun. That's what I mean by that. 

I want you to do that with why you're in this challenge and what your goal is and the person you're becoming through the change that we're making here. And you need to write these two things down: your intention and your lens, because those two things have to go together.

And I'd love for you to report back on that piece alone. You'll see at the top of the show notes that you can send me a text, so let me know how that's landing. If you want to include your intention and the lens that you're looking at your intention through, I would love to hear it. That would be really exciting and super fun for me, and you could also send me that information on Instagram, or you can go on my website and send me a note from there as well. I'd love to hear what you're doing and how this is landing.

Christine DeHerrera: 4:38

I call this challenge the Free Your Magic challenge because in our current society, we're almost always operating outside our magic, and here is why we're doing so much work through our heads. Everything is through logic and reasoning and productivity, because that's how we've been trained and in our culture, that keeps us really safe. And that leads us to the next reason our magic needs to be freed. Our subconscious mind that makes us take almost all of our actions is only concerned with our safety and keeping us from being harmed or destroyed. A huge part of that is fitting into our culture, which means making decisions only from logic and looking at how everyone else is making decisions.

Christine DeHerrera: 5:22

And in the business world it's like oh, I listened to this expert and she said do these five things. Or I signed up for this course and the host of the course said this is the right way to do things. And so we start following those rules, but that, inherently, will dampen down our own magic, our own way of doing things. And if you've listened to any of the previous episodes of this podcast, you know that I think our magic lies in our energy and then the way we would strategize for using our energy. So what works for someone else may not work for you, because it's not your natural way of being. And that is what got me really excited about doing the Free Your Magic Challenge, because when I created my own business, I didn't follow anybody's advice. And not because by nature, I'm a rebel, but I was just doing the things that I knew how to do, and I know that's why it worked. If I had set out to start a publicity business, it wouldn't have worked for me. The whole point of this is to go your own way, and to do that, we have to start looking at that unconscious conditioning that's holding us in place. That is why I picked for our first topic today: toxic positivity.

Christine DeHerrera: 6:39

One of my personal favorite ways to keep my magic locked up is toxic positivity. Now, this is not to be confused with my natural enthusiasm, my natural effervescence, my natural positivity. Those are all true-to-me traits, and I can attribute a lot of my success to this. 

Now, when I was a young girl, I had serious things going on in my life. When I was 11, my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor and by the time I was 16, he had passed away. And my uncle was sending us, this is way back in the day, sending us Tony Robbins cassette tapes. And so I learned from Tony to reframe everything, which is a freaking fantastic skill, and I am so good at it that I was able to reframe absolutely everything.

Christine DeHerrera: 7:28

And, yes, this helped when I was a kid going through my father's illness and his death, and allowed me to work with all sorts of interesting people in my publicity and advertising business. And that's where toxic positivity really reared its head for the first time for me. Because I was so good at reframing and always looking on the bright side and always seeing the good in people, which are all so awesome, but it's what led me to keep clients that were no longer a fit. It's what allowed me to keep all kinds of relationships alive in my life long, like years long, maybe even decades, long past the point of their real, true expiration date. 

And so reframing and looking for opportunities to see the good is good, but being so good at it meant that I didn't make changes that needed to be made. And so, I wonder for you, do you see any patterns of toxic positivity in your life where, instead of addressing how you actually feel, like I'm really angry, or my boundary was violated, or I need to switch things up because this no longer fits who I am, and instead of feeling those three feelings and then taking action to make change, instead you go back and you look for what is working. 

Well, what about that boundary? Could I do differently? What about that situation? Can I make it work because they mean well? That's what I want you to look at today. That positivity and that ability to see the good is actually becoming a toxic trait. Where are you overriding your feelings and looking on the bright side and being optimistic instead of saying this is something that actually needs to change? 

And if you can't see this, which if you're so good at this like me, you might not see this in your life, right? And so another question you could ask yourself, looking at the course of your day, or over the last week, where did I feel really bad about something that I immediately pushed through it? Instead of just sitting with the actual feeling that was in your body and then reframing it into how you could work through it and be positive and use your positivity as your armor?

Christine DeHerrera: 9:44

Another area you can look at if you're having trouble identifying this toxic trait is when you make an excuse for something. Oh well, that client called me on the weekend and I answered and oh, I shouldn't have done that. Or she really needed to talk to me. It was really important. Whatever the case might be, where are you making an excuse instead of saying oh, use, instead of saying oh, I really did not explain those boundaries to my client, or I did explain them and she pushed through them anyway. And maybe it's not a client, maybe it's your friend or your child or your significant other or your mother or your father. Look at those areas.

Christine DeHerrera: 10:23

And then the last sneaky way that you can look at toxic positivity and look for where this might be functioning in your life is this: If you know, like you know, like you know that something should be different in your life, and you say to yourself, well, at least it's not blah. For example, the friend that never follows through with making plans and you say, well, she's just so busy, she just, you know, has all these hard things going on, but she never returns my calls and she's never there for me.

Christine DeHerrera: 10:57

And I'm always there, but hey, at least I have a friend, or at least she's not the kind of friend that's talking behind my back. So look for those sneaky ways that toxic positivity might be just coming in and making your life seem charmed. 

And it is charmed, but also how, if you addressed that issue, would make your life freaking amazing. 

I hope that you enjoyed this first day of our Free the Magic challenge and look for the sneaky ways that toxic positivity is actually keeping you from making change, so you can step into this next version of yourself that the world and you so desperately need. Tomorrow I have another, what I think is a fun one, and so you'll just have to tune in to find out what it is and, in the meantime, remember you are the magic.