My Top 5 Beauty Mistakes

From my hair to my lips. Today I'm sharing my top five beauty mistakes, so let's dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where personal development meets style. Here's your hostess, master life coach, Tonya Leigh.

Hello, my beautiful friends. Beauty is our topic today. If I've learned anything over the course of being a woman, it's that beauty and our worth are tied to each other. Worthy women choose to see themselves as beautiful, and that choice causes them to show up in the world in a very powerful and confident way. They don't let the outside world dictate to them what their beauty should look like. They decide for themselves, and then they focus on creating their own beauty and surrounding themselves with beauty.

Beauty is our superpower, and it's something that each of us has, and yet, most of us aren't looking for it. This is why this month within the School of Self-Image we are doing two things. Number one, for all of the members of the School of Self-Image, we are focused on creating your own beauty. I want each of my members to feel beautiful. I want them to own it. I want them to stop looking for validation of their beauty outside of themselves and for them to recognize it within themselves.

We are also hosting a five-day workshop called The Worthy Woman. I have seen myself, I've seen my friends, and I've seen my clients reject the lives that we want because on some level we didn't feel worthy enough of it. I've witnessed myself reject opportunities, reject certain relationships, reject money because on some level I didn't feel worthy of it. I had a self-image that did not allow for the beingness of certain things in my life. But fortunately, this is something that I've been working on for almost two decades, and I've seen a direct correlation between the level of my success and my belief in my own worth. This is exactly why I'm hosting this five-day workshop called The Worthy Woman. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/worthywoman and get signed up.

If you've ever attended my workshops before, you know that I overdeliver. And time and time again, I have women tell me, "Wow, those five days change my life," and this one will be no different.

In fact, if you have been struggling to create results in your life, I'm going to have you look at what you think you're worthy of. I'm going to have you question, "What is the real issue here?" Have you been pushing things away because on some level you don't think you deserve it, have you been rejecting opportunities, have you been rejecting abundance, have you been rejecting love, because maybe subconsciously you have a belief that you are not worth it? Because I want to destroy all of those beliefs during these five days, and I want to show you how you can begin to show up as the worthy woman that you are.

And part of this is you owning your beauty, which is why the whole month within the membership we're going to talk about creating your own beauty. As a young girl, I did not feel beautiful. I remember I had mousey strawberry blonde hair. My brother got chewing gum caught in it one day, and so he decided to cut my hair. So I remember when I was like seven years old I had this terrible haircut. I had two big front teeth because my face had not grown yet. My teeth were growing, but my face was not growing. I just felt really unattractive and not beautiful. That really did carry over into my early adulthood. As a young woman, I never really felt beautiful.

And so, like a lot of women, when you don't feel beautiful, you start taking measures to try to be more beautiful, but it's being driven out of an energy that isn't serving you. The way I like to describe it is even when it comes to money, you can create abundance from a feeling of enoughness or you can try to create abundance from a feeling of lack. The second will never work. You cannot create abundance if you're feeling lack. And the same goes for beauty. It's very difficult to create beauty from a feeling of not enoughness, not worthy, not attractive.

I've had gorgeous clients come to work with me, and they've done the things. They've had plastic surgery. They have worked with top stylists. They have done all of the things to make themselves look beautiful on the inside, but they don't feel beautiful. When they look into the mirror, they still don't see their own beauty, which is why beauty really is an inside job. When you start to recognize and look for and see the beauty within yourself, then you get to express it to the outside world.

Now, this may sound contradictory, but just bear with me, okay? Beauty is also something that you create on the outside. Beauty requires attention. It requires intention. It requires care and respect. I think about a house. If you don't maintain the house, if you don't take care of it, if you don't paint the walls and put beautiful landscaping and mow the lawn, then eventually that house is going to be run down. It's going to not be as pleasing to the eyes. The same goes for our physical beauty. But there's a difference in taking care of the house because you love and respect the house versus taking care of the house because you're concerned about what everybody else thinks. I want us to approach our beauty from the inside out of us doing it for ourselves because it feels good, because we deserve that, because we want to express our beauty, because we know the power of owning our beauty.

My beauty journey has been ongoing. Beauty is actually one of my core values. I love to surround myself with it. I love to create it, and I love to feel it. I will tell you, as I approach my 50s, I feel more beautiful than ever. What's really crazy is that my body's changing. I'm getting wrinkles, got gray hair, and still I feel so beautiful. It's because of the work that I do within the School of Self-Image. It's because I have decided that I want to live in a beautiful world. I want to seek it out. I want to celebrate it. I want to create it. I want to be it. And because that is my intention, that is where my energy is flowing, that's where my attention is going. So therefore, I'm experiencing more of it, which is how the world works.

Now, within the membership this month, I'll be sharing things that I do. I'll be sharing my beauty plan, so to speak, but I thought it'd be fun on this podcast to share some of my beauty mistakes. Because in striving to create more beauty, you're going to make mistakes. It's just like art. No artist paints the perfect piece the first time; there are a lot of mistakes along the way. One of the things that I will say before I share my beauty mistakes is this: what has been so crucial for me to do is to really look at beauty through my own perspective, through my own lens, which can sometimes be hard to do because we're so influenced by the media, by corporations as to what is beautiful this season, because it's always changing. It's important that when you're doing this work around your beauty that you ask yourself, "Is this really beautiful to me or is this just what I've been taught is beautiful? Do I really like the way this looks? Is this aesthetically pleasing to me? Or is this just leftovers from the brainwashing that happens through our media?"

Whenever I'm looking at things, I'm trying to find out what is my truth here. When I'm looking at a piece of art, when I'm looking at a dress on me, when I'm looking at my makeup, I'm like, "Do I really, really like this? Or do I think I like it because this is what I've been taught I should like?" That takes a lot of practice. But along this journey of figuring out what is beautiful to you, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. So without further ado, let's talk about my top five beauty mistakes.

Okay, let's start with number one. Top beauty mistake number one was getting stuck in a hair rut. Okay, so what do I mean by that? Ever since I can remember as a little girl, I have had bangs. They were my security blanket. I didn't know who Tonya was without bangs. I also had developed this belief that I didn't look good without bangs. I told myself the story that my forehead was too big and that it just wasn't a good look for me. All the while I would look at women who didn't have bangs, and I would wish for that. I thought it would be so much fun to just pull your hair straight back, not have to worry when you get out of a pool that your bangs are going to be a hot mess; you can just pull all of that back.

And so, this year I decided to grow out my bang, and it has not been easy. We discount the power of style and beauty, but it's all connected. When you change something in your outward appearance, it's signaling a change that's happening within you. It can be a positive change or a negative change, but we are connected people, meaning what we do on the outside is directly correlated to what's going on on the inside. And so for me, changing my hair and growing my bangs out has brought up a lot of insecurities, has brought up a lot of limiting beliefs about my face. And I've done a lot of healing just from growing out my bangs. Believe it or not.

I also feel like growing out my bangs and getting out of this rut, this beauty rut, has opened up the next level of myself. It's helped me evolve. I'm starting to see myself as more sophisticated. I'm seeing myself as more confident. I'm seeing myself even as more mature just from growing out my bangs. And so, the beauty mistake again, was allowing myself to get into a beauty rut. I feel like we need to change things up. We need to shake things up. If you've been wearing the same clothes for years, if you've been wearing your hair the same way for years, if you've basically look the same for years, maybe it's time for you to shake things up a little bit. Because when you do, it's going to shake up things inside of you. And when you do that intentionally, I think it's a beautiful thing and great healing and growing can happen in changing up your style and changing up your beauty. Okay, so that's mistake number one.

Beauty mistake number two was getting eyelash extensions. Now, when I first discovered them, I may have even mentioned it on this podcast, I thought they were the best thing ever. I love beautiful eyelashes. I find them aesthetically pleasing. What I don't love, number one, is the upkeep of eyelash extensions and the cost. I also, even more than that, don't love what they do to your natural lash.

I had mine for two years, and at the end, I don't know what they were hanging onto because I literally had very few lashes left. I had destroyed my natural lash. And beyond that, there were a couple of times that I had really super, super long extensions put on. I thought they looked good, but now looking back, I'm like, "They looked so fake."

And this is just my own personal preference. When I'm working with clients, it's like helping them figure out, "What is your style? Who do you want to be? What do you want to express?" But I want my beauty to be subtle. I want it to be an enhancement, not something that takes over my face. And there were a couple times, as I was saying, that my extensions, those were the first things that you would've noticed about me, are my big eyelashes. And it was obvious how fake they were. And so, that along with the cost, the time, and the fact that I had no natural eyelashes left anymore, I stopped doing eyelash extensions and I probably will never do them again. I don't want to say never, because then I may have to eat my own words, but I'm almost 99.9% sure I will never do the eyelash extensions that I was getting professionally done ever again. I have found a substitute, however, and I will be sharing this with you all within the membership. But no more eyelash extensions for me.

Beauty mistake number three, we're going to go back to my hair, beauty mistake number three was bleaching the crap out of my hair. I was 100% bleached. I'm not talking about highlights, I'm talking about full-on bleach with toner. I was doing that to my hair for probably 10 years every six weeks. It's so crazy, while I go back and I look at pictures of my hair back then, many of you all knew me then, and there are pictures that look so good. I miss that hair. I had my bangs, I had my bleach, but I was destroying my hair. And I didn't realize it at the time.

Whenever you get fresh bleach on your hair, for those of you who've done it, you know how good it feels. It feels thick. It feels like you can style it well. But year after year of putting those chemicals on your hair, it begins to compromise the hair. And so, last year, I think mixture of bleaching and probably having COVID, my hair just started to fall out in huge clumps. I was really afraid of what was going on with my hair because, like the Bible says, my hair's been my crown of glory. And all of a sudden, my glory was shedding, it was going down the shower drain. And so I really made it a mission of mine to focus on getting my hair to be naturally healthy, which has meant that I'm not bleaching my hair as much. I get highlights a couple times a year now, and I just get some color on my roots.

I'm not ready to go gray yet. I know some of you all have told me that I should consider it. It will happen eventually one day, but right now I'm not ready. But I do want to take exquisite care of my hair. And so that means that I'm no longer bleaching my hair like I was. I've been doing other things that have really made a big, big impact on my hair. I don't have time to share it on this episode, but for those of you within the membership, I'll be sure to include some of the things that I've been doing for my hair in the behind the scenes.

Beauty mistake number four is not paying attention to the ingredients of my beauty products. For the longest time, it was just ignorance. I thought, "If it makes me look good, who cares?" And now as I've become older and wiser, I realize how important it is to pay attention to what we put on our body. Our skin is the largest organ. I'm a little frustrated with myself that I didn't pay attention to this even though I worked as a nurse. I knew the power of a topical cream. It seeps right through the skin, gets straight into the cardiovascular system, and impacts your body. And yet, I just didn't pay attention to this very important part of our beauty.

And that is paying attention to what we're putting on our bodies, caring about ourselves enough to make sure that the products that we use are clean and safe to use. Now, I'm not going to go into detail about this one, but what I do encourage you to do is watch the documentary called Not So Pretty. This documentary will shed the ugly truth on the Beauty industry and open your eyes to things that you should be looking out for to make sure that you are truly taking care of your beauty by taking care of your health.

Okay, let's talk about my last beauty mistake that I must share with you. When it comes to procedures, the only thing that I've ever had done, except for this one other thing that I'm about to share with you, is Botox. I get Botox twice a year right on my forehead and between my brows. And so, I was about to go to Mexico, I think it was last year, and I went in to get my Botox. The girl doing it was like, "I really think you should do a lip flip." And I was like, "Oh, do you now? What is that?" So she starts explaining how they actually inject your lip so that it flips up.

When it comes to these kinds of procedures, I've just never been that interested. It's not that I think they're bad. I don't judge any woman. You have to decide what you want to do for you and just make sure you like your reason for doing it. But for me, I've never had laser. I've never had chemical peels. I've never done any of this stuff. Now, I'm not against it, and I probably will consider doing some more in depth skincare stuff like appeal at some point in the future. However, getting a lip flip was not top of my list, but I was like, "Okay, let's try it." Big mistake. I looked ridiculous. I got to Mexico, my friend Brooke was like, "What have you done to your face?" I'm like, "Girl, I got a lip flip." Thank goodness it's not permanent. It finally settled down.

But that just showed me that, first of all, you should do research before you get a procedure. Don't just walk into a place and allow someone to be like, "Hey, I think this would be fun to try on you." It's your face; I don't know what I was thinking. And then the second thing is make sure that the person who's doing the procedure knows what they're doing. I did not do any research on this girl. I didn't know anything about her, and I'm letting her literally distort my face. So that was a beauty mistake that I made and I learned from.

But at the end of the day, you all, I do love all things beauty. I love creating it. I love experimenting with it. I love seeing what works and what doesn't. And mostly, I love doing all of this from a place of fun and joy and love for myself, not because I don't think I'm good enough. I spent a lifetime trying to change from that energy and it didn't work. I had to do a lot of work on seeing my worth and seeing how good I really was and then letting everything be an extension of that. And that's what I want for you all. I want for you to see the beauty that is already within you and outside of you, and then let's create more of it, whatever that looks like for you.

But at the core, what you must do for yourself is to claim your worth, to decide you're worthy of beauty, decide you're worthy of abundance, to decide you're worthy of whatever it is that you want in your life. And if you're ready to make that decision and be the worthy woman that you came here to be, come join us for my upcoming five-day workshop. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/worthywoman. I cannot wait to see you at the workshop and spend five days helping you step into the worthy woman that you came here to be. Have a great week, everyone, and I will see you in next week's episode.

Hey, have you grabbed your free copy of the School of Self-Image Manifesto? If not, what in the world? Head over to schoolofselfimage.com/manifesto and get a copy that teaches you how to think and show up in the areas of mindset, style, and surroundings so that you can transform your self-image.