Q&A: life updates, setting boundaries, and more

Welcome back to SEASON TWO of small steps to self-love, the podcast! I am so excited to be back with some life updates and a Q&A where you asked some really amazing questions about mental health, relationships, and healing.

Join me for a conversation about one-sided relationships, how to navigate your energy as an introvert, how to overcome low confidence especially as a creative, and more. 

Each episode covers a different mental health-related topic and has a "small step" or action for you to take on your self-love journey. tune in for today's small step and let me know in the comments what your answer is to today's question, if you feel comfortable sharing!

Like this episode? Please consider leaving a short review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps more people find the podcast who need it!

About shelby:

Shelby is a mental health author, who has grown an audience of more than 500,000 on social media who resonate with her work. Her bestselling book, changing with the tides, is a poetry collection about self-love, doubt, insecurities, and more. Her new collection, girl made of glass, was recently released and is a collection about self-love, isolation, and fear. Shelby also edits poetry, runs an online poetry community, and helps authors market themselves and their books for more sales.

resources from shelby:

·        check out Shelby’s mental health poetry books

·        Free self-love poetry print

·        Join the poetry club

·        Get help with marketing as a writer

connect with shelby:

·        Instagram: @shelbyleighpoetry

·        YouTube: Shelby Leigh Poetry

·        TikTok: @shelbyleighpoetry

·        Twitter: @shelbyleighpoet

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Transcript

Shelby

Hello and welcome back to season 2 of small steps to self-love. Thank you for joining me for a new season of the podcast. I'm so excited to be back and I've been working behind the scenes to really figure out how to make this season different for our listeners. But of course also keep the same mental health, self-love themes and helping you on your self-love journey as well. So if you're watching the episode on YouTube, I got a nice camera, hopefully to help the quality of the videos a little bit more. And I also have been recording interviews with a bunch of guests across a range of industries and backgrounds and experiences to come onto the podcast and talk about so many different things, from confidence to time management and how that affects our self-love, to a woman who has traveled to more than 80 countries solo and we talked about her experience with that and how that has grown her mental health and self-love as well. So a range of different interviews, so many more than what I just could mention in this quick summary. But I just wanted to give you a sneak peek of what to expect moving forward with season 2. Of course I'll do solo episodes as well, and for today's first episode back for the new season, I thought that we could jump into a quick update on what I've been up to since the last season ended, as well as a Q&A because my very first episode of the podcast last year was a Q&A, and that's still one of my top listened to podcast episodes so well, why not do another one? 

I asked my Instagram followers for some questions mental health related as well as just books and writing related, so we will dive into that after my quick update of what's been going on. Whenever I ended season one in January, it was a week or two before my third book’s release date. So girl made of Glass is now out. Since the word has been out for a couple months now, here it is. If you are watching on YouTube, I am holding it up here and I just want to say that this launch was amazing and thank you so much if you have read the book, left a review and just been following along on Instagram or TikTok where I've been sharing some poems from the book. But to get everything inside, you can definitely pick up the book from your favorite retailer. It's on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Target, Walmart. I could go on, but I just really wanted to say thank you so much for your support. January was a bit of a draining month for me. I was sick for a lot of it. Then I had the book launch so that is one of the main reasons why I decided to take a step back from the podcast for a little bit. But I also just wanted to figure out where I wanted to go with this podcast and get some episodes set up for you. I'm really excited moving forward. And just of course, I had to talk about my book really quickly because I'm so proud of this collection. Lots and lots of poems about self-love and mental health in here, fears and anxieties and how they can affect us and affect our future. And I'm really proud of it so I hope you enjoy it. On a similar note, the audiobook for this collection comes out this month as well. I got to narrate the audiobook for this collection, which is my absolute favorite thing to do. I love reading my poetry and you may know that I share a lot of my poems on TikTok and read them out loud, so that has been a huge insecurity of mine that has really helped me like my voice after years of not liking it. The fact that I have recorded audiobooks for two of my books now is wild. That is out this month as well. So if you're interested in the audiobook, March 21st that audiobook is out everywhere that you can get audiobooks, so I hope you'll check that out as well. 

What else have I been up to in February? I spent a week in Florida with my parents and my fiancé, which was really, really nice. I've been doing some writing, typing up a bunch of old poems that I hadn't touched in a while and working on the book marketing side of the business where I teach authors how to market their books on social media, which has been growing quickly. And it's really fun. Lots of work going on there. And then the last piece is the Poetry Club, which, if you aren’t aware, is my online poetry community where I teach and help other poets write and publish and market their poem books. We bring in guest poets who are often award-winning and best-selling poets to teach us a lesson on poetry. So I have some amazing guests lined up for the next few months. I myself will be teaching a workshop on marketing your poetry book and I'm really excited for that. So the doors for that open up on March 24th. So if you are interested in joining the poetry club this year you can head to jointhepoetryclub.com and get on the wait list and you'll be the first to know when doors open and claim a spot for yourself. It is a beautiful community of more than 100 poets who are all so passionate about poetry and writing and creativity, and we just have an amazing time in there. If you were interested, I will put the link in the description. 

Let's dive into the Q&A and answer some questions. So I left this pretty open and asking my Instagram audience to ask questions on anything mental health related, or really just anything about my life updates, all of that. It's a range of questions, but I'm just going to dive straight in and answer them. The first one is from solel hooray, they asked how to build and rest when hosting guests as an introvert. That is a great question because I am also an introvert and I think that there's a misconception about what introvertedness is versus extrovertedness. It doesn't mean that you are antisocial, that you hate being around people. It just means that where extroverts get really energized and get their energy from other people and being around other people, introverts instead are the opposite, so their energy is kind of drained when they're around people and they need that alone time to get their energy back up. So when you ask about hosting guests, that can be very energy draining. For an introvert, getting your energy back up or maintaining your energy when hosting a guest as an introvert. So I don't know the exact context of this question, but I think it's just really important to build on boundaries and the time for yourself, depending on how long these guests are staying or what kind of like hosting you are doing, just knowing your own limits, knowing that if you need some time of your day to yourself that you can point them in the direction of a fun activity to do, or a restaurant to try out, you can absolutely do that and don't have to be like 24/7 with them or showing them around things like that. For me, this question made me think of I host a lot of virtual events as an introvert and. It can be draining. I love what I do. I love workshops and writing sessions that I host. I just taught a poetry class for teens virtually for a couple of hours recently, and I think it's just important to know your limits and kind of try to frame your time to reflect that. So on days where I do have a bunch of calls, I don't have calls the day before and the day after. Or for times that I'm doing workshops and write-ins and things, I try to keep my calendar open around that time, so I have time to prepare, but also reenergize after I've just been talking for hours and hours so things like that can really help you get your energy back after a big social event or something like that where you might be feeling a little bit drained. 

The next question is just how to balance your mental health, which I think that question is a great question. It can be taken a lot of different directions, so I'll just share the first things that I thought of when I read this question about how to balance your mental health. I think boundaries, which I just shared in the last question, could totally be applied to this question as well and knowing what brings you joy and what doesn't, what might cause you anxiety or what might cause you to kind of get into a bit of a rut, make you feel less confident. All of those are things to kind of track and be aware of. I myself have done multiple weeks where I will track just in the notes on my phone times where I feel like I'm getting really frustrated or times where I feel more anxious, times where I'm feeling sad or in a rut and notice patterns that is really, really helpful so that you can either avoid situations like that which may not always be the best route, sometimes we kind of need to face our fears and move forward past them. But we either avoid situations, lessen situations, or just know our areas of focus of where we can improve in our lives and you know, work to be more confident in certain areas. That's something that can be really helpful to, I guess, balance your mental health really. That's just being aware of the ups and downs of our own mental health and our emotions and thoughts, and that can really help you see the gap and the times that you're feeling your best and your happiest to help you balance that. 

The next questions are kind of similar. Ask profile asked how do you deal with writers block and Devree asked what do you do when you don't like everything you're writing lately, which are similar about writing? So I'll come back to the mental health questions, but I love these writing questions. As well, so for writer's block, you're sitting down to write and you really cannot think of anything to write or you just feel blocked. I think a lot of the times that can be a confidence issue if you're not feeling confident in your ability to write well. And of course there's, you know, not a quick cure for confidence issues. I deal with that myself, but I think just remembering that what you write doesn't need to be shared with anyone else, it can just be for you can really help me get over those creative blocks and just write what I want to write. Sometimes I finish writing and laugh because it's just so bad and I just wanted to get words on the page and call it a day, and that's OK. Not everything that we write is going to be a masterpiece or something that we need to share. But for me, I write for myself. Of course I write for my readers and my audience as well, but when I first started writing, I was writing for myself as an escape, as a way to deal with emotions as a way to explore those emotions. So if we come back to our main reason for writing which for you might also be to help yourself and remember that that is your key goal with writing. I think that could really help overcome writer’s blog. Of course there are writing prompts, there are just like stream of consciousness where you just touch pen the paper and you just start writing what you ate for breakfast that day and just get words on the page and eventually it might transform into something different, but sometimes just really getting yourself to write for 5-10 minutes straight again, randomness can really help. You just know OK, I can still write. I can still do this. Sometimes something like that can help you get over the block. 

And when it comes to what do you do when you don't like everything that you're writing lately, that is a tough one that I think going back to writing that you do enjoy, that you've written, writing that you're proud of can really help to build confidence and remind you that you can write amazing things. If you don't have that to go back to and you really are feeling not confident like nothing you've written is good, those are the times where I challenge you to one, be nicer to yourself and remember why you are writing in the 1st place but two, a lot of other people probably wouldn't agree with you, because we do tend to be our harshest critics. So if you're someone who posts your poems on social media or you have people that you can ask in your life for feedback, share it with them and see what they think. I know that sharing with friends and family, like a lot of times, we'll get, you know, positive feedback even if we don't believe it. But if there's someone else in your life who is a writer and you just ask for honest feedback, that can really help too. And maybe they'll even give you something beneficial to work on, but if not, it can kind of boost your confidence a little bit. But for me, whenever I'm feeling unconfident or if I've gone a while without writing, I love to just go back through poems that I'm really proud of. I actually have some of my favorite poems that I've written in a separate document, so I can just go through and read them. Usually unpublished stuff that hasn't seen the light of day yet and that really inspires me to write more, and I tend to write really well after I've read a lot of stuff that I've written that I'm really proud of. It just gets you in a good mindset and a confident mindset. 

Cecil or Cecil, sorry if I'm saying your name wrong asked are you aware of how many lives you describe in your poetry and the impact it makes? I thought that was a really sweet question and I don't think about it often enough. And I think I need to more, especially on days where I'm not feeling confident about my writing, which we just were talking about. It is wild to think about how many people have read my books and how many people you know, read my poems on social media. The numbers can really do damage to us mentally, and I think that that's something that I've stepped back from looking at a lot at the same time. Whenever I do actually think about that number, that like millions of people have seen my poems and visualize what that actually would look like in person like if I was presenting my poetry to all the people that have ever seen it online, that is pretty mind-blowing to me, so it's incredible to think about and I don't think about it enough. So I actually really appreciate the reminder that I am making an impact even on days where it might not feel like it. So thank you for that. That was really sweet. 

Two more questions. This one asked how to move on from one-sided love. That's a really tough question and I think that that question can apply to both romantic relationships or friendships, or really any other type of relationship in life. Sometimes they can be rather 1 sided and that's something that I've been thinking about and working through a lot with friendships that feel one sided or relationships in the past that have been one sided for me and I've had to realize a couple things. One being that it's important to set expectations and to have standards, it's OK to have what some people might think are high expectations. But for you, it's just the minimum of what you need. And that's OK. So the first thing is before assuming that it's one sided or feeling like it's one sided, have you actually told this person your expectations in terms of communication, or how often you're seeing them and things like that, because if you haven't had that conversation, they might need way less than what you are looking for, and so it might not be a good match for that reason. But if they never know, they don't really have a chance to work on it. So I think that's the first thing. 

Of course, if you're someone who puts a lot of time and energy into your relationships or you text back right away, or you want to call every day or you want to see each other on a regular basis, it might seem obvious to you that they're just not putting in the effort, but they really might not know what you're looking for. And so if you give them the chance to step up a little bit then they deserve that chance. And if they still don't, or if they're not interested after you kind of talk with them about it, then it's probably not a good fit anyway. So I just wanted to say that first, because I think that I myself have jumped to those conclusions before and then realized like I didn't really even share that it was something that was making me upset or that was bothering me. But there also have been times where I haven't been getting what I needed or needed to be happy in a relationship or in a friendship and moving on from that, which is why your question can be really really hard, but I think that it does come back to being confident in yourself and knowing that you have expectations that deserve to be met that the right person will put in the time and energy that you're looking for and that moving on is ultimately the best option if you were always feeling unhappy and feeling like you weren't a priority. So even though it's painful now, it will get easier and you made the right decision to prioritize yourself and know that there is someone out there, friendship or romantic relationship or whatever, that will treat you the way that you are hoping to be treated, that will be thrilled that you are putting the same time and energy and effort. Into them as they are to you. So I hope that that helps. 

And ending on this question, which I absolutely love, if you could share what is the thing you've learned from all of the stories and poetry that you've written, that's such a tough question. I've been exploring myself and my mental health and my feelings and relationship and all of the things through poetry for 7-8 years now, written thousands of poems and shared hundreds of them online and in my books. And I don't know if I could pick one thing that I've learned. I think if I had to pick one thing, I would say just the ups and downs of our minds and how much one year, five years can change someone if you put in the work to do so. I just look back at when I first started sharing my writing anonymously to now doing this podcast, reading my poems online, having audio books, like all these things that I never thought I would do. That's a wild amount of change and not a huge amount of time and I think it's just really fascinating to think about. I keep a daily journal that I can look back on and seeing my growth is amazing. I even just posted on Instagram the other day about this mirror that I've had for years that I've taken with me apartment after apartment after apartment and I have like different photos that I've taken in the mirror. And a lot of them, I'm covering my face and kind of like hiding. My stance is a lot less confident. You can see, like over the years, how much differently I view myself and stand and don't cover my face and my smile is bigger and it's just really cool to see the growth that can happen when you put in the work because mental health takes work. Self-love takes work. That is what this podcast is here to do as well. 

So thank you all so much for your questions. They were amazing questions really made me think, and I really appreciate that. If you are new to the podcast, welcome! I give a small step to my listeners every single week and so this week small step would be to reflect on your growth as well. Think back to areas that you used to not be confident in that you are now confident in, or things that used to maybe cause you anxiety that cause you less anxiety. Now any amount of small growth or big growth is something to celebrate and so I'd love to hear in a review or in a comment if you're watching on YouTube and the area of growth for you that we could all celebrate together. So let me know in the comments and if you have a moment to leave a quick review of the podcast wherever you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate that as we head into season 2. Thank you so much for supporting the podcast. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week filled with self-love and compassion and kindness. See you next time!