289. I Was Checking All the Boxes Yet Felt Empty Inside: My Self-Love Awakening with Misty Laboy

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello and thank you for joining us today. I'm so happy you're here. Happiness solved is the place where we explore everything you need to become the best possible version of you. This is Sandee Sgarlata, and today I've got some exciting news for our dedicated listeners. We've just launched our exclusive members only portal.

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Misty Laboy, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really looking forward to this conversation because I love everything that you're about and your mission in life and can't wait to dive in. How's it going today? Good. Thank you so much for having me as a guest.

00:01:25
I'm really excited to be sharing with your audience. Oh, thank you. So for the audience, Misty Laboy is a master makeup artist, weight loss advisor, and a self love mentor. Love it. I'm going to let you talk about what you do, and we're going to dive into all of that.

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But before we do, I'd love to hear people's stories because I feel like that's how we learn. We learn from stories. Humans have been storytellers for thousands of years. So how did you get to where you are today? What is that backstory that drives you every single day?

00:02:01
Yeah, I would love to share.

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At a young age, I felt like I checked all the boxes. I did all the things that I was supposed to do. I graduated from college with a teaching degree. I got married, I got the house. I had the two 2.5 kids, all those things.

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And I just found myself feeling very empty, very unfulfilled. And I thought I did all the things I was supposed to do, yet I wasn't feeling happy. And I did start selling cosmetics and doing makeup about 20 years ago. And I really enjoyed loving, helping women transform. I loved their facial expressions when they looked in the mirror and they just said, wow.

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And it was always a paycheck of the heart, a feel good moment and a win win. And I did that for a lot of years. But personally, I was still feeling like something was missing. And I struggled with my weight over the years, especially as a young mom trying to keep up with two kids. And I put on some comfort weight, if you will.

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And a friend of mine introduced me to a wonderful weight loss program. And after being a yoyo dieter for lots of years, I finally found something that worked, and I was excited to share it with other women. And that led me into weight loss coaching. And for the last eight years, I have been doing that and again, helping women transform inside and out. And that led me to two years ago where I was still feeling this gnawing sensation that something was still missing.

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And I was starting to feel like, man, I'm never going to be truly happy. What's wrong with me? Right? And I kind of embarked on a spiritual journey, and this was during the pandemic, so I think we had a lot of extra time on ourselves to reflect. And what I realized, what was missing was self love.

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And I had always thought, being in the beauty industry, I liked what I saw in the mirror, especially after losing 60 pounds and being able to keep it off. I thought I look great, but I noticed that emptiness. And I tried retail therapy, and I tried filling that void over the years with a lot of different unhealthy things, and nothing just seemed to really stick. But once I dove into this self love and self acceptance, and not needing external validation, really kind of looking at why I am the way I am, I was fully able to truly accept myself. And once you're able to truly accept yourself, you can begin to really, truly love yourself.

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And I realized that I was able to fill that void with self love. And I thought, you know what? This has been missing from my life for so many years, because I thought I did love myself. Like I said, I looked in the mirror. I liked the way my appearance looked.

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And I equated that with self love. Not really understanding that self love is so much deeper than the surface. And self acceptance is more about accepting the good and the bad. And there was a lot of bad that I wasn't accepting. I was just kind of burying and didn't want to talk about, didn't want to think about.

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And I think deep down, I thought no one would really, truly love me if they knew who I really was. So I always felt like I wore a mask. There were so many parts of myself hidden. And the more people that I met, especially online, once social media blew up, I had a lot of followers, and I connected with so many people, but I still felt like I was hiding parts of me that were surrounded by shame. And on this self love journey, being able to fully accept myself and own the good and the bad, I was able to become more my true, authentic self and started sharing differently.

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And it has really helped to grow my business and attract followers, and it has led me to be able to help more women this way. My gosh, you just unloaded a lot of information right there. All incredible. So let's start with self love, because I too found myself many years ago. It was brought to my attention that, well, you need to work on self love.

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And I was like, what are you talking about? I love myself. And then you start diving a little bit deeper. And when you really start to pay attention to your thoughts and the things you say to ourselves. Negative self talk.

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Yeah. Especially as women, we are so hard on ourselves. The self talk that we tend to do to ourselves, we would never say to another person ever. Right. And so that's the first place to start, is to start thinking about it.

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But self awareness is definitely key. Yeah, the self awareness and just paying attention to that internal dialogue. But what was it for you? And what advice can you give to women or men that are struggling with coming to Terms with the shame and the guilt? Was there like one little thing that really helped you to really embrace those negative parts of yourself?

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Really? Because it's easy to accept the good stuff that we have. It's harder to accept the negative parts that we all have. We're human. We all have warts all over.

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Yeah. For me, it was becoming radically honest with myself and others. I felt like I got tired of living a double life, and it wasn't really a double life, but there was so much of me that people didn't know. There were so many parts of me that I kept hidden that it felt like a double life. And I just was in fear of judgment.

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And when I got radically honest with myself, working on my self acceptance, I journaled a lot, I meditated a lot, and I realized that we're our own biggest hurdle, our own self sabotager. And I started paying attention to the things that I was saying to myself. And I had to get radically honest with how I got here, that all the decisions that I made led me up to this point, and I had to take ownership of that. Going through a divorce. Yes, he may have cheated, but I played a role in that, and I chose to stay in that marriage.

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So owning all of that, owning your shit, basically, that led me to be able to start really diving deeper into love myself. So getting radically with myself and with others and with myself was hard. But getting radically honest with other people was even harder because I feared they'd reject me or they wouldn't love me. But I had to stop self abandoning myself and stay true to myself and be honest in every way that I could possibly be. And those that loved me unconditionally and supported me unconditionally, they stayed in my life while the others.

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I don't like to say I lost people, but they kind of vibrated out. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. They vibrated out. And I want to come back to what you said and you said it multiple times, and I'm just going to reiterate it to the listeners. You said radically honest with yourself.

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That is such a beautiful way to put it, because that's really what it's all about. It's that extreme honesty with yourself, because you can tell yourself lies all you want, but at the end of the day, it's still there, the shit is still there until you get radically honest with yourself. I love that. That is absolutely beautiful. That really helped me also start to notice my patterns and my cycles, what I was attracting into my life.

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It's like, why do these same people, why does this thing keep happening to me? Why does this thing keep presenting itself? And it's like our life lessons are going to keep presenting themselves until you change. That's right, you're going to keep getting more of the same until you change. So in owning the fact that I played a part in that, I was co creating and there were things that I needed to change, because for so long, I just thought, I'm good, I'm great, I'm a great mom, I'm a great wife, everything's great.

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But once I dug deeper, I thought if everything was so great, then I would be happy. And there are just certain parts of my life that I'm not happy with and let's dig deeper and address them instead of stuffing them. Well, I want to applaud you because so many people do not have the courage that it takes and they settle for things because you could have easily just settled, right? Yeah, I feel good, I feel good. And yet you knew there was something more.

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And so I really want to acknowledge you. Thank you for taking or having the courage and taking the time, because it does take work. And a lot of people, quite frankly, they don't want to do the work, because doing this type of work means that you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Absolutely. And so often it's hard, it sucks, it sucks.

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It's just, do you want to just keep living a mere existence or do you want to thrive because this is it right. We've got this one chance here, and you can either settle for just mediocre or you can aspire to be something really great for yourself. Yeah. So I just wanted to acknowledge you for that because it's really awesome.

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So you talk about how you empower women to discover their worth beyond their appearances, which is what you did. But let's talk about that and how it plays into our body image. And while I think it's very important that women accept themselves as they are, there's also a health component to it that needs to be talked about. Yes. All right.

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Like, it's great that women are accepting of their size. However, it can be dangerous to your health when you're overweight.

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When you're focusing on weight loss, for example, because you want to be healthy, it's a whole different vibe than focusing on weight loss to be a certain size or a certain weight or to look a certain way. Right. Thank you for pointing that out, because it's a delicate conversation, and we're certainly not here to shame anyone. It's more about health. And in the United States, the obesity is such a problem, and not only is it a problem, because your lifespan is going to be shortened, it's also a drain on our medical system and the doctors and the healthcare system and our whole society as a whole.

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So can you talk a little bit more about that and how you were able to focus on weight loss loss for your health? Because that does tie into self love, right? Yeah, absolutely. I tell my clients, you can't hate yourself thin. That's right.

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It's not going to happen. It doesn't work. I love that. You can't hate yourself thin. Right, exactly.

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No. When you get radically honest with yourself, you start to question things like, who am I doing this for? And why am I doing this? Am I doing it for external validation? Really, it's like we're all looking for this feeling, and we think once we lose the weight, we're going to feel great and everything's going to just magically work and fall into place, and it just doesn't happen that way.

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I mean, even for me, after losing 60 pounds, even though I liked the way I looked, it didn't change anything internally. I didn't really feel different. That's right. And after years of Yoyo dieting, I had to learn that really, any diet can work. It's more about lifestyle changes and making changes that you can sustain.

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For me, no carbs, that was not something. Yeah, I could do that for a month. And lose 15 pounds, but then I'm going to gain those 15 pounds right back. That's not a sustainable thing that I could do every day to benefit my health. Yeah, well, I think that anytime you're depriving yourself, it is just going to backfire on you.

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While I only have one experience in my life where I needed to lose weight, but it took me ten years to finally do it. And it was after I had my son. And when I got pregnant with my son, I was 34 years old. I was in the best shape of my life. I had very little body fat.

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This was when I was a us national and international figure skating coach. I was also ice dancing six days a week. So I was in the best shape of my life. And I was told I would never get pregnant. Well, lo and behold, miraculously, I became pregnant with my son.

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And they told me, well, we don't know if you're going to be high risk, so put your feet up and gain weight. And I'm like, okay, sign me up. And it was so funny because it was like, okay, I'm not going to go over 150 pounds. I'm not going to go over 160 pounds. And I just kept saying that he was born two weeks early, and that morning I was at the doctors and I was 196 pounds, and I was like, I'm not going to go over 200 pounds.

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He was a seven pound baby. Okay, now, granted, I lost, like, 40 pounds in a couple of weeks, which is all wet water weight, because it was end of the summer, but then it took me six months to lose the next 30 pounds, but then it gradually came back on, and then I started going through pre menopause. I couldn't lose weight to save my life. Nothing would work. And I finally found something that worked for me, which was intermittent fasting.

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And I've kept the weight off now for nine years, and it was like 25 pounds. So I'm certainly not one to give advice on weight loss because I have been very fortunate with a metabolism. But plus, being a professional athlete, it's hard to consume enough calories every day anyway because you're exerting so much. So when it comes to the mindset behind weight loss, what advice can you give? Because we already talked about the self love, and sometimes people aren't going to be there, right.

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And so let's try to meet some of those people that aren't at that point where they're ready to look at that. What are some other advice that you can give to people that aren't ready to really take a look at themselves. Right. But how do they go about it and it still gets some sort of progress? Yes.

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I mean, I will say that even if you're not ready to dive deeper into yourself, mindset still plays such a huge part of it. And you do have to work on your mindset always, because wanting to lose weight because you want to look a certain way or fit a certain size is going to be so much harder than wanting to lose weight, because your body needs to be at a lesser weight to be healthy and wanting to do what's best for your body. And instead of shaming yourself and hating yourself for looking the way you do, give yourself grace. Going through three pregnancies, and I know with one pregnancy alone, I gained 80 pounds, give yourself grace for that. You birth the human right.

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It's always going to come off slower than it comes on. Unfortunately. That's the way we're built as women, I think. But coming at it with the mindset of just a loving attitude and wanting to do it because you love your body, going to exercise because you love your body, not exercising because you hate your body and just working on pouring that love into yourself. And I have my clients do some mirror work where we go through exercises in the mirror that you can start to do that.

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Positive affirmations help a lot. Being aware of that negative self talk. We have those two voices in our heads at all times. You can be your biggest cheerleader or your biggest critic. You've already tried being your biggest critic.

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For me, it was like I did that for 40 years and it didn't work. So let's try something different and start rewiring those neural pathways that you've been telling yourself how fat you are for years and years and years. It becomes a part of your self identity, and you need to work on changing that. Really, that's the best advice that I could give right now. I love it.

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Let's talk about comparing yourself to others, because I think that plays a big role in it as well. And sometimes that's our motivating factor more than just doing it to take care of yourself.

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What do you have to say about that? Because I know I can talk for a long time. I can talk about that for sure. Yeah. But as women, we do it.

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We're always comparing ourselves and. Yeah, how's that working for you? There's a reason why they say comparison is the thief of all joy. Because when you're comparing yourself to others, you're comparing your flaws to their strengths, especially on social media. Studies have shown that people who spend more time on social media are much more likely to compare themselves to others, but you're comparing your low points to their highlight reel, so you're putting yourself at a very unfair disadvantage, and it doesn't serve you to do that.

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So for me, when I found myself comparing myself to someone, I had to unfollow them. I didn't unfriend them, but I had to unfollow them because it wasn't helpful to me. You don't want it showing up in your feed, so it's not right in your face. Right, right. So it's like, we all have our strengths.

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We all have our weaknesses. Focus on your strengths because you might have great legs and someone else might have a great butt, but they hate their legs. So focus on your strengths and celebrate women for their strengths as well. Yeah, that's a great thing. I mean, look at somebody and be like, oh, my gosh, that's so great that they're doing that.

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But let me just remind everybody that person that you're admiring, I had a friend say once, if you say you want to be like somebody else, you better be willing to accept all their good qualities and all their bad qualities, because I promise you, I promise you, they have probably more bad baggage than you do. Yes. And do you really want their bad stuff? No. Most likely, you don't.

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We want the good, but we don't want to take the bad. But if you want to compare yourself to that person, then you better be willing to take all the good and the bad. Yeah. And with being self aware, recognize the societal beauty standards and how impossible they are and how not real they are, how much of it is photoshopped? I mean, even people on social media photoshopping things, and you're comparing yourself to a photoshop.

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Right. It's not even real. And I think that when you look at a lot of the advertisements, they are showing women that are bigger than the size two models, but they're still photoshopped. It's still not real. Right, right.

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And so they look amazing, but it's still not real. They're still being. Yeah, no, I love that. Missy, this has been such an amazing conversation, and we could talk for hours about all of this. Is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you'd like to share with the audience today?

00:24:08
Before we wrap up, I would love to just invite your listeners to dive deeper on their journey of self love and self acceptance, because I know a lot of women, they don't know that they need it. They don't even know for me. For years, I knew something was missing. I knew something was off, but I didn't know what it was. And like I said, I tried to fill that void with so many other things.

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And I think for so many of us, it comes down to a self worth issue and healing that we all need to do around our own worthiness. And that's just really what I'm passionate about, helping people transform inside and out. But when you find your worthiness and you really fully accept and love yourself, it will change your life like no other diet will, like no other makeup will. And I just wanted to just share that. Thank you.

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I love that. Because really, when that happens, I can honestly say that for most women, when you truly are loving yourselves, you're going to notice the weight is going to come off. You're not going to reach for that second serving because you're going to be like, you know, that's not a good thing for me. I've had enough. Because I'm enough.

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Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I love it. So where can people find you? We'll have it in the show notes as well.

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But you want to shout out your website and Instagram. I have a free self love quiz on my website that I'd love for you to come and take. I think it's three minutes and it will share with you what your main love lock is or what is keeping you from fully loving yourself. And that can be found@mistylaboy.com. So thank you.

00:26:01
Easy peasy. All right, we'll have that in the show notes as well. Misty, thank you so much for joining me today. And for all our listeners, let's just, here's to self love and look in the mirror and give yourself a high five and look in the mirror and tell yourself that you love or say I love you when you're looking in the mirror. I do it every day.

00:26:23
Absolutely. You are reminder, right? All right. Thank you so much.

00:26:40
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00:28:01
Again, that's happinesssolved supercast.com and it will also be in the show notes I am so grateful you are a part of our happiness solved family and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continued support. Again, I am so grateful for you and I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care everyone.