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

personal development for hairstylists, mindset coaching for salon owners, self-trust, burnout in the beauty industry, hairstylist confidence, salon owner exhaustion, course junkie recovery

Join us in Costa Rica for the Industry: UNPLUGGED Retreat April 2027

In this episode I’m sitting down with Janean, The Healing Therapist — a hairstylist of 22 years, a yoga teacher of 10, and the woman I asked to lead all the movement at our Costa Rica Industry Unplugged Retreat. This one is full circle in the best way, because Janean first found this podcast when money was her whole story, and now she’s sitting across from me as a friend, a peer, and someone I get to build something beautiful with.

We get into the stuff that doesn’t get talked about enough behind the chair. Janean shares how she quit doing hair three times and rebuilt her clientele a fourth — this time through grief, a neck injury she didn’t think she’d recover from, and major debt. We talk about the difference between hearing the information and actually implementing it, why being in the room changed everything for her, and how she dug out of her lowest point not by fixing what was most broken, but by leaning into what she was already good at.

This is a conversation about the mind-body connection, self-sabotage, worthiness versus capability, and why hairstylists are quietly some of the most powerful people in their communities. We laugh, we almost cry (more than once), and we land on something I believe with my whole chest: you don’t have to do the big scary version of healing. Sometimes it’s just staying curious and not overthinking it.

In this episode we cover:

• Why yoga is less about flexibility and more about building a relationship with yourself
• Rebuilding your career with everything you already know instead of starting from zero
• The difference between consuming information and actually implementing it
• Self-sabotage — how to start catching it in the moment instead of years later
• Why focusing on what you’re best at (not what’s most broken) can pull your whole life up
• Worthiness vs. capability, and the money stories we don’t realize we’re carrying
• How hairstylists create real change in the world, one client at a time

personal development for hairstylists, hairstylist mindset podcast, self-worth for salon professionals, yoga for hairstylists, retreat for hairstylists

Industry: UNPLUGGED Retreat Learn more here

You built the thing. The salon, the clientele, the reputation. From the outside, you made it — and somewhere in the last few years, something got quiet. Not falling apart. Just… missing. You can’t quite hear yourself anymore.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the person everyone trusts to have it together: you hold so much. All day, every day. You stand behind the chair holding your clients’ stories, their grief, their excitement, and you regulate the whole room. You’re the calm one. The safe one. And then you go home so full of everyone else that you can’t find yourself in there.

That’s not burnout from working too hard. That’s exhaustion from consuming too much and listening to yourself too little. In this solo episode, Misty gets straight to the heart of it — the tiny gap between the should and the want that’s been quietly wearing you down, and why the thing that helped you grow can become the thing that keeps you stuck.

She also opens the doors to something she built because she couldn’t find it anywhere else: the Industry Unplugged Retreat. A week in the jungles of Costa Rica with ten women in the hair industry who’ve been in the game for 10, 15, 20, 30+ years and are craving a real reset. Not a business retreat. Not a healing or spiritual retreat. Not a content trip. Think pre-internet vibes — space to take off the brand face, drop the self-induced pressure, and get quiet enough to hear yourself for the first time in who knows how long.

In this episode:

• Why this kind of tired isn’t burnout — and what it actually is
• The gap between the “should” and the “want” that quietly drains you
• Why it was never about the hair — it was always about the conversations
• What it means to be in a room you’re not leading or performing in
• What Industry Unplugged is (and very clearly, what it’s not)
• How to tell if that voice in your gut saying “I need this” is worth listening to

hairstylist burnout, personal development for hairstylists, hairstylist retreat, salon owner burnout, hairstylist mindset podcast, behind the chair mental health, Costa Rica retreat for hairstylists, hair industry community