Successful individuals use coaching and mentorship to help them unlock their potential. Not all
coaches are created equal, and that's why we work with the top five percent
of coaches at Idemics. Welcome to coaches you need. Brought to you by
IDEMICX. Hello. Today we're conversation with Katie Harwich. Katie, it's great
to have you on the show. It's so great to be here. Thank
you so much for having me. What a wonderful way to spend my day,
especially on a really day, especially on a rainy day. And I
mean, it's so cozy in here, and we've just been talking for like
three hours before this, so I feel very, very cozy and at home.
I'm wonderful. So, Katy, you had a wonderful way in which
you introduced yourself, and I want to play this quick clip for our listeners
to really hear how you introduce yourself in your own words. Let's take a
quick look. My name is Katie Horwich. I am a writer, I
am a speaker. I'm a mindset coach and the founder of Want Women Against
Negative Talk, a platform that gives you tips, tools, motivation, and
inspiration to shift your self talk patterns let's get this show on the road.
My name is Katie Horwitch, and I have spoken around the globe about shifting
your self talk, that internal narrative that tells you who you are and how
you fit into the world. The phenomenal Oh my gosh, she will literally
set yourself on fires. So Katie, tell us about the germ, the
idea that made you found want with it against negative self talk and what negative
self talk really is. Yeah, I you know, I think that one
lead directly into the other. So I'll start with your second question. Yeah,
self talk in general is the narrative that we have going on internally twenty
four seven that tells us who we are and who we believe ourselves to be
out in the world. Yeah. So negative self talk is sort of where
the self talk takes a dark turn. And it's the self talk, the
internal narrative that belittles who we are, what we do, how we fit
into the world. That's where the self doubt comes from. Lots of fears,
people sometimes talk about limiting beliefs. These can all be grouped under this
sort of blanket umbrella term of negative self talk. So for me, when
I first started want, women against negative talk. There's a short answer,
and then there's the bit longer real answer. So the short write exactly Well,
the short answer is that I noticed I've been aware of my self talk
my entire life, and I always had a lot of self confidence, but
I like to say the lens that I viewed that self confidence through was all
tarnished and muddy. So I believed that to have confidence in yourself was synonymous
with narcissism, vanity, all of these negative skewing terms that really were focused
on women when I was growing because a lot of these things having a lot
of confidence or pride in yourself when it came to basically anyone other than a
man, it was something that you were supposed to dim down and make smaller,
right, And what I realized is that there was no place that was
really talking about self talk as a whole and how to shift your self talk
in a real, lasting way beyond affirmations and one off things that made you
feel good, and a lot of the self talk confidence building focused platforms that
I could find at the time. We're focused on body image, which many
of us know who have struggled with body image issues, is that it's really
about more than the body just that. Yeah. The side note, which
is part of the longer answer, is that I thought of the idea back
in two thousand and seven. So I was twenty one years old, and
at the time I was struggling speaking of body body image issues, I was
struggling with a host of eating and body and related disorders. And what I
was struggling with didn't fall under the terms that were used to describe eating disorders
at the time. Yeah, I struggled with something called orthorexia, which is
basically an unhealthy focus on health amongst exercise, bulimia, body dysmorphia. Like
I said, a whole host of things, Okay, And I remember seeing
the first of Real Body's commercial. Do you remember that? Yeah, Yeah,
with like the white underwear all of the women. It was like the
first confidence building advertisement. Like any sort of media campaign, we take those
for granted now, but that was new, yeah at the time. And
I remember when I saw that, Yeah, I had this these three thoughts.
It was like a boom boom boom type thing. I thought, this
is incredible, this is revolutionary. I've never seen anything like this. And
then I thought, well, this ad is telling me that I should love
myself and love my body, and love myself exactly as I am. What
happens when I don't and what happens when I can't just tell myself that thing?
And then I thought, I'm going to start up. I think I
called it an awareness campaign at the time. I'm going to start an awareness
campaign that is helping women shift their self talk, giving them tips and tools
and most motivation and inspiration. I'm going to call it and want women against
negative talk. That all came to me within like five seconds. But it
was two thousand and seven. Yeah, I was twenty one, and it's
not so much about age, but I was still within my own struggle.
So I basically saw the idea that I wanted in my life, but I
didn't know how to deliver that. Yeah, because I needed it so badly.
And so when it came back into my mind years later, Yeah,
and I had gotten older, gotten more experience, worked through many of my
eating and body related issues, Yeah, I realized that I had the tools
to now implement this idea that I had all of those years ago. And
I felt confidence self assured enough to be very clear with what I knew and
what I didn't know yeah, because I think that can be a problem sometimes
and in it I think in everything we do, we have to slay our
own demons before we can teach others to slay theirs. And I know that
for a lot of our listeners. For myself, I was much more of
a traditional eating disorder patient than you were. It was all all the sort
of problems that were classified as writing disorder, and so much of it had
to do all of it had to do with negative self talk, right,
that that you never considered, even if you presented with a very externally self
confident manner, you didn't actually believe that in yourself right, And so in
the private moments, and then the food was just a mechanism, right,
You're you're always critiquing yourself and you're always finding yourself wanting yes, whatever it
is you're seeking, And it really is like a total mindset shift rather than
telling yourself or I shouldn't do this, Because there were lots of moments when
we all when we're in when we were in those phases, told ourselves and
knew that we shouldn't do it, but didn't know how to not do it.
Yeah, And there's a difference between logically knowing something and actually being able
to implement it totally. And and yeah, I mean that's that's in the
end, coaching and behavioral change and finding a new way of being in yourself.
Yeah, and commitment, commitment to a new to that new way of
being, Because can be really scared, Harry, to start something new,
even if, like I said, like you know logically that it's a good
thing, it can be really hard to start something new because you don't know,
you don't know if it's gonna work, it's unfamiliar, and so a
lot of times what can happen is we stay in these negative self talk loops,
not necessarily because we want to be there or that we want to believe
these things, but it's habit, but that there's no option in a sense
exactly right. We're trapped in it until we find the mechanism to get out.
So so much all of that I think revolves around fearlessness. And I
want to take a quick look at the way that you described fearlessness, and
let's take a quick Lissen. Fearlessness is not about not being scared. Fearlessness
is when we fear is less. That sounds like a really cute, pretty
blowy, poetic, tweetable, and believe you me, I have tweeted it
out many times. But it's also an equation. Lowering your fear is hard.
Fear is a human emotion, and it exists for an important reason.
Life is all freaking over the place. However, upping your faith is a
different story. So many times we just think at this high high, we
think that we're supposed to be there all of the time. Life is up,
it's down, it's in between. If you can start to notice the
reasons that you already have to have faith in yourself, it loops right here.
You think you're going up, but oh, fake out, and you're
still going down. Slowly, but surely those reasons pile up and the scales
start to tip from the fear toward the faith. Right, Canny, you
talked a lot in that clip about being fearness on the day to day and
learning to sort of take life's up and downs in stride and not too sort
of affected right by them. How do you empower yourself to do that on
a daily basis? So the idea of fearlessness, so the fear that you
have a situation thing is less than the faith that you have in yourself.
I've found that that's a very grounding north star, yeah for me, if
you will. And fearlessness, a lot of people will talk about fearlessness is
feeling the fear and doing it anyway, which I think can be useful as
well. I'm not going to bash that whole phrase, especially if it works
for people who are watching or listening. And also, I really believe that
we need multiple tools in our toolkit when it comes to things like developing yearlessness,
confidence, dealing with self doubt. So for me, what I like
to do when I'm feeling that fears start to come up, yeah, is
I give myself actual what I call faith points for myself. Yeah. So
that's stuff that so that stuff that feels like I can trust. It's stuff
that feels real, that feels tangible. It's not stuff that I'm reaching out
of the air to make myself believe. So, for example, I have
not recorded a podcast in person any very time, and so I felt when
I was planning out my week and I knew that I was going to be
coming here, I started to feel that little flicker of fear I come up
and I think, oh my gosh, like I hope, I hope,
say who likes me? Yeah, I hope I do well. I hope
I'm not tripping over my words. And it's really easy and very natural to
get caught in that place. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think it's what
you've what you've sort of articulated and identified is. And it's interesting because I
don't know if you've read doctor Lisa Demor's book, which was about stress and
anxiety and young women. And one of the things she talks about in that
book is she was working as a school psychologist at a couple of different high
schools in Los Angeles actually, and she talked about young women coming in,
you know, saying I'm super stressed about an exam I have tomorrow, and
where a lot of adult responses are generally to say, oh, don't be
stressed, right right, right, Like that helps, Like that helps.
Her approach was, Okay, I understand that you're stressed, and it totally
makes sense. What is it. Let's talk through what you can do to
diminish that stress, Like what's the actual roadmap of how you're going to feel
less stressed about this exam to the worrow? Right? And And I think
that tactical, practical sort of what am I going to do? For a
second and third is what is something that's very difficult for us to do on
our own in a vacuum? Yeah right, Like, even though we know
the goal, it's very hard to identify the path to get there, and
talking learning or teaching ourselves to sort of step back at that moment and say,
hang on, let me just think about this and hey, and I
can think it through and identify steps, you know, A, B,
and C to then overcome that year. Yeah right, or just thinking,
Okay, what do I know? Yeah? What do I know? Like,
let's go back to this very real time example. I know that I
have been doing this for fifteen years, So whatever we talk about, I'm
not going to be scrambling for words. I know that I have that experience
behind me, don't. I also know that I very simple. I have
outfits that I like to wear that I know I will feel comfortable because I'm
wearing an outfit that I love. I know that I know how to speak
on a mic and camera because I've been doing that for even longer. I
come from a theater background way, so just pulling these small little things that
feel inconsequential and that sometimes is a really great in Yes, for doing exactly
what you talked about, which is the next step of Okay, what's my
game plan? So what am I going to do about it? Right?
Yeah, it's putting together. It's sort of taking these puzzle pieces that you
have within yourselves and actually combining them into a coherent image or plan. Yeah,
how you tackle something? Yeah, Yeah, you've had some experience with
coaching yourself. You also coach others extensively. How did coaching impact you in
helping you to kind of put aside or put down the negative self talk.
Of course, for any of us who've suffered from this, it constantly arises.
It's not ever going to sort of disappear into the void. But we
evolved in the tools, as you said, that we use to slay those
demons. Yeah, tell me about that. So I'm someone who I feel
like I came out of the womb self aware I have there is there is
no lacking in self awareness in me, and so which is a wonderful quality
to have and also can also burden. Yeah, it can. It can
be really really hard sometimes. And so what was really useful for me when
it comes to getting my own support is to recognize exactly what I need.
And if I didn't know what I needed, that's that's valid as well,
because what I see sometimes in people who talk about coaching and they're like,
well, I haven't really noticed a difference or haven't seen a thing. You
hear this a lot also with therapists. Yes, people will say, well,
I didn't really notice the difference. You also, as the person who
is being coached, have to show up just as much as the person who
is coaching you. And you have to be willing to to be honest.
And also it's a practice and asking for what you need. So, for
example, I was on a call with a coach of mine a few weeks
ago, and I was struggling through I'm writing a book right now. I'm
in the midst of finishing up my MANUSS and that's a very insular, isolating
experience sometimes, and I realized that I needed in my life a little bit
more of a sense of community. But I didn't want to go so far
in the other direction that I completely neglected all the good that I had going.
And so I said that to my coach, and I said, look,
I understand what's going on. Here's where I believe it comes from.
I would love to figure out some tools that maybe I could use in this
time. And also like, is there anything that you're noticing that I'm not
noticing? Right, So that for me on the coach the coache and has
been really really important. And then on the coaching and find that it's so
vital for coaches to go or at least for me as a coach to go
into a session with a client with a blank slate. First of all,
I take notes during my sessions. Yeah, I like to remember. I
want to remember names, remember important details, certain words that they've said that
are like important to them. So just bare bones like stuff that I go
into the session with. And then I do not assume that the issues,
struggle, situations that are going on in the last session are happening this session.
I think that that's that's where the importance of the blank slate comes up.
Yeah, my dad always says that it's a very dad joke that to
assume is to make an ass out of you and me. He's not wrong.
And then really working with people to help them come to their own conclusions
and help support them with strategies and systems to make however they want to be
or whatever they want to do sustainable. Like I don't go in as a
coach thinking that I have all the answers. What I do go in with
is the intention to help the person that I'm coaching ask better, more nuanced,
more useful questions. If that makes sense, Yeah, that totally makes
sense. I think in the end, what you're going in with is a
framework, right that you can use. And the reason the framework I think
is so important for coucheese is as a coachy, you are there with a
problem and sometimes people just want an answer, right, Like a lot of
times people will just say, well, I just want, you know,
someone to tell you what to do so I can just solve this problem,
right, And in a sense, that's such an unproductive path because someone telling
you what to do might solve your problem in the immediate term, but it's
again given you no tools to tackle a problem when it arises next. Yes,
And I think the purpose and the importance of coaching and the framework ultimately
is teaching you those tools so that when you confront that situation the next time,
or even in this moment, when you're in a situation you're asking yourself
the right questions, listening to the answers, and then behaving according exactly.
I mean, it goes back to how I approach self talk. Is you
can't just replace one word with another word. Yeah, yes, maybe if
you're writing a paper and one word expresses your thoughts better than another word.
But to go from I don't believe in myself too, I believe in myself.
That's putting words first, and that's band aiding words on top of the
situation. And so in order to shift your self talk, you really the
talk comes secondary. It's the self part where the real lasting changes come.
And it's tough work, but that's like the groundwork for the self house that
you're building. You know. Do you feel? And this maybe anecdata on
my part, but it feels like as women, we suffer from this problem
a whole lot more than men do. Is that your impression? You know?
It's still interesting because I get so many men who will come to me
be like, we go through this also, like we deal with low self
image and self worth and self down out. And my experience is that all
genders experience negative self talk. Historically, women's negative self talk has been reinforced
more and reinforced in very subtle ways through I mean even just looking at advertisements.
In the words used to describe a cream, it's an anti aging cream,
so anti we are anti aging aging, not exactly exactly. And so
there are some incredible men who are doing this type of work focusing on men.
You know, Justin Baldoni is one of those people. He has a
fantastic podcast for me. I choose to focus on women because not only is
that the experience that I have, and I also find that women so many
times start to lead the charge for change, yes, in whatever area they're
in in life. And so if women can start to shift their self talk
and look, we all take cues from each other. So if you are
holding yourself in a certain way, doing certain things, speaking of yourself in
a certain way, I'm going to take note of that, and I'm going
to start to feel more comfortable and more permission to be that way myself.
Yeah, And then that creates this ribble effect where what we do is not
in a silo and we I mean we learn best not from books, but
from each other. Yeah, from engagement and from conversation and in groups,
and with the benefit of different perspectives. I sig. Do you think is
negative self talk something that is age related in any way? Like do you
find, um, when people are in their lateens twenties, is it more
of a problem in a sense, you know, there's there's not as much
experience there in kind of navigating the world. But is there any kind of
pattern that you observed like that. I mean, it's interesting because yes,
no, and kind of yeah, yeah, and very wide variation of that
answer. Um. Negative self talk is something that I've noticed. Is it
transcends age or life stage? The things that you're negative self talking about might
change throughout time? Yeah. Um. But the one commonality that I do
find is that the earlier you start down the negative self talk path and like
aren't really taking proactive steps to build that sense of self and that proactive sense
of self like we were talking before, the stronger the habit gets, yes,
and so it becomes something that we don't even realize that we're doing.
And there's a term that I that I use called casual negativity, and it's
the negative self talk that we use so emotionless that it's like commenting on the
weather or like the sigh is blue I'm so untalented, you know, the
stuff that we don't even think they go about. And so while I would
say that negative self talk, like I said, transcends hage, it is
something that the longer you're saying something to yourself, the more they begin to
believe it. Yeah, and the more it's it's lodged into your head and
your heart as just something that I say, it is something that I am
and that's why I am passionate about working with all ages, Henny and all
people. But when I get someone who is in a transitional point in their
life, and that could be someone who just graduated college, who is about
to hit maybe what has been socially deemed a milestone birthday thirty forty fifty,
someone wants to create a career change, that's when it's like I get even
more excited about it because it's a sign to me that they are ready to
do something differently and I get to support them through that. And that's just
it's a transition moment and it's a really nice time to reflect and look back
but also to move forward. Yeah, exactly, wonderful last question, Katie,
for you. So many of our listeners or mothers and what role do
you think as much, I mean, as the mother myself of three teenagers,
two of which are our young women. What advice would you give mothers
to help their daughters sort of hold this negative self talk at bay, because,
as you said, it's around us kind of everywhere. Yeah, And
what can we do as mothers to really teach some of the skills more proactively?
Yeah, to our daughters. So, if you are a mother to
a child, but in particular a daughter, you were once a daughter your
mother, I mean you still you still are. And whether that was a
mother or a mother figure, you had older women in your life, yeah,
who were modeling behavior, Yeah, like what it meant to be a
woman in the world. Yes. And so while I am I wear my
aunt status with pride, I am not a mother myself. I am a
daughter, and I'm a granddaughter, and I'm a niece, and I'm a
friend. And I believe that the best thing that we can do for our
children, our younger generations, for each other is to kind of turn that
advice of treat others how you want to be treated on a head, yes,
and say, well, I know how I want to treat others like
I know, I want to be a good mother, I want to be
a good friend, and then getting clear on like what means how am I
being that for myself? Yes? Because we learn, Yeah, and humans
learn, like we were talking about, from what we see. It's sort
of the like don't tell me, show me right, um saying. And
the best thing that we can do is really model what it looks like to
be the type of person that we needed when we were younger. That's a
great, great point. Thank you Katie for being with us today. Oh
my gosh, you are so welcome. This was such a such a joy.
This is so much fun, and thank you for nesting. Thanks for
listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your
ideal coach at www dot vidmx dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin
Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.