How to Reimagine and Reinvent Yourself with Natalia Castellanos

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Success often calls for advances in your personal and professional lives; from time to time you’ll need to reimagine and reinvent yourself. Sometimes it’s chosen; sometimes it’s forced. Either way you need success strategies to deal with it. I discuss some with my guest, Natalia Castellanos.

Natalia is a bilingual actor, director, producer, and voice artist whose work spans film, television, commercials, and voiceover. What sets Natalia apart is not just the breadth of her credits but the intentionality behind them.

She has built a full-time acting career by staying grounded, staying curious, and never being afraid to ask herself the harder questions about growth and reinvention.

Her professional acting career began in Kingston, Jamaica working as Jennifer Grey’s body-double in the RKO Pictures’ feature film Ritual. This transformative experience on-set convinced her that she had found her calling. Additional credits include NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS), Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders (CBS), Secret and Lies (ABC), and Battleship (Universal).

We dive into topics including:

Natalia’s origin story in the world of reimagining herself.
The importance of self-awareness and how to develop yours.
Where the journey of reimagining yourself begins.
How to realize what parts of your life you can influence and then take control of them.
Why you need to be a lifelong learner to have success throughout your life.
How to embrace change when it happens to you unexpectedly.
Strategies to successfully reimagine or rebrand yourself.
The power of observation and how to use it for self-reflection and changing yourself.
Why baby steps are the key to getting to the top of the mountain.
How to know when you’ve successfully reimagined yourself and you can stop (for the time being) reimagining yourself.
How to know when it’s time to reimagine yourself again.
Why you need to remind yourself that you have to plant the seed and then let the flower grow.
The difference between forced and chosen reimagining.
How to deal with both annoying and constructive criticism.
How to keep on keepin’ on during the tough times.
The one thing, above all else, that you need to do to successfully reimagine yourself.

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

Natalia’s Reimagining and Reinventing Origin Story

Natalia believes reimagining and reinventing are important to her because of the way she grew up. She grew up always having to reimagine herself because she was always moving around to different countries because her dad was a diplomat.

She was always having to learn new cultures, new ways of living, new ways of how to connect with new people. She’s always on the edge of trying to figure out how to approach new people. It can be difficult because each person is so much different because of their background, where they grew up and the personal relationships in their life.

For Natalia reimagining herself always has been a part of her DNA without fully knowing it at first.

The Conscious Start of Reimagining and Reinventing Yourself

Reimagining herself became a conscious effort when Natalia came to this country to go to college. She learned how things were done in the US versus a lot of the other countries that she had lived in. At that level she was already mature enough to consciously pick up patterns and seeing the way things happen. It was a matter of her being able to make that a conscious effort in the sense of being like, “Oh, I see what’s happening, I need to adjust this way,” or, “Oh, wait, that didn’t fall the way I thought it was going to be“.

Natalia always likes to take responsibility for her experiences. She is a person that has learned that human nature tends to be a matter of what we are reacting to. When something doesn’t go well most people tend to blame other people for their negative circumstances and experiences.

Natalia asks herself questions such as, “What is happening to me? Why am I being, wanting to react to something in a certain way?” She wonders what about them is causing her to feel certain ways.

Growth Through Self-Awareness

Growth happens in a split second in Natalia’s mind now. It’s something that she’s consciously trying to see how she can reimagine herself as far as the ways she interacts in certain situations. She feels like that has caused her to be more truthful toward people. For example there are situations with not being embarrassed if she doesn’t know something, and asking people to clarify things instead.

Now when she feels like, “Why didn’t I know that?” Natalia’s response is something along the lines of, “You know what? That’s okay.” Or I don’t know everything, and this is where she gets interested, and her response is, “Well, tell me about it.” And that’s how she thinks it starts breaking some of the boundaries with others. That’s how she lives her life as much as possible these days.

Now granted, we are human. There’s times that Natalia can be reactionary, but she really tries to go back into introspection and think about why a certain situation is affecting her and what’s causing her to feel that way in that moment.

You Breaking Down Boundaries with Others

Boundaries go up easily these days. Especially in the world of social media where things are often façades; breaking boundaries to Natalia means being truthful and real with others.

We’re all human. We all have the same basic needs. We eat; we breathe. Breaking through includes creating situations where you say, “I’m just as flawed as you, but how can we together create this beautiful thing and lift each other up?” Many times it’s hard because there people that put up these walls and don’t want to let somebody in because of whatever they’ve gone through and their personal history.

There’s always this delicate balance and dance between two people. And to Natalia, breaking through is being able to be human and be able to have an honest, truthful conversation. She personally does so much better when it’s a one-on-one situation, because I really like to focus on one person as an individual.

Once you can manage relationships you’re ready to reimagine and reinvent yourself…

And that’s just the beginning!

Watch or listen to this episode for the rest of the story and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

About My Guest

Photo Credit: Instagram @matt_kallish

Natalia Castellanos is a bilingual actor and voiceover artist, currently residing in Los Angeles. She can be seen guest-starring in the recurring role of Mayor Susanna Lopez in Amazon Prime‘s long running drama series BOSCH & BOSCH: LEGACY.

The Colombian and Venezuelan actor is the daughter of a South American diplomat. While Natalia was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, she has called many countries home: Romania, Jamaica, Poland and Venezuela. Her professional acting career began in Kingston, Jamaica working as Jennifer Grey’s body-double in the RKO Pictures‘ feature film RITUAL. This transformative experience on-set convinced her that she had found her calling.

Additional credits include NCIS: LOS ANGELES (CBS), CRIMINAL MINDS: BEYOND BORDERS (CBS), SECRET AND LIES (ABC), and BATTLESHIP (Universal). Among her hosting appearances are the second season of MTV’s hit series THE X-EFFECT, FOX‘s MY GAMES FEVER and E!‘s E! NEWS NOW.

In Other News…

Natalia has been seen in national and digital commercial campaigns for brands such as Chevrolet, AT&T, Verizon, Toyota, Chick-Fil-A, Bimbo Bakery Breads and McDonald’s. She has also lent her voice to myriad projects, most notably for spots with Marriott Bonvoy, Verizon, Gap, Evenity, Hallmark, and McDonald’s. She was the voice of the bilingual channel MTV Tr3s, voices trailers for Disney+ in English and Spanish, and is called on to dub many Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ shows and films.

Her voice acting credits include the zombies on AMC‘s critically acclaimed The Walking Dead franchise and the Emmy Award winning The Pitt on HBO Max. Natalia has also made her mark in the gaming world, lending her voice to the AAA games Starfield and Horizon Forbidden West, where she also performed the facial motion capture for the latter, just to name a few.

Natalia’s Personal Life

When Natalia is not acting, she enjoys cooking, hiking, and photography. Through it all, her rescue dog Chanse remains a cherished part of her story. She channeled her creative energy into creating Indigo Terra, a pottery brand.

That inspired the name for her most recent venture; the launch of her production company Indigo Terra Pictures; where the mission reaches beyond any one identity. Championing originality, cultural authenticity, and the kind of bold creativity that moves people to think, feel, and see the world differently.

Click here to learn more about Natalia!

Click here to learn about Indigo Terra Pictures!

Click here to follow Natalia on Instagram!