The 30-Day Reset That Changes How You See Yourself

The Unused Space

There is a room in my house that I don’t use. It has a name. I call it My Studio. I’ve called it that ever since we moved in almost two years ago. And in all of that time, I have never once recorded a podcast in it. I’ve never sat down in it and done a full day of work. I take my Zoom calls in my other office and I record this podcast in front of my bookshelf.

In the studio, the room I was so sure about, the room I had a whole vision for just sits there, door closed, waiting. Two of the walls are painted black, two are painted white. That was supposed to be intentional. I was going to have different scenes and different sets and I wanted it to be moody and dramatic and editorial. I wanted it to feel like me. But the truth is I never truly decided. I started with one idea, shifted to another, and then I just stopped. So now it’s just a room that looks confused because I’ve been confused. There’s almost nothing in it. There’s a few things that I moved in when I thought I was about to make it happen. There’s a piece of furniture I bought in a hurry that was supposed to be temporary. It’s still there, still temporary, still the only thing in the room besides my indecision.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where our motto is simple, elevate your self-image, elevate your life. I’m Tonya Leigh, your hostess, and I’ll guide you to become the woman who doesn’t just dream bigger. She lives bigger. Let’s dive in.

The Gap Between Vision and Reality

Now, here’s what I want you to know. I had this whole vision for this room, a real one. I saw myself walking in every morning with coffee in hand, everything set up, the lighting right, the camera ready, a space that felt like a creative home, a place that was mine, my refuge, my headquarters, the room where I would build what I’m building and it looks like what I believe and feels like where I’m going. That room exists in my imagination. It’s existed there for almost two years. But in reality, it’s empty and I walk past it every day. I don’t open the door on most days, but I know it’s there. And every time I pass it, it says something to me. The half-painted walls say, “You don’t finish.” The empty space says, “You’re still not ready.” The closed door says, “You had a vision and you abandoned it, again.”

What Avoidance Is Really Saying

We think spaces are just spaces. We think a room is just a room, but that’s not true. An empty room is still a mirror. A room you don’t use is still having a conversation with your self-image. And this room has been whispering the same thing to me for almost two years, “You are a woman with beautiful ideas, but you didn’t follow through on this one.” I’ve been avoiding that conversation. I wasn’t ready to hear what it was saying, and I definitely wasn’t ready to change the answer and I had all of the excuses. It’s too busy. I have too much going on. I’ll get it done later.

But if I’m being honest with you, I haven’t really talked about something else publicly. I am in the middle of one of the biggest personal reinventions of my life. But here’s the thing, it’s not really an evolution into someone new. It’s a return to someone I already know. I know this woman. I’ve met her. I’ve been her. She is the woman who sailed through St. Bart’s. She’s the woman who lived a whole summer in the South of France and wore color every single day. She’s a woman who would walk into rooms and would feel like herself, not the responsible version, not the practical woman, not the version who holds it all together for everyone else, but the real, alive version, the creative version, who was a little bit wild and completely unapologetic about loving beautiful things, about loving life. She is a woman who French-kissed her life. And if you’ve been around for a while, you know her too. She’s romantic. She’s very feminine. She’s passionate. She lives more in her body than she does in her head.

The Identity You’ve Set Aside

I didn’t lose her all at once. That’s not how it works, is it? You don’t wake up one morning and realize, “Hey, she’s gone.” It happens slowly. You get busy. Life happens. You start to become very practical. You start making responsible decisions. You build something big and important and you pour yourself into it. And somewhere in the pouring, you set her down. You told yourself it was temporary. You told yourself you’d come back to her when things settled down, but things didn’t settle down and she’s still waiting.

That studio is her room. And that’s why I’ve been torn into building it and why I also can’t let it go, because there’s something about building that studio that means admitting that I want her back, that woman in silk, the woman who designs her life like a creative piece of art, the woman who refuses to live provisionally. She’s not just some past tense version of me. She is actually the truest version of me and I abandon her for the busy one, the capable one, the one who gets things done but doesn’t always feel alive doing them. That empty room is the space between who I’ve been operating as and who I actually am.

In this studio, it’s where that gap lives because the woman I’m returning to doesn’t walk past an empty room every day and close the door. She doesn’t record her podcast in front of a bookshelf because she didn’t build the space that she actually envisioned. She doesn’t keep a three-year-old vision in her head while the actual room just sits there bare and waiting. She has a studio that reflects what she actually believes, that beauty matters, that your environment is not separate from your ambition, that the space you create your life’s work in should feel like the work itself.

Why You Haven’t Followed Through

I haven’t built that studio yet, and I think I know why, because if I actually build this room, I have to admit that I’m done being the woman that I’ve been. I have to admit that this season, this era is over. I have to admit that I abandoned the very essence of myself, and that’s terrifying because as long as that room is empty, as long as the door stays closed, I have an excuse, I have a reason to keep being the practical one, the busy one, the one that knows this familiarity really well, the one who takes care of everyone else. I also don’t have to risk the vulnerability of admitting that I veered away from my truth in some ways, but something shifted in me recently. I realized I’m not becoming someone new. I’m finding my way back to someone I already know, and she is so tired of waiting.

So here’s what I’m going to ask you, and I want you to sit with this for a moment. What are you avoiding? Mine is an entire room. Yours might not be. It might be smaller than that. It might be a drawer you haven’t opened in months. It might be a closet that you shove things into and close it so nothing falls out. It might be a bathroom cabinet you pretend isn’t chaos every time you reach for your moisturizer. It might be a corner of your bedroom piled with things that don’t have a home because you never gave them one. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It just has to be yours, the space you walk past and feel something that you’d rather not feel, the one that sends a little pulse of guilt or overwhelm or I’ll deal with it later every time you walk by it.

Over the last few weeks on this podcast, we’ve been circling this idea from different angles. We talked about the spaces that you keep avoiding and what they’re trying to tell you. We’ve talked about how clutter isn’t really a clutter problem. It’s a self-image problem. We’ve talked about reinventing our lives one room at a time. And all of it has been leading here to this question, what’s the space that you keep walking past? Maybe it is the junk drawer in your kitchen that holds every dead battery and expired coupon and takeout menu since maybe, I don’t know, 2019. Maybe it’s your closet still full of clothes that belong to the woman you haven’t been in years. Maybe it’s the guest room that stopped being a guest room a long time ago and became a place where things go to be forgotten.

It doesn’t matter how big or small it is. What matters is that this space is talking to you every single day. It’s sending you a message about who you think you are. And more powerfully, it’s sending you a message about who you think you’re allowed to become, the woman you’re returning to. The one you can feel in your bones when you’re quiet enough to listen, she doesn’t live in one day. She doesn’t live in when I have time or when things aren’t so busy. She lives right now and she’s waiting for you to stop walking past the drawer and to actually open it.

The Path to Real Change

I’ve thought a lot about how to actually do this, not just think about it, not just feel inspired and then let the feeling pass. And I keep coming back to 30 days. Not a weekend blitz, not a let me just knock this out on a Saturday approach. 30 days, and here’s why. You can clean a room in a weekend, but you cannot shift your self-image in a weekend. If you do a weekend blitz, you have a nice room for a couple of weeks. Then life happens, the clutter creeps back in, and you’re standing in the same room wondering why the effort didn’t stick. It didn’t stick because you changed the room without changing the woman standing in it. But if you spend 30 days making conscious choices about your environment, if you spend 30 days proving to yourself that you can finish what you start, that you can surround yourself with intentionality, that you can live like the woman you actually are, then something shifts and it shifts permanently because you’re not just organizing. You are gathering evidence for the woman you’re becoming.

Every time you curate a shelf, you’re gathering evidence that you are someone who has discernment. Every time you remove something beautiful but wrong, you’re gathering evidence that you can say no to what doesn’t fit. Every time you finish a corner you’ve been avoiding, you’re gathering evidence that you follow through. And by day 30, you have built an unmistakable case for who you’ve decided to become. And the ripple effect is real. A refined chore leads to wanting a refined morning. A curated closet leads to wanting a more intentional way of dressing, a beautiful kitchen that leads to actually wanting to cook in it. A thoughtfully designed bedroom leads to actually wanting to rest. These aren’t separate things, they’re connected. Your environment and your identity are in constant conversation. When you change one, the other follows.

So I opened this episode by telling you about my studio, the half-painted walls, the emptiness, the door I kept closed, the two-year-old vision that has lived in my head and nowhere else. I told you that because I’ve been avoiding it. This room represents the evolution I’m in the middle of and the version of myself I haven’t fully stepped into yet, and that ends in May.

Here is my public commitment. I am going to build this studio, and I’m going to decide on those walls. I’m going to furnish it. I’m going to set it up so that the lighting and the camera and everything is ready for me to continue to build out my life’s work. I’m not going for a perfect room, not a magazine room, but a me room, a room that looks like the woman I actually am and where I’m actually going. And I’m not going to do it before I ask you to do it. I’m actually going to do it alongside you. I’m in the same place that you are. I’m feeling the same resistance, the same I’ll do it later ” impulse, that same small voice that says, “Maybe you don’t actually want to do the studio right now. Maybe you should just be grateful for what you have. You can do it later.”

I’m fighting that voice and I want to fight it alongside you because here’s what I know from years of doing this work, the magic doesn’t happen when you finally have the perfect space. The magic happens in the process of creating it in the daily decision to honor yourself, to make the hard choices and the willingness to say, “This is what I want. This is what I’m worth. This is who I’m choosing to be.” When I walk into my studio at the end of May and I see the walls that I’ve chosen on purpose and a space that is set up and ready and is mine, I’m not going to feel proud of the aesthetics. I’m going to feel proud of the commitment. I’m going to feel the evidence of a woman who finishes what she starts, a woman who doesn’t just keep her vision locked in her imagination, but a woman who has arrived in it. That’s what this is actually about.

We’ve been on a journey together this month. We’ve talked about the spaces that we avoid and what it’s trying to tell us, how clutter really is a self-image conversation. We’ve talked about reinventing your life one room at a time. And today, I told you the truth about my studio and the evolution that I’m in the middle of. Now, I want to invite you into something. In May, I’m leading a two-day live workshop called the Spring Edit inside the School of Self-Image Membership. It will be recorded, so even if you can’t join us live, you can still be a part of the experience because a lot of the magic is going to happen within our private community.

You’re going to pick one room, one space in your home that’s been talking to you, and we’re going to do the real work, not just the cleaning, but the seeing. What is this room saying about you? What self-image built it? And who is the woman you want to be when you walk into it? Then we are going to spend the rest of May practicing, one space, day by day, gathering evidence for the woman you’re becoming.

This is not a decluttering workshop. I need you to hear that. This is self-image work that happens to involve your home, and it’s the most tangible, visible, livable version of this work that you’ll ever do. So if there’s a room or a space in your home or life that you’ve been avoiding, if there’s a corner that represents an old version of you that you’re ready to release, if you’re tired of living provisionally and you’re ready to arrive, then come with me. I’ll be doing it right alongside you, my studio, your room, our evolution together. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/join to join us, and I cannot wait to see what you create. I cannot wait to see the woman who emerges when you stop avoiding and you start choosing.

Have a beautiful week, my friends, and I cannot wait to see you inside the membership, and I’ll see you in next week’s episode. Cheers.