The Champagne Mindset

Happy 2025 and let's start this year out with a really fun question. What if the secret to achieving your biggest goals wasn't grinding harder, but in celebrating more? I call this the champagne mindset. It is a way of living that's all about finding the extraordinary in everyday moments and celebrating life's challenges as much as the victories. And it's what we're talking about in today's episode. 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.

Happy New Year, my friends. If you're listening to this, it means it is 2025. What a year, right? I don't know about y'all, but I am glad that that one is over and I'm also very excited about the year ahead. One of the traditions that I do every single New Year's is I celebrate. I celebrate with a very clear practice and a very intentional purpose. And I'm going to share that with you today. And my hope is that you will do this. When you're listening to this podcast, I don't care if it's in August of 2025 or 2026. That you will stop and do what I'm about to share. And the reason being is that this practice rewires your brain. It rewires your neural pathways to focus on possibility, to focus on what's going well and right, to focus on what's good, to focus on what's possible.

And your focus is creating your entire life. Yes, it's your thoughts, but your thoughts tell you what to focus on. And when you begin to focus in the direction that you want to go, that is where your energy is going to follow. I call this the champagne mindset. So what is the champagne mindset? Well, to me it's an approach to life that combines celebration with resilience. Because think about it. The way champagne is produced is produced through pressure and through that pressure emerges something extraordinary, especially if you're someone like me and you enjoy a great glass of bubbly. There's nothing like it. It's also about recognizing that our challenges and our successes are both worthy of celebration. How many of you all just want to celebrate your wins?

You never stop and take time to look at the challenges that you've been through and the lessons learned. You just want to get away from those. You want to run into the fun part. But it's because of those challenges that you have successes, those challenges make you stronger. They teach you things that you didn't know prior. And it also allows you to appreciate the success because without challenge, without failure, you don't even understand what success is. Life is about the contrast, but so many people only want to experience the good stuff without the experience of the not so good. But the champagne mindset ask us to embrace all of it as part of life, as part of living.

And it's also about understanding that every moment, the past, the present, and the future contains something worth honoring, while embracing the pressure that transforms you into your finest self. So every New Year's Eve, I get together with family and friends, and I have a tradition of celebrating those three things. I first celebrate the past year, and I don't just celebrate all the good stuff. I celebrate the challenges too because I know that it's because of those challenges that I have grown so much over the past year. Challenges are what grow you. Without those, there's nothing to practice, there's nothing to lift and get stronger from. It is the pressure from the challenges that cause us to emerge as stronger and more wise human beings.

Now, one of the things that I often see is that people tend to, without awareness, experience the same type of challenge year after year. And that's why I'm so passionate about self-image work because I'm all about creating new, exciting challenges that will grow you. That will make your life better. That's why I love having a really big goal every year. It is that goal that is going to require that I go through some challenges to create because it's going to require that I change my self-image. And so if you are someone who you're listening to this and you're like, "Tony, I'm just so tired of the same old challenges. I'm tired of struggling with X, Y, and Z." I really encourage you to number one, sit down and get really clear on what you want.

Not what you think you should want, not what you've wanted for the past 10 years and try to create but what you want really deep down in your soul and start to create goals to help you create, achieve, experience, have that thing. And then it is going to require that you change your self-image because to create something you've never had, you have to become someone you've never been. And the really cool thing about this process, and I wasn't planning on talking about this, but this is where this podcast is going. But the cool thing about this process is that what I really think is happening is when your goals come from your deepest parts of yourself, when they are authentic to you, again, not what you think you should want.

Those goals, what they're really doing is trying to lead you back to who you truly are. And so that is the work, and you are going to have challenges and it's going to create pressure and you are going to emerge from that experience just amazed at what you are able to create. But let's get back to celebrating. So the first thing I do is celebrate the past. I celebrate the past year and all that. I've learned all that I have experienced. Everything. I love to look through the lens of growth as it relates to celebrating. I love to look at life as everything is teaching me something. So even when it's hard, even when I would prefer that it's not happening, I know that what I resist persist.

And so I've learned, I've trained my brain to just relax around it and ask what can I learn from this? What is this teaching me? And when I do that, I'll tell you, it shifts my energy. I stop fighting and that's when I can grow the most. So think about it for you. What are all of the things that you want to celebrate from 2025? Not just the good, but also the not so great because of what it taught you and maybe what it taught you is what you don't want anymore. Maybe it taught you what you're tired of tolerating. Maybe it taught you that you know what, this is an area of my life where I need to raise my standards. Good to know, but celebrate the past. And then we move into celebrating the present.

Looking around right now and looking for what is abundant in your life, looking for what's going well, looking for where you have been so blessed, where love is everywhere. We have to direct our brains as to what to focus on because our brains are meant to protect us. And so our brain thinks the way to protect us is to constantly warn us of potential danger and to look out for what could go wrong and to look out for what's lacking so we can go and fill that need, that space. But the reality is, for 99.9% of us listening to this right now, our life is so abundant. We have so much around us. We have so much opportunity. We have maybe our health, maybe our friends and our kids, and we have food, we have clothes.

We have much that we don't recognize as abundant because we're always looking for what we think we're missing. The saying is true, what you focus on grows. And the reason being is that your reticular activating system, that part of your brain that sips through all of the data in the world to provide you with what you are subconsciously looking for, it's always at work. And so if you are subconsciously looking for what is wrong, for what's missing, your reticular activating system is going to ignore everything that's abundant and look for the things that you think are wrong or missing. And it's going to provide that to you. It's going to tell you, "Hey, look over here." And because that is where your focus is, that is what grows in your life.

When I look around at my life right now, I know that a big reason why I have created what I have created is because of practices like this. Think about it. Before I understood the power of our own minds, and before I understood the science of neuroplasticity, before I understood quantum physics, before I understood just self-image, I was like a lot of people. I was living my life by default and I was just letting my brain do its thing. And let me tell you, it was not a good time at all. And I was in a constant state of panic and stress and overwhelm and worry and anxiety. And when I think about how I showed up when I was in those states, I just wanted to run and hide. I wanted to sit on the sofa and binge-watch ER.

I wanted to eat my feelings. I wanted to just shrink from my life because my brain was telling me that it was too overwhelming. Those types of actions don't help you create the life that you want. This is why this is so important, you all. Beginning to shift to a celebratory mindset will give you more to celebrate. I always say the more you celebrate life, the more life celebrates you. And if we want to look at the science of it, it's there. Because when you're celebrating, when you're in that state of gratitude, when you're looking for what's going well and right, a lot of things are happening in your body. You are calming your nervous system. You are releasing dopamine and serotonin. Those feel-good chemicals into your body.

You therefore are more relaxed, you're more creative, you're more excited, you're more hopeful, you are more clear because it's hard to think when you're in a state of fight or flight. But when you're calm, you can think better. And it's from those places that the actions you take are way more effective at helping you create the life that you want. But what often happens is you want to wait until something is done to celebrate. You want to wait until you get the stuff before you allow yourself to celebrate. If that's you, you are living by the do, have, be model, which means I'm going to do things to try to have the things so then I can be the thing. But life is always responding to your being. It's the energy of your being that is determining the state of your life.

This is why self-image work is so crucial to creating what it is that you want because it focuses on that level of being. It allows you to focus on the be to have model, which means I'm going to be this thing and then I'm going to do things to reinforce the state of being. And when I do that, I end up having what it is that I want because then everything is in alignment. When you are waiting to be until you have, you're out of alignment with what it is that you want. And that's why I encourage all of you and listen, you all. I get what it's like to be in a place where you're looking around and you're thinking, "I don't really have much to celebrate right now." But find one thing. It can be small.

It can just be, "You know what? The sun came out today and the sky is blue and pretty." Find anything. Go general. Find anything that starts to put your focus in a direction that you actually want to go. Think about it this way, I am a big believer in that you are living out the stories that you tell. If you pay attention to the story that you're telling about your life right now, is it one that you want to live out or is it a story that you just look around and repeat day after day and therefore you're living it day after day? You have to take control of your story. You have to take control of your narrative. And one of the ways to do that is to make celebrating your life a daily practice.

So the final thing that I celebrate, so we've celebrated the past, we've celebrated the present, and then our final celebration is celebrating the future. This is my favorite one. So what I like to do is I like to go to the future, 365 days from the present. So on New Year's Eve, I fast-forward to New Year's Eve of the next year. And I start celebrating as if the things that I want to achieve, create, become, experience have already happened., and I talk about them as if they have already happened. I'll be like, "Can you all believe that I moved into my dream home? I love it so much. I am so grateful of all of the hard work and the dedication that I have put into creating this dream for myself.

Can you all believe that I brought on a whole new team after years of delaying this decision? I finally did it and I am so proud of myself. It was bumpy at times, but I learned so much, and the team is so much stronger and better off for that decision that I had the courage to make." These were celebrations that I did last year, by the way. But you can see how you get into the state as if it's already done, that it's inevitable. Now it's about you holding onto that energy throughout the year and reminding yourself, "Hey, it's already done. Now I just need to show up. I need to make the hard choices. I need to do some of the hard things. I need to stay committed to what it is that I declared that I wanted. I need to take the action."

And most of the time, I'm not going to sit here and tell you everything I've celebrated has come true. But I will tell you a lot of it has. A lot. Which tells me that this is a practice worth doing. And the things that I didn't achieve, I learned so much in the pursuit of them. And for that, I am grateful that I had the courage to go after it. And so think about what you would love to experience over the next year. What would you love to achieve? What would you love to create? And the best question is who have you become? That's part of my celebration too. I talk about who I am now versus who I was a year ago as if I'm already her, because the reality is I could step into her at any point.

But because of cognitive dissonance and the way our brain likes to stay in its comfort zone. Throughout the year, I have to do a lot of self-image work to overcome that. But it is fun to try on for a night. It's fun to celebrate from that energy, and it begins to create neural pathways of, "Oh, hey, we're doing something new around here. We're going in a different direction." And here's the really cool thing, these mental rehearsals, getting into state, acting as if it strengthens the same neural networks that are used in actual performance. This is why athletes love to visualize. They will close their eyes and visualize the game. They'll visualize the run, they'll visualize whatever sport they're in, and their brain doesn't know that they're not actually going through it.

So they're actually wiring their brain for that success. The brain has a difficulty distinguishing between vivid imagination and reality. And so for this reason, especially over the past couple of years, I have gotten into visualization in a big way. It's become a big part of my life, and I have experienced what happens in my body. I've experienced how it shapes my energy and therefore how I'm showing up in the world. And it's why I'm a big advocate of it. And to me, this practice is just an outward display of a visualization. It's you speaking and talking as if you are already there. And it shifts your thinking from if thinking to when thinking, which changes your unconscious behaviors. So it's no longer, "Oh, if that happens." It's like, "Oh no, when it happens."

And so what happens subconsciously is the brain is now being introduced to a new version of you that you have a lot of certainty around, and the brain is always working undercover to prove itself true. And so if you can practice and get your brain on board like, "No, this is happening, buddy. This is what we're doing." Then your brain's going to be like, "Oh, I am going to have to shift my identity. I'm going to have to shift to my self-image." It's a really powerful process. Plus, when we feel like something is already accomplished, we naturally align our actions with that reality. We make decisions from the perspective of our future self.

We notice more opportunities that align with our goals because our reticular activating system is looking for them. Because we've told it, "Hey, this is happening this year, so you need to help me look for how we're going to make this happen." We're also more likely to take bold action because we're operating from a position of assumed success. This is my practice, and this is what I call a champagne mindset. It is celebrating your life. Looking at your life through the lens of there's always something to celebrate. And taking it to the next level by looking into the future and realizing you don't have to wait until something has been achieved to celebrate it.

You can start celebrating it now, feeling the feelings of it, telling your brain that this is what we are focused on and increasing your likelihood of actually achieving it. Now, I have had people who have said to me, "Tonya, you're not being realistic when you do this sort of thing." And I always find that very amusing because what is reality? Reality are facts. And not many of us are walking around just looking at the facts. We are looking at our interpretation of them, and we get to decide how we interpret the facts of our lives. So you can interpret them in a way that makes you feel bad, that scares you, causes you stress and worry.

Or you can interpret them in a way that supports how you want to feel, that encourages you, that allows your nervous system to calm down a little bit so that you can see more clearly. So that you can take those actions that will help you create more of what it is that you want. I want you to remember this. You are the writer of your story. You're also the editor of your life. You get to choose where you focus. You get to choose what words you use. You get to choose what surrounds you. You get to choose all of it. And if you want to live a beautiful life, you're going to have to be intentional about what you are choosing. And if you want to make this year one of your best yet, choose to have a champagne mindset.

Choose to focus on the lessons. Choose to focus on what's abundant, what's going well, and right and just be amazed at how your life can change in 365 days. Happy, happy New Year, my friends. I'm excited for this next year around the sun. I'm excited to witness our growth and our own evolution, and I look forward to many more podcasts this year. Have a beautiful day, and I'll see you in the next episode.