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Be Freaking Awesome Podcast
Tired of surface-level conversations and sugar-coated advice? You’re in the right place.
Be Freaking Awesome is not your average personal growth podcast. Hosted by Angela and Sami, an insightful mother-daughter duo with a gift for keeping it real, this is the space where authenticity, emotional intelligence, and radical self-awareness come together.
We’re not here just to inspire you. We’re here to equip you with tools, stories, and soul-level truths that will help you grow in the real world, not some Pinterest-perfect version of it.
Each week, we open up the real stuff: the messy middles, the limiting beliefs, the grief we never processed, the boundaries we were never taught to hold, and the dreams we’re still afraid to say out loud. From navigating burnout and setting healthy boundaries to healing your relationship with money and learning how to sit with hard emotions, we go deep and we do it with compassion, humor, and zero judgment.
This show is especially for the big-feeling, high-achieving, people-pleasing, growth-obsessed folks who are ready to stop pretending they’ve got it all together and actually start living aligned. If you've ever said, “I know there’s more for me,” or “I’m tired of carrying all this alone,” this podcast was made for you.
We bring two generations of experience, two distinct but complementary perspectives, and one shared mission: to help you stop settling, start healing, and live a freaking awesome life.
You’ll hear from a mix of powerful guests including trauma-informed financial coaches, creatives who turned pain into purpose, and business leaders with heart. We also share solo and co-hosted episodes where we dive into our own struggles and triumphs from the therapy room to the boardroom to our own kitchen table.
We’re not into quick fixes or perfectionism. We’re into progress, emotional regulation, nervous system safety, redefining success, and showing up with more courage, joy, and clarity than you ever thought possible.
No matter where you are on your journey, whether you’re starting over, in transition, building something bold, or just feeling a little lost, we’re here to remind you that you are not broken, you are not too much, and you are capable of far more than you’ve been led to believe.
Take a breath. Hit play. And get ready to do the deep work of becoming who you were always meant to be.
This is your space to grow, heal, laugh, cry, question, and transform. Because life’s too short to settle for anything less than freaking awesome.
Be Freaking Awesome Podcast
EP218 When Your Brain Goes Negative Before You Even Have a Reason
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
You didn't do anything wrong. Your brain just got there first.
That's the thing about automatic negative thoughts: they don't wait for evidence. They don't ask permission. Something happens, and before you've had a single conscious thought about it, your brain has already decided: of course this went sideways. Nobody ever comes through. Something is wrong with me. And then you feel bad about feeling bad, which is its own whole thing.
In this episode, Sami and Angela wrap up an accidental three-part series on how your brain actually works, following conversations on metacognition and cognitive distortions, by landing on the concept that ties it all together. We dig into:
- What an automatic negative thought actually is (and why it's not the same as pessimism)
- Where these thoughts come from and what seeds them
- Why "just choose a better thought" is not as easy as it sounds (and what to do instead)
- How to recognize when your brain is jumping to a conclusion that isn't yours
- What it actually looks like to interrupt the pattern without judging yourself for having it
Angela breaks down how these thoughts grow from deeper core beliefs, the weed whacker vs. the root analogy is going to stick with you. Sami brings her factory metaphor to explain why the machine itself shapes the output, and why understanding that changes everything. They also talk about the spotlight effect, a story about a speaker who got a standing ovation and still thought she bombed, and the one thing that actually interrupts an automatic negative thought in someone else.
You're going to walk away with language for something you've probably experienced a hundred times and never had a name for. That's half the work. Once you can call it out, you're already ahead of it.
Press play. Your brain is not broken. It's just been running the same loop for a while, and this episode is a good place to start changing that.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk - besselvanderkolk.com
- Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown - brenebrown.com/book/atlas-of-the-heart
- Be Freaking Awesome by Angela Belford - bfreakingawesome.com
- Loving What Is by Byron Katie (The Work / four questions) -- thework.com
The 3rd Annual Family Business Forum is May 19 in Springdale, AR. A day built for family-owned businesses who want to communicate better, lead stronger, and actually enjoy working together. Sessions on communication, AI, and high performance, plus a panel, awards, and networking. Early bird tickets are $75 through April 30, then the price goes up. Grab your spot before May 1 at familybusinessnow.com.
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