Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Katie Horwitch. Katie is a writer, speaker, mindset coach and activist. She’s the founder of WANT, Women Against Negative Talk. She’s coached some of the world’s most prominent brands and leaders on building confidence and creating impact, and has been praised by CNN as a woman empowering others around the world. With Sounds True, she’s the author of a new book. It’s called Want Your Self: Shift Your Self-Talk and Unearth the Strength in Who You Were All Along. Here’s my conversation with Katie Horwitch.
Katie, you’re known as a self-talk shifter. You help people change and shift their own self-talk. How did this become such a focus for you? Tell us a little bit about your own journey as a way of introduction, to focusing on being a self-talk shifter.
Katie Horwitch: Yes, I mean there’s the short answer and then the more nuanced answer, so I will give you both of those. The short answer is that I got angry, I got frustrated that people, particularly women, were given such a small amount of tools to shift this thing that we call our self-talk, particularly our negative self-talk.
The longer answer is that, my entire life I was super confident. The lens through which I viewed that confidence, though, was super murky and scratched because I got so many messages from the world, overtly or otherwise, that confidence was synonymous with narcissism or vanity. And I am, which I believe you are as well, I am a highly-sensitive person, so I feel things very deeply as far as emotions go, but I also pick up on things like lights and sounds that other people don’t. I can read a room before anyone has ever said a word.
So I was getting all of this input that sort of made me believe that I needed to shrink myself down to fit into this loud world that was around me. So all of this sort of came to a head when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I entered college and I became such a shell of myself and so alone in the skin that I was in that I developed a host of eating and body-related disorders, which anyone who has gone through them knows that it’s not about the food, often, it’s not about your body. It was really about how I felt about myself and the story that I had told myself about what it meant to be an adult in the world and fit in.
And I had no attention that was being paid to actually belonging. So fitting in is about taking the information from your environment and internalizing that, so that you are more like them. Belonging is about belonging to yourself more than anything. It’s about, I know who I am and I’m going to stick by this person no matter what is happening on the outside. And so, in college when I developed all of these different mental illnesses, I saw a commercial and I was struck by how it affected me in multiple ways. So it was one of the first body-positive, if you will, self-affirming, encouraging commercials that ever existed. This is back in 2007.
So things that we take for granted now when it comes to the conversation around mental health and body image, they just didn’t exist. And I saw this commercial as I was going through my own struggles and wasn’t getting many answers from the outside, by the way, because what I was dealing with did not fit into the pretty neat little boxes of the eating disorders and the body-related disorders that were being described at the time. So I decided to turn that high proprioception and that highly-sensitive self of mine inward to hopefully help me out.
And when I saw this commercial that was basically saying, “You should love yourself, you are amazing,” I first felt like, “Oh my gosh, this is incredible. Nothing that I’ve ever seen is like this.” And then I also thought, “Well, what about those days when I can’t look at the mirror and say, ‘I love myself, I’m beautiful’? What about those days?” And it sort of came to me in this boom, boom, boom, Oprah-style aha moment of, “I’m going to start a platform and it is going to be called Women Against Negative Talk and the acronym is going to be WANT and it’s going to give people, particularly women, tips, tools, motivation and inspiration to shift your self-talk patterns.” All of that happened in like five seconds.
What ended up happening is the first go-round in 2007, early two thousands, it kind of fizzled out. And it went into the back of my mind for a very long time, almost a decade. And what I realized in hindsight is that at the time I had created what I so needed at the time. So when it came back into my mind as something that I felt called to explore again, I had not only ridden the wave of my own life, the ups, the downs, I had the life experience, I had the wherewithal to say, “OK, here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know, here’s where I’m going to do research, consult experts.”
And I also had the technical background to actually sustain this platform that I felt was so necessary, because these things still weren’t being talked about in the way that I thought they should be talking about at the time. I had the tools, personally and professionally, to bring what I had always needed and what I felt the world needed to life. And that was 2015, and here we are in 2023.
TS: Now, you mentioned that you felt angry at the narrow set of tools that women are given to work with inner negative self-talk. What do you see as the narrow set of tools and what do you think are the greater tools that we need? How do you see that?
KH: Ooh, that’s a great question and it’s a great way to word the question, because you didn’t say “the good tools and the bad tools.” You said the narrow set of tools and then the broader sense of set of tools. So the narrower set of tools are sort of the pop culture, positive self-talk tools of positive affirmations: looking at yourself in the mirror, telling yourself you love yourself, writing loving notes to yourself on post-it notes and putting them on the mirror. And those are all great tools. They’re wonderful tools. I’m not saying that they should be taken out of anybody’s toolkit. However, this more robust toolkit that we’re talking about goes beyond what the narrow toolkit speaks to, which is the talk part of the self-talk, the words. But in order to actually shift your self-talk, you can’t just plaster pretty words over a negative phrase.
That’s like putting a Band-Aid over a wound that you’ve gotten when you broke your leg. Eventually, you’re going to need to tend to the broken leg. So it’s not about plastering the positive talk over things, it’s actually about getting to that first part of the equation, the “self” part of self-talk, which we can talk about all of the different ways to do that, but I outline in the book sort of a guidepost and a blueprint for people to go through, because it is nuanced work and it can be overwhelming, and I wanted to give people a tool that could sort of support them along that journey instead of them feeling like, “This is so overwhelming, I might as well just stick with this negative set because that’s what I understand.” You know?
TS: It’s interesting because you’re talking about how for some people positive affirmations and changing language can work, but it doesn’t necessarily work for all people all of the time. There can be this disconnect, like I’m trying to sugarcoat something and I know what’s underneath it. And this is actually a quote from your book, “Positive self-talk as we commonly think of it, can do more harm than good depending on your state of mind.” And I’m wondering if you can explain that more. I’m one of those people who’s never been drawn to positive thinking, and yet, in my experience, I’ve met a lot of people who tell me how powerful it is and how it really does work for them. And I believe them. It’s just never worked for me.
KH: Yes, I love that we’re having this conversation and that we’re both those types of people. Because I am the same way, where the power of positivity in the way that many people talk about it, especially today, especially with social media being the way that it is and things in such small easily digestible sound bites, that to me feels like, “OK, I’m grabbing a snack on the way out the door because I need something, but that’s not actually nourishing me in the long run.”
So when it comes to positive self-talk, I mentioned this in the book. When I was doing research, there was this study that I just became a little obsessed with, and it was out of the University of Waterloo, and they had two groups of people. One group of people already had preexisting, let’s call it high self-esteem. The other group had low self-esteem.
And the experiment was, basically, we’re going to give these two groups of people what we’re calling positive self-statements, and we’re going to tell them to say these statements over and over to themselves and then see what happens to these groups. And what ended up happening is that the group that already had that solid base of what we would call positive self-esteem, those positive self-statements were wonderful for those people.
They either buoyed them up and gave them a little boost, or they kept them in that sort of high-level positive range. The people who had preexisting low self-esteem ended up feeling worse about themselves. Because at the end of the day, there was a cognitive dissonance. They felt that they were lying to themselves over and over and over again.
So it’s not about just saying something nice to yourself, especially if you’re feeling in a low. It’s about getting underneath what’s actually going on, and getting to that core of the self instead of jumping straight to the talk part.
TS: Now, when you say getting to the core of the self, I notice I have a lot of questions about that, because there’s the narrative of our self, and that’s a narrative that keeps changing. There’s a feeling inside of our inner light and alignment and a sense of the depth of who we are in our core. And I wonder when you talk about the self, what you’re really referring to, because it seems like there’s lots of potential layers there?
KH: Yes. Actually, someone asked me this the other day, and I was like, “I’m going to look up…” I’m a words person, so I was like, “I’m going to look up what the dictionary says about the self and see if that’s useful.” And there were multiple definitions out there. I think especially in the type of space that you and I are in, there are a lot of also very flowery definitions of the self.
When it comes to our self, I believe it to be the truth of who we are, what we believe at our core to be true of who we are, and that can be informed by a lot of things. So that can be complicated, because then we’re like, “OK, what is truth? And what is actually some belief that I’ve picked up along the way that now I’ve taken on as truth?” So it’s important, a lot of times we will just focus on the things that we perceive are negative that we’re saying, and we will try and get to the core of that.
It’s actually more about practicing this awareness of, “OK, what’s the information behind what I’m saying?” No matter what you’re saying. And I’m not telling people to be walking around in the world and after they say every single thing or think every single thing, they pause and they say, “What’s the information behind that?” But really getting curious about who you are, how you are, and how you came to be that person, and how and why you continue to be that person, can start to unearth a lot of information that can lead us to, “OK, what am I standing behind as the truth of myself? And oh, what do I actually have within myself that I’ve called true for so long, but that was actually something that someone else said to me a long time ago, or it’s based on how someone else was, and I just decided that that was the right way to be for myself?”
So that curiosity and that self-interrogation when it comes to “the self” is really, really important, and I would say essential to getting to the core of who and what that actually is.
TS: Now, one of the things that I saw on your website about you is that you’ve reimagined positivity in a new light. So it’s not the positivity that we were referring to that’s kind of putting cover-up on top of something that’s painful, hoping it’ll just go away. How do you see positivity now?
KH: Positivity, I think it’s a lot more pragmatic than people give a credit for. I define positivity as being proactive, not reactive. And with that definition, that actually makes the feeling good part of positivity completely irrelevant, and it allows it to be more durable and more sustainable. Because then, let’s say you’re going through a tough time and you say, “OK, I want to be positive.” If you’re chasing after those feel good moments, that might be really hard depending on what you’re going through.
However, if you can reframe positivity as, OK, it’s about being proactive, not reactive. It’s about moving forward and saying, “OK, so where do I go from here?” versus cowering away and responding sort of willy-nilly to the people around us. Then you don’t have to feel good to do that, but it starts to feel right in your body.
You start to feel that sense of self-trust that you’re developing over and over, versus “I’m going to look on the outside because I don’t trust these awful feelings that I’m feeling, so I’m going to take a positive feeling from here. I’m going to take some happiness from here, and I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope it happens.” It actually allows way more agency when it comes to positivity.
TS: Katie, I’m feeling like a positive person right now. You’re helping me feel really positive.
KH: We’re doing it.
TS: We’re doing it. I don’t have to feel good. I don’t have to be rah-rah, I don’t have to be anything like that. I just have to claim my power of choice and agency and creativity as a human. I can do that. That’s awesome!
KH: Totally. Yes, yes. Oh my gosh, great. My job here is done.
TS: Now you mentioned confidence, having confidence. What do you define as a genuine sense of confidence?
KH: Confidence, well, I mentioned my good friend the dictionary just a moment ago, I literally got a dictionary for I think my 11th birthday from my mother. It was one of my favorite presents ever. I still have it. If you look up confidence in the dictionary, the actual definition is trust. It’s “firm trust.”
So with that framework, confidence, very much like positivity, where a lot of times we can think of positivity as what we’re seeing on the outside, the happiness, the
happy-go-luckiness, the feeling good, the skipping down the street, a lot of times we can think of confidence in the same light. We can think of someone standing on top of a hill making strong arms with a superhero cape behind them. We could think of a rock star on stage. A lot of times we think of confidence from the external standpoint.
But when we think about confidence as trust, then we’re able to check ourselves when we get tempted by the sort of “fake it till you make it” crowd, right? Because that’s something that a lot of people will say when it comes to confidence, that you should just fake it till you make it. However, that is, again, pulling from the outside.
So if we can start to develop that sense of self-trust and give ourselves reason to trust ourselves over and over again, I mean, it can be as simple as something like, “I said that I was going to make my bed this morning, and now I am going to make my bed.” Then we start to develop that self-trust like we would build a habit, and then that confidence again becomes sustainable and lasting and unshakeable.
TS: That’s a beautiful word, unshakeable confidence. Yes. One of the things that’s interesting to me is that you focused not just on helping individuals change their negative self-talk, but really turning this into a movement. And you write, “Shifting your self-talk is an essential part of shaping the world you want to live in.” So I’d love to understand more this sense of a cultural transformation that you’re working towards through being a negative self-talk shifter.
KH: Yes. This is actually my favorite thing to talk about, because a lot of times people will talk about self-talk, positivity, all of these things that we’ve been talking about, and they’ll talk about it as it starts and ends with themselves. And I view it as way more urgent than we give it credit for. So of course we need, in our world, mega mega systems changes. We need policy changes. We need all of those things to happen, and we need them to happen in a very real way, and hopefully very soon.
However, when I talk about self-talk, I’m talking about us stepping in and actually being able to put those policies into place and be able to move forward and shape the world that we want to live in. Because, for example, in the last few years, we are so blessed that we have had multiple female candidates for president, right? And this is a fairly new thing when it comes to presidential campaigns and getting to not just that primary, but that full-on election.
If we have a norm where someone of any gender can run for president, that’s amazing. And we also need those people who have developed that sense of self-trust, like we talked about, that unshakeable self-confidence, to go forth and run for president, and step into those roles.
And then on the other side, let’s get a little more everyday here, if we have developed a sense of feeling self-doubt, low self-worth, we’re being reactive, not proactive, we don’t have trust in ourselves, that is going to really change our relationship with power, and we are going to take that with us out into the world, into our conversations, into our workplace. And so when I talk about shifting your self-talk, I talk about it as not this thing that feels good, is nice, but you’re doing it within yourself. This is about if you want to change the world, you have got to do the work to change your own world at the same time.
TS: Do you ever find that when you’re barraged by negative self-talk and you say, “Be proactive, Katie,” you say to yourself, “not reactive,” that you can’t quite find your way? Like, “Oh God, I just don’t have…I’m being beaten down by whatever this is. It’s a cascade? It’s like a waterfall of negative sentences that are coming inside my head. I just can’t find my creative place of being proactive right now.” What do you do in those situations?
KH: First of all, yes, 1000% have been there, because even though I have dedicated my life to talking about shifting self-talk, I am a human and I’m not a robot, thank goodness. So when that sort of negative self-talk loop starts and it keeps going and going and going and going, there’s a few different tools that I start to pull from that toolkit. There are different questions that I can ask myself, like, “What is my priority right now? And is this one of them?”
Because sometimes I can think that focusing on something in a negative way, I don’t think of the negative part of it. I just think, “OK, I’m focusing on it,” on the inside, so I can think I’m doing something to make some change, even if it’s not on the outside, on the inside. But that loop keeps on going. And so if I’m able to ask myself, “OK, what’s my priority? Is this one of them?”
If it is, then that’s when it leads to the be proactive, not reactive. Then I’m able to take some steps. So I’m looking at the talk underneath the talk. If it is not one of the priorities, I’m like, “Great, that’s cool information.” This is time where I just need to ride the wave of feeling and owning exactly what I’m feeling and where I am. Because if we jump to silver lining our way through those tough times, especially if it just keeps on coming like a wave, what can end up happening is we bottle up those emotions, and like I just alluded to, those can come out in some really harmful ways.
And so I do try and go more internal, and that can look like anything from people maybe are listening who have a meditation or journaling practice. It’s a time where I can get into just the dreaming space. It’s time that sometimes I’m like, “I just need a minute to stare at the ceiling.” That is one of my favorite pastimes. And I allow myself to be exactly where I am because what’s happened over time is I’ve learned to trust that I’ll make it to the other side.
So while that might not seem like the easiest thing for people to jump to in the moment, because it feels like this is never going to end, I think if people can start to reframe that as, ‘Well, I’m building a habit, and I need to get stronger at this habit.” You are not going to go to the gym and work out for 45 minutes every day or pick up the heaviest weight right off the bat, or else you’re going to get injured. It’s about making those small choices over and over again and being consistent enough with those choices so that you develop that sense of, “Oh yes, I am on my own side, and I am going to see another side to this.”
TS: One of the tools that you offer in Want Your Self is this notion of developing, and then calling on anchor words. And I wonder if you can share that practice and help our listeners find anchor words for them.
KH: So anchor words, I define anchor words as one to three words that you can call on whenever, wherever, that are very easy for you to remember, that help remind you of who you are at your core. So I would recommend, when it comes to anchor words, I would recommend finding them in a neutral time and not waiting for that low. But anyone can find them at any time in their life, and it’s about being really specific and asking yourself, like I talked about before, “Do I already believe this?”
Because we want our self-talk to ultimately be believable, like those people in that University of Waterloo study, so that it becomes more of a habit to be proactive, not reactive. So my anchor words, for example, that I have, that I call on all of the time are the words visionary, worthwhile, and fearless.
Visionary, to me, reminds me that I have not just an actual vision of what I want to create, the world that I want to see, but there’s something new, there’s a spark there that I have within me that is always going to be there, and that comes in handy really, really well when I’m comparing myself to other people.
Worthwhile, that is different to me than worthiness. Worthwhile is more about my space in the room, my seat at the table. I am deserving of being here. My ideas are deserving. And then there’s fearless. And I define fearless, not as feeling the fear, but doing it anyway, but when the fear you have of the situation, of the thing, is less than the faith you have in yourself. So fearlessness is when the fear is less than the faith.
And these are words that I tell people when they’re first thinking of them, like write it down in your phone notes, put it on a sticky note, write it on a whiteboard, just so that you can remember them. And in those moments where you’re feeling that negative self-talk coming through, you can tell yourself those words and they will actually help buoy you up and create a solid foundation, because you already believe them. They might feel grandiose, but you have created them because they’re already yours, and you know that, and that’s really powerful.
TS: But what would you say to that person who’s listening right now and they’re like, “Well, I don’t really think I’m fearless, and I’m not sure even, I don’t know, worthwhile sounds a lot like worthiness, and I feel a little unworthy, and I can’t remember the last time I really had a vision. How am I going to find…? So those words, they sound great for Katie, yay. But I’m over here and I’m not quite sure how to find what are my anchor words? I’m loving. I’m actually loving.” OK, what else might somebody say? I don’t know. They might be at a loss to find three words that are really going to help them.
KH: Yes, I mean these words are very, very individual, and I think sometimes, especially when it comes to words, affirmations, mantras, these sort of end goals that we’re told to create for ourselves, we can jump to, “OK, what’s the most impressive thing that I can think of?” And it’s not about what’s the most impressive, it’s what’s the most true.
So loving is a great one. It can be as simple as I am kind, and then you define kindness for yourself. Like OK, what does kindness mean? For me, kindness is different than niceness. Niceness is about a moment that maybe is more on the outside. Kindness is deeper than that. It’s more about integrity. It’s about your intention and your impact and how those move from being two separate circles, to a Venn diagram, to a full circle.
So these can be simple, simple words, just asking yourself, I mean, maybe people haven’t even asked themselves, “OK, what is true? What is true about me and what can I believe about myself that I might be able to call on in a hard time?” Which is why I suggest that people do it when they’re not in a hard time, so that they already have them ready.
TS: So these are three words about myself that I believe are descriptive of sort of the positive nature of who I am in my core or the essence of who I am? What’s the question I’m asking myself as I seek my three anchor words?
KH: What is true about myself that I am willing to stand behind? So a lot of people, when they are in those negative self-talk loops, sometimes the things that they feel are true about themselves, they might not be the things that they want to think of. They might think of things like, “Oh, well, what’s true about me? I am awkward. I am overwhelmed. I am these things.” So that second part is really important, and that’s why they’re called anchor words. What are three words that I believe about myself to be true, already believable, that can anchor me in who I am and that I am willing to stand behind?
So one of my words that I call positivity proof point for myself, that’s another thing that I describe in the book that is more about creating these phrases for yourself that you can call upon that go beyond just a singular word. A positivity proof point for myself is, “I am enthusiastic,” because that is something that people might feel any which way about me being enthusiastic, but I’m willing to stand behind that I am enthusiastic. That is a quality about myself that I know to be true, and I’m willing to stand behind.
TS: OK. Now, I wanted to ask you about one of your anchor words that I’m curious about, because I think so many of us want to be fearless and would like fearless to be one of our anchor words, and then you defined it in an interesting way. You said something about not doing it but feeling the fear, but feeling that there was some, and in the book, you described there’s some ratio between faith and fear. So describe your understanding of being fearless.
KH: Fearlessness to me is when the fear is less than the faith, and when I talk about faith in this framework, it’s about the faith that you have in yourself. So the fear you have of this thing out there, this situation, is less than the faith that you have in yourself, which sounds like a pretty phrase and could be plastered on social media. I have done it many times, but it’s also an equation.
So it is really hard for us to lower our fear. Fear is a human emotion. It serves a purpose. Way back in the day, it kept us safe from, I don’t know, saber-tooth tigers that were going to attack us in the jungle. We do not want to practice lowering our fear because our body doesn’t know the difference between a saber-tooth tiger coming to attack us and a test that we’re about to take, or a podcast interview that we’re about to do, maybe.
So that’s really hard, and it’s good that that’s hard, but upping your faith in yourself is actually a lot easier and more finesse-able. So I always advise people– I love a worksheet, I love an exercise. I advise people to make two columns when they are feeling fear in a situation, and these can be actual columns in a notebook or maybe it can be lists that they’re making in their head. I ask them to write a list or think of a list of all of the different reasons you have to be afraid of this thing. And number them, that’s important. That’s very important.
Then on the other side, the other column, you write or think all of the different reasons that you have to have faith in yourself and you get really, really granular. Because a lot of times, we can make the laundry list of the fear, but when it comes to the faith, kind of like the anchor words, we try and think of the most flowery, most showy things that we can think of. And then we number them. And the goal is to keep going until those faith points outnumber the fear points. So to make that really pragmatic for people, let’s just use being on a podcast, for example.
TS: Just for example.
KH: Just for example. Yes, like neither one of us have any experience with that. So for example, we had our podcast recording today, are having our podcast recording today. I was very excited to record with you, and also, you are the founder of my publishing company. You are reading my book. I know you’re going to be asking me questions about the book. You’re also someone who I think is really awesome, and so a little of that fear was coming in beforehand, and I was able to make that list of, OK, here are the reasons that this fear is getting sort of drummed up in me.
Well, I’ve never met Tami before. That’s one. I want her to like me because I am a recovering people pleaser, so that’s two. I am recording actually from my husband’s office, and so I’m afraid that maybe the internet is not going to work. That’s three. And I was like, OK, cool. Those are my big fears, and I couldn’t really think of a lot of other things, and I was like, all right, what do I have faith in when it comes to this situation?
Well, I have faith that I can give a really useful podcast interview. I’ve done this many times. I know I can do it. I have faith that I know what I’m talking about. I have not only written this book that we’re talking about, but I have spent most of my entire adult life talking about this subject. I know that if the internet doesn’t work, that there’s a place around the corner that I can go that has internet that can work. I also know that I know how to plug in all of my equipment, that I know where to find all of the things to make sure the things work. That’s four.
So already, we have more faith than we have fear. And you can keep going and going from that of, well, I have faith that I am going to be comfortable on camera because I’ve done this before. I can have faith in the fact that if I cough in the middle of recording, like I did our first go around, that I can say, “All right, I need to pause and get a sip of water,” and people will understand and I will feel good about that. You can keep going and going and going, and that is actually what builds fearlessness.
TS: Well, it’s interesting because you mentioned you like words, and I really like words too, and I think that I had this idea about fearless, that it meant no fear, but the word itself is fear less. And here you’re describing a situation where you had fear, but you had less fear than your faith. You had more faith and less fear, so you were able. So in that sense, is that how you’re relating to this word, fear less?
KH: Yes, exactly. It’s fear less, not “fear not”. So those are two different phrases that we’re talking about. And a lot of times when we think of fearlessness, we focus so heavily on the fear that we forget to even notice the “less” part of it. That less doesn’t mean it’s not there, it means it’s there in some capacity. It’s just in comparison to something, because less is a comparative word. You know?
TS: Oh my God, Katie. Now I’m not only positive, I’m fearless. Look what’s happening to me here. This is amazing!
KH: We are getting so much done. We are bringing so many things to light. This is a very productive first meeting.
TS: Really indeed. OK. One of the things I read in Want Your Self is that, in your work, you believe it’s not just about finding this true inner core or true self, but about being her out loud, being our true self out loud. And I thought, huh, how come? How come we have to go out loud with all this? Why can’t we just be our true self and kind of keep it quiet?
KH: It’s such a bummer, right? It would be so much easier if we could do all of this great work in our head and then not share it with people or not take it out into the world because it feels vulnerable, it feels scary, but it’s important to not only find out who you are, but be that person out in the world so that who you say you are and who you actually are is consistent. It goes back to what we were just talking about integrity.
So integrity, I define it as when your intention and your impact are in alignment. So integrity is about getting those as close together as possible, but I meant to do something or, but I meant to be something, that’s like you were just talking about, that’s being yourself in your head, but not necessarily being yourself out loud. And unless you ask the question, well, what was the actual impact and am I willing to change it?
And the answer is yes. If the answer is yes, that’s how you’re able to take that internal self and let it live out loud instead of creating these two separate people where, like we talked about at the beginning, you are feeling that sense of inconsistency, which can lead to self-doubt, imposter syndrome, all of these things that we think of as these really scary and sometimes out of the blue things, really stem from that lack of taking who we are inside and who we’ve built ourselves to be and who we’ve unearthed in there, and bringing that person out into the world.
And of course, being that person is important, staying that person is sometimes a little bit harder, but it’s that journey of finding and being and staying yourself that is actually going to lead you to want the self that you have.
TS: You told a powerful story in the book about coming forward online, I can’t remember on what social media platform. And oh yes, the person who then attacked you, you called him an Insta-bully, so it must’ve been on Instagram, and how this person really made fun of your last name, and how painful that was first and also how you worked through it. And I wonder if you can share more about that really as an emblematic story of how, when we do live out loud, we do become a target. That’s what happens, and we have to be able to be fearless enough to walk through that.
KH: A lot of times what we will do is we will say, “Oh, this person must be really hurting, and this person who’s bullying me,” if we’ve gotten to the point where we’re like, “OK, well, I am not going to let this bully shake me down,” a lot of times we can jump to, “This must be a really sad person and we’re going to send them love and light.” And in the book, I call BS on love and light, because that actually puts you in… I’m very careful about how I use this word because I think it can be overused when it comes to sort of the Instagrammable therapy speak, but it puts you back in the victim perspective, right? Like, “Oh, well this person is really hurting and so they deserve all of this good energy, and so I must send them the good energy, or I’m the bad person in this situation.”
It becomes like this existential crisis for us of, “Oh, well, am I not a good person because I can’t send this person love and light?” That’s not what it is. I think that in order to stay yourself in a moment of being knocked down on social media, like the story that I shared, or in the workplace, it really comes back to, “OK, anchor myself in my anchor words. How am I going to feel a sense of power, again, within myself?”
I think there is truth in the saying that we can’t change other people oftentimes, but we can choose how we react in that situation and how we respond and be proactive there. So taking the focus off of that person or that situation, and then putting it back on, “OK, what do I need in this moment?” It might be an immediate act of self-care.
Again, I’m not telling people to silver lining over the emotion that you’re feeling, because especially in a lot of cases when it comes to gender or race or just not fitting some sort of binary norm that has been prescribed from someone else out there, we could be talking about really heavy stuff, not just someone making fun of a last name and making a joke that my middle school classmates would’ve made. We’re talking about heavy stuff that is not excusable.
And so being proactive, not reactive in those situations, this is what positivity looks like. It looks like allowing yourself to feel how bad that felt. It could look like performing an immediate act of self-care. It could look like saying, “OK, who can I tell about this that is going to maybe be an ally or an accomplice in this situation?” That could be a trusted family member or it could be a teacher, a mentor, it could be someone who’s in a position of power.
There are so many different things that we can do to be proactive in those situations, but the biggest thing that I want to give to people is that, if something feels bad, it is normal for that to feel bad, because it was hurtful. It’s OK to get hurt and not give your bully an excuse. It is OK not to just jump to the next thing. It’s really about honoring and being honest with where you are, what happened, and then moving forward from there, in sometimes these small ways that, again, we can perform over and over to build up that sense of, “OK, I have my own back. Self, what are we going to do now?”
TS: I just want to make sure I understand something. Why do you think it’s BS to send love and light to the Insta-bully and say, “Oh, this is someone who obviously is in a lot of pain and I’m going to have compassion for them, because otherwise they wouldn’t have lashed out in this way”?
KH: It’s good question. A lot of times when we use that phrase, it’s a way of trying to make ourselves feel better, or bypassing the very real emotions that we are feeling. And also, I bring it back to the habit building. If we are building a habit of when, let’s just use meanness as the overarching phrase, when someone is mean to us, this is what we do. We send them love and light, we go on our way. That can lead to some really, really tricky situations, because we live in a complicated world where not everything is just someone pulling on our pigtails or writing a silly comment on Instagram or writing a negative review of our piece of work that we’ve worked so hard on.
Some of this stuff can really cut us down, and isn’t excusable by love and light. And that’s, again, I love that you mentioned it before, why I talk about shifting your self-talk and this work of finding, being, staying yourself as such an important part of building the world that we want to create. Because this process also allows us to call out that hatred and that cruelness when we see it, in a way that can actually make a difference, not just for us in the moment, but for other people. Those people who are being mean or cruel to you, they’re probably being mean and cruel to other people as well.
TS: I got it now. Thank you. I understand the point you’re making. It’s part of your activism to name it and stand up against it, which brings me here to one of your anchor words, being a visionary. Will you share with me a bit what are the visions you are currently holding, in particular for women against negative self-talk? What’s your inner visionary nature bringing forth right now?
KH: What a great question. I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that specifically. When it comes to my inner visionary nature, I see a world in which people are stepping up to the plate of their own lives. And what I mean by that is when they have a dream to do something, when they have a desire to do something, not only do they go out and find a way to do it, they also are able to, without relying on anger or love and lighting things away as their sort of primary tool to deal with the people who are trying to keep them down, they’re able to move forward fearlessly in their own life, so be proactive with faith in themselves.
That to me is absolutely revolutionary, and I do hope that as the conversation, I see it happening in a bit now, and hopefully it’ll happen more and more, as the conversation starts to evolve when it comes to not just our mental health, but our collective wellness when it comes to social change, I really hope and hold a vision for a world that is less about the quick fix solutions or the damage control, and more about this long-term vision of we see what is possible, let’s take the steps to get there. Does that all make sense?
TS: Indeed. I’ve been speaking with Katie Horwitch, writer, speaker, mindset coach, activist, founder of WANT, Women Against Negative Talk. With Sounds True, she’s the author of the new book, it’s called Want Your Self: Shift Your Self-Talk and Unearth the Strength in Who You Were All Along. You’ve turned me into someone who’s both positive and fearless.
KH: Hey, I did not turn you into that person. You were already that person. We just unearthed it through some wordplay.
TS: I never would’ve used those words, and I’m so happy now to be able to. So thank you so much, Katie Horwitch.
KH: Thank you so much.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
