Hi! So, I’ve been keeping a huge secret. And that secret is that How to Stop Feeling Like Shit has been updated and is being RE-RELEASED next month! 🎉🎉🎉
The original version came out in 2018 and a lot has happened since then, am I right? The civil unrest of 2020, COVID-19, and a bigger conversation around toxic positivity left me itching to update our beloved HTSFLS, so when I asked the publisher…they said YES!
Every chapter has updates and I can’t wait for you to read them (or listen, if you prefer audiobook, which yes, those updates will be in the audiobook too)!
We have some amazing bonuses and giveaways planned, so head over HERE to pre-order and grab those! I’d be honored if you were one of the FIRST to purchase this new updated version, which will ship on or around December 27th.
In this minisode, I talk about the origins of the book, the journey this book has been on over the last half-decade, and what you can expect in this new version. Oh, and I tell you all about the BONUSES!
Thank you so much for listening and supporting HTSFLS!
Right-click to download the .mp3
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
You're listening to Make Some Noise Podcast minisode number 489.
Welcome to Make Some Noise Podcast, your guide for strategies, tools and insight to empower yourself. I'm your host, Andrea Owen, global speaker, entrepreneur, life coach since 2007, and author of three books that have been translated into 18 languages and are available in 22 countries. Each week, I'll bring you a guest or a lesson that will help you maximize unshakable confidence, master resilience and make some noise in your life. You ready? Let's go.
Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I am so glad that you're here because I have a huge announcement and I'm gonna keep you in suspense for a second. No, I'm just kidding. All right, so I may have actually left this leak a few months ago, a few weeks ago, I have a terrible judge of time, but here's what happened. The pandemic happened, as you know and I thought to myself, you know what, I wish that I could go back and update How To Stop Feeling Like Shit. You know why? I wrote that book in 2016, it came out in January of 2018, which has been almost five years. And a lot has happened since then. The #MeToo movement happened in 2017, I know the book came out in 2018 but it was already done and written, getting printed at that point. We had the global pandemic, that is COVID-19, we had the civil unrest in the summer of 2020, and then we also had a bigger conversation that started to happen more and more around the topic of toxic positivity, that I was excited about. I'm excited that people are talking more about this in this industry. And I thought, oh, how I wish I could go back and update How To Stop Feeling Like Shit to talk about these handful of things.
And really, the biggest thing was this. When the pandemic happened, I think so many of us went and fell back on many of the habits and behaviors that we have read about that I wrote about, in How To Stop Feeling Like Shit. And for those of you who have never read it, I'm gonna go through the table of contents, so you can kind of get a feel of what the what the whole book was about. But I was like, you know, what, one of the habits is isolating, um, like, we had to, because we had to quarantine, right? A lot of people were numbing out, that's another one of the behaviors. You know, alcohol sales went up. So I was like, well, shit, you know, none of us have lived through a global pandemic before. None of us have done this and experienced it. So I wanted to like raise my hand and be like, wait, wait, yes, there's some I have some things to add some things to add. So my agent and I approached the publisher, and I said, hey, I would like to update this. What do you think? And I've never done a rerelease, an update a revision, and any of that. And they said, yes. They said, yes, we'd love to. Here, sign these papers, you go do your writing, and we will take care of the rest.
If you sign up for my updates, my emails, which I hope that you do, if you don't, you should, it's very easy. If you go to AndreaOwen.com/Free, there's also a free PDF, there's a free podcast series that I have. It's a secret that…you cannot find it. It's not on my regular feed. And you can't get it anywhere else except if you go to AndreaOwen.com/Free. Anyway, in my emails, there's a picture of it in the email that went out today, the day that this episode is released. It's also in my Instagram feed. The cover is yellow. It's just a bright and cheery yellow. Same confetti on the front. Still called How To Stop Feeling Like Shit subtitle is The same 14 habits that are holding you back from happiness. So this book is being released on December 27, 2022 and every chapter has an update at the very end, where I'm giving you additional tools, additional tips, additional insight for that particular chapter.
So let me start from the very beginning and tell you how this book came to be. What is its birth story. So in 2014, I went to San Antonio, Texas and went through a grueling five-day certification process with Brené Brown and her senior faculty, and people ask me a lot of times like, was she actually doing the training? Yes and no. She was there the first day in the last day speaking and then we were split up into small groups the rest of the time and her senior faculty was facilitating the training. And the training is called the Daring Way. This was the retreat that you probably heard about earlier this year that we did in the fall. I might do one next year. Stay tuned. Listen to the podcast for more details. But it's this methodology that takes us through shame resilience. And one of the things, one of the modules I should say, is she talks about these behaviors that we all do as humans, to try to avoid things like criticism, failure, judgment, shame, you name it. The hard things, right? The more challenging things, she talks about the behaviors that showed up the most in her research, were perfectionism, foreboding joy, which we also call catastrophizing or rehearsing tragedy, and also numbing out. And in this module, she talks about, she says something to the effect of, there are other behaviors that we all do to try to avoid shame, criticism, judgment, blame, you can discuss them with your facilitator in your small groups and I was like, wait a minute. Stop right there. I've got a list of behaviors that I have done in my experience as a human as a woman walking this earth, and my clients and my community. So I got out my whiteboard, actually, I think it was just a piece of paper and I brain dumped and I came up with a bunch of behaviors and those three were in there, the numbing out, the catastrophizing, and the perfectionism for sure. Don't get it twisted. 100%. And there were more and that is How To Stop Feeling Like Shit and the reason the book is titled this, is because when I would talk about this, on the podcast, or being interviewed or whatever, I would say these behaviors actually work temporarily. And sometimes for a long time. In perfectionism, and control can get us that promotion. I always say like, perfectionism and control helped me graduate with honors from college. I was a mess, I was burned out. By the time I graduated, I had a toddler and I was eight months pregnant with my second child, but I did it. And numbing out allows us to avoid feelings, situations, emotions that are just too much for us to deal with at present moment.
There's a saying in the rooms of 12 Step Programs that says it works until it doesn't. And specifically, especially in Alcoholics Anonymous, they're talking about drinking but the same can be said for these behaviors they work until they don't. And when we get to a point in our lives, when they stop working, when the numbing out stops working, when the perfectionism stops working, when we are getting very little benefit from it, then it starts to feel like shit. And we're thinking, okay, I feel like I'm crossing off all the boxes in my life and why do I feel like shit. And the reason we feel like shit is because our coping mechanisms are terrible. Our coping mechanisms are going against intuitively, what we truly want to do, the kind of woman that we want to be. By engaging in these behaviors, we end up turning our backs on the woman that we truly want to be. And largely this can be unconscious, we don't know until we do and sometimes we gain that conscious knowledge in therapy. Sometimes it happens in our own journaling and our own personal journeys or having conversations with people or maybe just when you heard about a right now in this podcast in this moment, I don't know.
At any rate, this book also, when I brought this idea to my literary agent at the time, so it had to have been around 2015, and I said, I have an idea for this book because it was my second book. Here's the title. What do you think? I was nervous because this was before… I mean, I did, not to toot my own horn or anything, but it was a little bit of, you know, one of the first people to come out with a book with a curse word in the title. This was before half the books on the self-help shelf had curse words in them. So it was not a trend yet. So I was nervous that my agent wasn't going to like it and then he would not be able to sell it to a publisher and he laughed out loud. And I'm like, is that a laugh out loud like, it'll never work, or is that a laugh out loud like you like it? And he's like, no, I love it. Let's go with it. And we sold it and then it came out. And this book has been my absolute best-selling book by far. And it has been translated now into 19 languages around the world, which blows my mind, y'all. I can't believe that this book has touched so many people across the world, in so many different countries in so many different languages. It's available in 23 countries, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, most of those, almost all those countries, I've never been there. But I'm excited that it has made its way around the world. And I'm excited to have been given the opportunity to update it as times have changed, and some big, big, big, big things have happened.
And I hope that you even if you have purchased, the previous version would get this updated version. You know what I was thinking, if you have your old book, the white cover one, donate it to your public library, if it isn't highlighted, and you know, notes in the margin or things like that. Or you can give it to a friend and then buy the new version. That would be fantastic. Thank you very much. I would appreciate that so much. And if you are an audiobook listener, which I know a lot of you are. As this podcast is dropping, I am actually at the studio recording the updates, which are going to be inserted in the book so you can get the audiobook and rest assured all the updates will be in there.
Okay, so I am opening up this book, and I'm going to read to you the chapter titles. Because I think they're pretty clever if I do say so myself because I wrote them. Chapter one. Well, first, there's an introduction where I talk about how to get the most out of this book and all that good stuff. So chapter one is… I had to start off with this because it was very intentional about the first handful of chapters actually because I know that a lot of people don't get through the entirety of a self-help book. Either they get overwhelmed or they get bored or they just life happens, they put it down and never come back. P.S. I do that with nonfiction books. So no shame in the game, if that's you. But Chapter One, I wanted it to be about negative self-talk because it's something that is so universal and that I've heard over and over again that so many of you struggle with to some extent to varying degrees. So Chapter One is called Being An Asshole To Yourself: Learn How To Manage Your Inner Critic. Chapter Two, Go Away and Leave Me Alone: Isolating and Hiding Out Isn't Protecting You. Chapter Three, Checking Out: Are Your Numbing Mechanisms Still Working For You? Chapter Four, Compare and Despair: The Never Ending Mindfuck. Chapter Five: The Demolition Derby of Your Life. Self-sabotage. Chapter Six, Feeling Like a Fraud: The Imposter Complex. I'm really excited, by the way for the update on that. It has to do with the workplace and how really for women, the workplace wasn't built for us. It's no wonder we have imposter complex. Anyway, I don't want to give too much away.
Chapter Seven, The Dog and Pony Show: People Pleasing and Approval Seeking. That particular chapter, the update is about the fact that over the years, I have gotten the question, you know, when I do Q&A after a keynote or in an interview or something like that, and the people will say so I have this conversation that I need to have with my partner, with my boss or whatever and they're like, can I read your book and can you help me, you know, how do I have this conversation? And I'm like, did you read the chapter on people pleasing and approval seeking? They're like, yeah,. I’m like, did you read the part about boundaries? And I said, yeah, they're like, yeah, I'm like, okay, well, it's in there. It's like a step-by-step process and the response that I get is that they understand kind of like the one two threes of having this conversation and all of my readers, all of my listeners, all y'all are smart, and can figure out sort of the script of it. But it's the ripping off the band aid of having the conversation that's actually the hardest part. And I want to acknowledge that because it is the hardest part. 100%. So we offer some additional tips and tools in there of like how to actually get the conversation done.
All right, we're where are we. Chapter Eight, Perfectionism Prison: Self-Destruction At Its Finest. Chapter Nine, Being Strong: The Elusive Tough Exterior. So in this chapter, I talk about what I call…I say something like being Strong's twin sister, is the use of humor when we are feeling hurt or afraid or, you know, when we when we talk about difficult things or our trauma, like we just make fun of ourselves or self self deprecating. Sorry for the vocal fry. That's not on purpose right now. You know, and I'm guilty of that. I'm guilty of the using humor. So anyway, that's what the addition is in that particular chapter. And Chapter Ten, Just Let Me Do It: Start Letting Go of Control. Chapter Eleven, The Sky is Falling: Bracing Yourself for Catastrophe. Chapter 12. The Blame Game: Your Ticket to Disconnection. Chapter Thirteen, Zero Fucks Mentality: Cynicism on Steroids. Chapter Fourteen, Nobody Likes a Slacker: The Downside of Overachieving. And Chapter Fifteen is All About Values: Which Are Your Roadmap.
One of the additional things that I mentioned several times throughout the additions and How To Stop Feeling Like Shit is to check in with yourself and make sure that it's not an underlying that your behaviors are not pointing to an underlying condition like ADD or ADHD or chronic anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder or chronic depression or things like that, because I think sometimes, it can be both, it can be that we'd have those challenges and we've always struggled with perfectionism or imposter complex or something like that. But we also struggle with anxiety and depression, or even autism and ADHD, things can get kind of muddy and by things, I mean, the behaviors. Like we're not sure where one ends, and the other one begins. It's the same with my anxiety and my ADHD. Like there's so many crossovers with symptoms and behaviors, I don't know where one ends, and the other one begins. And so sometimes, it's not really about figuring that out and pinpointing it because many times it's impossible. The point is just to have so much grace and compassion for yourself. You're not going to get it right, every time, you are going to cross over into behaviors that don't serve you that you know, that are quote, unquote, playing small, and all these things. And like, I don't know if this has just come with wisdom and age, but I've gotten to the point where I have no tolerance for perfectionism in personal development. It's like, I'm not going to trade in perfectionism in my regular life, and pull it into my personal development journey. Life is so messy, and it's so nuanced, and there again, it just kind of ebbs and flows and sometimes you're really struggling with control and other times, you find it really easy to surrender, and back and forth, and back and forth.
I have just personally surrendered to the roller coaster of varying behaviors and as long as I have compassion for myself, as long as I am aware as possible without being too far into over identification, by over identification, I mean, when we sort of obsess on, well, what is this behavior? Is this people pleasing? Is this my trauma? Is this… You know, and we're racking our mind trying to figure out and put a label on stuff. When that becomes not helpful, and just distracting from my life. That's what I want. That's my hope for you is that you become aware of that and just compassion, compassion, compassion, Grace, Grace, Grace, cut yourself some slack, and know that it's not linear. None of its linear. I stopped beating myself up a few years ago for finding myself back in places that I've already worked on 5, 6, 7 years ago, I used to beat myself up and be like, I do this for a living, I should be better at this, I should be through this, I should, at the very least be able to be resilient at a quicker rate. That's kind of the expectations I was putting on myself. And now I'm just like, you know what, it doesn't matter, you know that I do this for a living, I just might be on different parts of the journey as other people, I might just be able to more quickly pull resources, and think of things that I can do to help myself more so than the average Jane and Joe.
But that's about it. We all are stumbling through this thing called life. And we will all sometimes feel like shit, we will all find ourselves back in those 14 behaviors that I mentioned for you. And my hope is with these updates, that the updates in many ways point to having more grace and compassion for yourself if you are falling back into them. And I just want to say I appreciate your support so much throughout the books that I have written over the years, and I am still writing more. I have two actually, in the works that I'm working on proposals for that my literary agent is anxiously waiting for the very beginning of 2023. So stay tuned for those, both of which I'm ecstatic about. Finally writing that memoir that I've been talking about. And just thank you for listening to the podcast. Thank you for supporting the sponsors. Thank you for following me on social media and telling your friends about the show and my books. I appreciate you all so much whether you have been with me, since the inception of Your Kick Ass Life in 2010 or if you are new to the show, I appreciate you all and I just am thinking of you when I write these books, when I created these updates, when I'm creating this podcast, you are so important in this world and the fact that you have committed to bettering your life, I think is incredible. It's incredible. It's courageous. And not everybody does it because it's hard and it's uncomfortable. And it's messy. Alright, everyone, thank you for bearing witness to this announcement. And again, AndreaOwen.com/Free you can get that secret podcast playlist that I created for you as well as get the email updates. We're gonna have prizes we're gonna have giveaways there are bonuses.
I didn't even tell you about the bonuses I do this like dramatic wrap up but I didn't even tell you about the bonuses. Okay. There's another secret private podcast series. It's a four-part podcast series that's going to go with these updates with these How To Stop Feeling Like Shit updates we are doing. There's a workbook, a absolutely $0 workbook that coincides. It companies How To Stop Feeling Like Shit totally for free. And we have the cutest bookplates ever. If you preorder the book, this is a limited quantity, so you gotta get on it. I don't know if the page is ready as this podcast is going to drop. If it is it'll be…the link will be in the show notes AndreaOwen.com/HTSFLS. And you can…if you preorder the book, you get this really cute, signed personalized bookplate it's basically a sticker and you can put it inside the book or you can put it wherever you want on your refrigerator on your bumper sticker doesn't matter. But limited quantity of those and it anywhere you are in the country. It does not have to be just in the United States. I will mail it to you. And I feel like I'm forgetting something. We're doing a drawing for a bunch of prizes free one on one session with me. Malicious Women was like my favorite candles. I have two candle companies that I'm obsessed with Support a Sense and Malicious Woman Company. Prizes from them. It will all be on the page. It will all be on the page. Thank you for going on this journey with me. I will not keep you any longer. You can go on to your next podcast episode or your workout or whatever it is that you're doing today. I appreciate you so incredibly much. And remember, it's our life's journey to make ourselves better humans and our life's responsibility to make the world a better place. Bye for now.
Hey, did you know there's free secret podcast episodes waiting for you that are not part of my regular podcast feed? Yes. AndreaOwen.com/free. And you just sign up, you get a link sent to you. It's very secret. It's like a secret club. We don't have a secret handshake, don't worry about that. But it's these motivating podcast episodes that I made for you. They're under 20 minutes each, there's three of them. There for wherever you are in your life. So head on over there and grab them. They range from really supporting you and seeing you where you are and being compassionate all the way to giving you a giant kicking your ass and telling you how amazing and gorgeous and phenomenal you are. So AndreaOwen.com/Free and get your hands on that free podcast feed.