The Starting Messy Podcast

Click here to get on the Industry: UNPLUGGED Retreat Waitlist

This week on The Starting Messy Podcast, I'm pulling back the curtain on something I don't usually get vulnerable about — the stuff that's actually gone right for me. I'm walking you through exactly how I took my Industry Unplugged retreat from an idea in my head to (nearly) sold out in under six months, and the three things that made it happen.

Here's the thing — I didn't wait until everything was perfect. I put out a waitlist before I had a venue, before I had dates, before my website was even done. And I'm breaking down why acting fast, before you talk yourself out of it, is one of the most important lessons I've learned in business.

I'm also getting into something I don't always say out loud: I believe in my ability to figure things out more than I've ever believed in anything. Not because I have all the answers — I don't — but because I trust myself to handle whatever comes. That's a muscle, and I'm telling you exactly how I built it.

And the third piece is the one that got me a little emotional to talk about — trust. I've spent the last decade showing up as the same person online, in the salon, and in my DMs. No performance, no bullshit. That's what filled this retreat, and it's the same thing that fills your chair.

If you're a hairstylist or salon owner who's tired of white-knuckling your way through growth and wants to actually trust yourself while you build something — this episode is for you.

In this episode:

• How I filled a waitlist before I had a single detail nailed down
• Why speed beats "perfect" every time
• The self-trust work that let me believe in something before it existed
• How a decade of showing up as myself built the trust that sold this out

In 2019, I was a year into running my own suite — thriving on paper, lonely in reality. I didn't have anyone around me who understood where I was trying to go, and that kind of isolation messes with your confidence more than people talk about. Then I found a retreat on Instagram, marketed as "summer camp for hairstylists," and something in me said go.

I flew alone for the first time. Slept in a room with strangers. Spent $6,000 I didn't feel ready to spend. And it changed the entire trajectory of my life — my friendships, my confidence, eventually this podcast, my own coaching business, and now my own retreat.

In this episode, I'm sharing what I'd go back and tell that scared version of me: the people you meet on a retreat become your expanders, your insecurities aren't exclusive to you, and the most impactful moments are never the Instagrammable ones — they're the unplanned conversations and the girlhood laughter at 1am. I'm also talking about what self-trust actually looks like when you build it through discomfort instead of reading about it.

If you're a hairstylist or salon owner who's felt isolated at the top of your own business, who's craving people who actually get your bigger vision, or who's been sitting on a retreat you're too scared to book — this episode is for you.

This is also where I'm telling you about Industry Unplugged — my own retreat, happening in Costa Rica in April 2027. It's everything I've loved and learned from a decade of retreats, built into one experience for stylists and salon owners ready to invest in themselves the way I finally did in 2019.

In this episode:

• Why isolation hits harder the more successful you get
• What an "expander" is and why you need people who have them
• The unglamorous truth about what actually changes you at a retreat
• How self-trust gets built through discomfort, not comfort

Misty is calling out something nobody warns you about: the decision to change is almost always harder than the change itself. She takes you inside two of her own — quitting drinking, which took a full year of stressing, questioning, and mourning the “party girl” identity before she ever said her last drink, and growing out her natural gray at 41, which meant two weeks of tears, research, and asking herself if she was willing to feel “ugly” before she felt the prettiest she's felt in years.

Then she brings it straight back to the chair. The same white-knuckle decision fatigue that shows up around quitting a habit shows up around raising your prices, changing your schedule, or finally breaking up with a client whose name on your book makes your stomach drop. Misty shares how she sat with a client relationship for a full year before making the call — and how the stress didn't lift when the situation changed, it lifted the moment she decided. Same story with the 2019 retreat she almost talked herself out of.

If you're a hairstylist or salon owner who's stuck circling a decision — pricing, boundaries, your schedule, or something bigger — this episode is your permission slip to stop needing certainty and start experimenting. Self-trust isn't built by getting it right. It's built by deciding.

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At 41, after coloring her roots every two weeks for over two decades, Misty made the decision to grow out her natural gray. In this solo episode, she gets brutally honest about what came up in the first month — not just the logistics of the grow-out, but the much bigger thing underneath it: how much she was still outsourcing her sense of pretty, her sense of okay, to other people's opinions.

When she shared the decision on Instagram, the encouragement felt good. But it was the pushback — the "don't do it" from people close to her — that cracked something open. It showed her she was still looking for permission to feel good about a choice she'd already made peace with. That's the real conversation in this episode: the difference between not feeling pretty because you don't feel pretty, and not feeling pretty because someone else told you that you're not.

Misty walks through the ripple effect one honest decision had on her life — skincare, strength training, how she was eating, how she was showing up for herself — and lands on the lesson she says applies to way more than hair: the decision is always the hardest part. The moment you actually decide, the perspective shifts. This episode is for the hairstylist or salon owner who is brilliant at making everyone else feel safe and seen and still waiting for someone to tell her she's allowed to trust herself.

If you're a stylist or salon owner sitting on a decision — about your hair, your chair, your business, or your life — and you're waiting for someone else's approval first, this one's for you.

Last week's episode was about living in survival mode — this week, Misty gets specific about how survival mode actually runs your hairstyling business without you even noticing. If you've ever people-pleased your way into a schedule you hate, felt too guilty to charge what you're worth, or avoided a conversation because conflict feels unbearable, this episode is your mirror.

Misty walks through the real story of the year she finally took Saturdays off after 14–15 years behind the chair — the fear, the coach who asked one simple question, and what actually happened when she stopped protecting everyone else's schedule at the expense of her own life. Spoiler: the clients she was most afraid to lose were the easiest ones to talk to.

This episode is for the hairstylist who is competent enough to hold a full book and calm enough to make every client feel safe in the chair — but who hasn't yet built that same safety and self-trust into her own business decisions. If you're a stylist or salon owner doing the personal development work and applying it to your business (not just your mindset), this one's for you.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why survival mode shows up as people-pleasing, pricing guilt, and schedule avoidance behind the chair
• The real story behind the year Misty took her Saturdays back
• The one coaching question that reframed her biggest business fear
• How to identify the actual fear underneath the business decision you're avoiding
• Why proving your own fear wrong is the fastest way out of survival mode

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This week, Misty gets more personal than usual. She's told you about getting out of debt. She's told you about leaving the chair to become a coach. But she hasn't told you the full story of going from a hyper-independent, angry teenager to the personal development junkie she is today — and the patterns she had to let go of to get there.

This episode is about the protective patterns that used to keep you safe and now keep you blocked. It's about survival mode — why it feels comfortable, and why comfortable isn't the same as forward. It's about the quiet stress that never fully goes away, and why the goal was never to eliminate it, but to change how you respond to it.

If you grew up believing that hustle and hardship are just what you owe before you're allowed to feel good, this episode is your permission slip to stop waiting. You don't have to earn peace through fifty more years behind the chair. You can practice it now — and yes, it's uncomfortable. But that discomfort is nothing compared to the discomfort of staying stuck in survival mode.

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This week on The Starting Messy Podcast, I'm sitting down with Ambrosia Carey — salon owner, business consultant, and host of the Successful Stylist Academy podcast — for a conversation that started with a single word swap that changed everything for me. I've been talking about confidence on this show for a long time. Ambrosia showed me it was never confidence I was chasing. It was certainty.

We get into her “5% method” — the practice of doing the one most painful task of your day, in just over an hour, as a way of proving to yourself you can be trusted. Because here's the thing: self-trust isn't built by getting it all right the first time. It's built by keeping small promises to yourself, over and over, until you have evidence you can't argue with.

We talk about the hedonic treadmill, why our brains chase artificial pleasure instead of leaning into discomfort, and why so many of us — stylists, salon owners, high performers of every kind — are running from the very thing that would actually move us forward. Ambrosia also gets honest about the ego, the not-enoughness she inherited from her parents, and the moment she realized people genuinely don't care what you're doing nearly as much as you think they do. That's it, that's the whole thing, and it's more freeing than it sounds.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why “certainty” is a more honest word than “confidence” — and how to build it
• The 5% method: a simple daily practice for rebuilding self-trust
• How the hedonic treadmill keeps us chasing pleasure instead of growth
• Reverse-engineering your “if I just had ___” thinking
• Letting go of control, curiosity over judgment, and why community gets smaller (and deeper) as you do this work

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Industry: UNPLUGGED Retreat Get Details HERE

I did an experiment: leave my phone at home for a 10-hour music festival and see what happens. Here's the thing — I wasn't scared of getting lost. I was scared of who I'd be without something to check, capture, or Google. So today I'm telling you exactly what happened when I unplugged — and why it's the whole reason Industry Unplugged exists.

As hairstylists and salon owners, we are constantly absorbing other people's energy while running on decision fatigue — and most of us don't even clock it until we're depleted. This episode is my real-time experiment in pulling my mind out of "what do I need to capture" and back into "what am I actually experiencing." Right?

In this episode, we cover:

• Why every single person I told about this experiment called it "dangerous" — and what that reveals about our relationship with our phones
• What happened when I swapped my phone for a Camp Snap camera for a day
• The moment I realized picking up my phone was like going to a mental gym I didn't know I'd stopped attending
• Why being present felt more restorative than a full night of scrolling to decompress
• How this one 10-hour experiment became the entire foundation for the Industry Unplugged retreat

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Industry: UNPLUGGED Retreat click here for details

You give your clients calm, presence, and a space where they feel safe enough to take their masks off. But who’s building that space for you?

In this episode/ Instagram LIVE replay, Misty sits down with salon owner and identity coach Kelly Cahen for a friend-to-friend conversation about the most important asset in your business — you. Not your skills, not your strategy, not the next course in your cart. You.

Here’s the thing: so many of us are growth-minded, we’ve built the businesses we love, and we’re still exhausted. We keep looking outward for the answer — the next guru, the next certification, the next balayage class — when the confidence we’re chasing was only ever going to come from doing the thing and getting quiet enough to hear ourselves think. Misty and Kelly get honest about course-junkie recovery, education as procrastination, the trap of comparison, and why the answers you’re looking for actually live in the discomfort and the white space you keep avoiding.

This is the conversation behind why Misty created the Industry Unplugged Retreat — a space for seasoned stylists and salon owners to unplug, drop the performance, and reconnect with themselves and their people.

In this episode:

• Why self-abandonment for the sake of success quietly breaks your trust in yourself
• The difference between the hamster wheel and working hard from a grounded place
• How overconsuming content kills your creativity (and what silence unlocks instead)
• Why confidence comes from doing the thing, not from one more course
• The power of getting out of your comfort zone — and the white space that changes everything

personal development for hairstylists, mindset coaching for salon owners, self-trust, burnout in the beauty industry, hairstylist confidence, salon owner exhaustion, course junkie recovery

Join us in Costa Rica for the Industry: UNPLUGGED Retreat April 2027

In this episode I’m sitting down with Janean, The Healing Therapist — a hairstylist of 22 years, a yoga teacher of 10, and the woman I asked to lead all the movement at our Costa Rica Industry Unplugged Retreat. This one is full circle in the best way, because Janean first found this podcast when money was her whole story, and now she’s sitting across from me as a friend, a peer, and someone I get to build something beautiful with.

We get into the stuff that doesn’t get talked about enough behind the chair. Janean shares how she quit doing hair three times and rebuilt her clientele a fourth — this time through grief, a neck injury she didn’t think she’d recover from, and major debt. We talk about the difference between hearing the information and actually implementing it, why being in the room changed everything for her, and how she dug out of her lowest point not by fixing what was most broken, but by leaning into what she was already good at.

This is a conversation about the mind-body connection, self-sabotage, worthiness versus capability, and why hairstylists are quietly some of the most powerful people in their communities. We laugh, we almost cry (more than once), and we land on something I believe with my whole chest: you don’t have to do the big scary version of healing. Sometimes it’s just staying curious and not overthinking it.

In this episode we cover:

• Why yoga is less about flexibility and more about building a relationship with yourself
• Rebuilding your career with everything you already know instead of starting from zero
• The difference between consuming information and actually implementing it
• Self-sabotage — how to start catching it in the moment instead of years later
• Why focusing on what you’re best at (not what’s most broken) can pull your whole life up
• Worthiness vs. capability, and the money stories we don’t realize we’re carrying
• How hairstylists create real change in the world, one client at a time

personal development for hairstylists, hairstylist mindset podcast, self-worth for salon professionals, yoga for hairstylists, retreat for hairstylists