Podcast Episode:
Ladies: Ever used or heard the expression “Get it together girl.” Our guest has coined the phrase and she is here to help you get it together … on this edition of Frank Relationships.
Karyn Beach: www.getittogethergirlmedia.com
ASLI Pure Skin Care Products: ASLIPure.bigcartel.com
LaTonia Taylor (Co-host): www.RebirthInternational.net
FRANK RELATIONSHIPS: “GET IT TOGETHER GIRL” WITH KARYN BEACH
Guests: Karyn Beach
Date: April 14, 2014
Frank: Ladies, ever used or heard the expression, “get it together girl?” Well, our guest has coined the phrase and she’s here to help you get it together, on this edition of Frank Relationships.
Welcome to Frank Relationships where we provide a candid, fresh and frank look into relationships with goals of acceptance, respect and flexibility. I’m Frank Love and you can find me, my blog and my various social media incarnations at franklove.com. You can also download the podcast of this and other archive shows on iTunes or with your favorite podcast app.
Hanging out with me, as always, is my super duper co-host, The Rev Coach, La Tonia.
La Tonia: Good morning.
Frank: How are you?
La Tonia: I’m wonderful.
Frank: Good, good, good. Anything interesting this week?
La Tonia: Just pushing.
Frank: Pushing. Alright, I understand, believe me.
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Today’s guest is a game show winner, producer, screenwriter, radio show host and published author. She has a movement to help women of all ages realize that she can live on her own terms and attain her definition of happiness and success. She just has to be willing to step out of her comfort zone and take a chance. The movement is called, Get it Together Girl and the woman is Karyn Beach. Welcome to the show.
Karyn: Thank you for having me, Frank and I love the way you say, “Get it Together Girl.” I can tell you have some daughters, the way you say that.
Frank: I’ve got three of them, but you rest assure, you’re not going to hear me say it too many times.
Karyn: They’re going to get it together after the first time.
Frank: Well you’re not going to hear me say so. I won’t be saying it that much on the show. I may say it to them at home. “Get it together girl, brush those teeth, get your clothes ironed the night before.”
Karyn: Exactly, exactly. I can tell, whether he’s on the show or not, you’ve said it. You’ve said it. I can tell the way you said it.
Frank: Now, funny enough, to my right in the studio is the leader of Juicy Spirit, she’s the Rev Coach, La Tonia and she’s got her own “get it together girl” type of movement going on. It’s again–
Karyn: Hey, girl.
La Tonia: Good morning. Welcome to the show.
Karyn: It’s always good to have people trying to empower women. It’s always a good thing.
La Tonia: Absolutely. I’m in good company. I might know you.
Karyn: You might, because I used to live up that way.
La Tonia: Uh-huh.
Frank: Alright, tell me about what you do Karyn and then we’re going to tie it into what La Tonia does and I’ll probably sit back and just let you all go at it, because it’s women talking to women. What do you need me for?
La Tonia: You have to give her some context though–
Frank: Alright.
La Tonia: Of our show.
Karyn: Yeah and–
La Tonia: Of last week.
Karyn: Its women talking to women, but its stuff that can help men too. There’s a very specific method to my madness.
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: But what I do is I started, Get it Together Girl, because I have 15 years experience in the training and development industry and I sort of got tire of trying to do corporate training with people that didn’t want to be trained.
La Tonia: Amen.
Karyn: It’s like, I’m in the bathroom getting ready to train a class and I hear people, “I got to go to training” and I really want to say, “I’m in here. I’m your future and I’m in here.”
Frank: You can imagine what teachers on a regular everyday-elementary, middle, high school teachers go through.
Karyn: Oh, I know. Both of my parents are educators, so I know.
La Tonia: But it’s funny when you’re a trainer of adults and you hear that, so I’m with you.
Karyn: Exactly, and after I went on, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, I decided I was going to get my coaching certification and work with people on the one thing they all want to know more about and that’s themselves and how to improve their lives.
When I got my coaching certification I realized that a lot of things that set people back weren’t the big things, but a lot of little things and so Get it Together Girl, is designed to help women take charge of those little things so that they can have the time and wherewithal to experience the life they want to live.
Frank: Where did you get your coach’s certification?
Karyn: From Coach U.
Frank: Coach U, got it. Tell me about your experience on the game show. What was it? Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Karyn: Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I’ve amassed through my life a whole bunch of useless information, so I’m the person that says, “Oh, do you know what a clover has to do with St. Patrick’s Day and why that’s associated with Ireland,” and people look at me like, “Why do you know that,” and so I’ve had this desire to go on a game show, but my requirements were specific.
It had to be a show where I didn’t have to compete with people. I wanted to be the only one and I figure if it was multiple choice, a lot of times I could by process of elimination, figure out the answer and I loved watching millionaire and I was watching it one day and they announced that they were coming to spend the day in Charlotte auditioning where I live and I said, “Well, you know what? I’m going to go.”
So, I got up one morning and I went down there and did the audition and after the audition-well, actually you pass a test. You have to take a test and then they sit you in there, they grade them real fast and then if you pass the test, they take you backstage to talk to a producer. I had him laughing. He was like, “What’s the first thing you do if you win a million dollars.” “I’m going to buy a car,” because right now at that time, I was driving my dad’s ’88 BMW–
Frank: Was it ’89?
Karyn: No, it was 2000. It was 2007 and it got to the point where it had no air condition, it had no radio and I would get angry at stop lights in the summer because I would look next to me and I’d be like, “Those people got the damn windows rolled up. I know they’ve got some air on,” and it would just made me angry, be sitting in my car, black car, black leather seats, sweating profusely. I was like, “The first thing I’m going to go is get a car.” And then they were like, “What’s the first thing you would say if you sat across from Meredith Vieira?”
I was like, “Well, now that I have a national platform, maybe I can get a date.” Of course, that didn’t work either.
Frank: We got a lot of entrees that are coming up. We’re going to talk about your dating life, we’re going to talk about whether you got another car now, but we won’t get to-
Karyn: Oh, I got a car that I love now.
Frank: Okay, alright, but clearly useless became useful.
Karyn: Yeah, and it just goes to show you and I use that in my Get it Together Girl, because it just shows you what you can do when you take a chance. The day I told my boss, she was like, “Oh, I’ll go with you” and I’m like “Cool, we’ll go together,” because at the time I liked my boss, but that’s a whole other story there.
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: I really can’t get into that.
La Tonia: I love your candor.
Karyn: But at the last minute, she was like, “Oh, I can’t do it, this and this came up.” Well, the thing is, Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s only going to be there for one day. You only have one chance, so I took advantage of that and then look what happened? My boss who was one of my life lines couldn’t make it, because she let all of those little things stop her from getting there.
Frank: Interesting. There’s a story there clearly, a powerful story to tell. Do you do public speaking?
Karyn: Yeah. I’m looking forward to doing more. I just put it on my site. I have three key notes. I have Get it Together Girl, of course. How old are your daughters, Frank?
Frank: Fifteen, three, almost four and ten months.
Karyn: Oh wow, you got the spectrum.
Frank: I do. I got some boys in there too.
Karyn: Oh, okay.
La Tonia: You have to tell us about your Get it Together Girl philosophy.
Karyn: Okay, I was just going to say about the public speaking. I have three key notes and my second one, Frank, would be great for your 15 year old, because it’s all about surviving college and graduating on time. And then, my third one is, kind of Get it Together Girl for the faith-based community.
Frank: Okay, very nice. Did you win any money on the game show?
Karyn: Oh yeah. I won a $100,000.
Frank: Very nice.
La Tonia: You got the car, right?
Karyn: You know, I ended up getting a car before I got the money, because after you’re on the show, they tell you that you can’t tell anybody how much money you got and you actually don’t get the check until 30 days after your show airs.
Frank: Don’t they see how much money you got, by just watching the TV show?
Karyn: When you’re on the TV show, but when you go back to your hometown, there might be people that say, “Hey-” the Charlotte Observer could have called me and said, “Hey, a local person was just on Millionaire, how’d you do,” and I couldn’t say how I did.
Frank: Got it.
Karyn: My Aunt Bessie and my dad were in the audience, so I had to tell Aunt Bessie, I’m going to need you not to tell the Holy Trinity circle. I’m going to need you to keep this on the DL for right now.
Frank: You didn’t say, “Get it Together Girl, this is how it be. We’re going to make this a pack between us.” You didn’t say that?
Karyn: I’m like, “My dad is your brother and you know how I’m always in his pocket. This could be a chance for me to stop that.”
Frank: Got it.
La Tonia: Right.
Karyn: “But I need you to be quiet,” and that was hard for her. She’s still trying to get me on who’s smarter than a fifth grader.
Frank: And what’s the problem?
Karyn: They haven’t come here and I haven’t put the tape together, but my Aunt Bessie is like, “You need to go on who’s smarter than a fifth grader, because I know you’re smarter than a fifth grader.”
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: We taped in New York and she was telling everybody. “My niece is going on who wants to be a millionaire. She’s very smart and went to good schools.” I’m like, Aunt Bessie, “We’re on the subway. They don’t care.”
La Tonia: Tell us about the Get it Together Girl philosophy.
Karyn: The philosophy is really simple. Start where you are, use what you have and you can get what you want. I encourage women to make small consistent changes and you can see a big difference.
If all you had to do was go to the gym once and eat a salad one day, we’d all be skinny, but it takes consistent and effort and it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of effort. You can start where you are and I think a lot of people don’t start, because they’re waiting for the perfect time or they’re waiting for something major to happen, but all of those little steps add up.
You might not be able to run out the gate, but you could still make progress if you walk. The only way to not make progress is to not do anything at all and that’s what a lot of people end up doing.
La Tonia: Start where you are, use what you have to get what you want?
Karyn: Yes.
La Tonia: I love it.
Frank: Alright, I’m going to sit back and just put my feet up. It sounds like ya’ll-
Karyn: I did a show a couple weeks ago and this woman was like, “Use what you got,” and I was like, “No, no, no. That’s not how I meant it.” I didn’t mean it like, the song. “You’ve got to use what you have.” No, I’m not–
La Tonia: Even if you did, what would be wrong with that, even if you didn’t mean it that way as a grown woman who–
Karyn: Yeah, you could use it that way, but you also have other resources at your disposal, you should be using as well.
La Tonia: Absolutely, what are some of the topics that you talk about in your workbooks?
Karyn: My first workbook was Get it Together Girl: a 28-Day Guide to Practical Not Perfect Home Organization and in that book for four weeks, Monday through Friday, I give the readers or what I call the “users,” because they’re going to be work in the workbook that I make, I give them a 15 minute task everyday, to help them get more organized and help them remove a lot of clutter.
The second one is on time-saving techniques. What you can do to save time and if you use those techniques and some of the advice in the back of the book-like I have a whole big chart on best times to do things, best time to schedule your doctor’s appointment, to go shopping and then a bunch of phone apps and websites that help you save time-you could save a couple of hours in your week.
Frank: I want to know the best time to schedule your doctor’s appointment.
Karyn: First thing in the morning or right after lunch.
Frank: Right.
Karyn: Find out when they go to lunch and then set it up first time after that.
Frank: I completely agree.
Karyn: Because in the morning you haven’t had a chance to get people that are running late, to have the doctor have other things come up, so if you do them-I always do my dentist appointments first thing in the morning and normally dentist’s office opens at 7:00 A.M. I could still pretty much be to work by eight.
Frank: The biggest problem in scheduling it in the morning is that sometimes the doctor runs late and the doctor’s office excuses is they’ve got some of the best excuses. I’m talking about they are-that’s part of the med school curriculum I think. The doctor got called into an emergency.
La Tonia: Yeah they do. Not so good.
Frank: The–
La Tonia: The patient.
Frank: Right, he’s not associated with a hospital. What are you talking about he got called into an emergency. And some doctors are, but I hear that so much.
La Tonia: Really?
Frank: And then the doctor walks in. You know, they got the side door.
La Tonia: Yeah.
Frank: They got the side door. They walk in the golf clubs.
La Tonia: Yeah, yeah.
Frank: But that’s the issue with the morning situation. Now after lunch-
Karyn: I haven’t really encountered that one that much, but if you want to talk about waiting for an appointment, try the hairdresser. La Tonia, you know what I’m talking about. You will be-“Oh yeah, I got a 10:00 A.M appointment,” you get there, five other people have a 10:00 A.M. appointment.
La Tonia: Yes indeed.
Karyn: With the same hair stylist.
Frank: But they just think they’re overbooking, because they think somebody’s not going to show up.
Karyn: Yeah, but after awhile when you’re doing the same people’s hair–
Frank: Yeah, when they always show up.
Karyn: Yeah.
La Tonia: I remember those days.
Karyn: Yeah.
La Tonia: Now, who’s your target audience? When you talk about topics like this, who’s your target audience?
Karyn: My target audience is pretty much just professional working women.
La Tonia: Oh, okay.
Karyn: Women that are juggling a lot of balls and are always going to be juggling those. They just need to know more effective ways of managing what they have.
Frank: And what are your credentials as you’re going about being a trainer? Why should some body listen to you?
Karyn: First of all, I’m a trainer, but I also have my Core Coaching certification from Coach U. I don’t call myself a coach, I actually went and got the training to be a coach.
Frank: Got you.
Karyn: Because a lot of people when I got my coaching certification and I started billing myself as a coach or a life coach. “Oh, I can coach, I can tell people what to do,” and I’m like, “That’s the reason why you shouldn’t be a coach,” because coaching is all about getting people to come up with their own solutions. As a coach, if you’re coaching with me, I should only be talking 20 percent of the time.
I ask the questions that get you to take the answers and I’m a writer, it’s just who I am. You’re in Charlotte, you’ll see a license plate called, “Writer Girl,” that’s me. Probably cutting you off and cursing. But anyway, that’s where my workbooks come from. I took my coaching practice and what I know about adult learning theory and adult training and put that into my books.
Frank: You said that doctors’ appointments are one of the things that you give tips on. Give us something else.
Karyn: I’ll give you a couple good hints. My first in my organization book, day one is what I call The Refrigerator Run Through and you’re not cleaning the refrigerator, you’re just getting rid of every thing that’s gooey, gross, scary, hairy in your refrigerator.
Frank: Why would anyone ever want to do such a thing?
Karyn: Because you’re living under the delusion that you got a lot more food than you do and you know half that stuff, you’re not gong to eat. Get rid of it so you can focus on what you have that works and that saves you time, because otherwise, you’re looking, “Oh no, I don’t want that,” but then you put it back in the refrigerator.
Another tip is when you get dressed for work, leave your hangers on top of your hamper and when you get undressed, get undressed in front of your hamper, put all the dirty stuff away, pick up those hangers and hang up everything you can wear again and if you don’t create a mess to begin with, there’s nothing to go back and do.
La Tonia: Very nice.
Frank: Okay, I could do that.
Karyn: Yeah.
Frank: I think my wife can. That’s a whole other–
La Tonia: Usually it’s flipped.
Frank: Yeah.
Karyn: Yeah, usually it is, but normally there’s one person in the relationship who is a little bit more together than the other one.
Frank: I’m pretty clear who that is in mine, but I won’t say.
La Tonia: You said that the men can benefit from your Get it Together Girl philosophy. How so?
Karyn: Here’s the thing and Frank, you can vouch for me. Men don’t buy self-help books. Really, men are interested in the outcome, but they’re not necessarily interested in the actual sitting down reading. My experience with men is that they want the cliff note version.
Frank: If I had to guess, I would say that men were probably 50 percent of the buyers of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Karyn: Right, because that’s a business book.
Frank: But that’s self-help.
Karyn: Its business self-help, but then how many of them read it?
Frank: Okay, how many women read it?
Karyn: And I’ll throw out a statistic I read. Ninety five percent of self-help books are never read to the end.
Frank: Exactly, why just relegate it to men?
Karyn: No, it’s everybody, but a book about organizing your home, not really a guy thing.
Frank: I agree with that.
Karyn: And however, if your woman reads the book and she says things to you like I just said, “Baby, why don’t you just get undressed in front of the hamper? Throw your dirty clothes right in it.” That’s something a man can do. Not only that, but in the beginning of my book, I champion that this is stuff you need to get your kids to do.
Frank: Now that’s real.
Karyn: You need to get your kids to do that and I don’t have any kids, but every time I put a book out, I have a team of friends of mine that are moms of everything from toddlers to teenagers and I send it to them and I ask them, “Is this doable? Will this work?”
La Tonia: I was just going to ask you about the mom audience, right? Like how do they respond since you don’t have any kids because you know moms can be dismissive if you don’t have any kids? “Oh, you don’t know.”
Karyn: Right, which is why let people know that moms have reviewed my book. And in fact, I’ve got a criticism from people that my books focus too much on people with kids.
La Tonia: Oh.
Frank: Okay.
La Tonia: Okay.
Karyn: I think in some ways, I try to overcompensate for the fact that I don’t have kids.
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You’re listening to Frank Relationships. We’re talking with Karyn Beach, creator of the Get it Together Girl blog, workbooks and radio show. Her goal is to help women of all ages realize that you can live on your terms and attain your definition of happiness.
You were speaking about the children paradigm. One of the things that I do each day-each Sunday through Thursday, I have my children pick out their clothes for the next day, the night before they go to bed and that works pretty well. I even have the three year old doing it. The three-specifically, the three, the six and the nine year old, they’re all charged with doing that and then I’ve got a list of stuff that they’re supposed to do before they go to bed. I got a nighttime list and I’ve got a morning list-
La Tonia: Wow.
Frank: Of stuff that they should do. They know where it is, they follow it. I have to remind them at times. What do you say about that, Karyn?
La Tonia: I say he gets off easy, because he has girls.
Frank: No, two of those, the six and nine year old are boys.
La Tonia: And they?
Frank: They do what I tell them to do for the most part.
La Tonia: I need some tips.
Frank: So you–
La Tonia: With these boys, I’m having a whole different experience with the boys, I tell you.
Karyn: But it works and two things about kids, because I might not have kids, but there’s a whole bunch of kids in my family, my friends have kids. Kids respond to structure, you giving them that list and them knowing what they have to do probably helps. And number two, what do kids want to be? Kids want to be adults, so when you give them responsibility, you give them things to do, they respond to it. I think they respond better when they’re younger and then they get older. “Why do I have to do this,” but it helps to build that up and that’s one of the things I say with, Get it Together Girl. Help instill these habits when kids are young.
Frank: You have a concept called, the “focused 15.”
Karyn: Uh-huh.
Frank: What is it?
Karyn: Anybody can do anything for 15 minutes and it needs to be a focused 15, meaning it’s not a multi-tasking 15. It’s not 15 minutes–
Frank: I like that.
Karyn: When you’re trying to do other things. It’s 15 minutes that you’re dedicated to one task. You can’t even watch a sitcom in 15 minutes, but what I do is, I set a timer-my kitchen timer for 15 minutes and it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to straighten up my house for 15 minutes.”
Frank: And just do that?
Karyn: Yeah. “I’m going to read this boring book for 15 minutes.”
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: I’m going to do something and that’s all I’m going to do for that time. When I tell people in my home organization minute book, you’re going to do this in 15 minutes, I’m asking you to give me 15 focused minutes.
Frank: You say that with goals people should stop, “shoulding” themselves, “shoulding” on themselves. What in the world is “shoulding?”
Karyn: Okay, that’s my third workbook and right now I have a webinar on this that’s free on my website. I’ll give you all the link to that, so your listeners can go and do this.
Frank: Well, give it up. Let me hear it.
Karyn: It’s getittogethergirlmedia.com and then you go to the shop page and then you’ll see the webinar. It’s a free downloadable webinar. It just takes an hour and it walks you through all five steps of my goal setting process.
La Tonia: That’s nice. Iyanla Vanzant, who is my teacher, says this all the time about “shoulding” on yourself. She’s been saying it for years, so I’d love to hear how you have worked it out into a process.
Karyn: My thing is every year around January or around people’s birthday’s they set goals and at the end of that year, a lot of those goals still haven’t been accomplished and I want people in my goal-setting process to ask themselves, “Is this something you really want for yourself,” or “Is this something that’s on your list, because you think it should be or someone else thinks you should do it?”
A really big one is weight. Okay, you know you need to lose weight, you think you should loose weight, society tells you and may be even your doctor tells you to, but are you ready? Are you willing to make the changes that you need to make to lose that weight?
Frank: Okay.
La Tonia: Karyn, a big one on the list that I hear all the time is spirituality. I need to be more spiritual and usually that’s just the concept that people “should” on themselves, because of more of a religious relationship than a spiritual relationship that they’re okay where they are.
Karyn: Exactly, and if you want to be more spiritual, do you want to be more spiritual or is it someone that tells you, you should go to church more, you should do something. My dad tells me that every week. “Did you go to church this Sunday?” “Well, no I kind of laid in bed and watched Law and Order.”
Frank: Here we go talking. This an entrée to my next question, which is, you said you have a key note that dealt with faith–
Karyn: Yes.
Frank: How do you justify being able to speak to the faith-based community when you don’t go to church?
Karyn: I don’t go to church, but I pray and I meditate and I live my life in a way that in order to be blessed, I need to be a blessing. And I try to bless the people in my life all the time, in the way that I act, in the way that I carry myself, in the things that I do. I know as a Christian and I do consider myself a Christian, that people are watching me.
Frank: Got it.
Karyn: And that when people look at me and I say, “I’m a Christian,” are you looking at my behavior? “Don’t listen to me, because there will be some f-bombs,” especially, if I’m driving.
Frank: Especially in what?
Karyn: If I’m driving.
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: But I’m a work-in-progress, but when Jesus, I was reading my Bible, which I do regularly, got accused of hanging out with tax collectors and drinking with people, “You’re do this, that and the other,” and he said, “You go to the people that need help, so people that know me, know you can count on me, I’m going to be there. I’m going to do everything I can to be a blessing to the people in my life,” and I am familiar with the word.
Am I getting up right now and going into the building. No, because I now moved across town from where my church is and it would take me almost an hour to get there.
La Tonia: Don’t get me started on that. I’m an ordained minister, what word-when you say you do the word, you could be doing any word and get your cup filled, right? You don’t have to have just one–
Karyn: Right.
La Tonia: One thing.
Karyn: And here’s my thing and I tell my dad this all the time, he’s practically a minister. Everybody thinks he’s a minister. Everybody also thinks he’s Danny Glover, but that’s another story. He looks like him.
Frank: But I digress.
Karyn: But I digress. I’m like could go to church and fellowship with church people, but all my friends are church people. All my friends are Christian. Even people at work. I was struggling at work with my boss and I literally had one of my co-workers–we went in the room and we prayed together. I’m not going to pretend to be perfect, because I’m not, but I am a Christian and I live the word. I know my Bible. I’ve read it from cover to cover, from Genesis to Revelations and all 64 books in between.
Frank: If there’s a general take-away message that you want young girls to get, what would it be?
Karyn: Don’t worry about what other people think.
Frank: Okay and–
Karyn: That would be my message to teenage girls, be you and I say that, because there’s so much pressure to be someone else, to look like someone else, to do–and when you’re a teenage girl, you’re in the middle of all that. La Tonia, you know, you were one. I was one.
La Tonia: Yes, absolutely.
Karyn: And be yourself. It took me a long time to–I battled with that, because I can’t really be someone other than myself, but I was always worried about whether or not that was okay.
Frank: Why did you start the radio show and tell us about it?
Karyn: Why did I start the radio show? My degree is actually in Broadcast Journalism and I started in radio before I moved into training. I wanted to do crazy things though, like eat and have gas to get to work.
Frank: The nerve.
Karyn: When you’re starting in the small market, like literally I lived in Waterloo, Iowa and worked for their NPR station.
Frank: Waterloo, Iowa has an NPR station?
Karyn: Actually, I lived in Waterloo. The station was in Cedar Falls.
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: That’s how I transitioned out of that, but I love what I do with the workbooks and the radio show gives me a chance to do that even more. Every week Monday’s at 8:00 P.M. live, but you can always listen to the archives at blogtalkradio.com/getittogethergirl and I interview people who have tips and advice and compelling stories that will help women. Inspire them and inform them to get it together. Last week I had on- some of my girlfriends came on and talked. We had a little diva dish session at the end and then I had a woman on, Jana Flag, she’s the Christian Comedian and humorist and she’s also a stage three Ovarian Cancer survivor.
Frank: Wow.
Karyn: And she wrote a book called, Fight Fear and Foster Faith and we had a really good discussion about confronting your fear and how fostering your faith is an antidote to fear, because you can’t have the two of them at once.
Frank: Interesting.
Karyn: Next week I’ve got two women coming on the first half who are going to talk about dealing with grief constructively and then another woman who’s using her story about how being an artist helped her overcome her depression.
Frank: What do you mean when you say that perfection is a form of procrastination?
Karyn: And this is also at the crux of Get it Together Girl, if you’re waiting for a perfect time, you’re never going to do anything. Again, I’m not a parent, but every parent will tell you, that when they have their kid, it wasn’t a perfect time.
Frank: I wouldn’t say that. I love having all five of my babies.
Karyn: You love having all of them, but when you had them you were like, maybe you could have made more money or maybe you weren’t living where you want to live.
Frank: Nope, never said that.
La Tonia: He’s a-just excuse him, he’s a little different.
Karyn: But the situation might not be perfect, but you do it anyway and it works out wonderfully.
La Tonia: He’s shaking his head, no and you know why, because his theme song should be like, Two Chainz, “I’m different, I’m different. Yeah, I’m different.”
Frank: Okay, I can get with that.
Karyn: I don’t know if you want to be anything like Two Chainz.
La Tonia: Oh he’s cute. What are you saying, Karyn?
Karyn: Listen to those lyrics and you end up going, “What? What?”
Frank: You talk a lot about delegation and saying “no.” Why do you think that’s difficult for a lot of women?
Karyn: Because I think a lot of women think that they have to do everything and it’s hard once you’ve gotten used to doing everything to relinquish something, but that’s what you have to do to make time for yourself, because what happens and La Tonia you can tell me if I’m wrong or not. We end up saying “yes” to everything, but the things we want for ourselves.
La Tonia: Oh, it’s so true and I’m actually-I have several women in my group process right now who are dealing with that very thing and mothers and super women, wives are faced with this all the time and that whole perfectionism thing starts when you’re a young girl. I was hoping that you’d talk a little bit more about your transition to discovering that being you is okay, because I think women start performing after a certain period of time and men don’t even know it.
Karyn: Okay, La Tonia, you said you liked me being real.
La Tonia: Yes I do.
Karyn: Okay, here it goes. When I was five, my parents moved from East Cleveland to Beachwood, Ohio.
Frank: Can you give that some context. Is Cleveland like the projects or Beachwood, Ohio is the Beach town?
Karyn: I’m about to give you some context, Frank.
Frank: Okay, excuse me.
Karyn: Beachwood, Ohio is a very, very nice suburb and it’s about 95 percent Jewish and we were one of the first-
Frank: And you are Jewish?
Karyn: No, but we were one of the first black people in Beachwood.
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: And by the time I graduated in a class of 133, there were 10 percent blacks. There were 13 of us. When I went through puberty, when I started to fill out or whatever we call it, I went from [granables] sp 41:32 to a size seven, eight with hips and a butt.
La Tonia: Okay.
Karyn: And that was frowned on where I was from, because I was called “fat,” even though I was 5’5″ and 125 pounds, just because I had-
Frank: Uh-huh. Well somebody might call you “fat” in D.C. too. Some of the, if you were in school-but I mean, it’s probably a different kind of fat.
La Tonia: P-h-a-t.
Karyn: P-h-a-t. This was back in the 80’s, and so from that point on I struggled, thinking that I was fat and I have a great dad, an amazing father and he literally–we were at the mall one day and he was like, “Do you know how many of these women would like to look like you,” but I didn’t have boyfriends, because at that time white guys didn’t go out with black girls, but black guys went out with white girls or high yellow girls or girls with good hair or all that. I was none of that, so I left school with these notions that I was too fat or too dark or my hair was too short and all of that and I struggled with that up until very recently, to be honest.
La Tonia: That’s very transparent to share. I can definitely relate. I was the skinny girl with no hips. Down south to be p-h-a-t was the normal, because-
Frank: Where are you from?
La Tonia: I’m from Mississippi.
Frank: Okay.
La Tonia: Yeah, and so the girls are shapely, very early there and so-
Frank: Yum, yum.
La Tonia: To be this-what’s that?
Frank: Yum.
La Tonia: To be the skinny girl, you kind of grow up with a complex. So, I get it when you kind of grow into yourself later.
Karyn: Exactly and then add to that, I’m the smart funny girl.
Frank: And humble.
Karyn: And a lot of men don’t like that.
La Tonia: Really?
Karyn: Yeah, I say something stupid like I’ve been saying for this whole hour, and then they just kind of look at me like-and you can hear the crickets in their heads. I’m like, “Really,” because I’m dropping good stuff and you’re not responding.
Frank: Sorry.
La Tonia: Really, you really are funny. I really do think you should consider stand-up.
Karyn: You know, it’s like okay and it’s funny, because I have a name for women, I call them “Laurens,” because I used to work with a Lauren when I was living up there in Maryland/D.C and Lauren was a perfect size six, she drove a BMV, she was light-skinned with long hair and when we left work, she still looked as flawless as she did when she got up in the morning. Because women, we look good in the morning. You know, you get your hair done, you got your make-up on. Okay, at the end of the day, and Lauren still looked like that: perfect nails, perfect stuff, like still-by the end of the day, I haven’t done my make up since noon.
La Tonia: You’re a little oily, right?
Karyn: I’ve got a little oil going on and truth be told, if we look not even really hard, there’s going to be a food stain, there’s going to be some sort of food stain. I always think guys want Laurens and I’m so not a Lauren. I’m like the anti-Lauren.
Frank: How do you deal with that today? You said you’ve struggled with it until recently, when that still rears its ugly head, or when it did up until the point where you felt as though you were over it and past it, how did you deal?
Karyn: It took a long time, because-and I’ll come back and talk to you guys about this, because I talk all the time as you can see. I got to the point where-well, the other thing about my teenage years when all of this negative stuff was going on, my mother was dying of complications from diabetes.
Frank: Wow.
Karyn: I didn’t really have a mother influence to sort of guide me in that way.
Frank: Okay.
Karyn: There were other women around me, but they were waiting for me to come to them and I never did that. And it took me a while and then one day, I just had this epiphany. It’s like, “Wait a minute, I deserve better than this. I can do better than this.” And of course that was a few years ago and I explained it to my aunt like this, because the beaches we shop is what we do. And I said, “Aunt Bessie, being single in your 40’s is sort of like finding out there’s been a really good sale all weekend, but you find out about it on Sunday and by the time you get there, everything’s picked over, most of the good stuff-”
La Tonia: We’re going to have to work with that. We’re going to have an offline Juicy Spirit conversation, so we can shift that.
Karyn: And like you said, “I’m real.” There are some areas where I have it together, but there are other areas where I need help and people are like, “How can you help people if you’re not completely there?” And it’s that I’m a work in progress, but I can help other women as well and I think it comes across better when you’re real than if I was sitting back trying to pretend that I was perfect.
La Tonia: Yes, and how do you deal with that pressure of the expectations of having it all together, particularly with folks that you may be familiar with? You know how that is.
Karyn: Wine.
Frank: Alcohol. Got it.
Karyn: I’m joking. Basically, I just tell them the truth. “Look, this is who I am. This is the information I’m sharing. I know this could have a positive impact on your life, because it has on mine as well, but I’m not Jesus, I’m not perfect and I know your struggles, because I struggle with the same things.”
Frank: Why is self-care not selfish?
Karyn: Self-care isn’t selfish, because a lot of women think that our roles-when we think about our roles, we’re wives, we’re mothers, we’re co-workers, we’re daughters, we’re friends, we’re church workers, we’re volunteers, we’re all of these things, but we never are ourselves. That’s one role we don’t own and what ends up happening is you’re doing everything for everyone and you start to get frustrated because you realize you’re not doing something for yourself.
It’s always about everyone else and then you start getting frustrated and you start snapping and it affects your relationships with your significant other, it affects your relationships with your children when that resentment and that overwhelms starts coming in. And so, taking time to get care for yourself and to do something just for you is necessary for you to be better for everyone else you work with, you deal with.
Frank: You’re listening to Frank Relationships and we’re talking with Karyn Beach, creator of the Get it Together Girl blog, workbooks and radio show. Her goal is to help women of all ages realize that you can live on your own terms and attain your definition of happiness. Please, tell our audience how they can find you and your books.
Karyn: You can find me, you can find my books, you can find all of that at getittogethergirlmedia.com
Frank: The promotional code for the Asli Pure gift pack is “softskin.” One word, no spaces, all lowercase. That’s “softskin.” Visit us at franklove.com and enter to win this week’s gift pack of Asli Pure Skin products.
I asked you awhile ago about a take-away message for the teens, the teen girls. You got one for the older listeners?
Karyn: Yeah, stop thinking about it and do it.
Frank: Stop thinking about it and do it. And what about one more tip for getting organized in the house.
Karyn: I call it “homes for the homeless” and what that means is that everything that you use regularly should have a specific place for it and no matter where it is during the day, it needs to be back there by the time you go to sleep at night.
Frank: That’s powerful and–
Karyn: And we spend days of our lives looking for lost items. I’ll give you two. If you put your homes for the homeless and you take 10 minutes every minute every night to prepare for the next day, you will not only save time, but you’ll reduce your stress level.
Frank: You’re listening to Frank Relationships. We’ve been talking with Karyn Beach, creator of the Get it Together Girl blog, workbooks and radio show. Her goal is to help women of all ages realize that you can live on your own terms and attain your definition of happiness.
Along today’s journey, we’ve discussed what it means to “get it together girl,” Karyn’s books and in general the get it together movement. I hope you’ve had as much fun attaining your definition of happiness and success and discussing it.
As always, it’s my wish for you to walk away from this conversation with a heaping helping of useful information that’ll help you create a relationship that’s as loving and accepting as possible. Let us know what you thought of today’s show at facebook.com/relationshipflove, on Twitter @mrfranklove or franklove.com.
On behalf of my producer, Phileta Legette, and my engineer, Jeff Newman, keep rising. This is Frank Love.
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