You Might Also Like: The Tamsen Show

**Tamsen** (0:05)
Hi there, friends. I am so glad you're here with me today. You know, I know a lot of you who listen to The Tamsen Show are in your 30s, 40s, 50s and on. And I was thinking about something recently because I have so many intergenerational relationships in my life, more now than I've ever had before. I have Iris' daughter, I have my daughter-in-law, the girls in my team who are Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, all of you who I hear from every single day, looking for advice and guidance. So in today's episode, I'm talking to my 35-year-old self. But I want you to know what this episode is for all of you. Because if I could go back and sit with my 35-year-old version of myself, there are seven things I would tell her. Seven lessons, and I drilled it down to just seven because I think anything more is just too overwhelming. Seven lessons I wish somebody had handed me 20 years ago. The kind of things that I think would have saved me doubt, years of maybe just frustration, accepting a lot less than I should have accepted. I'm 55 years old now, and I've learned every one of these hard way, like the really hard way.
Today, I'm giving them to you because I want you to be able to skip the parts of this that I walk through by myself. Quick disclaimer, none of this is going to feel revolutionary on paper. You've probably heard some version of this before, especially if you follow me.
But there is a difference between hearing something and then believing it and putting it into action. My hope is that today, even if one of these things lands hard enough, that you actually start living with it, that you wake up tomorrow morning and implement it or think about it when you're going through the course of your life. And if you're watching on video, by the way, we are in a new studio. We're visiting LA and we've tried out a couple of different studios here, but this one has been a lot of fun to be at. So let me know what you think.

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**Tamsen** (2:47)
Lesson number one, my stepmother actually told me about this years and years ago. Be careful how you talk about yourself. If there's one thing I could do, I would grab the 35-year-old version of me by the shoulders and say, it's this. I spent my entire 30s running this constant, low-grade commentary on myself in my head. Oh my God, I look fat today. I don't look good today. My hair's a mess. I just did a terrible job at work. I suck. I'm so slow. Everybody else is ahead of me. I'm never going to catch up. Does any of that sound familiar? I'm always running late. My skin looks so tired. I should have done it better. On and on and on.
In a lot of it, I didn't say out loud. I said it to myself looking at myself in the mirror. I thought because it was in my head, it didn't really count as self-criticism.
But I realized now it counts every single one of those things.
Even if you're doing them as a joke, even if you think you're doing them to motivate yourself in some way, that voice did not stay private. It blended into how I walked into rooms, how I shook hands at events, how I got up on a stage, how I sat next to somebody at a dinner.
People started to treat me the way I've been treating myself because they were picking up on something that I was broadcasting, that I was putting out there and I didn't even know it. Then I would get frustrated that they were treating me the way that I was actually talking to myself. So I promise you this, and this is why this is number one, the way you talk to yourself becomes the way you carry yourself, and the way you carry yourself becomes the way that people read you. So I don't care if you're 35 or you're 65 listening to this, I want you to keep that in mind because it becomes a habit after a while, and we don't even realize what we're doing. Whatever the voice in your head is saying about you, people around you can feel it even when they can't hear it. And if she's telling you, you're, I don't know, you're running out of time or you pick the wrong career or you're just not enough, I promise you, you'll see the world's gonna start confirming what she's saying because she is not like this quiet roommate. This is the loudest woman in your life. So this is a habit that worked for me that I would love for you to start, I don't care if you start it today, catch the voice just one time a day, just once. You don't have to be perfect. And trust me, I catch it all the time. The next time you hear yourself say, I look terrible or I can't believe I just did that. Oh, I want you to stop and ask yourself one question. Would I let my best friend say that about herself in front of me? If the answer is no, you don't get to say it either about yourself.