From Teen Anxiety to Success and Leadership with Peter Anthony

Today I'm joined by Peter Anthony, who shares a poignant story about his daughter Belle's battle with anxiety and low self-esteem. Discover how small, actionable steps and a powerful mantra helped Belle transform her life, leading to the inception of her 'Nuff' clothing line that promotes self-worth and supports the Batia Charity. Dive into practical tips for managing anxiety, creating emotional wealth, and fostering self-love. Tune in for heartfelt insights and an inspiring journey of overcoming adversity.

See the clothing line and learn more about Nuff at https://youranuff.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/imanuff. If you send Peter a story of how you overcame adversity in your life, he will send you a free shirt! Contact him at Peteranthonymail@gmail.com and be sure to mention the A Magical Life podcast.

Transcript

Magic Barclay: 0:42

Welcome back to A Magical Life. I'm your host Magic Barclay and today Peter Anthony joins me and here's a little story that Peter sent me. When my daughter Belle moved in with me full time, she was 16 and was suffering from many of the anxieties facing young women. She had a traumatic experience with a boy, she suffered anxiety and held destructive views about her body. She stopped going to school. was involved in drugs and alcohol, and was smoking a packet of Marlboros a day. I thought the antidote was lots of love, but it turns out I was only half right. That's about my average. I learned that what she needed was to love herself, to have more self esteem, and one night we were talking in the kitchen after dinner. I said, just remember, you're enough, strong enough, beautiful enough, and smart enough to deal with life. She said, I'm enough? And you're enough? Became our mantra so she could remember, to remember that she was enough. Starting with baby steps like getting up in the morning, she decided to spread the message by starting a Nuff clothing business and make it part of her high school project. She started with simple t shirts and sweatshirts with the Nuff message. And proceeds from the business go to the Batia Charity, who support young people to develop self esteem. You can see pics of her Nuff supporters on her Facebook, which is facebook. com. au. I'm enough. Welcome, Peter. I could go on, but this is a really cute story, and I'm probably massacring it for you. G'day,

Peter Anthony: 2:27

Cowager.

Magic Barclay: 2:29

I am so good. So good to hear a g'day from Australia.

Peter Anthony: 2:33

A little bit north of you, but, uh, I can be forgiven for being in New South Wales and not in Victoria. Is that okay?

Magic Barclay: 2:39

Oh, I should be forgiven for being in Victoria. It's not the place to be anymore, but enough of that. Cause most of the listeners are in the U S and they're probably going, what the heck are these two talking about? Talking

Peter Anthony: 2:50

about exactly.

Magic Barclay: 2:51

tell us about you and Bell's journey through anxiety. Sounds like she, she kind of turned it around there.

Peter Anthony: 3:00

Yeah, she did. It wasn't one of those, uh, revolutionary changes magic. It took us, uh, It took us a year to even, uh, begin to understand what she was experiencing, as you read through in, in, in your intro, when she landed on my doorstep, um, she was, uh, she was anxious and almost every aspect in her life was a disaster. physically, emotionally, mentally, she was at the very lowest, point you can possibly be. And, at that time I had zero experience, in dealing with anxiety and helping someone I loved and cared about, my daughter, through anxiety. In fact, true to say, I had. the opposite view of what would work in helping somebody with anxiety. Because I was raised old school male, which was all about, if you get a feeling, push it down. and, if you've got a problem, just take massive action to fix it. Um, so it was as much a journey for me, if you like, as it was a journey for her.

Magic Barclay: 4:04

I love that. And I think that's something we really need to point out here to the listeners. Everyone has their different coping mechanisms and different learning styles about things like anxiety. No one's wrong. Just means that sometimes you need to take a different tack, a different trajectory, if you will, on your approach to it.

Peter Anthony: 4:26

Exactly. Exactly. And I guess what I wanted to share with you today is like some, some practical things that Bill and I learned. And, ideally, there'll be some nuggets of wisdom in there, uh, for your listeners if they suffer from anxiety or they know someone or care about someone that, that is suffering from anxiety too.

Magic Barclay: 4:44

Great. And we will cover those in just a minute, but I ask all of my guests the same three questions to start with and everyone gives me different answers and I know yours are pretty cool. So here comes your first one. What can your expertise do to accelerate health, not just physical, but also emotional and spiritual health? Thank you.

Peter Anthony: 5:06

I can help you accelerate your spiritual and emotional health by helping you understand a fresh perspective on anxiety and what to do about it when it turns up.

Magic Barclay: 5:18

Fantastic. We talk about wealth here as well, not just financial, but also personal and emotional wealth. So what are your top three tips to creating wealth?

Peter Anthony: 5:29

my top three tips, are about emotional wealth as opposed to physical wealth and the way I see it, emotional wealth leads to physical or material wealth anyway, tip number one is, think about anxiety as separation from yourself, tip number two would be to find an appropriate mantra that you can repeat to yourself regularly during the day and tip number three would be When you are dealing with anxiety to think of the smallest possible steps you can take. Um, to move your, move yourself into a different space.

Magic Barclay: 6:07

I think that's really important because when we're dealing with anxiety, obviously everything can seem a little bit overwhelming and any step forward is a step forward. Doesn't matter how big, how small, as long as you are doing something to get out of that state of being.

Peter Anthony: 6:26

Exactly. And quite often what we found when we, when Bell and I looked at the anxiety very closely was that what usually happens when you're anxious is, or what often happens in our experience is, uh, it's a lack of action orientation. You tend to just stop doing things, particularly you stop doing healthy behaviors, if you like. So by taking tiny steps, even if they're not necessarily going in the right direction, because you may not know what the right direction is. At least getting an action orientation and doing things like in our case, doing things initially were very simple, like doing things like getting out of bed, doing things like eating meals, doing things like getting outside into the sunshine. So, uh, they can be, they can be tiny steps. I wouldn't be too concerned with making them the right actions, uh, just getting more or thinking more action orientated and think, okay, how many, how many actions did I take yesterday? I took two. Well, tomorrow I'm going to add one to that and do, and do three and just gradually build up that, um, that action orientation by taking more and more of those tiny steps. And as the tiny steps build, the steps get bigger, your self esteem begins to build. And you begin recognizing and getting rewarded for taking the right actions. That's that's the tiny step approach. I wouldn't be too concerned about are they the right actions or not, because quite often thinking right and wrong can make you anxious, often by itself.

Magic Barclay: 7:56

That it can. The final standard question is around weight loss. Many people battle their weight. And so have you battled yours? If so, how did you win the war? And what can you offer the listeners who might be dealing with that? Because we know that weight issues cause a lot of anxiety.

Peter Anthony: 8:15

Uh, they do. I have battled with weight. It's like, and I still do from, from time to time from quarter to quarter. I still, I get to a weight that I'm not comfortable being. I would say my number one tip, um, for weight loss is, the better you feel about yourself, the more healthy your weight will be. So it's a matter of emotional wellbeing will bring you physical wellbeing. Uh, and I'd also, if I could add a second, uh, thing I've learned here is to reduce consumption on social media because social media for both men and women is full of it, of, of images of people that are. If you look at them often enough, they can make you feel like you're not the right, height, weight, size, color, whatever, whatever it might be, it's full of very perfect looking people.

Magic Barclay: 9:05

Exactly. All right. That's the standard questions. Now tell us more about how you and Belle turn things around, how she turned this crippling anxiety into a clothing line and a success and how's she going now? You're welcome.

Peter Anthony: 9:22

that's that's what one big question. So, the way we turned it around was the way she turned it around was by doing the opposite of what I originally tried, I think, as you mentioned your intro, I thought. if I loved her enough, if I showed her enough love, if I cared for her enough, it would turn her around. But that, that does not work. what we needed to do was to help Bill feel more self respect and more self care for herself. she was also struggling with weight issues at that time. so was about looking at a baseline of where her life was then and think about, okay, so, with some really basic parameters. how can we turn her life around? How can we get up half an hour earlier a day? How can we eat one more meal a day? How can we get outside? How can we have some sort of exercise each day? Which I mentioned earlier about these, these tiny steps. and we did arrive, as you mentioned in your intro, we did arrive, at a mantra. We arrived at this, uh, mantra or this saying is that you are enough because she was thinking that she wasn't enough to deal with her life and her problems and the issues that she was facing. And I was attempting to tell her that she was more than enough, that she had to take this massive action and that she was, she was more than enough that was required. And then what we both learned together through one conversation we had after dinner one night was that. All she really needed to think and believe. Was that she was enough, like just enough, not more than enough, not less than enough. Like I'm enough to get up in the morning. I'm an, I'm enough to eat a good meal. I'm enough to be loved. I'm enough to be cared about. and, that became a mantra for us. it also meant magic that she had to change, who she had as her so called friends. And I call them so called friends because it was a very destructive group of people that she was with. And we learn that you do become who you hang around. so we, we gradually change those people too, or she changed the people, she was friends with and she was, uh, she was hanging out with, if you like, during the day and during the evening. And, what we found was that we needed to get, or she needed to get more connected with herself to find out who she really was. And one tool we used that she found really, really useful was to think about herself in the future. So, she would sit down near the beach, uh, near where we live and just look out at the ocean, close her eyes, just imagine herself in the future. And the future self she imagined was about three or four years down the track. And this girl was at uni, she was doing a degree. Um, she was in a relationship and she was happy and she was healthy and she imagined that person. and then what Bell did was she wrote a letter from that future self, from the future Bell to the current Bell, like a letter of love, if you like, but like sometimes what people do with, with wounded child, they'll, they'll care about themselves in the past when they're little. in this case, what Bell was doing was caring for herself from the future to the present. Um, Which really helped her and she journaled quite regularly from her future self to her present self. Now this began, this Nuff idea really began working for her. so much so that she said, dad, I really want to spread this message. And I said, really? She said, yeah. She said, I want to, I want to, like make some simple t shirts and just for the Nuff on it, like just with N U F F Nuff on it. And people buy them. I'm thinking who would buy a t shirt with Nuff on it? But I thought, no, I care about her. I love her. Uh, this can be part of, and it became part of her HSC project. Cause she was in, she went back to school in year 11. She missed a year of school and this became a HSC project for year 12. So she started this business. I'm thinking who's going to buy the, it could be a good HSC project. No one's going to buy these shirts, but sure enough, I bought a 200 T shirts in four different sizes from extra small to extra large, uh, I advertised them on Facebook for Bell. We started a little Shopify, store. And they sold out in a bit less than a day, magic. And I was amazed, I was surprised. Then Belle said, look, we've got to package up each individually, dad. We've got to, uh, I'm going to put a note in with each person. So she packaged them all up individually, every, every t shirt and we delivered them all to the Northern beaches, one weekend just in the back of my car. And that started this Nuff business. I was thinking it would just be a, an idea that just lasts for the HSC. But she was very keen to spread the message and it wasn't the message of just you're enough, which is a great message of and by itself. But what she was keen to do is to get people starting conversations. Like if you're wearing enough t shirt, people say, what's this not about? Oh, it's about feeling enough. It just starts the conversation about self esteem because quite often what we were finding is that a lot of people are challenged with self esteem, but they don't know how to start a conversation with other people, either about how they're feeling or about how they're feeling or the other person's feeling. So that's, that's how that, that business started. It all started from a kitchen conversation that translated into a HSC project that now three years later is a, going concern, which no one is more surprised than me, Magic.

Magic Barclay: 14:34

All right, for all the mums out there, I'm going to ask, do they come in larger sizes?

Peter Anthony: 14:39

They do. They do. They go from extra small to extra, extra large. And we also do special orders, Manchik, because we had one, um, one guy that contacted us. He was on the North coast of New South Wales. He says, he said, do you do 5XL? Uh, he sends a message and I run a message back, uh, no, but I'll just double check. I had a conversation with Bell and said, Bell, we don't do 5XL. She said, this, this guy was in a group of men, like large guys that wanted to, uh, build their self esteem and, and reduce weight. And they wanted to use this NUP idea for themselves. So we made a special order of 5XLs, which is the biggest shirt I've seen, Magic. Have you seen a 5XL shirt?

Magic Barclay: 15:23

Yes, sadly, I have, I used to wear one and it's huge.

Peter Anthony: 15:28

It was, it was big. I thought this is really cool. So, um, we do, I mean, we go to, we go to double XL for the regular, uh, the regular sizes, but we do special orders. We've also, because most of when we look on Facebook and the customers that we had and on, on Shopify, most of our customers are mums. Originally I thought they'd be young women, just like Bell, but no, most of them are mums. Between say 45 and about 55 ish, uh, and they buy it for themselves and they also buy it for their friends. I think you mentioned, you showed us the Facebook, uh, you mentioned the Facebook page and the, the Instagram, there's photos of our supporters there, like all the women that originally supported that program. I call them the, the mum mafia, cause they basically took over the business and, and spread the word themselves. Um, so yeah, we did big, we did all sizes and the mums were also requested kids sizes. So we now got little like children's sizes too, like larger and very small. I love

Magic Barclay: 16:30

that. And Peter, that that's such an important message. A lot of my listeners. Uh, in the age group that I'm in, like the 45 to 65 and, you know, post divorce or once the kids are grown up, our lives kind of change. And there's still that demographic of women around the world who tend to slip through the cracks because they lose their self identity. You know, they're no longer the wife, they're no longer the mom of kids that need them every day, they might be changing careers. And I think this is a really important message for that age group, because sometimes you can feel like, who am I? Why am I here? You know, what's my role? And that anxiety can really drive you down a very dark road.

Peter Anthony: 17:24

Yeah, I, I, I believe that and I've had a lot of experience hearing, um, people, uh, in our, in our cohort or in our, what I call the, um, the mum's mafia. some have had kids that have, um, grown up and don't need them anymore, or they've, they've, they've, they've separated or divorced from their partners and they, they find it hard to get a sense of identity because they've been a mother or a partner for most of their lives. Uh, and thinking, well, who am I really, uh, and am, am I enough as myself, as a woman, am I enough in the world? And it's very challenging, particularly now with social media perceptions, and a lot of pressure, on womankind a lot more than that there is on, on men. So. I hear that loud and clear from our customers, uh, and women all over the world feel the same way. I mean, we've been fortunate enough to, Bill and I, and sometimes me, sometimes just her, sometimes both of us, talked to, podcasts in the UK, in the US and Canada. And we're finding people with the same experiences all over the world. It's not just an Australian thing. it's a global, a global issue. And it's, it's very much about being separated from yourself and not thinking that you're enough. to deal with reconnecting with, who you are.

Magic Barclay: 18:38

Exactly. All right. We've covered a lot here. Is there something we haven't talked about that you feel the listeners need to hear?

Peter Anthony: 18:45

No, I think, I think suggesting the main things. I mean, the main things is to have a, a daily mantra. The mantra, obviously, that I suggest is that I'm enough. I'm enough. I'm enough to deal with it. I'm enough. Like, I am enough. the second would be to, think about whatever the, issues are that are causing you anxiety, to think of the tiniest possible step that you can take. Towards that particular goal, like to say, for example, I'm thinking about I should be going for a walk and I'm not, what's the tiniest step I could take? I could just leave my running shoes out to go for a walk in the morning. what's the tiniest step I can take towards that goal? and, the final one that, I'd recommend in addition to that in mantras and tiny steps. is to think about that letter from the future idea and think about thinking about yourself in the future, not like in an ideal future, because no one lives an ideal life, but think about yourself in the future when you have got past this issue that's causing you anxiety, what your life will look like. And reconnect with who you are, because that person that has dealt with the issue is who you really are, hence it's often called the hero's journey, and it's always happy in the end, and if it's not happy, it's not the end. Which means this is just one leg of that journey that's full of challenges, but the next leg is going to be one where you've resolved those challenges, you've manifested yourself into something bigger, brighter, and stronger than where you are now. And you can celebrate that, in advance, right back to yourself in the present. And use that as, as your, as your guiding light, you are your best helper. You are your best guide. You're your best coach.

Magic Barclay: 20:20

Love it. Now we love freebies here. So what can you offer the listeners? I know it's something that requires them to believe in themselves and put themselves out there. So what is it?

Peter Anthony: 20:33

Well, I'm going to, I'm going to offer your listeners, I'm going to ask them to do something. I'm going to ask them to do something. I want to hear a story from a listener. a story about how they've overcome some sort of adversity in their life and they've had a sense that they're enough to deal with that adversity. And if I get that, if we get that story, uh, I'm happy to, uh, to send them, a free shirt with a size and color of their choice. and that they can see them on the website. If they want to check them out, that's you're enough. com. The most popular is, charcoal with pig nuffs on it, but we've also got white, uh, and purple shirts too. They can check those out, see what they like. but for everyone, that sends in a story, to me, I'm very happy, and as is Bell to send them, um, a free shirt to celebrate the fact that they took that step. How does that sound magic?

Magic Barclay: 21:26

That sounds gorgeous. So the website is www.youranuff.com. That's right. So you're enough. It's a very Australian way of doing it, and I love it.

Peter Anthony: 21:42

You're enough. You're enough. We've had a lot of grief from the grammar. Nazis magic about it should be. You are enough, but that's not the point. The point is it's simple. You are enough. It's funny, it's Australian, it's not too complicated, and it's meant to be a conversation starter, not meant to be the whole, the whole piece.

Magic Barclay: 22:03

And on Facebook, I'm enough, I M A N U F F. And on Instagram, you're enough, which is Y O U R A N U F F. Thank you so much, Peter, for joining us.

Peter Anthony: 22:19

Absolute pleasure, Magic, and I hope your listeners found something of value from the conversation.

Magic Barclay: 22:24

And listeners, just remember that you are enough and I'm enough. We are all enough. We're all enough.

Peter Anthony: 22:32

I've never had enough.

Magic Barclay: 22:34

All right. Before we sign off, listeners, thank you so much for joining us today and don't forget to like, review, subscribe, share, and go forth and create your magical life.