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The Shadow Side of Self-Development
28 Plays15 days ago
🎙️ The Awakened Self Podcast — Episode 125: The Shadow Side of Self-Development
Why does self-improvement sometimes leave you feeling worse instead of better? In this episode, Gianna Badot breaks down the inner critic — the “shadow self” — and reveals how perfectionism and negative subconscious programming can sabotage your self-development journey.
You’ll discover:
✨ Why focusing on problems makes your inner critic louder
✨ How to shift your focus toward growth and celebration, not self-judgment
✨ Practical steps for rewiring negativity at the subconscious level — including self-hypnosis and deep healing techniques
✨ The importance of celebrating your progress and choosing new beliefs that support your fullest potential
About The Awakened Self Podcast
The Awakened Self Podcast blends subconscious reprogramming, emotional healing, and spiritual growth for conscious leaders, seekers, and mothers. Hosted by Gianna Badot, Certified Hypnotherapist and founder of The Rewired App, each episode helps you:
💫 Break free from negative self-talk and patterns
💫 Heal your inner critic and nurture self-acceptance
💫 Integrate mindset, mothering, and mindful success
💫 Reconnect with your awakened, empowered self
Because awakening isn’t about fixing what’s broken — it’s about honoring who you truly are.
Go Deeper
Experience The Rewired App — your daily sanctuary of subconscious meditations and healing audios.
🎧 30-day free trial with code PODCAST → www.giannabadot.com
📘 Free Rewired Mind Guide: https://giannabadot.com/rewired-guide/
📥 Free Wealth Guide: https://giannabadot.com/the-entrepreneur-wealth-code/
📖 Free Mindset Hacks: https://giannabadot.com/3-subconscious-mindset-hacks-for-high-performance/
Connect with Gianna Badot on Instagram → @giannabadot
Learn more about Gianna’s private coaching and resources at www.giannabadot.com.
#TheAwakenedSelfPodcast #ShadowWork #SubconsciousHealing #InnerCritic #SelfDevelopment
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Transcript
Awakening to True Self
00:00:02
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There's a moment when you begin to see life differently, when the noise quiets and you realize you've been living half awake and you're ready to wake up. Awakening isn't about doing more or being different.
00:00:17
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It's about being present to who you truly are. This is your invitation to wake up to yourself and your life in the deepest way.
Podcast Introduction with Gianna Badeau
00:00:27
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Welcome to the Awakened Self Podcast, where the science of the subconscious mind meets a wisdom of the soul.
00:00:34
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Each week you'll discover how to reprogram your subconscious patterns, live and lead from your higher self, and awaken to your life in the deepest way. I'm your host, Gianna Badeau.
00:00:46
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Let's begin.
Episode Sponsor: Rewired App
00:00:48
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This episode is sponsored by the Rewired app, your daily meditation library for subconscious rewiring and emotional alignment. You can start your 30-day free trial in the notes below.
00:01:02
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All right, welcome back.
Exploration of Shadow Work
00:01:03
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In this episode, we are diving into shadow work. Why sometimes self-improvement, which is designed to make you feel better, actually makes you feel 10 times worse.
00:01:18
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And how you can go about working on yourself and healing yourself and improving yourself without punishing yourself and beating yourself up. Because there is another side of you, the shadow side of you, who is really hard on yourself, who beats yourself up, who is a perfectionist. that bubbles up and tends to come up whenever you focus on yourself and start to do work on yourself. So this episode, we are diving into the shadow side of you and how you can do healing work and self-development work without beating yourself up. My name is Gianna Badeau. I'm a certified hypnotherapist, holistic coach, meditation teacher, and guide. And if you'd love deeper support beyond this episode, make sure you grab access to the resources that are linked in the notes below, especially the Rewired app. There's over 50 subconscious
00:02:16
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activations and meditations to help you go deeper within yourself on layer the layers of yourself that are currently holding you back and keeping you stuck from living in alignment with your highest potential.
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you can stress less and achieve more every single day. All right, let's dive in.
Understanding the Shadow Self
00:02:37
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So why does self-development often make you feel worse than you did before? Well, to put it simply, what happens is when you do start to work on yourself, it's like that saying, sometimes it gets worse before it gets better, but it doesn't always have to be this way.
00:02:56
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But What happens is this shadow side of you this darker side of you bubbles up from within you. This part of you that you may already be very familiar with, this part of you who maybe you've never had contact with, but there's this shadow side of you, this darker side of you that can bubble up and start to beat you up worse than you already had been beating yourself up before, making you feel bad for all the ways that you do need to improve, all the ways that you want to improve.
00:03:33
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So this shadow self comes up. It's the inner critic. That's probably the best way to describe it. Your shadow self is your inner critic. It is the part of you who feels like you always need to be punished. You are not enough. You're not good enough. You don't deserve to be loved. You don't deserve to be successful. It's this part of you that is always in the background of your mind telling you that you need to do more, be more, succeed more, create more to feel worthy of enjoying your life.
00:04:03
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And this part of you bubbles up even more when the focus and emphasis goes on you. When the spotlight is on you and your improvement and on your growth, that is when this inner critic is all the way up.
Criticism in Self-Improvement
00:04:21
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The volume. That is when this inner critic turns the volume all the way up, where it is very loud, where often you're doing all these great things for yourself to improve yourself, but you don't feel like you're reaping the benefits because you're constantly beating yourself up about how you're not doing it perfectly or how you could or should be doing it better.
00:04:46
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So this shadow self, this inner critic, is oftentimes what causes it to feel like self-development work is actually self-torture and self-punishment, or may even be the reason why you don't want to do this work at all.
00:05:02
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Because you set off on this journey to work on yourself, but now you're shining light what all of the parts of you that aren't going well that you currently need to work on and you're feeling a lot worse about yourself. And this becomes an even bigger issue for those of you who are already perfectionists, who have already been heavily beating on yourself every single day for all the ways that you're not perfect or you're not doing enough or you're not worthy enough. So this inner critic gets really loud and the inner critic is extra loud for those of you who are,
00:05:40
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perfectionist. So if you are a perfectionist, you know this inner critic all too well. And as soon as you start to shine light on the parts of you that need some growth, you want to improve. Maybe you don't even need to grow, but there's a part of you that wants to be better, that wants to reach a new level of success.
00:06:01
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And because of that, you want to work on yourself. So self-improvement doesn't always mean that there is something wrong with you. Sometimes You're working on yourself because you simply want to be better. You want to grow. You want to evolve.
00:06:18
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And both paths are perfect
Emphasizing Positive Growth
00:06:20
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and correct. Whether the path is a healing journey where you have these things that are causing you to self-sabotage and you know you need to heal it, you know you need to work on yourself or else your life is going to get worse and worse. Or perhaps you just want to grow and evolve and reach new levels of success. Whatever path you're on,
00:06:40
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They're both okay. And whatever path you're on, it's also very likely that this shadow side will bubble up at some point on your self-development journey.
00:06:51
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And again, the reason why this is because you're shining light on yourself. And so the moment you start to shine light on yourself, it's human nature, unfortunately, to focus on the bad instead of focusing on the fact that, hey, i am working on myself. I am doing this work and that should be celebrated.
00:07:12
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Instead of being in this state of celebration because you are working on yourself. You're in this state of self-criticism and self-punishment because now that you are working on yourself, you're noticing all the things that are wrong instead of focusing on the things that are right. So the reason why self-development does feel like self-punishment sometimes is because of where you are putting your focus.
00:07:37
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And so to do this work in a way that actually feels good and actually feels like healing, like growth, like development, like it's not this punishment or guilt or exhaustion is to keep your focus on what is going
Managing Negative Influences
00:07:55
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well.
00:07:55
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Now, this is really hard. This is the hardest work that you'll ever probably have to do because by nature, you are likely programmed to focus on the negative.
00:08:08
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Unfortunately, most human beings in today's society are focused on what's not right with them. And that's because society trains you to be like that. Society trains you that you should be better, you need to buy more, you need to do more, you need to fix this about yourself, need to look better. We live in this Botox world now where everyone needs to change and improve their looks and they're not enough as they are.
00:08:33
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And on a deeper level, there's this need to always need to make more, do more. And again, it's normal to want to look your best. It is normal to want to feel your best, to be the fittest, most successful version of yourself, to make the most money that you possibly can. But when it goes down the path of, if I don't succeed, I'm not enough, that's when you find yourself in this cycle of
00:09:03
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self punishment, self criticism, where it feels painful to shift and change and want to be better. And so if you're currently in this state of self criticism, because society, then it's time to change what you're looking at every day. You may be in a place where you're constantly on social media, comparing yourself to others, or maybe you're seeing things on television, right?
00:09:30
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Whatever it is, you need to shift your focus away from what your mind is looking at every day. That is a very basic level, conscious level action to take. is go through your social media accounts. What are you following that is not making you feel good on your social media feed? Of course, you can cut back scrolling. That is definitely something you should do, but unfollow all of the accounts that are not bringing positivity to your life when you are looking at it.
Subconscious Programming from Childhood
00:10:01
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That is a basic level, conscious level action you can take. On another level, many of you have these wounds because you have been programmed to feel like you're not enough.
00:10:14
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You have been programmed to criticize yourself since you were a child. Now this requires deeper level work. This is not a conscious level action that we can take like unfollowing social media accounts.
00:10:28
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This requires healing yourself at the subconscious level Because the tape in your mind that is playing on repeat over and over again tells you you're not enough.
00:10:41
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And why do you have this tape on repeat? Well, because when you are a child, your subconscious is the most suggestible, which means whatever you were shown, whatever you were told, whatever you saw growing up becomes the lens by which you now show up in the world.
00:11:01
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It is your subconscious blueprint. And so this requires deeper work, deeper rewiring to deprogram and delete that programming that makes you such a critic of yourself, that makes you focus on the negative and the bad all of the time.
00:11:20
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Because your life experience is determined by what you focus on. What you focus on expands. And the more you are focusing on the parts of yourself that you need to work on, that aren't enough, that have been causing you pain and suffering, that is going to be the experience you're having every day.
00:11:40
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Now, the more you're focusing on the good, how you're growing, how you have this desire to heal, this desire to create a bigger vision for your life, focusing on that bigger vision, that bigger goal that you have for your life, that is going to be your experience.
Reprogramming the Subconscious
00:11:56
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So whatever you focus on is what is going to expand and grow and manifest in your life. So it's time to get really clear on what you are focusing on in your day-to-day reality.
00:12:10
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Number one, we need to deprogram and take conscious actions every day to shift focus away from things that are negative in our lives. negative social media accounts, negative people, the most you can, obviously all of the negativity, the news, all of the things that don't make you feel good.
00:12:31
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You have to deprogram that out of your day to day. And again, those are conscious actions that you can take right now today. Look at your life, see where there's negativity and remove it.
00:12:43
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Take action on that, that those are easy things you can do. Now on a deeper level, which is not always the easiest work to actually deprogram your negative mindset, your negative focus, your heavy emphasis on criticism so that you can turn down the volume of your inner critic and actually focus on the growth and evolution that you want to be having. This requires you deprogramming that at a subconscious level, which means going deep into your subconscious, understanding the hard wiring you have, where it came from, why it's there, why it's playing out, really gaining this deep and profound awareness around the unconscious parts of you because you're programming. It is unconscious. That's why you're not aware of how it's playing out every day.
00:13:35
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Your subconscious mind is an unconscious part of you, but it is responsible for 95% of everything you're saying, everything you're doing, and all of the actions that you're taking every day.
00:13:49
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So this part of you, your unconscious mind is literally the blueprint of who you are and how you're showing up every day. And unfortunately, you have no idea what is in your unconscious most of the time, unless you do subconscious work and you bring awareness to it.
00:14:06
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So it's very essential, very important that you gain awareness around what is in the subconscious and then choose intentionally choose what you want to keep.
00:14:18
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What is the good programming in your subconscious that you want to hang on to that has supported you in a good way? And what is the negative programming? that you want to delete, that you want to rewire.
00:14:31
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And then once you know what that is, you can start the process of rewiring forward every day by
Utilizing Resources for Self-Improvement
00:14:38
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inserting new programming. Now there's a few ways that you can rewire your subconscious. The two most effective ways is self-hypnosis. This is listening to self-hypnosis meditation recordings on specific topics. Very different than traditional meditation. In traditional meditation, you're really focused on clearing your mind, finding a space of peace, and grounded energy.
00:15:01
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a hypnosis meditation is like meditation with a goal. There is a very specific intention to why you are doing the recording. For example, on the Rewired app, there is meditations on Increasing your confidence, rewiring your money mindset, increasing your self-worth, your productivity, your focus, healing your inner child. There are different topics for different things you have going on. So that is the really the main difference. And this is something you can do on your own. You don't need support from another human being. You can listen to a recording. In fact, I recommend if there is something very specific that you are struggling with, that you listen to the same recording over and over again.
00:15:44
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for at least two weeks or for as long as you feel like you need to over and over again until that problem has dissolved until you feel clear and you will know when that time is right. Usually does take about two weeks. to fully rewire using the audio recordings. Now, on a deeper level, if you know you have hard wiring from your parents that is deeply ingrained in you, things that you know you may need support on, the second way to rewire your inner critic is to do hypnotherapy one-on-one with a certified hypnotherapist, someone who is an expert in the subconscious mind. This is different than traditional talk therapy where you are talking about things that are coming up for you, where you're talking about your problems. This is an eyes closed therapeutic experience where you are journeying into your subconscious. And it's not a sleep state. It's a state of deep awakening.
00:16:42
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It's awakening to yourself. It's becoming the awakened self by gaining this deep awakened awareness around what your programming is. And with the support of a certified hypnotherapist, you can rewire and reprogram what is in there much faster than doing recordings.
00:17:01
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Now, of course, this is a bigger investment, a much bigger investment. So you can get started using the recordings right now. i have given you a code to access all of my recordings for free.
00:17:14
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In the notes below, there's over 50 different topics that you can choose from. that will support you in your transformation journey. And unlike traditional self-development work, of course, there's a focus on healing the parts of you that you want to shift and evolve. We end every session, whether it's an audio or one-on-one session, focusing on where you're moving towards, focusing on what you actually want.
00:17:42
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So we're not focusing on the problem. We are focusing on the vision of where you want to go. And i think that's what often can go wrong in traditional therapy. You get to this point where you've done a lot of healing in traditional talk therapy, but then it gets to the point where you've been talking about the problem and all of the things that are going wrong for so long that you're stuck in this loop.
00:18:06
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With hypnosis and hypnotherapy, the focus is not on the problem. Yes, we are going to eliminate the problem, but the focus is on what you actually want instead of what you're currently experiencing. So this is a really profound way to you know heal the parts of yourself that are holding you back and keeping you stuck without having this heavy focus on your shadow side without this heavy focus on the problem.
00:18:34
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So if you want to learn more about how you can utilize the power of this work today, if you are ready to just start diving into some audio recordings and get your feet wet into subconscious work, check out the rewired app linked in the notes below. and if you want to go deeper, we want to explore what it would be like and what the investment would be to go deeper. You can also apply for a consultation to work with me one-on-one using the application link in the notes
Focusing on Solutions for Growth
00:19:03
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below. Okay, so to sum up today's episode, the reason why self-development work often feels like self-punishment is because your inner critic turns all the way up and traditional self-development work is heavily focused on the problem. And to do this work in a way that doesn't feel like punishment, that actually feels good, you need to stay focused on the solution. You need to stay focused on what you want instead. So stop focusing on
00:19:31
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what's wrong and focus on what you want instead. That simple mindset shift, if you just do that, will change literally everything for you.
00:19:43
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So try this on. And there's also so many resources, free resources, paid resources, guides, you name it, linked in the notes below to also help you get started. And if you loved this episode, make sure you subscribe and you hit that notification bell so you don't miss a single episode along this incredible journey.
00:19:59
Speaker
And I'll see you next time. Thank you for awakening with me today. If this episode spoke to your soul, i would love to hear what resonated most. Come connect with me over on Instagram at Gianna Badeau and share your takeaways.
00:20:13
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And I would be so grateful if you could leave a review so this podcast can reach more and more people. And if you're ready to go even deeper into this work, explore the Rewired app.
00:20:24
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a daily toolkit of subconscious meditations to help you rewire your mind, regulate your nervous system, and return to peace. You can start your 30-day free trial using the code podcast through the link in the description below.
00:20:39
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Until next time, stay awake, stay grounded, and keep returning home to your awakened self.