Natasha Graziano on Becoming Unapologetically You, Rewriting Your Story and Listening to Your Calling

What if the voice holding you back isn’t the one you should be listening to?

In this episode of Heal Squad, Maria sits down with mindset coach, motivational speaker and author Natasha Graziano for a conversation about hitting rock bottom, rebuilding your life, meditation, manifestation and becoming the person you actually want to be.

Natasha’s story includes addiction, financial collapse, homelessness and serious struggles with her health and anxiety. But it’s what she says about coming out the other side that becomes the heart of the conversation:

Listen to your calling, not your critic.

You Don’t Need Everyone to Like You

Natasha knows what it’s like to feel different.

Growing up in Oxfordshire, she says she was bullied at school and often felt judged for being outspoken, intuitive and different from the people around her.

Today, she’s almost defiantly herself.

Bright clothes. Big energy. Strong opinions. No attempt to blend into the background.

But she says becoming unapologetically yourself isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s something you practice every time you choose not to let someone else’s opinion determine what you do next.

That’s where one of the best lines of the conversation comes from:

Listen to your calling, not your critic.

Because there will always be critics.

The question is whether you’re going to build your life around satisfying them—or around the people you’re actually meant to reach.

Get Your Full Sparkle Back

Maria connects Natasha’s story to something she learned growing up: don’t give people a reason to be jealous.

So instead of standing out, she learned to tone herself down.

Don’t be too loud.

Don’t dress too boldly.

Don’t attract too much attention.

Natasha argues for the opposite.

She calls it showing up in your “full sparkle.”

And this isn’t really about clothes. It’s about the version of yourself you bring into the world.

When Natasha went through some of the hardest periods of her life, she says she lost that sparkle. Reclaiming it meant doing the things that made her feel like herself again—how she dressed, the rituals she practiced, how she cared for herself and the energy she brought into a room.

Sometimes becoming yourself starts with giving yourself permission to stop shrinking.

Who Is the Person You Want to Become?

Natasha takes that idea further.

She doesn’t just set goals. She says she intentionally creates a character for the person she wants to become.

Who is Natasha?

How does she take care of herself?

What kind of relationships does she have?

Where does she go?

What does her career look like?

What impact does she make?

Then she writes the script.

She creates detailed descriptions of different areas of her future life—love, health, career and purpose—and writes about the person she wants to become as though that life has already unfolded.

It’s the idea behind her book, Be It Until You Become It.

Instead of waiting until you achieve something to become that person, begin practicing the behaviors, mindset and choices of that person now.

Write Your Future Like It’s Already Your Past

Natasha offers an interesting journaling exercise.

Write your future story in the third person and past tense.

Instead of:

I want to build a successful business.

Try:

Maria built the business she always imagined.

Instead of:

I want a wonderful relationship.

Write the story of the relationship as though you’re looking back on it.

Natasha connects this practice to the brain’s reticular activating system—the filtering system involved in determining which information receives our attention. Her larger point is practical: what we repeatedly focus on can influence what we notice and the opportunities we recognize around us.

The neuroscience claims in the conversation sometimes go considerably further than established evidence supports. Visualization can be useful for clarifying goals and directing attention, but imagining an outcome does not make the brain literally treat an imagined future as a completed memory or guarantee that the outcome will occur.

And Natasha emphasizes something important herself:

You still have to take action.

One Foot in Front of the Other

Maria brings the conversation back to a deceptively simple lesson from one of her favorite Christmas movies: put one foot in front of the other.

She used it while filming a movie when the enormity of what she’d taken on suddenly overwhelmed her.

Don’t think about the entire shoot.

Get through tomorrow.

Then do the next day.

She applies the same principle to healing and meditation.

When you look at everything you want to change—your health, career, relationships, habits, mindset—it can feel like standing at the bottom of a mountain.

So stop staring at the mountain.

Take the next step.

Then another.

Natasha’s Rock Bottom

Eventually, Maria asks Natasha to go back to the part of her story she rarely discusses in detail.

Natasha describes a period involving drug use, debt, deteriorating health, broken family relationships and eventually having nowhere permanent to live with her young son.

She talks candidly about doing webcam work while trying to survive and support her addiction, pushing people out of her life and hiding what was happening because she felt ashamed.

By 2018, she says she was tens of thousands of dollars in debt and temporarily without a home.

She sold jewelry to pay for a hostel and stayed on friends’ couches.

And then she began rebuilding.

Not all at once.

One step at a time.

The $150 That Helped Start Everything

One of the most memorable stories comes from those days.

Natasha still had an Instagram account but couldn’t afford the clothes she needed to create the fashion content she’d previously made.

So she went into a charity shop.

She tried on clothes, asked strangers to photograph her wearing them and posted the pictures to Instagram.

Within days, she says brands began contacting her.

One of the first paid opportunities brought in about $150.

It wasn’t an empire.

It wasn’t even financial security.

But it was movement.

She combined those small business steps with meditation, journaling, gratitude practices and a mentorship program she had purchased despite already being in debt.

Within roughly a year, she says she’d gotten herself out of debt.

The lesson isn’t that everyone should follow her exact path.

It’s that your next step doesn’t have to look anything like your final destination.

It just has to move you forward.

Go Through It to Get Through It

Natasha’s story gets even more personal when she talks about childhood trauma.

She recalls being ten years old on a family trip in the South of France. Shortly after seeing her parents together on the beach and having the strange intuition that she should remember the moment, the family was involved in a car crash.

Her pregnant mother went into premature labor.

Natasha’s baby sister, Isabella, survived for ten days before dying.

Natasha describes the loss as a turning point in her family and in her relationship with her father. She says it contributed to years of anger, distance and unresolved emotion.

Looking back at the many difficult periods of her life, Natasha returns to another phrase:

You’ve got to go through it to get through it.

You can’t rewrite what happened.

But you can decide whether what happened gets to write the rest of your story.

Meditation Helped Natasha Rewrite Hers

Meditation became a major part of Natasha’s transformation.

She describes what she calls the MBS Method—Meditational Behavioral Synchronicity—combining breathing practices, guided meditation, visualization and work around limiting beliefs.

Her goal is to identify the deeper belief underneath the surface problem.

Maybe it isn’t really:

I can’t build this business.

Maybe it’s:

I’m not worthy of success.

Perhaps it isn’t:

I’ll never find the right relationship.

Maybe underneath it is:

I’m not worthy of love.

Natasha’s approach is to identify that belief, challenge it and repeatedly practice a new one while also changing behavior in the outside world.

Whatever language you use for it—reprogramming, mindset work or simply questioning the stories you’ve been telling yourself—the underlying question is powerful:

Is this belief actually helping me become who I want to be?

Visualization Is Not a Substitute for Action

Both Natasha and Maria talk enthusiastically about manifestation, meditation and healing, including personal stories involving serious medical conditions.

Some claims made during the conversation—particularly around breathwork healing disease, thoughts affecting the body’s water, meditation producing specific physical recoveries or manifestation causing desired outcomes—aren’t established medical facts.

That distinction matters.

Meditation, breathwork, visualization and gratitude practices can be valuable tools for stress management, emotional well-being and goal-setting, but they shouldn’t replace appropriate medical evaluation or treatment.

There’s also a grounded idea inside the conversation that doesn’t require believing every claim about manifestation:

Imagine where you want to go—and then behave like someone who is going there.

Don’t Stop Doing What Worked Because It Worked

Near the end, Natasha makes a point that’s easy to miss.

When something starts working, we often stop doing it.

We meditate until we feel better.

Exercise until we lose the weight.

Journal until life settles down.

Practice gratitude until we’re happier.

Then we gradually abandon the habits that helped get us there.

Natasha’s message is: when you’re winning, keep practicing.

The goal isn’t to use these practices only when your life is falling apart.

It’s to make the practices that help you feel grounded, focused and alive part of who you are.

Be It Until You Become It

Maybe the biggest takeaway from Natasha’s story isn’t manifestation at all.

It’s agency.

At one point, she describes herself as sick, deeply in debt, disconnected from family and without a permanent home for herself and her young son.

She couldn’t fix everything that day.

So she did something.

Then something else.

A gratitude exercise.

A meditation.

A photograph.

An Instagram post.

A $150 opportunity.

Another opportunity.

Another step.

And another.

That’s what be it until you become it can mean without any magic attached.

Decide who you’re trying to become.

Start making choices that person would make.

Stop waiting for every critic to approve.

And when the distance between where you are and where you want to be feels impossibly large, remember:

Don’t climb the whole mountain today. Put one foot in front of the other—and listen to your calling, not your critic.