Burnout, Mental Load, and Self Validation: The Wellbeing Code with Marianne Talkovski

Danielle: Hello, hello. This is Danielle Ireland and you are listening to Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs, the podcast remedy for anytime you feel like everyone else has life figured out but you. Spoiler: they don’t.

Today I get to welcome one of my OG, top-50, all-time downloaded guests: Marianne. She is a multihyphenate healer. She’s an acupuncturist, Chinese medicine practitioner, emotional well-being strategist, coach, author, and now, adding to her resume, a retreat leader.

Basically, if it has to do with the nervous system, emotions, and feeling more at home in yourself, she’s your girl.

I first met Marianne—you’re going to hear this in the episode—but I first met her at a party. Not long after, I found myself on her table. I had just recently gone through a miscarriage before I met her. I was deeply burnt out and I was treating my body like a brain taxi—just taking me from place to place.

Marianne was one of the first people who really helped me understand at a deeper level—because I thought I knew, but there’s always another layer—how much I was carrying physically and emotionally and how all of that was connected. I believe that healing in this relationship has made me a better person, a better partner, a better friend, and also a better therapist.

It’s humbling to realize I was doing the work I was doing—helping others process their feelings—without realizing how much I was still burying inside of me. But that’s okay. That’s why we have this community. That’s why we’re calling people in. And that’s why it’s okay to stay curious, compassionate, and open. There’s always more to learn.

This is a judgment-free zone.

In this conversation, she shares the next evolution of her work: The Well-Being Code. There are four pillars to this code: Regulate, Rewire, Resync, and Radiate. And in a world that glorifies hustle and constant achievement, Marianne believes that well-being is the new gold standard of success.

That’s what this episode is all about.

We talk about why emotions are never wrong and what happens when our body doesn’t get to express them. Why many of us are trying to prove we belong instead of trying to belong to ourselves—what that actually looks like, how we actually do that.

We talk about how travel, rest, and stepping outside of your “operating life” can reveal the changes that need to happen when you come home. Not just a mental health day or an escape, but using a retreat and mindful travel as a way to really tap into what your heart has probably been wanting all along.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, burnt out, or like you were constantly hustling for worthiness—even when you’re doing everything “right”—this episode is definitely for you. So take a breath, settle in, and get ready to dive into this beautiful, wise, and deeply grounded conversation with Marianne Talkovski and The Well-Being Code.

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Ad Break – Treasured Journal & Walrus

Danielle: As we find ourselves in the holiday season, I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful gifts—the kind that help us slow down, reflect, connect with ourselves and the people we love.

If you’re looking for something special, I’ve created two resources that come straight from my heart and my therapy practice.

The first is called The Treasured Journal. It’s a guided reflection tool built around seven key areas of your life, filled with prompts, sentence stems, stories, and space to explore the things that really matter to you. It’s a beautiful way to reset, especially as we’re heading into a new year.

For the little ones in your life—or the grownups helping them navigate their emotions—there’s also my children’s book, Wrestling a Walrus: For Little People with Big Feelings. It’s a sweet story about a small penguin, a big obstacle, and the power of meeting our feelings with kindness instead of fear.

Both make wonderful holiday gifts for friends, family, or for yourself—because calm, curiosity, and connection are gifts we all deserve.

You can find both The Treasured Journal and Wrestling a Walrus in the links in the show notes, or on my website, danielleireland.com.

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Conversation

Danielle: Marianne Talkovski, welcome—welcome back to Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs.

I have to share something fun with you. Back in May, when I decided to relaunch this podcast, it was suggested that I edit my catalog back to my top 50 episodes. In the process of doing that, you were one of my top 50.

So I thought it would be really fun, as I was reimagining and relaunching the show, to have some of my OG top-listened guests back. You are the second person I’ve welcomed back from that original top-50 hit list.

I am really excited to have you back because it was beautiful content before—but you’ve continued to expand and grow and evolve as a person and as a businesswoman, and you have some fun new offerings to share with the listeners. So it’s great to have you back and I can’t wait to share all of your new adventures.

Marianne: My goodness, how exciting. Thank you for having me back.

And I also wanted to say congratulations on your book and also being featured—was it CNN? Where was it? Today?

Danielle: It was The Today Show.

Marianne: Good Morning America?

Danielle: No, The Today Show.

Marianne: It was one of those amazing networks. So yeah, congratulations.

Danielle: It’s like when you say, “Having my children changed my life and their names are…” and you blank. That was a great moment, and that moment was… But no, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Let me just share something fun. For new listeners joining me for the first time—or for those who’ve been here for a while but maybe didn’t catch Marianne’s original episode—some context for how I know you.

I first became acquainted with you at a bachelorette party—which is a great way to either really make or break fast friends. Luckily, we made friendship there.

And then, over the course of getting to know one another, I had maybe just a few weeks before we met experienced a miscarriage. That’s something I’ve talked quite a bit about on the show, so I’m comfortable sharing. But I remember being in a really raw and tender place.

Through that loss and really dialing my focus inward, it became apparent that my body was trying to tell me some things I needed to pay attention to. That is in no way me saying that loss was my fault. I just didn’t realize what I was carrying in my body—physically, energetically—how hard I was being on my body.

I didn’t really even fully understand or have the context for burnout at the time, which I was definitely just constantly managing—burnout and fatigue. I had no kids, and nothing but this combination of ambition and fear of not being enough. That became a lethal, very combustible combination for me: a lot of ambition, a lot of goals, and a lot of fear that it wasn’t going to work.

So I just hustled my way through my twenties into my early and mid-thirties. And then when I wanted to build a family—essentially grow life—the body I had taken for granted (again, not my fault, but still) was just the “meat suit” carrying my brain around.

It was around the time I met you that I was starting to tap into a deeper understanding of how I could love myself whole.

In the process of doing that, I worked with you with acupuncture, and you’re certified in several healing modalities, which I want you to talk about. But that’s how I came to know you. It started with me receiving the medicine of your healing and expertise.

And as I began to grow my family, you had your second, and a beautiful friendship evolved from there. You’re just such a special person for me.

Marianne: Yeah.

Danielle: Yeah.

Marianne: Gosh, I love our evolution together, because we were pregnant together also with our second children.

Danielle: Yes.

Marianne: Yeah, that’s special in so many ways. And you actually came to see me first for a Chinese face reading, which is what we talked about on the first episode you had me on.

Danielle: Right, that’s right.

Okay, so not that this episode is about Chinese face reading, but I think we decided to build out a series that you and I could do. You’re a yin yoga instructor, an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, you’re an aesthetician, you’re a trainer, you’re a coach, you’re an author two times over, you’re a speaker… it is just like multihyphenate, multihyphenate.

The only thing you don’t do is make sourdough bread, which I don’t either.

But yeah, you’re right—the face reading. Please tell the listeners about Chinese face reading.

Marianne: I definitely outsource what’s not my wheelhouse, and cooking is one of them.

So, Chinese face reading: there’s so much depth and richness there, and there’s never a dull moment in my life or my professional development. A lot of the things that I pursue are connected.

Chinese face reading is an ancient branch of Chinese medicine. I’ve been practicing since 2010. One of the first scrolls ever found in Chinese medicine was a map of a face. The face holds so much diagnostic information—not just physically, but also in terms of personal development.

You can see patterns. No matter what modality you choose, there’s a lot of talk about how we “sign contracts” or have agreements before we’re even born about the things we come here to experience—our purpose and destiny. Chinese face reading talks about your face as a map that delves into that for each individual.

Lines, markings, features—they all tell a story about who you came here to be and also where you’re headed. The face is the most dynamic part of the body. Even a microsecond can change a facial expression, and so much wisdom is communicated in a micro-expression. In the body, it takes a long time to see change represented.

I find it fascinating how much the face can tell us about what’s going on inside.

And then there’s that element of skin—I just love helping people understand that it’s such a complex organ. It shows how what we experience in the external environment and our internal environment are reflected simultaneously. Hormones, nutrition, stress—it’s all reflecting on our skin and on our faces.

Danielle: Something else I felt like I learned—because the best lessons bear repeating—is that when I started working with you, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how interconnected the systems of the body are. But through working with you, and later with a pelvic floor physical therapist, it was like the more I learned, the more my jaw dropped.

Emotional experiences I’m having, stress I’m experiencing, things I experienced as a child—you’ll notice something about my hairline, my chin, my jaw, my eyes. You’ll pull these connections that seem completely far apart, but together they paint a picture of deeper understanding of how our whole system is interconnected.

And that philosophy has really come together in such a beautiful way with this new iteration of the work you’re putting out now, which is The Well-Being Code.

So I want to shift gears a little bit. I could keep talking about all the ways I’ve loved you before, but I want to hear the new songs.

You are shifting now into being an emotional well-being strategist, and you’ve come up with a framework called The Well-Being Code. The four points of that code are: Regulate, Rewire, Resync, and Radiate.

I’m going to quote you to you for a moment: “In a world that glorifies hustle and constant achievement, well-being is the new gold standard of success.”

As someone who has observed your evolution over the last seven-ish years, I’m curious about that process. It feels like you continue to heal and then share your medicine, heal and share your medicine. Before we talk about what you offer others, can you tell me a little more about your own process evolving into this Well-Being Code?

Marianne: Oh gosh, there’s a lot there. I’ll do my best to keep it succinct.

Danielle: It’s a podcast, you can talk as much as you want.

Marianne: One of the things I want to preface is that I’m going to shift this on my website—I’m really focusing on emotional well-being. There is obviously a physical component, and being a Chinese medicine practitioner, everything’s connected—physical and emotional.

But I think our society really needs to hear how emotions, emotional intelligence, and emotional regulation are the new standard of success when it comes to well-being. When we can regulate our emotions—and that’s one of the things I love about your podcast, making big feelings feel normal, normalizing that it’s okay to feel.

I grew up in a generation where I was told it’s not okay to express emotions. “Don’t cry. Don’t be mean. Don’t get angry.” There was a lot of suppression in Gen X, and even older millennials, definitely boomers.

From a Chinese medicine perspective, if you do not express an emotion, it gets trapped in an organ. That’s where dis-ease starts to take root. An emotion is never wrong.

I tell people who come to me for acupuncture: there are so many directions you can take in this medicine. Over the years I’ve had people talk to me about skin issues, fertility, pain, stress, migraines, hormonal imbalances. At the end of the day, the constant stream on my table has been people sharing their emotional challenges that lead to stress.

I didn’t want to go back to school to become a therapist. I really wanted to help people move forward—pull them forward. So I pursued coaching. I wanted to ask the most potent questions—questions that were just as impactful as an acupuncture needle—to unravel what was expressed as stagnation or feeling stuck.

To help people understand intrinsically: “Oh, okay, I’m connecting the dots here now. The way I’m seeing this, the way I’m thinking about it, is creating a feeling. That feeling is creating a behavior, and that behavior is creating an outcome.”

That was my way of empowering people beyond the treatment table: helping them start rewiring and changing how they talk to themselves by changing what they’re thinking and feeling.

Going back to the Well-Being Code, after hearing so many people share their challenges, I wanted to equip them with healthy ways of expressing their emotions and processing them. Emotion is energy in motion. It’s a signal. Feelings are flags.

We’ve talked about “triggers are teachers.” When you feel something, it’s an alert. It may be healthy, it may be unhealthy—we need to listen. When we listen, we can explore and process in a healthy way.

In the Chinese elemental system, there are five elements. Each element corresponds to an organ, and each organ governs an emotion with a healthy and unhealthy expression.

Danielle: Rather than getting overly conceptual, can we use me as an example? We’ve talked about my stuff a lot. I need a lens.

So: there are five elements, each element corresponds to an organ, and that organ corresponds to an emotion. My element is water, right? I always have to ask.

Marianne: Yeah. Chinese medicine is influenced by Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. The Daoists were philosophers who watched nature and patterns in nature. They created this whole system of correspondences, essentially saying: patterns in nature are also reflections of patterns we experience internally.

They came up with five elements: water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. We all have each element, just in varying degrees.

With you, over the years, it’s been very apparent in your personality and constitution. Whenever I do diagnostics—and that’s very subtle, because while I’m talking to you, I’m also assessing, but I don’t make that a big thing—

Danielle: She’s got the Terminator scanning: scanning, scanning…

Marianne: Exactly. We’ll take pulses for acupuncture or read tongues. The tongue takes a long time to change, so I usually only do that once or twice.

Water, your primary element, is like the ocean—very calm on the surface with a lot of depth. Things are much deeper than they appear at first glance.

With you, there’s so much richness and depth underneath what you present initially. Water is also about peace and being in the flow. It’s expansive. Water also forms to different containers, so there’s flexibility and adaptability.

Under stress, though, water can become deficient or stagnant. An unhealthy expression of water is fear. Think about the ocean: it can be scary because of the unknown—what’s beneath the surface, the darkness, the depth.

The healthy expression of fear is wisdom and courage. When people are tapping into fear, what I help them transition to is trusting and knowing there’s an inner wisdom they can access, and courage that will help them move through whatever fear they’re facing.

Danielle: I love that. All the information, all the training, all the certificates you hold, the information passes through your experience—but you’re also such a curious person. You’re like an emotional detective: “How does this connect to this? How does this impact that?”

That’s definitely a strength and a level of mastery you have—making those connections.

I want to understand a little more about something you wrote on your website that really struck me. You wrote that as a biracial girl in a small Midwestern town, you learned early to prove your worth by pushing harder and doing more, and you tied your value to achievement and appearance until it led to exhaustion, burnout, and a deep sense of “not enough.”

What you say you want to help transform in others—you named as your own experience.

With respect to whatever feels comfortable to share, what were some of those breakdown/breakthrough moments where you realized, “I’m burned out, I’m exhausted, I’m trying too hard to prove something to someone”? What did that look like for you?

Marianne: Oh my gosh, there are so many. This lesson has taken some time.

I connect it to being in a generation where I was raised to be hyper-independent—to take care of myself and do it all myself. That’s a big song of Gen X.

Being biracial is a tricky experience. I would walk into rooms and not really know which box to check. On any form, I had to choose one identifier. I couldn’t say I’m both Asian Pacific Islander and Caucasian. My dad is a “Heinz 57” Caucasian, my mom is Filipino.

I’m happy to hear from younger generations that things are shifting and it’s more celebrated to be biracial. For me, that constant question of belonging—“Where do I belong?”—rocked my foundation. At the same time, it made me adaptable, a chameleon. I can flex and flow in any environment.

I actually see being biracial as being a bridge: connecting cultures, societies, even continents.

But that constant question of “Where do I fit?” was exhausting. That subconscious loop was always running.

Then there was overachievement. I felt I had to prove I belonged by being productive and accomplished—hence all the certificates. Now, if I take a program, I ask, “Do I even need the certificate?” I’m not trying to prove anything anymore. It’s more like, “I just want to know this. I like to learn.”

Back then, it was, “I need to show I’m competent. I need to be certified so people see I know enough.” That drive led to burnout—like you mentioned, hustle and grind.

Danielle: There were a few things you just said that I want to tease out a little.

If we took any one quality—the desire to belong, to build community, to follow our curiosity, to grow and evolve—none of those are inherently bad.

Through the lens of your experience, there’s so much I can relate to, even though our stories are different. I can feel that sense of not belonging and wanting so badly to fit in.

For me, that fear often showed up as either walling up—walking into social situations expecting to be judged, coming off curt or puffed up: “I don’t care what people think,” when the opposite was true. Or I’d become the dancing monkey: making jokes, trying to make everyone laugh so nobody would see how uncomfortable I was.

Those expressions were rooted in a very small place in me that felt “not enough.” I can also relate deeply to wanting to prove, through achievement, that I belonged. “I don’t want anybody to know I don’t belong here, so I’m going to work my butt off so everyone thinks I do.”

But that’s grasping for approval outside of me, which was never in my control.

What I can understand now is that the desire to belong and the desire to grow also have healthy expressions. The way I’ve made sense of it is this: none of these qualities are inherently something to judge or fix. It’s the intention behind them.

If I’m trying to manage perception to get something from someone else—approval, validation, acceptance—then I’m probably not grounded. I’m performing.

Elizabeth Gilbert calls that LAVA: Love, Approval, Validation, Acceptance. If I’m contorting myself to get your reaction, I’m not coming from my highest and best self, and that performance takes a toll.

For you, this mirrors the work you do with clients—and what you’ve helped me with in hundreds of conversations. You walk yourself through these steps too.

How do you know, in your body, the difference between, “I’m taking this certification because I really want to know this,” versus, “I’m doing this to hustle and prove”? Or, “I want to write another book,” but not from a proving place?

Marianne: It’s a great question.

First, going back to belonging and ego identifiers—you’ll hear in spiritual circles, “Let go of your ego.” I really think we have to address the 3D. Name it to tame it. If you don’t acknowledge it, your prefrontal cortex is going to keep spinning: “I don’t know, I don’t know…”

Actually naming things—this person is female, that person is Gen X, that person is Christian, this person is biracial—helps you understand the lens people walk through the world with.

Everybody, no matter their lens, wants love, safety, and belonging.

For me, walking around with that constant, “How do I belong?” meant my nervous system was often dysregulated. I never felt grounded, so I walked into rooms with that assumption, that conditioning. That was exhausting—because it came from an ego-based place that wasn’t acknowledged or soothed.

With certifications now—like the master life coach certification I just finished—I’m proud of it. A lot of it involved intuition and emotional intelligence.

In the program, people kept asking, “How do you know if you’re a master life coach?” Some people are skeptical of coaching: “How could a coach know more than I do?”

For me, a coach is someone who might be two steps ahead and can offer perspective, stretch you, support you, keep you accountable—no matter the niche.

I coach people on emotional regulation so they can reach their goals, live their best lives, walk into rooms belonging to themselves.

So with this certification, I told myself: yes, I’ll do the work, I’ll meet the requirements. But at the end of the day, I trust myself. I know what I offer. I know I deliver.

That trust—that sense of “I am enough as I am”—is my first step in the Well-Being Code: nervous system regulation.

I notice on the table, whenever someone walks into my treatment space, we cannot affect change if the person is dysregulated. If they’re stressed out and in survival mode, we can’t get to a state of healing.

Danielle: Another way of saying that—something I learned from my husband, who learned it from his dad in 12-step recovery—is the acronym HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.

If you’re any of those things, that’s not the time to take on a new skill or jump into a hard conversation. My husband and I use that a lot. Full disclosure: we don’t always catch it in real time. Sometimes you’ve already said the whoopsy-doodle thing. You can’t take it back and you’re like, “Oh, I said that because I’m really tired and really hungry.”

It’s like, I need to refuel and regulate before I can be the person you deserve to have a conversation with—not this rabid animal who’s starving.

Marianne: I love that. And I think that’s so important because women, in particular, are taught to sacrifice themselves. There’s a lot of shame and guilt around taking care of yourself first.

Just that acronym shows: you need to address your basic biological needs before you can be available—for your kids, clients, partner, anyone. Meeting those needs helps you show up with emotional well-being.

Danielle: I wanted to find a smooth way to weave this in and I can’t, so I’m just going to ask directly.

For people who are listening and don’t know you yet or don’t follow you, I’ve watched you take on this transformational journey with what you want to offer the world—and at the same time, I’ve seen you live in a way that feels very aspirational.

From afar it could sound like, “Must be nice,” but I mean it more like, “Wow, that would be nice.”

You’ve taken these incredible trips—to Morocco, Spain, France—and you’re leading a retreat to Bali. You travel while running a business, nurturing a healthy marriage, and making space to live life on your terms.

I think you’re leading by example. Can you tell me about that first big leap—when you said yes to a big adventure? Because I imagine someone listening might feel that tug too.

Marianne: I’ve been wired to travel. My father was a sailor in the military. I grew up in Puerto Rico for the first five years of my life, then we moved to Philly—from island to inner city. Then from inner city to a tiny country town where if you blinked at the stoplight, you missed it. And then to the suburbs.

So I’ve been in very different environments. That again speaks to being a chameleon and adaptable.

I’m obsessed with travel. I really feel travel is a transformational tool. You can’t see the picture when you’re inside the frame. Stepping out of your everyday life lets you pause, pour back into yourself, be in community with other women, experience cultures and lands you’re curious about, and be in beauty and delight.

I’m comfortable being an outsider because of that constant question of belonging. I actually think it’s important for everyone to feel like an outsider sometimes—it gives you perspective. It helps me see: “This is what I love about home, and this is what I love about this country.”

The contrast fuels gratitude and curiosity.

When I travel, I feel like I’m alchemizing into my “ultimate self.” I pull different things from different places that I enjoy.

And then there’s the simple gratitude of coming home: “I’m so happy to be back in my bed, with my shower.” It reinforces how privileged and supported I am at home.

I also want to highlight that I talk to a lot of women who feel guilty about leaving—kids, home, responsibilities. They feel like a week away is a lot. In the grand scheme of things, if I picture myself at 90 on my deathbed, a week is a blip.

Yes, I’ve gone twice a year or so, but still—it helps me come back a more present mom. Everyone in my treatment room benefits when I return, because I receive spa services and I bring that love back. From Morocco, I was giving everyone scalp massages!

It’s a big part of taking from the land, letting that pour into me, and bringing that culture back here to Indiana.

Danielle: What I’ve observed—and also benefited from—is how your travels enrich your work and that you’re modeling something powerful:

When I live my life on my terms, everyone who truly loves me benefits.

There were a couple of quotes that came to mind while you were talking. One is that when we step outside of our “operating life” (I love that phrase), we stop just running the script—wake up Monday, blink, it’s Friday.

The clients who find me often describe it as: “My smoke detector is beeping, but I don’t know where the fire is.” Something is off. They might feel burnout, ennui, low-level depression, or just “off.” And the assumption is, “The problem must be me.”

Sometimes, zooming out, we see it could be the environment, the pace, relationships, unprocessed grief—any number of things.

I love that travel, for you, is a way to step out of the frame and see the picture of your life. I’ve watched it light sparks in you in real time.

Marianne: Travel is magical. There’s so much data that can be taken from, “Oh my gosh, this isn’t working in my life—when I go back, I’m going to change this.” Or, “In France, they take a break in the afternoon. The whole culture supports rest.”

In Morocco, community is normalized. People just stop by, sit, have tea—no scheduling texts, no “Is my house clean?” It made me realize how much we schedule everything here.

There’s so much we’re missing that I like to pull from.

I also talk to people who feel anxious about travel. Not everyone has an adventurous spirit right away. One of the things that helps is having plans—but letting them become backup plans. At the end of the day, things change. Delays, lost luggage, room mix-ups, weather—you need flexibility.

I like being challenged in that sense. It keeps my brain young and active. I don’t get stuck in ruts because I have to flex and flow.

Danielle: My son is a huge teacher for me in this way. I can get locked into a plan and treat the plan like it is the future.

He lovingly reminds me that life happens regardless of my plans.

During COVID, a quote came across my path I loved: “In the absence of control, you realize you never had it. All you had was anxiety.”

Saying yes to adventure doesn’t guarantee hardship, but it doesn’t guarantee comfort either. When you say yes to possibility, you might be inviting discomfort—but you’re also inviting magic.

The more you experience, the more you realize you can survive things. It reminds me of performing arts: once the worst thing you can imagine happens on stage in front of people, you realize, “Oh. I lived.”

For every crazy travel story I’ve experienced, somehow I made it back. I’m not permanently stuck in Switzerland without my luggage.

Marianne: There’s always a choice in how we look at things. We’re wired as humans for negative bias. Conscious thought pulls us out of that.

You can look at it as, “Oh crap, I missed my flight, this sucks,” or “Okay, there must be a reason this is happening.”

Going back to the Well-Being Code and emotional well-being, studies show that when you cultivate positive emotions, you become more resilient. Travel helps with that.

Well-being and resilience are so connected. You’re speaking my love languages.

I want to invite other people to experience this—to guide women to step outside their day-to-day and be somewhere they’re fully taken care of. Take away the workload they carry—seen and unseen—that may be impacting their nervous systems.

Help them get to a state of regulation, so once they’re there, the reflection can happen:

“This is what I love about my life. This is what I think could be different or better.”

Looking at life from that 30,000-foot view and then asking:

“When I return, what new habits am I going to try? What am I going to commit to, to create a different outcome? How do I bring the sense of calm I accessed in Bali back home?”

And from there, my fourth step is Radiate, which ties back to why I love skincare, Chinese face reading, and coaching—especially coaching women on accepting and belonging to themselves.

When they do that, they can show up in a way that is impactful and turn down the volume on the inner critic that keeps them from contributing.

It’s a human need to contribute and grow. I want to help women step into the impact they can have—whether that’s in their community, their family, or on a larger scale.

When they feel truly seen, they radiate.

Visibility, I believe, is a love language. When you feel like someone really sees you, it acknowledges what’s special—your strengths, talents, inner wisdom, inner light. That’s when people really light up.

Danielle: Before I shift to the final question—the “Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs” question—something you said helped me reintegrate a lived experience.

Thinking about belonging to ourselves vs. hustling for belonging from others (that’s some language I’ve borrowed from Brené Brown): when we’re hustling for worthiness—even if we get the thing we were convinced we wanted (the look, the image, the acceptance)—it can feel incredibly lonely.

Because you’re not really being seen. Your PR representative is receiving the compliments, attention, and affection. The mirage gets the flowers—not you.

Underneath is that deep shame: “If anyone saw the real me, they’d leave.”

Often, clients come in wanting deeper emotional work and they’ll say, “I’m doing this because I think I should. Maybe I should talk to a therapist.”

For me, the why is: the friendlier your relationship is with yourself, the friendlier the world feels. The safer you feel.

The more at home I feel in myself, the more secure my relationships feel, the more secure my attachments feel. The easier it is to say fully embodied yeses and nos. The clearer it is to make decisions that truly serve me.

Everything in my life improves when I feel seen and known by myself, and by extension, by others.

Thank you for helping me process that in real time.

Marianne: Yeah. You belong to yourself.

Danielle: Yeah.

So, Marianne, I would love to know—anywhere you want to take this—the answer to the “Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs” question: a time you tried to rush or force an outcome, or control something because of big feelings, and now you can see what you learned from it.

Marianne: Okay, you were going to tell me yours first.

Danielle: Okay, let me think.

A recent “Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs” moment for me was when my sweet husband organized a family photo shoot. He didn’t surprise me the day-of—he knows me better than that—but he did surprise me by actually booking it. We hadn’t had family photos taken in two and a half years.

I’d been walking around the house noticing our son’s face wasn’t really reflected anywhere beyond his two-week-old pictures. I also felt like when he turned two, something clicked—we became a unit. Not two adults and a baby we were just trying to keep alive, but, “Oh. This is our crew.”

I wanted that reflected in our home, but I think I was just saying I wanted it and not doing anything about it. Thankfully, my husband grabbed the baton and booked it.

Not only did he book it, he hired someone to help with outfits. I feel stressed coordinating outfits—I don’t want to look too matchy, but I also care. I don’t want us to look like a family version of Destiny’s Child when there used to be four members. I get torn between not wanting to look like I care, and deeply caring.

He hired someone to make those decisions for me. I felt so seen—that he recognized this was important to me and also knew where I’d feel stress. He lovingly teed it up so I could just show up.

If I stopped the story there, it’s a sweet, tidy story. And that’s all true.

But the actual photo shoot? It was a sweaty, stressful shit show. Every kid wanted to run in opposite directions. There are only two of them, but it felt like thirty. Everyone forgot what to do with their hands. It was like, “Do we know how to be people in the world?”

Our photographer, Marissa, was a genius. She finally said, “Why don’t we get some ice cream and take photos of you sitting, and just let the kids be?” So there we were at 6:30 pm—when my son should be in bed and my daughter almost in bed—both kids stuffing ice cream into their mouths, ice cream running down their brand-new outfits.

What did I learn? Sometimes the best-laid plans throw you a curveball. Even though it felt stressful in the moment, that’s a memory that will stay with me. It actually matches what our life feels like right now: beautiful moments, treasured moments, and really stressful ones. Sometimes the adult in me just goes, “Why is this so hard?”

Marianne: Oh my gosh, yes. Photo shoots with toddlers are so stressful—even if it’s a 10-minute slot.

The premise of the “Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs” moment—let me share a literal one.

I have an actual bang-cutting story. I thought I could cut my son’s bangs when he was two. I started to snip and then thought, “Oh, I’ve got to keep going, I’ve got to keep going.” He ended up looking like a Hasidic Jew because the sides were long and his bangs were cut super short. Hair is not my forte.

We were getting pictures with Santa that day. Nate had to watch YouTube videos to learn how to cut his hair. He ended up looking like Tom Cruise—like Maverick.

So we went from my botched mess to him looking like a movie star. But yeah, that was an actual “Don’t cut your son’s bangs” moment.

Danielle: Don’t cut your son’s bangs.

So would you say the lesson is: when it gets bad, don’t try to make it better by just doing more?

Marianne: Yes. Or: outsource what’s not your wheelhouse—which is what I typically do.

Danielle: It means call an expert. There are so many things you do well; it’s okay if cutting hair isn’t one of them.

Marianne: Hair is not my thing. And I don’t cut my own bangs either—I go to the professional.

Danielle: You go to the professional.

Thank you, Marianne. Thank you so much for being here. I can’t wait for people to hear this.

Marianne: Thank you.

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Outro

Danielle: Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs with my dear friend, Marianne Talkovski.

I hope this conversation reminds you of something really vital—something I’m going to need reminders of many times over. That’s okay. That’s why we have this community and people like Marianne in our corner.

Your emotions are not a problem to fix. They are signals. They are invitations. They are information, holding something important for you to know.

And as Marianne shared, when you regulate, rewire, resync, and radiate, you stop hustling for belonging and you start belonging to yourself.

My goal in life, as it continues to evolve, is not only to help make big emotions feel less scary and easier to hold, but to help make the brain space, the emotional space, the space we inhabit in ourselves a friendlier place to be. The Well-Being Code is one beautiful and worthy step on that journey.

If this episode resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you could rate, review, and subscribe to the show. It’s one of the best ways to help the Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs podcast and community reach more people who might benefit from these conversations.

Before you hop away, please check out the show notes. They’re linked wherever you’re listening—YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other platform. That’s where you can explore The Well-Being Code, tap into the resources we mentioned today, and connect with both Marianne and me.

You can always reach me at da******@*************nd.com, subject line “Bangs,” and say, “Hey girl, can you talk about this more? I want to hear about that. I have a question about…” And I will say: yes, please, let’s do it.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your time and your attention. I hope you continue to have an incredible day.