The Original Self Podcast

You got what you wanted. Why doesn’t it feel the way you expected it to? A longtime salon client tells Evet, “It’s not the hair; it’s me.” She describes looking forward to something, getting it, and still feeling empty. Her words open a question: what are we expecting our goals to change for us? In Episode 35 of The Original Self Podcast, Evet DeCota explores conditions of worth—the requirements w...

When did “I think you’re wrong” become “I think you’re a bad person”? A conversation about gas prices left me looking at my own delivery. I disagreed with a client’s explanation, then commented on how recently she had moved to California. It sounded like a question. I wasn’t really asking. In Episode 34 of The Original Self Podcast, I explore what happens when disagreement begins to feel like a ju...

What can look like “having it all together” from the outside feel like on the inside? In Episode 33 of The Original Self Podcast, Evet DeCota welcomes Jen Walters for a personal conversation about ADHD in women and the years before an explanation made certain patterns easier to understand. Episode 32 looked at research on delayed recognition, the cost of coping systems, sleep, emotional regulation...

What does it take to look like you have it all together? In Episode 32 of The Original Self Podcast, I explore why ADHD in girls and women can be missed for years—and what it can cost to appear fine while working so hard behind the scenes. A woman may remember every appointment because she checks three calendars. She may complete a project under pressure while struggling to begin it days earlier....

Does Your Former Self Have to Die For Growth? What if people do not recognize the new you because the person they knew no longer exists in the same form? In Episode 31 of The Original Self Podcast, Evet DeCota sits down with Joseph Okoroji, Muay Thai martial artist, personal trainer, and author of A Mark in the Sand , for a deep conversation about identity and the cost of meaningful change. The ep...

How do we know whether continuing is an act of meaningful perseverance—or evidence that we’re having difficulty letting go? In this episode of The Original Self Podcast, Evet DeCota examines that question through her own experience of creating a podcast while watching analytics that do not always reflect the time, thought, and effort behind the work. Then an unexpected message arrives. Someone sha...

A coworker once made a blunt observation about a client who had lost a significant amount of weight: she used to be nice, and now she was difficult. The comment stayed with Evet because it turned a person’s complicated change into a complete story without describing what had actually happened. In Episode 29 of The Original Self Podcast, Evet explores labeling theory and the way a description can b...

Why do certain people’s words stay with us while other compliments disappear? Sometimes it is because those words come from someone who has paid attention to who we are becoming. In this episode of The Original Self Podcast, Evet reflects on the clients, teachers, and mentors whose belief helped her take action before she felt fully confident. Through stories about returning to college, surviving...

Some people leave us with memories. Others quietly change the way we see our own lives. After cutting Loren's hair every six weeks for sixteen years, Evet came to recognize his unusual gift: he knew how to live inside an ordinary moment. Whether he was eating a sandwich in a crowded deli, sharing music, debating an opinion, or lingering in conversation after a haircut, Loren paid attention long en...

Episode 5 of The Original Self Podcast offers an honest, research-backed look at why we avoid the things that matter most to us. The episode begins by distinguishing procrastination from other forms of delay, arguing that not everything we label procrastination actually is procrastination, and that this distinction carries real consequences for how harshly we judge ourselves. At the heart of the e...

In this episode of Lessons from Behind the Chair, Evet shares stories from nearly forty years behind the salon chair to explore validation, attention, reassurance, and the quiet ways we seek to feel seen. From repeated selfies to interrupted conversations, she examines how external reassurance, phone distractions, and indirect communication shape our relationships—and asks whether lasting confiden...

Hair can be one of the first visible losses during cancer treatment, but the deeper experience is often one of identity, grief, and learning to recognize yourself through profound change. In this deeply personal episode of The Original Self Podcast: Lessons from Behind the Chair, Evet shares two unforgettable stories from nearly forty years as a hairstylist. One begins with shaving her sister-in-l...

This episode begins a new chapter of The Original Self Podcast. Topics include: • Stress responses • Expectation violations • Attachment and belonging • Identity threat • Nervous system regulation • Reacting vs. responding • Curiosity over judgment The real question isn't, 'What's wrong with this person?' It's, 'What might this person be trying to protect?' Website: decotalifecoaching.com Email: d...

Evet DeCota is the owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. Between the salon chair and the coaching session, she's spent years watching people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. This is it, the final episode of A Psychology of Food. Eight episodes ago, this series opened with a q...

Is it addiction, or is it something else wearing the same symptoms? Episode 21 opens the final section of A Psychology of Food, The Self, by taking on the food addiction debate directly, then following the thread into the binge-restrict cycle and the cheat day culture that keeps it spinning. What you'll learn in this episode: ● The 2025 research proposing "Ultra-Processed Food Use Disorder" as a d...

Episode 20 turns to one of the most misunderstood stages of a woman's life: menopause and the very real metabolic and neurological shifts that come with it. Evet DeCota walks through why the strategies that worked in your twenties and thirties stop working the same way at midlife, and why that has nothing to do with discipline or effort. Key takeaways: ● Estrogen decline during perimenopause and m...

When most people think about their relationship with food, they point to their first diet, a painful comment about their body, or years of struggling with emotional eating. But what if the story began much earlier? In this episode of The Original Self Podcast, we explore the science behind how our relationship with food begins long before conscious choice. From prenatal flavor exposure and epigene...

Have you ever reached for food and only realized what you were doing after the fact — as if the decision had already been made without you? You're not imagining it. In this episode of The Original Self Podcast, psychology-informed life coach Evet DeCota explains why that experience is neurologically real, and why willpower is often the wrong explanation for what's happening. Drawing on her graduat...

You've probably heard the term food noise showing up in conversations about GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. But food noise isn't new — millions of people have been living with it for years without a name for it. Food noise is the constant mental chatter around food that exists whether you're hungry or not. It's thinking about lunch while you're still eating breakfast. It's the negotiati...

Have you ever told yourself you would stop after a few chips, one cookie, or one episode — and then couldn't? Have you spent years believing the problem was your willpower, your discipline, or your relationship with food? You are not broken. You were never supposed to easily resist what the food industry spent decades and billions of dollars engineering you to crave. In Episode 16 of The Original...

Welcome to Before the Rules, a special series from The Original Self Podcast. In this opening episode, Evet DeCota introduces the central question that will guide the entire series: "Who were you before all of this told you who to be around food?" This conversation is not about dieting, weight loss, meal plans, macros, supplements, or the latest nutrition trend. It is about identity. Together, we...

Are you always busy but never truly fulfilled? Do you schedule every hour, stay constantly productive, and still go to bed feeling like something is missing? You are not alone — and you are not broken. In Episode 13 of The Original Self Podcast, psychology-informed life coach Evet DeCota explores the real reason so many high-achieving people feel empty despite doing everything right. This episode...

If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, start there. This episode will hit differently if you do. In Part 1, we explored the psychology behind our true crime obsession — the science, the costs, and the ethical questions the genre rarely asks. In Part 2, we go somewhere the research can’t take us. Into the room. My guest, Rhonda Gaines, didn’t watch the Lori Vallow Daybell sentencing on a screen. Sh...

You told yourself you were going to bed early. And yet here you are. In Part 1 of this two-part series, psychology-informed life coach Evet DeCota breaks down the real science behind our true crime obsession — and why it says more about us than we think. This isn't about morbid fascination. It's about evolution, threat intelligence, justice, community, and the complicated cost of consuming other p...

Most of us learned to say “I’m fine” long before we understood what it was costing us. In Episode 11 of The Original Self Podcast, Evet DeCota shares how a childhood bone disease, the loss of her best friend, and a love she was too armored to fight for all shaped her into someone who buried her feelings so deeply she eventually stopped feeling them altogether. Then she’s joined by Jackson — her 17...