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Be Freaking Awesome Podcast

Be Freaking Awesome Podcast

Living a freaking awesome life is achievable for everyone. Angela Belford and her daughter, Sami Kinnison, join together to provide practical applications to level up your success, business, and life, in a freaking awesome way.

EP183 Self-Compassion Tools for High Achievers with Leadership coach Massimo Backus   

 August 5, 2025 | EPISODE 183

What if being kind to yourself wasn’t just a nice idea—but the key to better relationships, leadership, and daily peace?

In this episode, Angela sits down with executive coach and author Massimo Backus to explore what self-compassion in action really looks like—especially for high achievers and recovering perfectionists. With Sami on a surprise maternity leave (yay!), Angela and Massimo keep it real, diving into everything from early childhood stories and emotional filters to workplace typos and repairing strained relationships.

You’ll learn:

  • Why self-love is hard to say—and even harder to practice
  • How childhood coping strategies become adult roadblocks
  • The 3-part framework for building a self-compassion habit
  • Why trying to “silence” your inner critic doesn’t work
  • How to respond differently (and more kindly) to conflict, failure, and feedback

This isn’t fluff. It’s practical, transformative, and—yes—a little messy. But that’s what makes it so powerful.

📘 Grab Massimo’s Book:

Human First, Leader Second: How Self-Compassion Outperforms Self-Criticism
Perfect for leaders, professionals, and anyone ready to rethink the myth that harshness equals success.

🔗 Connect with Massimo:

🎧 Whether you’re deep into your healing journey or just starting to realize you’ve been too hard on yourself, this episode is your permission slip to soften, reframe, and show up differently—starting today.

Order Traveling Light wherever you get your books!

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Let us know what questions you want to be answered and discussed by emailing us at podcast@bfreakingawesome.com.

Listen to this weeks episode here!

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EP242 How to Stop Handing People the Remote Control to Your Emotions

EP242 How to Stop Handing People the Remote Control to Your Emotions

Someone says one thing in a meeting and you are still pacing the hallway twenty minutes later, or your family leaves their socks on the floor for the hundredth time and suddenly it feels like a referendum on whether they respect you. This week Sami and Angela get into what emotional resilience actually looks like day to day, not the version where nothing ever bothers you, but the version where you know how to reset and which fights are really yours to fight. They walk through the rule of five, a decision tool Sami taught at a Family Business Forum that people are still using months later, and the real difference between picking a battle and setting a boundary. You get to decide what deserves twenty minutes of pacing and what does not, and holding your own remote control is not coldness, it is resilience.

EP241 Why Uncertainty Feels Like Danger (Even When You’re Safe)

EP241 Why Uncertainty Feels Like Danger (Even When You’re Safe)

The conversation you keep rehearsing in the shower, the ask you keep almost sending, the version of yourself you keep not quite showing: you tell yourself you are waiting for information, but you are really waiting to feel safe. Sami and Angela pull apart why your brain is wired to make accurate predictions rather than to make you happy, and why that makes “I don’t know what happens next” feel like a survival threat instead of a character flaw. They share a worst case scenario reframe that actually calms your nervous system, a client story about role-playing a hard family conversation in advance, and the visualization practice Angela used to land a Mary Kay car at 23. You do not have to feel certain you will survive something to have the courage to do it, you just have to be willing to find out.

EP240 Living for Your Own Approval Instead of Others

EP240 Living for Your Own Approval Instead of Others

You know the feeling of finally setting a boundary and immediately regretting how good it feels, mixed with the guilt of knowing someone you love is annoyed with you over it. This week Sami brings a book she cannot stop talking about, The Courage to Be Disliked, and it cracks open the difference between explaining your life by what happened to you and explaining it by what you are actually moving toward. Angela traces her own theory in real time, from four different family situations and eight schools by second grade, to deciding that becoming excellent at making friends and living an unmistakably good life was her best answer for anyone who ever hurt her. Sami gets honest about realizing Be Freaking Awesome had technically already met her stated goal, without that goal actually being the real one, and how naming the true goal underneath it changed her motivation overnight. If disappointing someone you love has felt like proof you did something wrong, this episode makes the case that it might just be proof you finally started living for your own approval instead.

EP239 What If Belonging Is a Decision and Not a Feeling

EP239 What If Belonging Is a Decision and Not a Feeling

You are tired of being the one who plans the get together, sends the first text, remembers the birthday, and some weeks you wonder if anyone would even notice if you just stopped. This week Sami and Angela dig into what it means to walk into a room like a host instead of a guest, and why belonging might be something you decide instead of something you wait to feel. Angela shares the speech she gave stepping into the presidency of the League of Women Voters of Arkansas, built around joy as an act of rebellion and belonging as a choice. Sami tells the harder story underneath it all, a friend who accused her of being a bad friend during the hardest season of her life, when she had nothing left to give. If you are tired of initiating, or you have been blamed for a friendship going quiet during a hard season, this conversation gives you permission to set that boundary without deciding you are a bad friend.

EP238 Why You Should Share Your Stories (Even the Small Ones)

EP238 Why You Should Share Your Stories (Even the Small Ones)

You have got a story you have been sitting on, the one that feels too small, too messy, or too someone’s already talked about this to bother sharing. Sami and Angela make the case this week that the story you tell about what happened to you shapes who you become more than the event itself does. They get into the two ounce cup, forty four ounce cup metaphor for meeting people where their actual capacity is instead of turning pain into a contest, and share a simple weekly practice for noticing your own growth before you forget it happened. If you have ever held a story back because you assumed it was not dramatic enough to matter, this episode makes the case that sharing it is not bragging or oversharing, it is connection. Press play, and then go tell somebody one of your stories.

EP237 What To Do While You’re Waiting for Someone Else to Change

EP237 What To Do While You’re Waiting for Someone Else to Change

You have said what you need, you have been clear, and now you are just waiting to see if anything actually changes. This week picks up where last week left off, because if growth can make the people around you uncomfortable, what do you do when you are the one waiting on somebody else, a spouse, a business partner, a friend, to do their own growing. Sami and Angela dig into the messy, undefined stretch between naming a need and having it met, including a working definition of boundaries that has nothing to do with controlling anyone else’s behavior. Angela tells the real story of telling her husband she had healed as far as she could inside their marriage, and how it took him months to decide to change for himself. This episode gives you a way to track whether the gap between an old pattern showing up and someone catching themselves is actually shrinking, and permission to hang on a little longer if it is.