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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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who you are, who you believe yourself to be, how you got there, how you are willing to dive in, dig deep, how you are willing to be out in the world, how you are willing to stay out in the world.
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And that gets us to that place, wanting the self that we have so that even when that negative self-talk
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comes up, we can start to get to the core of the information that s there.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome back to episode 355 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked by Apple as one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts and the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize in convenient topics.
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that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs or Spotify to get started.
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In case you missed it, earlier in the week, I interviewed my friend, Dr. John Deloney, who s a best-selling author, mental health expert, and host of the very popular Dr. John Deloney Show.
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For over two decades, Johns immersed himself in research, experienced personal growth, and compassionately guided countless others towards reclaiming their lives from the grips of anxiety.
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The key to this transformation lies in the power of choices, six essential choices that pave the way for a non-anxious life.
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These choices that he s outlined in his new book, Building a Non-Anxious Life, are not easy, but they are the stepping stones towards a brighter future, enabling you to rise above challenges and find peace amidst chaos.
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I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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They go such a long way for bringing more people into the PassionStruck community.
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And if you loved today s episode or the one with Dr. John Deloney, we would appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and family.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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In today s episode, we have an extraordinary guest who s on a mission to help us break free from the relentless cycle of self-doubt and negative self-talk.
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Let s face it, we all grapple with that inner voice that tells us we re not good enough, not smart enough, or not talented enough.
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It s a loop that can leave us feeling stuck and disconnected from our true selves.
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But what if there s a way to shift this toxic self-talk for good?
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Our guest today, Katie Horwich, is a writer, speaker, mindset coach, and women s empowerment activist.
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She s the founder of WANT, Women Against Negative Talk, a platform dedicated to empowering women to move forward in their lives fearlessly by shifting their negative self-talk patterns.
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Katie is also the host of the WANTcast, the Women Against Negative Talk podcast.
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Katie s latest book, which launched earlier this week, Want Yourself, offers a revolutionary approach to transform your self-talk patterns in a deep and lasting way.
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It s not just about speaking nicely to yourself.
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It s about rewriting the stories you tell yourself at the core.
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In today s episode, we ll delve into the essence of self-talk, the power of self-love, and the practical steps you can take to make this transformation last in the face of real life challenges.
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We ll explore concepts like truth maintenance, plan freak out, and the fearless equation
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all aimed at helping you unearth the strength within you that s been there all along.
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Katie s wisdom and compassion shine through as she shares her personal journey and stories that will resonate with anyone seeking to break free from self-doubt.
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With mental health awareness more crucial than ever, Want Yourself provides a provocative blueprint for lasting change.
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It guides you on a journey to become fluent in an inner language that nurtures self-love and empowers you to embrace who you truly are.
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Join us as we embark on a transformative conversation with Katie Horwich about shifting the narrative of self-talk and discovering the path to wanting yourself.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so ecstatic today to welcome Katie Horwich, Passion Struck.
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Welcome, Katie.
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Thank you so much for having me, John.
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I m so pumped to be here.
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As I was reading your book, which is titled Want Yourself, which we re going to discuss in a bit, I was so enamored with it because you and I have so many similar thinkings about so many different topics.
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So I can t wait to explore this interview with you.
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Katie, I understand you grew up as you describe it, thinking big.
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And I read an article where you described yourself as a sporadic yet impassioned journal writer.
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Case in point, your bio in the fifth grade journal read that you wanted to be a writer, actress, singer, model, artist, and teacher.
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And it s amazing because so many of those things you have accomplished in your life.
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It s normal to want to accomplish big goals, but what is the problem when we want them now?
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Well, I love that you referenced that.
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I think if I was even to go into more of my journals, there were probably 12 other things that I could have mentioned there.
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But yeah, I wanted to be many things all at once.
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And as I was growing up, as I think many people grew up, I was asked, of course, what do you want to be when you grow up?
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And usually the subtext of that question is what is the one thing that you want to be and the one label you want to have when you are an adult?
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A few things can happen, or at least I can say happened for me with that.
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I was someone who wanted, like you said, many things.
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And because people would say, what do you want to be when you grew up?
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Because of that subtext, I thought, okay, well, I can t really toggle back and forth between these things.
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If I m going to do it, I m going to do it all at once.
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Because if you re told you have to be one thing, then you figure out how you can do all of these things all at once because you only have this
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one chance.
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And that can lead to not only so much overwhelm, but doing a lot of things to a portion of their potential, right?
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Someone once said to me, if you re good for everybody, then you re great for no one.
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So I think sometimes what can happen for people who love many things and want to do many things, especially if they have to do with making an impact on someone else, everything can feel so immediate that we get stopped in our tracks before we even begin.
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Yeah, that is so true that we end up wanting all of this, that then when we want it, we don t even know where the best place to start is.
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And so we end up being stuck because we re paralyzed and we don t know what direction to go.
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Yeah, a hundred percent.
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And then we get all of the self-talk that comes along with that, right?
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Which is my area of, let s say expertise, but really area of curiosity is why we talk to ourselves and why we think about ourselves the way we do.
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When we get that sense of overwhelm and we get stopped in our tracks, we don t feel like we really have any which way to go.
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Then we start to develop feelings about that.
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And then even more than that, we start to develop feelings about the feelings, right?
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I m not motivated enough.
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I must not be smart enough.
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I m not good enough.
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Imposter syndrome.
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The list just goes on.
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And so it becomes this seemingly never ending negative self-talk loop that we just spin round and round in.
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I m glad you brought that up because it was fascinating for me as I was preparing for this to learn how your self-image was deeply impacted for a significant part of your life.
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Your journey led you to found WANT, which is Women Against Negative Talk, a platform that s dedicated to empowerment.
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Can you share some of the pivotal moments or perhaps the realization that inspired you to take this transformational step?
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It came from a very personal place and then became way more than personal.
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And what I mean by that is that I struggled growing up and then through my teens, early 20s with a host of
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eating disorders and body-related disorders, which anyone who has gone through any of that knows that it s not really about the eating and the body, right?
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These are mental health issues.
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But that was not a conversation that was happening at the time.
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So I have always been a highly sensitive, highly attuned to myself type of person.
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And I ve actually always had a lot of confidence, but the problem is that when I was growing up, there was this narrative that confidence was synonymous with narcissism or vanity, being so stuck up.
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And so because I had this sort of self-knowing, I also knew that it didn t feel good to just let that confidence go.
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And so I ended up toggling between
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pretending on the outside and knowing my truth on the inside.
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And that led to me feeling such a lack of a sense of grounded self and control later on in my life when I think a lot of people are starting to enter adulthood and figure out their place in the world.
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So cut to my early twenties, I saw a commercial and it was one of the first
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body-positive commercials, if you will, out in mainstream media.
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We take this for granted now, like the conversation that we have around mental health and body image in 2023, but back in 2007, that was not happening.
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And so I knew that there was something up with me, but the way that these conversations were going at the point in time when I was experiencing this, I was like, I have to turn this
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high proprioception, high self-awareness that I have, and I need to use it to help myself out of whatever I am going through.
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And so I saw this commercial, which basically the thesis statement of it was, love yourself, you re wonderful, look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you re awesome.
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And I thought two things at the same time.
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One of them was, oh my gosh, this is revolutionary.
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I ve never seen or heard anything like this in my life, especially directed toward women.
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And then the other thought was, well, what happens when I can t get there?
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what happens when I can t just tell myself something nice and believe it?
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And I started to get angry that I only had this limited set of tools to work with.
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And I thought, I wish that there was a place where people, particularly women, could go to get tips, tools, motivation, inspiration to shift their self-talk.
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And then in that sort of
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lightbulb moment, if you will, in my early 20s.
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I thought, I am going to start that.
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I m going to create this, I think I called it an awareness campaign at the time.
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I m going to create this awareness campaign and it s going to be called WANT, Women Against Negative Talk.
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I ended up creating a website.
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I sent out an email blast to everybody that I knew.
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This is the days when I think Facebook was really the primary social media.
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So this was
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definitely pre what we are seeing right now as far as Instagram and online branding and marketing and awareness campaigns, if you will, go.
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But after that first year, it really started to fizzle out because what I realized in hindsight was that I had created what I so needed at the time.
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And I was basically creating
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from my place of wanting to heal.
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So my wound, if you will, versus creating from my scar.
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So I was feeling like I don t even know what I know and what I don t know.
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And so I had this passion to lead and to help other people, but really I had to go through the journey over those next seven or eight years or so after it fizzled out to really not only work on my own journey and my own self,
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But I also had to see how this was affecting other people beyond myself.
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Because I think a problem that a lot of us can get into is we want to do things that we want to give to either ourselves right now or our younger selves.
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And then when we get to a place of
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Well, I m good.
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I actually don t need this anymore, or I don t want to talk about my younger self anymore.
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Sometimes we can lose our grounding in that thing that we felt so passionate about, because it doesn t apply to a greater whole.
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When it came back into
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let s say my consciousness back in 2014, I had experienced so many of those things that you mentioned in that early journal entry.
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I had left a career in acting and musical theater.
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I got into editorial and journalism, this sort of emerging wellness and mindset.
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ecosystem that was evolving.
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I had started to not only develop the professional skill set to be able to sustain what is now want and what is now this platform.
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I also got really solid in both what I knew
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and what I didn t know.
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And so I was able to reach out and whether it was conduct research or reach out to experts, I was able to sustain this thing once I decided this is what I want to build in a way that was actually sustainable beyond a
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fleeting moment, because at that time, even when we fast forwarded into 2014, I still did not see self-talk being talked about anywhere that I could find that was really diving in and digging deep into the nuances of why these conversations we have with ourselves about ourselves exist.
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And then moreover, how do we do this in a way that works for us?
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And I m glad that you brought up your work in front of a mirror because I ve had a number of guests on the podcast who ve talked about Louise Hayes and her mirror work regimen and how it s completely transformed their lives.
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I remember
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A long time ago, I had this woman on named Saskia Lightstar and Saskia was out there always wanting to be the life of the party because she thought that was what brought her fulfillment.
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But inside she had body issues.
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She had self-esteem issues.
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She didn t love herself.
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And then she ended up developing breast cancer.
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And as she was coming out of her successful treatment for it, she began doing that mirror work.
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and just telling herself that she was worthy of living a life that she wanted, that she was worthy of self-love, that she was worthy of being her authentic self.
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And she said over a period of nine to 10 months, it started to take root and has completely changed her life.
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That s amazing.
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And I also want to say that
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I am all for positive affirmations.
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I am all for looking at yourself at the mirror and saying things to yourself.
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But the research actually does show that there needs to be a grain at least of belief in the things that we say in order for it to sink in.
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So I hope that through my work in the book and Want Yourself, through Want, I m looking to
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help add to people s toolkit and build a more robust toolkit versus saying, here s a hammer.
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Now you should expect to do everything with it.
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Hammers are important.
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If you want to build a house, sometimes the hammer is going to be the most important thing.
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Sometimes you re going to need a wrench.
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Sometimes you re going to need
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a concrete spreader.
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You re going to need multiple tools.
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So I really hope that anybody who s listening right now can start to at least get curious about the tools that they already have and then say, all right, great.
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What other tools?
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It s really exciting when you start to view it that way.
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Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
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And I wanted to go back again to your childhood just for a second before we move forward.
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And it was interesting because Katie, your perspective on never experiencing that childhood sense of being wild and free and unaffected by society is unique.
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Can you share more about this early experience and how it shaped your journey?
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So as I say, like you just so wonderfully stated, I say in the book that a lot of people talk about when you were a kid and you were wild and free and without a care in the world and they talk about getting back to that time and to that child.
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For me,
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I never experienced being that child.
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And if I did, not only do I not have any memory of it, but that is nothing that I have been told by the people who experienced me when I was a child.
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I was always a big thinker, deep thinker, deep
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feeler.
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I didn t cry a lot as a baby.
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I obviously cried for normal baby things as we as humans are learning to literally use our voice, but I was someone who I even remember just to give a super specific example.
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I remember having playdates with my friends and we d be in my room and we d be playing with dolls
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And all of a sudden they d say something to me, and I d realized that I had actually stopped playing with them, and I was building a house for my Barbies in the corner, and I was narrating the Barbies  voices in my head versus out loud, because I was like, well, if I m saying their voices out loud, that s obviously fake.
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But the world in my head felt so robust and so nuanced.
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And I felt like I was able to communicate in my head in the way that I wanted to communicate and maybe didn t have words as a first grader or a second grader.
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And so I really was someone who was
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very grounded in herself from an early age.
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And that s not to say that I wasn t super social, which I was, or I didn t play with my friends, which I did.
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However, I always felt like
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I was leading maybe the conversations in a direction that people weren t able to engage with at my age, that I felt like I fit in better with my parents  friends.
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I feel like I was always a 30-something in a three-year-old s body.
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Well, how did that then lead you to become what you describe as a professional noticer?
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And what is a professional noticer?
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And what have you noticed the most about people who are seeking some sort of change?
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So professional noticer, it s about what, to me,
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And it s also about what you feel.
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So it s the connections that you make.
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I got really good at reading body language, about figuring out subtext.
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And this isn t something that I, thinking back on it, that I did from a state of, okay, well, I need to do this, or I m not going to be loved.
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This is just how my brain worked.
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When people would talk about kids being a certain way, it very rarely resonated with me because I was like, well, but I don t think like that, or I don t see that.
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And I not only was this way, but I loved being this way because I was able to be very easily, I don t want to say excited or entertained, but the world felt like it was so open to so many possibilities because there was so much going on at all times.
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And I felt as if
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I was able to see that, and I was able to feel it, and I was able to have conversation, a monologue about it in my head.
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And I think that really was part of what made me feel and believe that I could be and could do all of these things because I thought,
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How could I not?
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This world is so big.
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How can I just be one thing when there is so much life to live out there?
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And the way to answer your question, that sort of started to impact me as I got older and I started to do the work that I do now.
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is I started to realize that I had, at one point I felt like it was a little bit of a burden, but I ve started to realize that it really is a gift.
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I ve started to realize that I have that sort of chip in my brain
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And that s not a chip that everybody has.
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And if I am able to help people get curious and not give them answers, but help ask better questions, I can be sometimes that translator, if you will, between people and the world.
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And that s not to say that there aren t a lot of people who do have that sort of chip, so to speak in their brain, because there are a lot of people.
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I am not a unique case here.
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However, what ends up happening a lot of times is we get these messages from our community, our media, our society, our world, that can make us feel like the way that we are.
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is not the way that we are supposed to doing air quotes supposed to be out in the world and so we can start to ignore or suppress that part of ourselves, or when it starts to pop up because it s a very real part of ourselves, we can start to
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develop a negative response to it that leads to that sort of self-questioning, self-loathing, imposter syndrome.
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I hope to help people who maybe don t have that chip again be that middle person, and then the people who do, help them feel self-trusting enough to tap into that again.
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I m going to go a little bit deeper on that because in your prologue, you write that we live in a culture that s largely engineered both consciously and subconsciously by conversations and campaigns and what s conceded as par for the course.
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to discourage us from being the person we know we re meant to be, the person we re put on earth to be, but forget to tend to along the journey. 
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Which I love that quote because I agree with what you re saying.
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And I have a way that I like to approach it where I say we wear a mask of pretense or we walk around so many of us wearing a disguise of who our authentic self is because we re trying to conform to what society tells us we should be.
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What ends up happening is we then go about our days, our weeks, our months, not being authentic in who we re supposed to be.
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How do you think doing so ends up creating an intentional cycle of self-harm?
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Oh, what a great question.
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I love that you brought up costume of pretense.
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That is such great language.
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And I think really gets to the core of how we get to this place where we don t even realize that we ve been building all along.
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So let s just take a phrase like,
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Fake it till you make it.
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That s probably a phrase that many people who are listening to this podcast have heard of, or at least are familiar with, especially when it comes to confidence in yourself, in the workplace, in relationships, whatever, all of them, take your pick.
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The thing with faking it till you make it is that it is built on a base of
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faking.
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So it s to use your words, you put on your confidence costume during the day, you go out into the world, and you are pretending to be someone that you re not.
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Then when you come home, you take that costume off.
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And you can feel like
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Wait a second, what did I just do?
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Or you can start to go down that hyper-analytical trail of retracing your steps to see if you were believable enough.
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And then even if you are not someone who ends up doing that, if you are not a chronic overthinker like I am, what ends up happening is you become dependent on that costume of pretense, right?
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That confidence costume, that faking it.
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And life will keep lifing.
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And the thing with a costume is if you think about a costume, usually you are wearing costume to play
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a character.
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And if you re playing a character, then you wanna get your lines right.
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So what happens when you get into a situation where you are thrown for a loop or there s something that happens that feels really emotionally close to the heart and is really affecting you?
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If you have been building that sense of self based on that faking or that sense of wearing a costume, if you will, then
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that can make a hard moment even harder because you don t know what you would do.
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And it s not because you are a bad person or you re ill-equipped to do something.
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To boil it down to simplest terms, it s habits.
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It s the habit that you ve built.
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And I really, again, sometimes people are able to fake it till they make it, but I really stress to people that is really only possible
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if you ve got that base of trust and truth already inside.
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Because like we talked about, in order to take yourself out into the world and speak in a more positive, more proactive language, you ve got to believe it first.
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It s really about believability.
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In your book, Want Yourself, and I want to say the title so that the audience remembers it.
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The book comes out in October, which is Mental Health Month, and mental health is such a critical topic today.
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How do you see your book contributing to the conversation about mental health and well-being?
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Oh, what a great question.
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There was just some article that was written that was saying that we as a society, especially here in the United States, we are more familiar with therapy and mental health than we have ever been.
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And what the article was basically saying is, so why are we all still feeling so bad?
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Maybe not all, but why are many of us still feeling so awful?
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And I think that when I wrote this book, like we talked about, it came from a place of
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Being frustrated for a really long time that we were being given such a limited tool set, and especially with social media now there s a whole subset of social media posts that really rely on what s called therapy speak and.
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can make these really nuanced concepts this umbrella phrase and so people are using terms in the ways that they actually weren t intended to be used.
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And I think that two things happen.
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First of all,
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are people who can get so confused by that language because it feels really clinical and you need to have a breadth of knowledge behind you in order to understand it.
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So people are like, I m not going to engage in this because this just feels like way too much for me.
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And then there are also people who can look at
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these really nuanced terms that they are being told to believe are these big umbrella terms, and these bite-sized social media posts that sort of remind me of, in the 80s and 90s, those magazine spreads, remember, where it would be like, eat this, not that, or dress this way, not this way.
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They can see something that s, say this, not that, and think, all right, cool, I m gonna say this, not that.
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And I looked at it from my over a decade in this work about shifting yourself talk I was like it is so much deeper than that.
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And also, it is complicated work, but it s not neither impossible work or.
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hard work.
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It just needs to be accessible for people.
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And especially heading into this Mental Health Awareness Month, I really hope that this book can provide some language that people can relate to while also giving them some of the science and some of the studies that are really important to know about and can also help them get back to the personalization
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of these tools and figuring out that there was never anything wrong with them.
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And if none of these tools that they ve seen on social media have worked for them, there s nothing wrong with them that they haven t worked for them.
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I really hope that this book can help provide a base for people
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to take a level of self-trust with them out into the world to figure out what works for them when it comes to their own mental health.
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Because mental health is just like physical health.
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It is actually one in the same because our brains are a part of our bodies.
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And just like one exercise routine or one workout regimen, it s gonna work for one person.
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It s not gonna work for everybody.
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And it s just like that with mental health.
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So I hope that this book can help give people guidance when it comes to figuring out their own protocols, their own tools, and how they feel about the way they feel.
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That really is a concerning dilemma that we have in society right now.
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And I can t tell you how many psychologists, psychiatrists, behavior scientists, doctors I ve had on this program who all say the same thing, and that is mental health issues are rising across the board, across every category, around the entire world.
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But the most alarming thing is that they re occurring at an even faster rate for those who are adolescents, those who are young adults, that that to me is so worrisome.
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We have so many youngsters now who are coming up in this toxic
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achievement culture or feeling like they have to be perfect or something else and all of a sudden they re losing all sense of significance in their life which is I think leading to many more of them feeling even at a young age that they re hopeless or that they re experiencing loneliness or leads to the rise of suicides even in that younger
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quartile that are out there.
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And it s something we really, especially given it s mental health awareness month, need to put focus on to help people, not just in the United States, but globally deal with these issues.
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So I m glad that you brought that up and your book is going to be a great help for people who are experiencing this negative self-talk as a way to help them look at their mental health issues, perhaps in a different way.
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Thank you so much for saying that.
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I really hope so.
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And I don t claim to have all of the answers.
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I actually say in the book that it s not a how-to book, it s a you-know-how-to book.
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You use the word hopelessness, and I think
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especially now, there s so much that is going on that is swirling around us that we can feel that sense of hopelessness and that loss of agency, if you will.
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One of the things that I m most passionate about is helping people get that back and build that from a grounded place, right?
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So not a place of
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fear or scarcity or clinging to something, but making that strong sense of self and that sense of agency something that is so deeply embedded in who they are.
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that the natural question ends up being over time, because we were just talking about habits, so it s habit building, it is a practice, so you have to practice.
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Over time, people can naturally go, okay, so now how can I be proactive, not reactive?
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What can I do right now in this moment, however big or small, to be proactive with my life, with the world, with whatever is coming up?
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things are scary out there.
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And when we act from a place of reactivity, so if you think of reactive, you re pulling back, you re pulling on something, you re responding to something as in fighting against something versus fighting for something that you believe in.
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I think that really is going to be work that can change us on individual levels and change us on a larger, more macro level.
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I m glad you brought up those tiny moments because as I was reading the book and doing research, I saw that you and I share a very similar philosophy and I think it s something that we should unpack for the listeners because it s a core part of this show.
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I, Hugh, do not believe that it s the big sweeping moments in our life that define us, but it s rather these everyday occurrences and the micro choices that we make that determine who we are.
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And a great analogy that I ll use for this is you and I are both writers.
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As I think about linking one paragraph or one portion of a story to another, we typically use transition points.
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And I think our life is like a transition point.
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We have some of these macro moments that many people think define us, but if you think of this as a person who s preparing to run a marathon,
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It s not that marathon itself that defines the success.
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It s the hours and hours of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual work that they re doing to prepare themselves to run that marathon that culminate in how that run is accomplished.
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And I think our life
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in so many ways is the same way.
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How do you think these micro-moments, as you call them, when they re presented to us form and become some of our biggest
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life choices.
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I love that you used that phrase transition moments, because I also think of things in terms of, okay, well, one thing has to get us from point A to point B. So what is it?
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And it s funny that you mentioned a marathon because I ran the New York marathon last year.
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It was my first marathon.
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I am not going to pretend that I am this mega marathon person.
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That experience
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like you said, was not just about the marathon, and it actually wasn t also just about the training.
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Because a lot of people say you can t just go out and run a marathon, it s about all the training that you do beforehand, which is 10,000% true.
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It s also about getting clear on how you want to feel after.
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Anyone who s run a marathon or done anything that is physically challenging like that, they will know that the recovery period is a real thing.
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And so bringing it back to the micro moments, me preparing for the marathon was not just about the months of training that I did and the spreadsheets and everything.
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It was about the micro moment about what I had for dinner.
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the night before, or how much sleep I got the day before, or what I had scheduled in the day or weeks after, because that was all going to inform the story that I would tell myself and believe later on of how the marathon went.
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It s all about these little things.
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I really tried in the book to
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keep the stories that I told as specific and hopefully relatable as possible.
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I actually didn t want to put in too many like big wild aha moments.
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I wanted it to be things like noticing a bird that s sitting in the corner by your parked car and wondering what s up with that bird.
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or a teacher when you were young saying something to you in a specific tone and that really affecting you, maybe not really realizing why it affected you, or a moment where you think something is going to be one thing
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and then it isn t, and the things that you notice in that moment.
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So a lot of times, like you said, we believe that our life is built in these big high highs or these low lows, and those definitely affect us.
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But the way that we are going to be able to navigate those moments, because they feel so emotionally heavy, if you will,
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is by getting curious in the seemingly everyday moments in our lives.
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Because then when those bigger moments happen, we will have already built that base and that habit of curiosity to help us navigate those times that sometimes seem to, I think, make up a word here, un-navigatable.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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And since you brought up the stories that you tell, I think it might be a good time for you to go through one of those.
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I m not going to pick one from the beginning of the book.
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I m going to pick one from further into the book.
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Oh, I m excited.
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Can you discuss your self-proclaimed period of bad luck when you were in your early to mid twenties and how your multi-year car metaphor relates to the confidence myth?
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Oh my gosh, I am so happy that you picked this one, by the way.
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This is one that there was a point in time when I was writing the book, I was like, do I include this?
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Because this seems almost too
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every day and too normal, if you will.
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And so the fact that you just picked this was very validating, but again, I wanted to pick that because I think this is a perfect example.
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When I was in my early twenties, I had multiple years of what I thought was really bad luck when it came to cars.
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This, in going back and going to the beginning of this, really started when I was in my late teens.
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At the time I was acting, and if you re an actor, many times you re also called in for modeling work as well, because those industries are very intertwined.
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And I was coming home from
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a modeling gig, which I felt all different kinds of ways about, right?
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Because I had feelings about how I was supposed to be out in the world, how people viewed me versus how I viewed myself.
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I had to go on set and be confident, but don t be too confident, because then you re full of yourself.
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And who are you to even question anything?
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You re modeling.
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You ve got this whole glitzy, glamorous life, which
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is not a glamorous life, by the way.
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I had this whole narrative about it already worked up.
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And when I was driving home from that gig, I was thinking about a moment that had happened that day.
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I won t give away the whole story, but my body was commented on by one of the people on the shoot.
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And I was ruminating about that as I was driving home.
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Then I was snapped back into the moment when I heard this car zigzagging behind me on the freeway in Los Angeles.
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And I tried to get away and this person ended up hitting my car.
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I spun into the center divider.
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It was
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the most horrible car accident I ve ever been in.
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And in that moment, the comment that the person said didn t matter anymore.
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My life mattered.
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And I struggled to get back in a car and get back to driving for a while after that.
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And after that, I was super, super tentative.
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I would slow down slower than you needed to.
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I would stop longer than you needed to.
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And I had at the same time, as many of us do in our late teens, I got a couple dings in my car.
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But because I had this big moment and I wasn t solid in myself, I was like, all right, well, Katie s a really bad driver.
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I must be a really bad driver.
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And people in my life would joke about it.
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And because that joke already had a seed of belief within myself, those jokes were like validation to me.
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And so over those years into my 20s I got a new car and then the car that I got, which we got for safety options ended up breaking down and blowing its transmission and I got another car and then it got rear ended, and then I got a rental car and then that rental car got rear ended and then I
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parked the other rental car on the street and then I got my car back and all of the hubcaps got stolen and I was like what is going on with me and my car here?
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This happened again not in the moment but in hindsight and as I started to
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get myself into different career paths, into different friend groups, I started to actually build my life for myself.
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I realized, not to say that everything in life is a metaphor, but if we re talking about metaphors, because we re both writers and we love figurative language, if I think about my internal GPS, if you will, at the time,
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I had no idea where I was going.
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And if I did have an idea of where I was going, I did not know how to get there for myself because I was still following so many rules that I thought that I needed to follow.
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Again, if we re going with a metaphor here, of course,
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my main mode of transportation was breaking down.
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I m not saying that everything is a metaphor, everything happens for a reason, but I do really like, as two writers speaking here, I really like these sort of literary devices that we can call on in our everyday life to help us get curious about what is happening
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in the moment.
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I think it s something that is really cool.
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And thank goodness that we are humans and not robots.
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And we have this complex web of thinking and feeling.
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And so we re able to do that and make these different connections.
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Because so many times we think that we need to turn off that part of ourselves.
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But if we turn off
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the hard parts of ourselves, or the parts that feel too overthinky, too overfeely, then it becomes really hard to access those parts when they can actually serve us and when it matters.
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most of all.
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Thank you so much for sharing that because I think it is so true.
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Sometimes we say no to life-changing opportunities because of the confidence gaps that we create through our negative self-talk.
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When, if we would just change that dynamic, we would be so much better prepared to understand when those moments happen and understand when to say yes to life-altering circumstances that come our way.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I m going to go back to the beginning of the book because there s a couple of core things here that I think would really benefit the listeners.
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The first is you write that shifting your self-talk is a two-part process.
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Part one is shifting yourself.
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Part two is shifting your talk.
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And as it happens, most of us are normally told to jump to the talk part, especially if we re struggling with negative self-talk.
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What are the problems with that advice?
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The book is called Want Yourself, Not Want Your Talk.
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And the book hopefully gives people this blueprint and this guidebook to get to that core of the self part of self-talk.
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Because the talk part is symptomatic, right?
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What it is a symptom of TBD, but in order to find out what
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it is a symptom of, you ve got to look at the core of who you are, who you believe yourself to be, how you got there, how you are willing to dive in, dig deep, how you are willing to be out in the world, how you are willing to stay out in the world.
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And that gets us to that place of like the book title suggests,
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Wanting the self that we have so that even when that negative self-talk comes up, because like I just said, we are humans, it will come up.
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we can start to get to the core of the information that s there.
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Because I also say that self-talk isn t inherently good or bad.
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It s information.
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And it s what we do with that information that informs what we do next and next and next.
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And it s important to be able to have that
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core self that you can stand by, whether in the moment you like who that is or don t like who that is, you believe it and you have that unconditional love and trust for it, so that then you can say, okay, how can I be proactive, not reactive?
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What is the information that s behind the words that I m saying in any of the moments, not just negative?
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Okay.
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Thank you for explaining that.
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And another core concept you bring up is called the planned freak out.
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Can you describe what it is and how it can help individuals navigate challenging moments in their life?
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Oh, yeah.
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So the planned freak out, that is also something that comes a bit later in the book.
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I believe that I put it in the stay yourself section of the book because
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Staying yourself is about what happens when life continues lifing and stuff hits the fan and you re thrown for a loop.
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How do you stay yourself in those moments?
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So the planned freakout is exactly what it sounds like.
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It is making a plan to freak out.
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It is planning to freak out before you do and losing it so that you can find it again.
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I don t know if I can curse on this podcast, so people can fill in the blanks there.
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So the planned freak out is an exercise that actually my husband and I developed and we developed it when we first moved across the country to New York city.
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So we re both Southern California kids, by the way, both lived in Southern California for the
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all of our adulthood, and me for my entire life.
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And we realized that we hadn t given ourselves kind of the space to process this big life change and we could start to feel that
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discomfort that I think that many of us feel before we have maybe what we ll call a meltdown, you can start to feel that building inside of you.
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So we went to a hotel and we got a fancy cocktail and sat on couches because that s what felt really fun to do.
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And we took two notebooks, we each took a notebook and we opened it up and we basically brain dumped everything that we both hate
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and dislike.
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And we put those in two separate categories.
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And we set a timer.
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And then after that,
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We flipped a page, and if people want and they have room underneath, they can draw a line underneath.
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And we wrote, so what are you going to do about it?
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And so that allowed us space to give room to all of these thoughts and these feelings and these experiences that we were having, and then redirected to, okay, so what now?
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And then the beauty of it, even after that, is that you then, in a planned freakout, what we did, and now what I tell people to do when I guide people through their own planned freakouts, which is something that I love doing, because it s been so effective for me, you turn a page and you do the same exact process, but you do it with love.
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Because a lot of times, and we talked about this fleetingly at the very beginning of our conversation, a lot of times we are so
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focused on the minutia of what we are fighting against or what we don t want.
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But we actually haven t given a lot of space to what we love, what we like, what we re fighting for, and what we do want.
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So you do that process, you write out everything you love and everything you like, and then you do the exact same thing and you write, so what am I going to do about it?
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And that is a way to get grounded within yourself before sort of everything feels like it s so dizzying around you that you don t know which way is up.
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And also starts to give you the bare bones of an action plan.
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And it s not about writing out that entire action plan in that moment, but it s about giving yourself
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the knowledge that A, you are on your own side, that, hey, self, we ve got this, we re good.
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And here s some places that we can start and some things that we can focus on beyond this thing that feels so impossible to not focus on.
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It actually isn t impossible.
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We just maybe need to take a couple extra steps to see what the other possibilities were.
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Well, I love that answer, Katie.
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So thank you so much for going through that.
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And for the audience, I wanted to just explain a little bit about Katie s book.
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It consists of five different sections.
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Section one is You Need a Self.
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Section two is Find Yourself.
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Section three is Be Yourself.
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Section four, which you just mentioned, is Stay Yourself.
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And section five is want yourself.
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I m going to go to section five because you end the book by describing how the word fearless has become one of your anchor words.
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Can you discuss the fear to faith ratio that you bring up?
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I love discussing the fear to faith ratio because it s something that if I told you how many times I used that throughout the week, especially during the process of launching a debut book out into the world, we would be here for another hour talking about it.
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So fearlessness, a lot of people will talk about it in terms of the sort of feel the fear and do it anyway quote, which is great.
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sometimes.
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But the thing is that we as humans are engineered, by design, we feel fear.
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This goes back to days way way back when we wanted to stay within our communities or not get eaten by an animal in the jungle.
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Fear is an emotion that we are supposed to feel and
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I have some problems with feel the fear and do it anyway, because I think that especially when we re telling that to younger people, whether they are children or young adults, it can be unclear as to what fear is worth following and what fear you should feel and then do it anyway, because there is some fear that is there to inform you of things that you should not do anyway.
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I like to think of fearlessness as when the fear you have a thing a situation is less than the faith you have in yourself.
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So fearlessness is when the fear is less than the faith.
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It s even in the word, right?
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It s not fear none or fear stop.
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It s fear less.
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There s less fear.
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And it s really hard to lower your fear because you are smart and you know that fear is an important thing to feel.
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So it s really hard to lower it, but upping your faith
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is a little bit easier.
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I m a writer.
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It s a cute phrase.
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I ve posted it on social media so many times, but it s also an equation, like we said.
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If you can think of all of the reasons that you have to fear something, and you can even make this super tactical and put it in two different columns and write fear in one column and faith in the other column.
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If you write down all of the points that you fear about something, and then you number them,
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And then you do the same thing with faith and all of the points that you have to feel faith within yourself.
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And then you make the goal, not thinking about the biggest things, but you actually make it a quantity goal and you make it quantitative.
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So you want those faith points to outnumber the fear.
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Then you have, if you re doing this on a piece of paper, like you have a visual right there of, oh yeah, I do have more faith in myself than I have fear.
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Look at all of these things that I can have faith on when it comes to myself.
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And if it feels hard and people are doing this and they re like, woof, my faith points, they are not outnumbering my fear points.
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really urge people to get super granular about it because fear is something that we know to pay attention to.
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It can be really easy to focus on all of the nitty gritty of the things that we fear.
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And the good news is that if we can do that with fear, we can also do that for other things.
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So let s do that with faith.
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And that can be as simple as for today, for this podcast, if I was feeling
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fear around doing this podcast, something I might say to myself is, okay, well, I ve been doing this work for over a decade, closer to two decades now.
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I literally wrote the book on it.
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I know what I m talking about.
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Or it could be even simpler than that.
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It could be, well,
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I have good internet connection, so I know that my internet connection is going to be good.
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Or I have a microphone, so I know that I m going to be heard.
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Or, well, I have John s contact info, so if we get disconnected, I know how to reach out and get back online so that we both know what s going on.
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It s these little things that might feel like they re not the sexiest things or the most impactful things, but if we can start to build
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our faith points and slowly tip the scales toward the faith, instead of the fear, then that gives us that solid ground to start to take those steps forward, because we know on some level that we ve got it.
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Thank you so much for going through that.
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And I think that was a great ending point for that aspect of the interview.
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I have two last questions I wanted to ask you.
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You ve alluded to this at the beginning of the podcast, but you write in your book that Want Yourself isn t a book meant to fix you.
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It s meant to unearth you.
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Using that saying, can you describe to the audience what you hope a listener of today s podcast or a reader of the book
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takes away from it so that they can unearth themselves.
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I love the word unearthing, especially because a lot of people talk about finding themselves and they think about it in terms of it being out there, that it s a search.
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The way that I think about it and I talk about it is less of a search and more of a dig.
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So there are
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things that we think and we feel on a regular basis, probably more regular than we realize when we start to actually pay attention to it, that feel through, that feel like, oh yeah, that feels good, that feels settled, that feels like who I am.
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And I do believe that all of us somewhere in there know the person
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that we know we re meant to be out in the world.
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And I m not talking about, I am meant to be the leader of this big thing.
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Like, no, who you are meant to be when you re sitting at home by yourself.
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who you re meant to be when you re with your family, who you re meant to be.
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It s all the same person.
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And so what I hope this work and this book in particular can provide to people is a way to not just access and not just accept, but truly embrace
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that solid sense of self and the person they always have known they re meant to be.
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Because it can feel really overwhelming and really obtuse when people tell themselves to love themselves or find themselves or know who you are.
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I really hope that what this interview and conversation in this book can help people do is reframe that question to themselves
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and ask, OK, well, not just how do I do that, but how do I do that for me, for my self?
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And if I can help provide those guideposts and that blueprint for people, then I feel like I ve done my job.
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Well, great.
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Well, Katie, you ve had a successful podcast called The Wantcast, if I have it right, for about eight years.
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Can you tell the audience about it and what are some of the most impactful conversations you ve had on your show?
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Yeah, oh my gosh.
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I know you obviously have your own podcast, so to pick like the most impactful conversation, every conversation is impactful in its own way.
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But to go back, the WANTcast, the Women Against Negative Talk podcast, it is, as I call it, lessons in moving forward fearlessly and spreading the good word.
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When I say the good word, it s about being not
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positive for the sake of positivity.
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It s about a more pragmatic positivity.
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It s about being like we talked about proactive, not reactive.
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So there are solo episodes that of course I go on, but much of the podcast is interviews with people who can speak to so many of the nuances of where our self-talk shows up.
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Because I do not just focus on
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self-talk around body image, or self-talk in the workplace, or self-talk around relationships.
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There are a lot of people out there who can give such valuable information around those.
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I think two of the conversations that come up for me as super impactful, one of them is with a person whose name is Anne Hodder,
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and they are a sex therapist or sex education, not sex therapist, but a sex educator.
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And they have been doing this work for years and years and years.
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And recently what they ve done is they ve looked at this formula of the five love languages.
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You ve heard of the five love languages, right?
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So words of affirmation, physical touch, all that stuff.
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And Anne looked at that rubric and saw it could be more and that it was limiting and it was actually not created from a place of inclusivity.
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So Anne has been doing work around, and I recommend her ebook to everybody.
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They can go to Anne s website.
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They can download it.
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It s called the 18 Modern Love Languages.
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And it is so nuanced and so wonderful, I think, especially for people who are deep thinkers and deep feelers, because they re able to recognize what actually helps them build
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connection within their communities.
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I wanted to talk to Anne for 18 hours about the 18 modern love languages.
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And then also recently I spoke with Chrissy King, who is an activist in the body positivity space.
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Chrissy wrote an incredible book that I am looking at right now called The Body Liberation Project.
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And Chrissy and I both have backgrounds in the fitness industry, one of the 20 million careers and interests that I ve had as I also have a background in fitness and the way that Chrissy speaks.
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about not just body positivity or body neutrality or these words that are body image these words that maybe we ve heard before the way that she speaks about body liberation is so impactful.
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and is really, I believe, the next iteration of this body image conversation that more of us need to be having.
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So I would look up Anne Hodder and Chrissy King.
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They re both doing incredible work in the world.
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Well, Katie, thank you so much for sharing that.
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And last thing is for people who want to learn more about you and your book, where s the best place for them to go?
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Yes, well, because this is coming out after the book is out, they can find Want Yourself, Shift Yourself Talk, and Unearth the Strength and Who You Were all along, as they say, wherever books are sold.
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They can also head straight to WomenAgainstNegativeTalk.com or WantYourself.com to not only find out about the books, but also become a part of
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The want community get those tips, tools, motivation, inspiration, resources to shift their self-talk patterns.
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And then they can find me on social media at Katie Horwich.
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It s just my name.
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They can find me on sub stack at women against negative doc.com.
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And I am very accessible by email.
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Send me an email at Katie at women against negative talk.com.
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I love connecting with everybody.
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Well, Katie, thank you so much for giving us the honor of coming today and congratulations on your incredible book.
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Thank you so much.
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I had so much fun.
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This was a fantastic conversation.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Katie Horwich, and I wanted to thank Katie, Jessica Retta, and Sounds True for the honor and privilege of having her appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Katie will be in the show notes at PassionStruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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All proceeds go to supporting the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles and PassionStruckClips.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at PassionStruck.com slash deals.
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And I have some exciting news.
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My new book, Passionstruck, 12 Powerful Principles for How You Create an Intentional Life, is now ready for pre-order.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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I m at John R. Miles on all the social platforms, or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter at either johnrmiles.com or passionstruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Strike podcast interview that I did with Martinez Evans, a man whose life is a testament to the power of intentionality.
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Martinez has embarked on a mission to make running a sport for everyone, which is fueled by his unwavering commitment to inclusivity and to the empowerment of others.
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He is the author of the Slow AF Run Club, the ultimate guide for anybody who wants to run.
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One of the things I usually tell people is that it s really a mindset thing.
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For a lot of people, like in their head, it s like, oh, I can t do this.
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I see how far you... I don t know if I can get there right.
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And one of the things I try to tell people is that, like, don t fall into this comparison trap.
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Like, your day zero will look different from my day zero.
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And that s okay.
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Your day 100 will look different from my day 100.
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And that s okay.
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Because it s not where you started, it s where you re going.
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The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know someone who s battling negative self-talk, then definitely share today s episode with them because the greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now go out there and become PassionStruck.