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

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