The Self Image-Method

Happy 2023 my friends. I am so looking forward to this year with you, and I have an exciting announcement, something that I cannot wait to share with you. It's called the self-image method, and I'm telling you all about it in this episode. 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 gorgeous friends. Happy New Year to you and your family and all of your loved ones. I don't know about you, but I am so excited for a new year. I am so looking forward to 2023, and right now it's a little bit chaotic at my house. You may hear some tape in the background. Got lots of things going on. We are prepping for our move that's happening really, really soon.

I took a look at my calendar this morning to just get a glimpse of what I need to prepare for over the coming weeks. In full transparency, I had a moment of, oh my goodness. I could feel that overwhelm want to creep in. Then I reminded myself, I was like, "Tonya, there is no hurry. It's all good. Calm down. This is fun. At least you're not bored. Just one thing at a time, sister, one thing at a time." And I gave myself a future self pep talk, and I got to work. And I have been so productive this morning. I have been packing. I'm recording this podcast. I'm getting it done.

And I really do believe that that is the secret. Whenever your brain wants to take you to that place of overwhelm, you have to just remind yourself that, number one, you're always going to have things to do. 

I think we daydream about this future place, this future point of time where we're going to arrive and there will no longer be things to do. What I say is, when you're done, you're dead. So thank goodness we still have things to do. We're not done yet.

Then I think you just come back to what's next. What do I need to focus on right now? And for me, scheduling is a lifesaver. But even with all the scheduling that I've done, I've literally scheduled my whole year. I still notice my brain wanting to be overwhelmed about it, and I have to remind myself. I'm like, "Listen, you've scheduled everything. You've got a plan. You're fine." It is a little hectic around here, but it's all good things, and I'm so excited to bring you all along on the journey this year of me not only moving back to my home state of North Carolina, but I'm going to be building a house. We have some exciting changes happening in the business, and I am here to share all of it with you. The ups, the downs, the challenges in hopes that I can inspire you to keep going no matter what, to have a vision for your life and to birth the version of you that can create that vision.

That's what we do within the School of Self-Image. If you want to get a taste of what we do within the membership, if you want to learn how to create your life versus fix your life, big difference there. If you want to learn how to live out your vision and embody the woman that you want to be one intentional choice at a time, I would love to invite you to join me for my most popular workshop that I've ever done. I have kicked off the new year for two years with this workshop, and I just received an email from a woman who did it last year. She said to me that 2022 ended up being the best year she's ever had. She said, "I know it's because I started my year off with the workshop that I'm about to share with you." It is one of my favorite workshops that I've ever taught.

The reason why I love it so much is, number one, it's fun. I think a lot of times when it comes to the new year and the pressure that we put on ourselves with resolutions and the self-image of someone who always lets herself down and always doesn't reach her goals, because that's how a lot of people start the year. This workshop creates this clean slate, and it's so much fun, and it's you learning how to look at your life and yourself through the lens of being an editor.

I want you to think of your life as if it were a magazine that you were creating. You get to choose the cover. You get to choose the name, you get to choose the articles, you get to choose the colors, you get to choose what that magazine represents. You are the editor of that magazine. Well, the same goes for your life. A lot of us don't approach our lives this way. A lot of us wake up and just react to life as if it is happening to us versus understanding we are creating it, and we're actually creating it from our self-image. 

When you learn to look at your life and yourself through the lens of being an editor, you start making intentional choices to line up and match what you have decided you want to represent in the world.

That's what this week does. I cannot think of a more beautiful way to start the new year, to set you up for massive success for the entire year. I promise you this. This will be the best investment of your time and your money and it is so inexpensive, you all, it's ridiculous. I had one woman say, "I cannot believe that I got this workshop for what you charged." She was like, "I have paid $1,000 and gotten less than what I got for $37."

But the reason why I price it like this is because, number one, I want you to have the tools to set you up for an incredible year. If you come into my world and you do this workshop and that's all you ever do for me, but it changes your life, I feel like I have accomplished my intention for this workshop. The second reason why I price it so low is because I want to give those of you who maybe are new to me, and you're curious about the School of Self-Image membership and you've been on the fence about joining, but you're just not quite sure yet. I want to give you a good taste of what we're all about because I love women coming into the membership who know this is for me. I have no doubts.

And so by doing this workshop you'll get a sense of like, is this something I want to continue doing? Do I want to use this membership to help me actually learn even more tools? Because there are way more tools within the membership, to help me completely transform my self-image to expand what is possible for me. That's the other reason. It is only $37 and you get to have it for life. Come and join us. I promise you, you will not be disappointed.

Go to schoolofselfimage.com/workshop to read all about the Live like an editor five day workshop. I cannot wait to see you there. Seriously, it's one of the most fun things that I do every year, and share it with your friends. A lot of women do that. They love to share it with their best friend, and they do it together and they brainstorm and set crazy extraordinary intentions for the year together, which is powerful.

The more people in your world that are doing this work with you, the better chances you have of being successful because you all rise together. You all hold bigger expectations for each other, and you all keep supporting and cheering each other on. Please share this with your friends as well.

Okay, that might have been one of my longest intros ever to a podcast. I don't know. I'm thinking it might win. But it's the first of the year. I got a lot to update you all on. Another update that I have, and this is especially for those of you within the School of Self-Image membership. 

We have been working behind the scenes to create an even better experience for you. I am always looking at how I can personally expand my own self-image and business image to provide even more value and an even better experience for members.

One of the things I want you all to know is that you will always want to improve. I feel like this holds so many of you back. You want to come out of the gate with everything being perfect. You want to be putting out work that people who've been doing this for years are finally getting to, and you let that hold you back. I always encourage my clients, just get started. Put your work out there. Yes, do the best you can with what you have and where you are right now. But do not let perfectionism stop you. I will tell you all, since the very beginning, since the very beginning, I have just constantly and consistently been putting my work out there. I do believe that is one of the big reasons for my success. It hasn't always been great work.

There have been things that I've put out into the world that I look at now and I'm like, ugh. But I'm also really proud that I didn't let perfectionism stop me. It took those experiences for me to learn what didn't work and what could possibly work and applying that knowledge to continuously expand. When I started this membership, I thought it was incredible. We did a really good job even though in the very beginning and some of you all were around for that, we had some hiccups that were not pretty, mostly tech issues of payments. And it was just something that we never dealt with before, and we worked our darnedest behind the scenes to correct everything. But we had some people that were understandably upset. I get it. Again, we did everything we could to reconcile because my big value in business is delighting my customers. I want all of you to feel delighted when you have any kind of contact with the School of Self-Image.

But I'm also really proud that we did it, and we learned so much. The membership is over two years old now, and I have grown so much as a CEO. I've grown so much as a coach, and I've grown so much in the world of self-image. When I started the School of Self-Image, the term itself, self-image was not one that I had heard in the personal development space, except for later on after I started the membership. I found some videos by Bob Proctor, may he rest in peace, that talked about the power of your self-image. I had also read a book years ago by Maxwell Maltz called Psycho Cybernetics, one of the most incredible books that I'd ever read that is all about self-image psychology.

Since I started the membership and started the school, I've been hearing more and more people talk about self-image. I've been seeing people call themselves self-image coaches, and it's just a topic that a lot of people are talking about more and I'm so happy. The reason why is it really is creating your entire life and trying to get results in your life without addressing your self-image is going to just backfire quite honestly. 

If you do not catch up with your results, you will sabotage your results every single time. This is the work that we do within the School of Self-Image. We focus on transforming how we see ourselves so that we can create lasting results, whether it's growing our businesses or having better relationships or having better health or having more money, whatever it is that you want.

We focus on the self-image aspect because I know that when you identify as someone, then that is who you are and you will work to prove yourselves true over and over again. If you identify as someone who is overwhelmed, that will be the result that you produce. If you identify as someone who is not good in relationships, then that will be what you produce. As you can see, you cannot create results without changing your identity, and that's what self-image work is all about.

Over the past two years we have done that within the membership by focusing on three areas, your mindset, your style, and your surroundings, your environment. A lot of personal development experts only talk about the mind. They will say that you do not need to change your circumstance. All you need to do is change your thought. Sometimes that is really good advice and sometimes it is not. Let me tell you why. Your environment is mirroring back to you who you think you are. If you keep staying in the same environments that keep triggering the same thoughts, you're going to keep perpetuating the same self-image.

Now, there is some truth in staying where you are when you think the problem is your environment and not your thinking, and you're being a victim. What this looks like ... let me give you an example just so you know. Let's say you are in a job and you are miserable. And you are blaming your job for your misery without ever questioning you. So you leave that job, and you go to the next job. And all of a sudden you find a couple weeks in, maybe a couple months in, maybe a couple years in, you're right back to having the same kind of relationship with that new job that you had with the old one. The reason is you thought it was the job. You blamed the job. You blamed your boss. You blamed your coworkers. You ran from that situation expecting the next place of employment to be better. But you never looked at you, and said, "Hey, what did I contribute to that situation? What was my thinking?" You just thought, hey, it's everybody else's fault, so I'm going to run from this to the next thing.

I used to do this all of the time, so I get it. I didn't understand that it was me. But that's very different than being like, "Hey, I know that I'm contributing to this. I know that I'm co-creating this, and I know that I need to look at my thoughts. However, I know that if I place myself in a new environment for my own betterment, for my own sanity, I will have a better chance of changing how I see myself." 

It's like I tell people, I'm like, "Listen. Can you be happy around a bunch of people who are complaining, or a bunch of people who don't believe in you, a bunch of people telling you that it's not possible for you?" Yeah, you can by working on your thoughts around it, 100%.

But it takes so much effort. Why? Why not just pick yourself up and put you around people that are more positive, who believe in you, who do support you. Now when those people aren't available, it's good to have the tools to be able to manage your own mind. But I just believe life is hard enough. Why do we make it harder? I think sometimes changing your circumstance from a place of wanting the best for yourself, not from a place of being a victim, but just from the place of I'm going to give myself the best shot at creating what I want to create and becoming who I want to become by placing myself in an environment where it's easier to birth and bloom into that version of me. This is exactly why we talk about surroundings and style within the School of Self-Image because those two things impact how you see yourself.

When you put yourself in new environments, it's so much easier to see yourself in new ways. If those environments are expansive environments, you start to see yourself in expansive way. Someone in our private group for the membership posted something about if you put a big fish in a small tank, it will never grow to be the size it was meant to be.

Then I did some research and I found out how they've actually been able to study fish that are kept in too small of a tank and how they become depressed and irritable, and they die in early death. I feel like that's what happens to a lot of us unfortunately when we are in small environments. When I say small, I mean small minded because our souls are here to be expansive and to grow and to experience and to achieve. When we place ourselves in environments that don't support that, it can cause us to be irritable. We know something's wrong, but we maybe can't quite put our finger on it. Well, maybe you need to change your environment, or maybe you need to go buy yourself a new jacket so you see yourself in a different way.

Okay, so that was a big talk to get us to where I want to go. But I think it's important for those of you who are especially new to the School of Self-Image that you understand what we're all about and what we focus on. But today I want to share with you something new and exciting that goes beyond the three pillars that we focus on. It is the process that we use in those three pillars to completely transform our self-image. It's something that I created last year, I've never shared it except for my School of Self-Image members. I'm embarrassed to say, and I'm not pulling up my calendar right now because I'm on a roll, and we're just going to keep talking. But I think by now, the School of Self-Image members have heard of it because I'm throwing a release party for the membership. 

And I think it's probably the day before this comes out. It might be the day after. But I'm going to be going deep into detail with the members about this new method.

It is a method. It's called the self-image method. It is five elegant steps to creating yourself one intentional day at a time. I can't wait to share with you how this method came to be because I've been thinking about how I work with clients and how I've worked with clients for years, but I never had a process to it except we focused on thoughts and feelings and then we also looked at our environment and our style and how they're all impacting each other.

But one day last year, I decided to do a big closet clean out. I decided I'm going to focus on my closet, and I did this huge clean out. When I was hanging the last dress into my closet, I had this big aha. I realized that the way I had gone about cleaning out my closet was the exact method that I had used for years to completely transform my self-image and completely change my life. I immediately grabbed in my journal and wrote it all down. It was just like one big brain dump of the method that I had just used for my closet that I had used for so long. Then I started to think about all of my coaching calls and how I think about my client's process. I went back and listened to some of the coaching calls within the membership, and I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is the way that I am always thinking about where my clients are in their journey." It's even how I go about my days thinking about how to live my days deliberately.

Are you all ready to hear about the self-image method? And listen, for those of you in the membership, we go way into detail. There is a whole training with a video for each steps of the method and a gorgeous, and when I say gorgeous, y'all know that the stuff that we put into the membership is not only powerful in terms of the results that it helps you create in your life, but it's also so beautiful. Aesthetics mean a lot in our company. Make sure you check out the gorgeous workbook to accompany the self-image method.

Here are the five steps to the self-image method. Step number one is to assess, and you need to decide which area of your life you're going to start with. One of the things that I see hold so many people back is they want to change every area all at once. That is such an overwhelming feat that you don't get started on anything. I think picking one area that you're going to do your self-image work in initially is going to have such a positive impact on all the areas.

Within the self-image method, we suggest nine different areas, and you choose one that you are going to focus on. The way to think about this is let's pretend that you have a messy house. Maybe it's really cluttered. That's like our brains. 

You need to decide what part of your brain are we going to focus on, just like you would look around your house and be like, what area of my house am I either inspired to work on first or least satisfied with? I want to tackle it first. It doesn't matter. You just pick an area and you assess who you are being in that area. You assess how you're feeling in that area. You assess what thoughts you have in this area. And so that's step one.

Step number two is to define. You've picked out your area. Now you need to define what do I want in this area of my life? This is where a lot of people get stuck because they don't know the secret that I know. Are you ready for it? You get to want whatever you want without apology. You do not need permission. You do not need someone else's blessing. You do not need proof. You just get to want it. The only thing that I suggest is that you like your reason for wanting it. That's it. You get to want a Bugatti. You get to want to sell everything and move into a trailer. You just have to look at why do I want it.Why is it important to me? And if you like your why, then let's get busy in creating that for you.

But you can't just stop there. And this is where a lot of you all are slowing yourself down, is you define what you want, but sometimes what you've defined isn't clear enough. I go through all of this in the self-image method. I help you get super, super clear on what we're doing. But beyond that, you also need to define who you need to become to create that. I like to call this a case study of your future self. Who is she? How is she different from the version of you now? How is she thinking? How is she dressing? How is she showing up? How does she think about the world? How does she think about money? How does she think about men? How does she think about her family? How does she think about herself? That's the biggest one. You have to get really clear on who she is.

A lot of you all are trying to create results without changing you, without changing your being. You're so focused on doing, that you fail to remember it's who you're being that's creating your life and letting your doing come from a new being. That's when you have some crazy magical results happen in your life. So that's step two. You must define what you want and who you need to become to create it.

The next three steps are when we get into action. For those of you in the membership this year, we're focused on action. We're not going to sit around and consume a lot of information this year, even though I am going to be teaching amazing classes. I am building this membership for women who are ready to take action because I know it feels good to sit around and consume a lot. It makes you feel like you're doing something in the moment, but you're not making progress. I want every single one of you in the membership this year to create an extraordinary after story. Do you know why? Well, I want it for you, but I also want it for me. 

My goal, my extraordinary goal is to collect 5,000 after stories. I want to see women show that this works. I want to see women prove to themselves what they're really capable of. I want women to be examples for their daughters and their mothers and their sisters and their community that you don't have to keep being who everybody's told you that you should be.

That means that we have to get to work and we have to take action. That's what steps three through five are. Step three, and I want you to understand this is a daily process, and it is included in your daily three journal for those of you in the membership, and we go into detail. But you're going to be editing one thing from your life every single day. Removing something, a thought, a thing, a person, an energy, you got to get rid of it. You can't just keep piling things into your life without removing things that aren't working. I'm giving you all the very simplified version of the self-image method, but you'll get the gist of what it's all about. So edit, that's step three.

Step four is to add. I think about when I was in my closet. I assessed where we were going to focus and what was going on in there, what was working, what wasn't. I defined what I wanted my closet to look like and to feel like. I had a goal for my closet. I also thought about the version of me who lived in that closet. I thought about the woman I was becoming and I wanted to curate a closet that represented her. I got clear on my after, and then I had to take a lot. I took everything out actually. That's not so easy to do in your life. It's like remove every person, every thought in your head, every item you own, and then put them back one by one as you see fitting into your vision. But you can do some version of that.

Often, I'll look around at my life and I'll say, does this thing belong in my future's life, my future self's life? Does she have this book? Is she hanging out with this person? Would she choose this man again? Would she choose this outfit again? That doesn't mean you have to get rid of it, but it's just good to be honest with yourself. You can do that as you're going throughout your day. But with my closet, I removed everything, and then I decided what got added back in. Every day thinking, what do I need to remove? What do I need to edit? And then what do I need to add? What kind of thought do I need to be thinking? What kind of people do I need to put into my life? What kind of clothes do I need to be wearing? What in my environment do I need to add in to remind me of who I'm becoming? That's step four. We add.

And then the final step is refine. My friends, this is an ongoing practice. For any of you who are daydreaming about a day when you don't have to put in the effort, if you're daydreaming about a day that you have finally arrived and no work will be required of you. If you're dreaming about a day where life gets super, super easy, I fear that you're just setting yourself up for failure. 

You're setting yourself up for disappointment because what I know about people like us is if we just had the goal that we have today and we achieved it and then we never wanted anything else, we could coast. But that's not who we are. We're always going to want to set the next goal and the next goal because I feel like we know deep down we came here to evolve. That is the purpose of our existence, and that's going to look different for all of us. But it's why we probably have this insatiable hunger.

I don't think that's a bad thing as long as you're appreciating your journey, as long as you are creating from a place of enoughness and excitement and joy, not from a place of I'm not good enough or I'm not there yet, and over there so much better than here, so I'm going to make myself miserable trying to get to happiness. That doesn't work. There are no happy endings from unhappy journeys. You can't go down the road of unhappy and expect to arrive in happiness. It just doesn't work that way.

Because we are always going to be desiring and wanting and having goals, we're always going to be in that self-image that we need to grow. We're always going to be encountering limiting beliefs, which cause us to have negative emotion. It is an ongoing practice, but when you see this is normal and you see negative emotion as just part of life and you know that this is just part of the process and it's a constant refinement, then you can relax and that's when it gets super fun. You can just enjoy the journey. Within the membership, our refinement, our step five is the daily practice of steps one through four and it's in your daily three journal.

We just recreated the whole daily three journal to mimic these five steps. It is so good. I've been using it for the last month since I created it, and it really is phenomenal. I've been playing around with making it extraordinary, and I've been working with some of my team members. Shout out to Julie. Her and I have been working hand in hand. How can we really just take this self-image method and take the daily three journal that we had and fuse those two to create an even better daily practice to help you get results.

I am so excited about the self-image method. I've been using the self-image method since I created it in my business. Going through the assessment, the definition, what needs to go, what I need to add, and then the refinement stage, which is the ongoing practice. I've used it in my health and wellbeing. I've used it in my relationships. I've been playing around with this method in a lot of areas of my life, and it works. It is so good. I am so excited to share it with all of you who are in the membership. If you're not in the membership, what in the world? Come join us for the Live Like an Editor workshop, so you can get a taste of what we are all about and learn a powerful process and a powerful way to start your year. Go to schoolofselfimage.com/workshop, and I will see you there.

Have a beautiful, beautiful week everyone, and I am so excited to spend this year with you. Let's rock 2023. Cheers everyone.

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.