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August 7, 2026 12 mins

On this episode of “Tommy Talk,” Tommy wants you to stop ripping yourself apart. Sometimes the biggest bully in our lives is ourselves. We beat ourselves up over the smallest things, or things we've convinced ourselves are huge when in the grand scheme of life, they really aren't. We criticize every decision, replay conversations, obsess over mistakes, tell ourselves we're not attractive enough, and convince ourselves that one setback somehow defines who we are. In this episode, Tommy shares the mindset shifts and "aha" moments that have completely changed the way he talks to himself and handles the moments that don't go according to plan. Because life is hard enough without becoming your own worst critic. This episode is all about building a healthier relationship with yourself. After all, the relationship you have with yourself is one of the most important relationships you'll ever have, so let's make sure it's a good one.

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Executive Producers: iHeart Media and Elvis Duran Podcast Network

Producers: Andrew Pugliese, Stephanie Lane, Josh Kolodny

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, guys, welcome to Tommy Talk, and today's topic is
stop ripping yourself apart. Oh god, we all do this right.
Sometimes the biggest bully can be ourselves because we just
rip ourselves apart for the littlest things or things that
we perceive are really big deals, but in the end,
they're not. They're not. And here's what got me thinking

(00:23):
about this topic. So I just covered the red carpet
premiere for the Odyssey and I got to interview the
entire cast, Matt Damon, Tom Hollins and Deya and Hathaway,
you know, et cetera. It was a really fun night.
But I did something in an interview that I caught
myself starting to rip myself apart four and that that
was I interviewed Anne Hathaway, and the show Extra that

(00:47):
I do some work on as well, wanted me to
ask her, you know, who are you wearing? What are
you wearing? Which, by the way, is a side note,
is not my favorite question because I feel like we
have such little time with these artists, Like I don't
really want to sit there hearing about a designer. I
want to talk about the movie and the project. But
that's something in the business, they quite often want us

(01:07):
to do, so I had to do it. But anyway,
I asked her, you know, tell me about the look.
Who are you wearing? And she goes, okay, I'll give
you a hint. Devil wears So obviously I know her
movies are The Devil Wears Prada, right, But my mind
went to this place of Okay, in the movie, what
scene was she wearing a designer? And a designer was
a big focus of the scene and it was a

(01:28):
pivotal moment. So I start going back through the movie
in my mind thinking about when was a designer mentioned?
And she leans in with the big smile. She goes
Devilwares and I'm like, ah, what scene is it? Like, God,
I don't know, and then she goes double Wares. I'm
like at Prada, Like Prada can't be that simple, And
it was Prada. She was wearing Prada. And I sat

(01:50):
there feeling like the biggest idiot for like twenty seconds thinking, Oh,
my god, does she think I don't know her movies?
Does she think I'm a complete dumbass? Is she offended?
But she was. It's so cute and gracious and just
you know, grabbed me and was like and I said,
oh my god, I'm such a stupid dummy, and she's like, no,
I'm not going to do you dirty like that. And
then we just continue the interview because we had no

(02:11):
time and I had to keep going. So I made
a joke like, oh my god, you've been looking gorgeous.
Do you ever wear sweatpants? She made a cute joke about,
you know, wearing maternity clothes. It was fine, and she
was fine, but in that moment after I left, I
started thinking like, oh my god, how stupid am I? Like,
how did I not get that? How did I not
get what? Anne Hathaway was literally handing me in the

(02:32):
palm of my hands, like she must think I'm a
moron or was I offensive? And I kind of started
doing the spiral. Luckily, once I talked to my team
and I saw the clip and ended up being this
really kind of cute and enduring and real moment. I mean,
it was a real moment and it made the show
and it was in the piece and all of that,
but I started kind of beating myself up for it.
You know. It's also this idea like, oh god, I

(02:54):
wasn't perfect in that moment, because perfection's another thing that
we rip ourselves apart for. But that's what they ae
me start thinking about this topic. It's like, Okay, why
did my mind start going to that negative place when
really it ended up being a fun and light and
interesting moment Because so much of what we see on
these carpets and in these press stores is the same
old stuff over and over again. So I should have

(03:16):
focus on the positive of it all, that it was
just like a fun, cute, innocent moment instead of beating
myself up. We all do this, right, whether it's about
our career, whether it's about our weights, whether it's about
an interaction we've had with someone, we rip ourselves apart.
We criticize our decisions or our mistakes. We ruminate, and
WePlay conversations in our head. We obsess over mistakes like

(03:40):
I started doing and then I caught myself. You know,
we can convince ourselves that one little bump in the
road somehow defines who we are. And this is what's
absolutely wild about all of this. Most of us would
never speak to another person the way we speak to ourselves,
or the way we beat ourselves up or rip into ourselves.

(04:01):
We just wouldn't do it. We absolutely wouldn't do it.
So here's kind of the ways that we can rip
ourselves apart because we need to catch this so that
we're kinder to ourselves. Because we only got one us,
we don't need to be that person. So I think
that over time, a lot of us have normalized self criticism.

(04:23):
Somewhere along the way, I don't know, we start believing
that being hard on ourselves can be the same thing
as being motivating. But I would disagree. I think there's
a really huge difference between having accountability and owning what
you're doing or what mistakes you're making or decisions you're making,
versus that self destruction negative self talk, right, like, one

(04:45):
helps you grow, having accountability helps you grow. The other
keeps it kind of stuck because you can't grow or
improve or change or better yourself if you're constantly pounding
yourself over the head because that's not motivating. That just
makes me feel stuck in this place. So I'm not
good enough for I'm never gonna amount to what I

(05:06):
think I can be. You have to be you have
to be positive in your your criticism. If that makes sense, right,
You have to spot what's wrong, or spot what you
didn't like, or spot what you want to change and
then grow from it. But this self criticism doesn't allow
you to do that. It really doesn't allow you to
do that. After that carpet, I could have gone home
and been like, I suck, I'm leaving the business. My

(05:27):
next interview is going to be a disaster. But it's
like no, no, no, no like it. It's okay. It's
okay to have a human moment. And I think we
need to be able to not always normalize the self
criticism and push past that and be like no, no,
I'm not listening to that voice. Damn that voice. Uh huh,
that's not happening. I also think that we beat ourselves
up and we rip ourselves apart because we hyper fixate

(05:48):
on the one thing we did wrong, that one thing right.
We can do so much right, Like the night of
that carpet, I have the most incredible interviews with the
entire cast, the entire higher cast. I had viral moments
come out of those interviews. Yet my mind still thinks
back to that one moment, and it's funny. It's on.

(06:08):
If you go to the extra Instagram page. It's on there,
and I shared all the clips that they were posting,
but I didn't share that one. And I still haven't
shared that one. And maybe this conversation will inspire me
to because as much as I know it was a
fun moment, a little piece of me is like, if
I share that, are people gonna think I'm an idiot?
Which is funny, which is really interesting. So I still
have work to do right And clearly I've hyper fixated

(06:30):
on that one thing that I quote unquote did wrong,
even though I've healthily moved past it in many ways.
But it's human, It's very very human. I think we
often think, did I do the right thing? Did I not?
Did I end up writing something that I thought I
shouldn't have to somebody, to a boss, to a coworker,

(06:51):
to a friend, did I not? Like there's just always
hyper fixation in our lives, And the truth is that
we've survived things that we've thought we wouldn't survive over time, right,
we've figured things out before, we've succeeded, We've I don't know,
we've helped people, We've made people laugh, We've been loved,
we have loved. Like all of that is positive in

(07:12):
our lives that we do. Yet the one mistake we
make or the one quote unquote bad thing gets more
of our mind and more of our energy than a
thousand victories. That's just how the human brain works. That's
just how it works. So what I would argue is
that when we do make these mistakes, or when we
do things that don't make us feel great, we have

(07:35):
two options. We can spend a month beating ourselves up,
or we can spend a couple minutes learning from it
and growing from it and evolving from it. One of
those moves your life forward. The other does not. That's
what I mentioned about being stuck earlier. We need to
move forward in our lives. So we have to make
the conscious effort that if we are fixating on something
we did wrong, learn from it, grow from it, and

(07:58):
move on from it. Move on from it, don't spend
three weeks hyperfixating on it. That takes away the one
life you have to live, and we need to live.
This life is for the living, right, So I guess
another thing is sometimes the biggest bully is ourselves. I
said that earlier. I truly stand by it. Everyone talks
about how mean other people are, but we can be
so vicious to ourselves. We really, really really can. I

(08:19):
imagine if somebody followed you around all day long saying
the things you sometimes tell yourself, right, like, imagine that,
Just imagine that. But yet when the voices come from us,
we believe it. We think it's true for a minute, right,
because if someone else says it to us, we don't
necessarily buy it or believe it or like they're an asshole,

(08:42):
they're bitter or whatever. But when we say it, we
believe it and we think it's true, not because it
is true, but because it's familiar. It's you know, us
saying it to ourselves. But familiar doesn't mean it's true.
It doesn't mean it's fact. Okay, it doesn't mean it's fact.
So that voice saying to you, whatever awful thing it's saying,
just catch it and remember that it doesn't mean it's

(09:05):
factual or truthful because it's coming from your voice. Because
we see things differently too, and we can embellish or
make things worse in our minds than they actually are.
So don't let that inner bully come for you. Don't.
And I think the last thing I want to say
is we don't need to have it all figured out
all the time. There's so much pressure. And I'm going
to do another time we talk about the timelines of life,

(09:26):
because I'm very passionate about this, But we don't need
to always feel like that it's it's the timeline needs
to be locked in and secured. We don't have to
always know everything. Social media has definitely made us think
that everybody has to have everything figured out because it's
a highlight reel right. People show their perfect relationships and
careers and bodies and confidence and yes, okay, great, like

(09:50):
we love to celebrate happiness, but remember, social media isn't real.
It's one one, one, one fraction of an entire life,
if an entire life. I've struggled over the last year
with loss and grief, and I've opened up a little
bit about it on social but I don't really post
about it. I talk about it here. This feels like
a safe place. But I don't really post on social

(10:11):
like I'm having a shit day and I open my
camera and show me crying. I don't, and some people
do that. Some I would argue it's a little performative,
but you know, it's it's weird it feels awkward, it
feel unnatural. So you have to remember that social media
is not real and we don't need to have it
figured out. All the time. We compare ourselves to behind
the scenes moments of someone's highlight reel. It's not the

(10:32):
whole real it's not the whole picture. So I've been
in a spiral of comparing myself to people on social
before I've openly talked about that. In fact, I started
doing that again, like a couple weeks ago. There was
someone I started comparing myself to it. I'm like, why
am I doing this? I'm forty Have I not learned
anything over the course of my life? And I quickly
like realized I was doing that and addressed it and stopped.

(10:54):
But it was I was doing it so much so
that IM mute to this person on social media, not
because they were doing anything wrong, because I was letting
it affect me in a negative way. And then once
I got through the why am I doing this? Like
this is crazy, I went back and umute to them
because I realized, Okay, I'm not that person anymore. We
all have moments like that. We all have moments like that.
So all of this to say is be gentil er

(11:16):
with yourself, be kinder with yourself. Know that you are
the only voice in your head, so make it a
good one, right, And we have one life to live.
I am so passionate about this. It's something that's coming
up more and more for me. That's why every day
I say, I'm so thankful to be here, because we
have one life to live, and we are lucky to
be here. And every day is a gift. Every single

(11:37):
day is a gift. So don't go through the one
life you have being so unkind to yourself. Because you
were with this person, You were with you longer than
anyone in your life, longer than you've ever been with
anyone in your life. So you want that relationship to
be solid and strong. And if that version of you,
that voice in your head, if that side of you
starts making you feel like you're not worthy or worth it,

(12:00):
you fight back and you catch them and you say,
hell no, hell no, We're gonna work through this together.
We're gonna work through this together. Like I said, one
life to live, Let's make it the best. Let's be
good to ourselves. Because baby, I promise you're doing all right.
You're doing all right, and I want you to keep
believing that I've never said this before. Is hosted by

(12:22):
Me Tommy Dedario. This podcast is executive produced by Andrew
Piglisi at iHeartRadio and by Me Tommy, with editing by
Joshua Colaudney. I've Never Said This Before is part of
the Elvis Duran podcast Network on iHeart Podcasts. For more,
rate review and subscribe to our show and if you
liked this episode, tell your friends. Until next time, I'm

(12:46):
Tommy de Dario

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