My Top 5 Lessons from 2023

As we wrap up another year, I've been thinking a lot about my top five lessons for 2023. And in today's episode, I'm sharing them with you. 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 friends. We are five days away from a brand new year. I'm so excited and I'm ending my year in the most human of ways. You're going to love this story. I went to the gym with my daughter this morning and we are walking with another friend to my car and I felt something hit my face, but I thought it was just a drop of water from a tree. And then my daughter looks at me and she's like, "Mom, what is on you?" And all over my white sweatshirt and on my face was a lot of bird poop, which I rushed home. I had to shower really quickly and I jumped on a team meeting and I was telling them, and they're like, "You know, that means good luck." And so, I'm choosing to see the fact that I was just pooped all over by birds as the sign of it's going to be a good year 2024.

Are y'all ready? I'm so excited for this community and what we're going to create. Notice I used the word create. It's very different than what are we going to fix about ourselves next year? One of the biggest beliefs that keeps us stuck in patterns and cycles that don't support us is the belief that we're broken and we need to fix ourselves. We need to fix our personalities. We need to fix our weight. We need to fix our relationships. We need to fix our homes. We need to fix our bodies. We need to fix our bank accounts. You name it, we think it's something that's broken. And the work that we do around Self-Image is based on the principle that however you see yourself is going to be what you're looking for in the world and ultimately what you create. So when you come at your life as if your life is broken, when you come at yourself as if you are broken, you end up perpetuating brokenness. I want us to change that narrative.

I want you to see yourself as a masterpiece. I want you to see your life as the same. It's something that you get to create from a place of love and joy and excitement and passion. And that's exactly why I created our most beloved workshop that I host at the beginning of every single year. Women start emailing me around October saying, "Are you going to do live like an Editor again?" Which is the name of the workshop. And it's my favorite way of starting the year because we started out not with a bunch of resolutions and problems that we want to fix, but we look at our lives through the lens of being an editor. And if you think about an editor of a magazine, she has been appointed to uphold the theme of that magazine. What you read in Southern Living is going to be very different than what you read in Vogue. And every word, every image, every design decision is based off of the theme of that magazine.

I want you to think about looking at your life for an entire year as if it's a magazine. What do you want this year to be about? More importantly, who do you want to be this year? And imagine starting your year out with that clarity and knowing what you need to edit, let go of, what you need to bring into support the magazine of you. This workshop is so much fun. Women create magazine covers. I've had so many of you tell me that this workshop set you up for your best year ever. So many of you have said it's the best $37 you've ever spent, and it's something that is so delightful and fun. I feel like when it comes to personal development, it can feel very heavy. It's, again, you're always looking at what's wrong and what you want to change, and it can start to perpetuate the self-image that something is wrong with you. Well, this workshop does the exact opposite. We come from the place of you are whole, you are extraordinary, you are amazing. Now, what? What do we want to create this year?

This workshop is going to be taking place over the course of five days. We start on, let me see, I think it's January the 8th. Let me look at my calendar. Yes, Monday, January the 8th. Every morning you're going to get an audio lesson where I am going to set the stage for that day and what your focus is. And then we will meet on a video call and I will go deeper into that day's topic. I will answer your questions about that day's topic. And then we also have a Facebook group where this comes to life. It's so much fun to go in there and see these magazine covers, see your headlines, see you bringing this idea and this process to life with a group of women who are doing it alongside you. And so come and join us. Let's kickstart 2024 in the most beautiful, creative and fun way in the Live Like an Editor workshop. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/workshop. You can read all about the workshop. And let's do it. I cannot wait to see you inside.

Now, if you are a member of the School of Self-Image, you probably either attended or you have watched the workshop that we just did for members called Your Extraordinary Year. Part of that workshop was all about reflecting on this year. We all looked at our wins, our accomplishments, our gratitudes for this year. And we also looked at our disappointments and our regrets. I asked everybody to really think about what were the lessons learned from this past year? Because I hope we're always learning. I hope we're always growing. If I ever end a year saying to myself, "I didn't learn anything this year," it tells me that I didn't put myself out there. It tells me that I've become complacent because life is always handing us lessons. And if I'm not learning, it means again that I'm either asleep and I'm not aware of the lessons, I'm not reflecting, or I'm just living the same year after year.

And so I had a lot of lessons this year. This was a big internal growth year for me. Sometimes I feel like we can get frustrated with ourselves because it seems as if the lessons were lessons that we should have learned years ago. And especially as a coach, I feel like as coaches, we put this pressure on ourselves to have things figured out. But I'm here to tell you, there's a lot I don't have figured out. And I tell my members all of the time, I'm like, "Listen, ladies, I am learning right alongside you." This isn't a lesson that I'm including in today's Top five Lessons of 2023, but it's the ongoing lesson of having grace with ourselves and not shaming ourselves because we haven't learned a lesson yet. Because I would never look at my daughter and say, "Why haven't you learned this by now?" I would be celebrating that she's learning it whenever she's learning it.

And so I have extended that grace to myself, and even still, I can hear my brain going, "And why at the age of almost 50, are you just now getting this?" And I remind myself I'm getting it at exactly the right time. And so without further ado, may I share my top five lessons from 2023?

Lesson number 1, health is your greatest wealth. Health is something that I'll admit that I've taken for granted. When you're young and things are working and your hormones are optimized and you're getting enough sunshine and you don't have the stress of life, you just, for the most part, are healthy and you never think about not having your health. But as you get older, things begin to change, right? You start having aches and pains where you didn't used to have aches and pains. Maybe you have an injury from doing something silly like dancing in the living room. You've noticed that your hair's changing and your hormones aren't functioning like they used to. Maybe you lose your libido. Your skin starts drying out. All kinds of things start to happen. And when these things typically happen, we just say it's our age. We're just getting older, this is just what happens. And with that kind of mindset, you can easily begin to give up on your health because in the back of your mind, you may have the thought or the question, "Why bother? I'm losing control. I'm losing the battle."

This past year, I started my year out with the word energized. That was my word of the year, because I was feeling the effects of my health not being what it used to be. Now, granted, over the last couple of years, I've been seeing a doctor and I've worked on my hormones, but I still was sitting a lot working. I wasn't stretching a lot. I wasn't doing a lot of the things that make you feel better. And so this year I really focused on being energized and doing things that give me energy. Sometimes, oftentimes actually, the things that give you energy are the things that we're most resistant to, i.e. exercising. My brain's like, "Ugh, you can do it tomorrow." But I made a commitment. And I can say that I'm ending this year feeling more energized than I have felt in many years prior. I feel good physically. I feel like I am going backwards in many ways. I have really focused this year on eating well-

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I have really focused this year on eating well, which because of all of the work that I've done in the past with my body and my weight, healthy eating was something that I was already doing for the most part. But this year's been more about finessing and refining it, and really paying attention to how does oat milk feel in my body? Well, it turns out my body doesn't like oat milk. I eliminated it and all of a sudden, I felt so much better and I lost three pounds in no time just by not drinking oat milk, but even more so, I felt more energized.

I also, thanks to my man, have stretched a lot this year. I'm talking about daily, and I realized that so many of my aches and my pains was because I wasn't stretching, and the older we get, the more we need to stretch. We need to stay flexible.

I was watching the documentary about the blue zones, and there was one, I think it was in Okinawa, and it was showing their daily lives of centenarians, people that live to be over a hundred. And one of the things that I noticed was how flexible they are and how their daily life is set up for movement. They sit on the ground, so they're having to constantly get up off the ground. They're doing squats. They're stretching a lot just by how they live their daily lives, and just by increasing my stretching this year, my body shape has changed, I feel like my posture has become better, and I feel so much better. I feel more energized because I believe when we don't stretch, this is just my philosophy, but we start to have that fascia that forms and we hold energy in.

And I'm telling you, I've had some stretch sessions with Vons where when he is doing deep, deep stretches on me, I start to cry just out of nowhere, and I don't even know what I'm crying about. But I can feel like this emotional release that happens, and so it's been as much a spiritual journey as a physical one, believe it or not. I know that sounds woowoo, but it's all connected - our mind, our body, our spirits. And so if we are rigid in our bodies, we're probably rigid in emotional release. We're probably hanging onto emotions that don't serve us, that want to move, that want to be understood, that want to be felt. And so stretching has been a big part of my year. Also working out. I have made a commitment to put on muscle, and so I have been in the gym, I have been doing squats, I've been doing bench presses. I've been doing all of the bodybuilding things, but in a way that feels good for me.

I have a love-hate relationship with the gym. Some days, I love going, and some days, I resist it, but I know it's good for me. I know that focusing on my health is my greatest wealth. Not to mention, when you feel good physically, and this is for all of you out there who are entrepreneurs or you're in careers and you're always saying, "I don't have time. My job needs me, my business needs me," or maybe you're a stay-at-home mom and you're like, "My kids need me." The healthier we are, the more energy we have and the better we can show up for our families, for our businesses, for our jobs, which can often lead to more wealth in the physical form.

There's a really great quote that Vons reminds me of often. He tells us this all the time, and it's this. "A healthy man has a thousand wishes. A sick man only has one." And on those days where I've been tempted to skip my workouts, on those days where my brain wants to tell me that, "You can do it later, it's too hard," I remind myself that one day, if I don't take care of this, it may be my only wish. And so I want to get ahead of the game. I want to take care of myself now so that I have space to have all these other wishes. And so that, my friends, has been lesson number one of this year - health is your greatest wealth.

Lesson number two, don't delay what you know needs to be done. This has been a recurring one for me. And I don't know, if you go back and listen to some podcasts. I've probably talked about this one before because it's the lesson that keeps showing up in my life. And what I've noticed is that I get better at it, but there's still a part of me that often wants to delay what I know deep down needs to be done, or what I want to be done. And I've thought a lot about this. Why do we delay the things that we know need to be done? Maybe it's delaying the decision that you know needs to be done. Maybe it's delaying the conversation that needs to be had. Maybe it's delaying the action that you know would help make your life so much better if you just do it, but you just keep delaying it. And it comes down to this, my friends. We're delaying facing the fear. We're delaying facing the scary stuff.

This year, I made a big decision and I'm actually going to be revealing this decision during the Live Like an Editor workshop for members of the school, because I am still processing it, I'm still understanding it, and I'm still learning from it. So you can imagine, I remember journaling a lot, really getting to know me and why this decision was so hard to make and why I delayed it for as long as I did, and it really did come down to just not wanting to face it. Just putting my head in the sand, pretending it wasn't there. It was almost like when I used to struggle with money, and I know a lot of you can relate to this. It's like you don't want to look at the situation and you're just hoping that it's going to fix itself without you having to be involved, but you're the one that created that situation so it's not going to fix itself unless you do get involved. And yet, it's scary to look at. It's scary to have the conversation. It's scary to make the decision.

But time and time again, I have been shown that the moment you do the thing that you've been delaying, there is instant relief. The moment after it's done, even if it's scary, even if it's hard, even if there's a lot of unknown, there is an instant relief that happens in your body that frees up energy that now, you can move forward. But up until you making that decision, it's almost like you're just putting a break on your life. But the moment you make that decision, now, you can start to speed up in a direction that you really, really want to go. And sometimes, delaying what needs to be done is about the small things from your day-to-day life. It's those things that you know you're going to get to. You're going to do it eventually, but you keep procrastinating and putting it off because it's so uncomfortable to sit down and just do the thing.

And I do believe the better we get at not delaying what we know needs to be done, the more ground we're going to cover in less amount of time, but it's going to force us to get rid of the distractions. Because when you're facing something that you know needs to be done and you're delaying it, what are you doing instead? And usually, it's a bunch of things that's giving you a dopamine hit, that feels good in the moment. It might be online shopping, it might be scrolling Instagram, it might be calling up a friend, and you just keep delaying that thing versus just getting it done. Now, in my day-to-Day life, and I actually teach this process in the Dream Atelier, which is a part of the School of Self-image membership, but for me personally, I schedule my decisions and so I just have to show up for them. But this one decision, I didn't schedule until I did.

So this was a decision that I've been wrestling with for over a year actually, and I gave myself a deadline to make the decision. And it wasn't even to make the decision. I already knew what the decision was, but it was to execute on the decision, and I gave myself a deadline. I actually put it in my calendar. And on that day, that decision was executed, but I spent a year wrestling with it, wanting to delay it. But when I saw my future, this was the decision that I had made to be in that future. And yet, even with knowing this, even with having had experiences of delaying decisions, I still delayed it, and I learned a big lesson. When you know something deep, deep down, don't delay taking action on it. Be brave enough to face the scary stuff and don't delay what you know needs to be done.

Lesson number three, don't take anything for granted. This is something that I have felt on a deep level this year, and historically, if you were to ask the people around me, they would say that I'm a pretty grateful person. I'm really mindful. I celebrate every day. I love to focus on my wins and my gratitudes, but there are things that I've taken for granted, one being my parents. When you're young, you just think your parents are going to be around forever and you don't even entertain the day when you may not have them. But now, as my parents are getting older and my dad has been in and out of the hospital over this past year, and I can see his health declining, I don't...

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I can see his health declining. I don't want to take any moment with them for granted. I want to be present with them. I want to tell them how much they mean to me, how much I love them, thank them for the lessons that they've instilled in me and the values and the morals that they've given me. I don't want to take it for granted because sometimes when you start to lose it is when you start appreciating it. And that's what's happening with my parents because now I realize that if things unfold in their natural course, there will be a day where I don't have them. Now, that's not guaranteed. I know that could change, but I want to act as if that is going to be how things unfold. And so knowing that, not taking them for granted and not taking our time together for granted.

I also, in lesson number one, mentioned health, but that's another area where I've definitely taken it for granted. I just assumed I would always feel amazing and great. And this year has been all about just really appreciating my body, even on the days where she doesn't feel so great, but appreciating her, celebrating her, thanking her for supporting me all of these years, even when I mistreated her. When you're constantly pursuing goals, which I'm all about, you all know I love an extraordinary goal, but I'm not for an extraordinary goal if it means you always chasing and never appreciating. And we can all get called up in it, we can all get called up in that energy that over there is better. If I just had more money, if I was at my ideal weight, if I had this, if had that, then life would be better. I would be free.

In another lesson, but I didn't include it in here, if you need anything to be free, you're not really free. If you need money to be free, then you're not really free because you're going to be a slave to money. If you need a partner to be free, then you're not really free because you're always going to need that partner for your freedom. That's a whole different side note. I don't know where that came from, but in this constant pursuit of goals and thinking over there is better, we often forget to look around and realizing that a lot of us are sitting in dreams that we once had and we're taking it for granted.

I think about the School of Self-Image community and the constant pressure to grow, grow, grow, and to increase, increase, increase. And I'm all for growth. I want to expose as many people to this work as possible. But if I'm always focused on growing and making more money and that is my focus, guess what's going to happen? I'm going to take for granted the community that we've already built. And I've seen little moments in my life where I'm so focused on growing the membership that I'm like, wait, whoa, Tonya, get your priorities straight here. And it's like those little wake up calls of like, oh, I already have an extraordinary community of women. And it is finding that balance, right? And that is, I think when you are creating a moral and ethical business, like you need to make money to pay your team and to pay your bills and to grow, but also never at the expense of your community that you already have.

And so this year I've really been sitting with that a lot. And for those of you that are in the membership, or maybe you're not in the membership, you just are a loyal podcast listener, or maybe you follow me on Instagram, I want you to know I appreciate you. I don't take it lightly that you listen, you tune in, you read, you engage with the work that I've created, and hopefully the goal is that you use that to make your life better, to bring joy and happiness and abundance into your life. But again, especially as business owners, if you're not careful, you'll get so swept up in more, more, more, that you take for granted what you already have.

One of the things that I think I did well early on is that I focused on the people I had, and there were times where I had eight women in a group coaching program and I focused on them, I worked with them, I helped them get results. And doing that at scale can feel more challenging because it brings its own challenges, but I still want to appreciate and focus on the women who have said yes to this work. And I am just calling myself out. And I think it's the struggle that many of us entrepreneurs have. When you're trying to market and get your message out there, you can at times forget, wait, I already have an amazing community. And so I keep bringing myself back to that knowing and it feels so good. That's what you all may miss.

If you just spend your life chasing more and more and more, it's exhausting. And I don't think you're going to go to bed at night feeling great, even if your bank account is huge. What feels great is knowing that you're serving at your highest level and you are really appreciating and not taking people for granted. I deeply believe that when you focus on people over profit, the profit will take care of itself. And the profit isn't just financial. Profit is what you get in return.

And so if you think about really appreciating and loving the people in your life, taking care of them, letting them know how much they mean to you, seeing how you can support them, then life will return that to you in some way. It may come in the most unexpected of ways, but it's going to return to you. I think it's Joe Polish that says, "Life gives to the giver." And so for me, not taking things for granted really comes down to giving to the people in my life, giving them attention, giving them time, giving them words, giving them support, whatever I can give to them, so that they know I see you, I appreciate you deeply, and I thank you for being on this journey with me. And then when it comes to the other things in our lives, I think the more we appreciate what we have energetically, the more space we allow for more to come in.

If you can't appreciate what you have right now, how are you going to appreciate more? And so if you're someone who like all of us, you want to create more, whatever that looks like for you, I want to challenge you, that appreciating what you already have is the first step. And this year it's been a big lesson for me just to notice when I'm not appreciating what I have, when I'm taking it for granted, and then just to stop and look around at all of the things that are bountiful in my life and not take them for granted.

Lesson number four. This is a big one. And that lesson is to trust your intuition. This year has been a lot about getting back to my soul because I had strayed away, not so far that I felt like I was out of complete integrity, but there were moments when I was told to do things and logically they made sense. Logically, I could look around and say, yeah, these people have done it and it's worked for them. But deep down my intuition was screaming, no. And this is something that I've talked to members about. I've actually done an advanced class within the membership around intuition. And the thing with intuition is that it's often not logical. It's just this deep sense in your body. Have you ever been around someone and you just feel like anxiety and you don't know why? If we go into our head, we can find a thought, but sometimes it's beyond thought. And I've been in a lot of debates about this because everybody's like, yeah, it always comes back to a thought. And yeah, we can find a thought and thoughts are powerful.

90% of the work that we do within the School of Self-Image is working with belief systems and thoughts and looking at how we're holding ourselves back with our thinking. But there's also this deep wisdom that resides in all of us that I think is like the GPS system of our lives, that with emotions, intuition plus emotion are trying to guide us. And oftentimes our intuition will tell us to do things that don't make sense, and that's scary.

I will never forget someone suggesting that I do something in my business, and I had invested a lot to work with this person, and so I had agreed to try what this person said, and it felt so icky and went against my intuition, but I was like, okay, I paid for this. It's an experiment. Let's try it. It did not work out. It was a huge fail, and I think I knew going into it, I'm like, this is not going to work. And yet I overrode my intuition, and I will tell you all, every time I do that, it is not a good outcome ever. But when you're surrounded by people who have done certain things and they're telling you, you have to do it this way. This is the way it works, and trust me, and you trust that person.

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... it works and trust me, and you trust that person. Sometimes we can override our own wisdom. And so this year, I've been paying attention to my intuition, I've been noticing how my body reacts to certain people. And sometimes I'm around a person who is saying all of the right things with a smile on their face and my body is saying, "No, get out, run," and I don't know why, but I'm learning to trust that little voice. Sometimes ideas are offered and logically my brain's like, "Yes, great idea," but my body is like, "Girl, what are you even thinking to even consider this idea?", and I've been paying attention to it.

With the big decision I made, the sheer around my business, I had just an intuitive knowing. I had one conversation with one person, and it was a huge yes in my body and my brain was like, "Girl, you should research this more. You shouldn't go with this quick," but I just trusted her, her being my intuition, and I'm so glad I did. I don't think we honor intuition enough, and it's something that I want to talk more about. And the thing with intuition is it requires that you get back in touch with your body. And for many women, that's a scary thing to do: we have shut ourselves off from our bodies because of trauma. Because of past experiences, our bodies don't feel like a safe place to exist, and so we have shut her down and we don't listen to her. And so, a lot of this work is befriending your body, again, noticing what she's trying to tell you, noticing the signs and the clues.

And sometimes, the signs and clues can come outside of yourself. There have been many times this year where I was like, "God, give me a sign," and then I'll hear a song, or I'll see a literal sign, literally, that there's the answer. And I'm learning to trust that more and more because I'm telling you all when I follow those intuitive hits, now, are they always a slam dunk? No, but they get me closer. I do know that. And it's all about learning to trust ourselves. I think that's what intuition's all about. But I also understand that if you have followed your intuition in the past and maybe you didn't get the outcome that you wanted, maybe it didn't lead you to where you wanted to go, you can have a distrust of that part of you. But I want to encourage you that even if it didn't go the way you thought it was going to go or the way you wanted it to go, she's still your best guide, she's going to take you way further than your mind can ever take you.

When I read about the business leaders that I really admire and respect, one of the things that I've noticed is that they follow their intuition. And sometimes it fails, but over the long haul, it has taken them much further than they would've ever gone just with logic alone. So, trust your intuition.

The final lesson of 2023 for me has been to focus on my own path. You can get distracted, y'all: there's a lot to distract you, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of influence, there's a lot of opinions that is coming at us all day, every day. You can just scroll through your Instagram. Now, granted, Instagram knows your algorithm, and so it's probably putting in front of you the things that feed what you already want to believe and think. But occasionally, you'll get discrepancies even on your Instagram feed. If you're in a room full of people, everybody's going to have thoughts about what you should do and what you shouldn't do. And each of us, we are responsible for our own vision and focusing on our own paths. And that means we have to put the blinders up, we've got to stop looking around and comparing, we need to stop looking around and focusing on how far someone else has gone in comparison to our own journeys, we need to stop looking at what everybody else is doing and ask ourselves, "What do we really want to do?"

And it's harder and harder in this day and age. I'll be the first to admit it's so easy to be influenced and to get distracted, and it's happened to me. But this year has felt like coming back home to myself, coming back home to the path that is meant for me, and then tuning out all of the other noise that distracts me from that path. But it also means bringing in things that support me on that path. If you're in the membership, then you're very familiar with the self-image method, and steps three and four of the self-image method are you edit, you let go, and then you add.

And so, when you know what path you're on, you can easily spot, what's a distraction from this path? And you have to have the courage and the discipline to not look in that direction. And then also, you need to ask the question, "What do I need to bring into my life to support me on that path?", and this is where you get to trust your intuition: what does your intuition tell you you need? Learning to trust yourself is so huge when you're following your own path because if it's truly your own path, no one has ever been down that path the way you are going to go down that path. Now, they may have been down similar paths, but your path is going to be so unique because you're unique, and no one has ever gone to where you want to go with the way you want it to look and the way you want to feel.

And so yes, we can be inspired by other people, we can get ideas from other people, we can get mentorship, we can get coaching. But ultimately, the path is yours, and you're going to have to spot, what are distractions from my path? And you're going to have to be willing to edit them out of your life. And you're also going to have to spot, what would support me on this path? And you're going to have to be brave enough to bring that support in whatever that looks like for you. It might be a coach, it might be a new tool, it might be learning a new language, I don't know because I don't know what your path is. But what I do know is that you have one, I have one, and you have to be brave enough to follow it and put those blinders on to anything that distracts you from it. That's been a big lesson for me in 2023.

So, I want you to think about what have been your biggest lessons of this year. Take time to really think on that question, and take those lessons with you into the next year. If you're learning, you're not failing, my friends. So if you learned something this year, and hopefully we all did, let's use that to support us and to make us even better in 2024, although you are good enough as you are right now. Thank you all for an extraordinary year. I appreciate you so much, and I'm excited for our 2024. And if you want to kick 2024 off with a bang, with fun, with inspiration, with clarity of your path, come and join us in the Live Like an Editor workshop. It starts on January the 8th, you can go to schoolofselfimage.com/workshop, and I cannot wait to see you inside. Have a beautiful New Year and I will see you and 2024.

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.