Tish Squillaro, CEO and Founder of CANDOR Management Consulting and author of HeadTrash: Cleaning Out the Junk That Stands Between You and Success, is driven by a belief that solutions exist simply because we can create them. A lifelong problem solver and serial entrepreneur, Tish helps leaders identify the internal obstacles that prevent clear thinking, strong decisions, and consistent execution.

We explore Tish’s journey from founding the first-ever dog daycare business in 1997 to building a career in human capital consulting and leadership development. Along the way, she uncovered a recurring leadership challenge: people often know exactly what to do—but don’t do it. That insight led to HeadTrash and the Mental Headspace Framework, a practical system for understanding and managing the emotions that silently sabotage performance.

Tish explains how everyday emotions are not inherently negative, but become destructive when they cross the line and begin to manage us. She walks through the **seven HeadTrash emotions—control, insecurity, arrogance, paranoia, anger, fear, and guilt—**and shows how leaders can recognize when emotions cloud judgment, stall decisions, and create chaos inside organizations. The episode also explores how HeadTrash shows up in entrepreneurs as shiny-object syndrome and non-listening, and how leaders can manage emotional reactions in themselves and others without suppressing or “fixing” them.

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Learn to Manage Your Headtrash with Tish Squillaro

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group. And here I am today with Tish Squillaro, the CEO and Founder of CANDOR Management Consulting, and the author of HeadTrash: Cleaning Out the Junk That Stands Between You and Success. Tish, welcome to the show. 

Thank you, Steve. I’m excited to be here.

Well, I’m glad you are here, and I’m also curious about all the head trash I have coming into this conversation, and hopefully you can help me clear it out a little bit. 

I will do my best.

Okay. That’s great. So before we get into that, let’s start with my question that I’m always asking every guest: What is your personal ‘Why’, and what are you doing to manifest it in your business and in your practice?

My personal “why” is because I can—

I love problem solving. I've always found myself interested in not having “no” be the final answer, or someone can't, or it's too difficult.
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So for me, I do it because I know we can, and that’s what drives me every day to start things new. I’ve had multiple businesses besides CANDOR. I’ve always tried to bring on solutions to problems. So that’s my ‘Why’. 

That’s good. I mean, as Henry Ford famously said, “If you believe you can, or if you believe you can’t, you’re right either way,” and you’re in the latter category, which is great. So tell me about your journey. How did you get to the point where you were writing books about Head Trash and being a management consultant and a coach? What led you to this point in your life? 

Sure. I wish I could say it was a clear journey.

I’m not as organized, and had a plan, but everything I did was based on what I enjoyed and had passion for—and I think that itself was the journey.
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Many years ago, when I graduated from college, my first business out of school was a dog daycare and boarding called Doggy World Daycare, and there wasn’t, and that’s why I created it. There was no place for me to leave my beagle, and I wasn’t about to leave the beagle all day without some less guilt. And I found a couple of people who got involved, had a business partner, and we started in 1997—the first dog daycare on boarding ever. Today, daycares are all over. As a matter of fact, I just had my dogs groomed in a cute doggy spa. I mean, so quite honestly, from 1997 to now, we have greatly evolved, but before ’97, we had nothing. Yes. So I guess I’m one of those change agents from early on. I see something that doesn’t exist, and I don’t even stop to think how hard should I, I just do it. Now, I’m not saying that’s for everybody, but that’s my mantra.

So from that business, I started to enjoy working for myself. I enjoyed the entrepreneurial energy, the fear, the unknown — I loved it all, and I just stayed with that.
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So when we sold that business, because it had kind of outgrown us, my business partner and I — our lives changed. And that business no longer fit for both of us. And neither one of us was going to run it without the other. So I went into consulting. I started out in HR. Human capital was my dog transition to humans. I went into HR, which, you know, I liked very much. But

I found a very solid niche in HR, which was people dynamics — people growth, insightfulness on people collaborating, engaging, communicating.
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So in 2000, I launched CANDOR, which is the business that’s focused on individuals, companies, and their people. So I don’t pick up poopy every day, but I certainly get involved with making messes go away, for sure. 

That’s interesting. And as you described that you came up with this doggy daycare idea because you had a need and you saw there was no solution for it.This is one of the best way to actually create a business because you really know the customer because the customer is you. So you know the problems and you know what would work as a solution. So that is fascinating. So you became an HR consultant and HR entrepreneur. Then you wrote a book in 2013, which is HeadTrash, and then you had a follow-up book, also called HeadTrash 2.So tell me about this HeadTrash idea and how you stumbled upon it. 

So I had been working for quite some time already with individuals, and the tough growing pains of self-awareness—making sure you do your job well, asking, Is this the right job for me? And I was on a project with another consultant, so I co-authored both these books. And there was this constant hesitation of a leader doing the right thing. They know what to do. We talked about it. We scripted it out. We created the environment so that the message that he was going to deliver would be perfect for the business. And at the last hour, he hesitated and didn’t do it. And I looked over at the coach that I was working with, so we were working together. He came in from one angle. I came in from another to help this one company. I said, “What’s up? Why is this guy struggling?” He said, “It’s his head trash.” I said, “Well, what’s that?” He goes, you know all that junk that sits inside your head that you can’t get out of your own way? I said, “Oh my God, I love that.

We should write a book about that. I bet other people have this. And so that was the birth of me becoming an author, I had no idea what that meant. Similar to opening up a dog business—if I thought about it, I probably would’ve talked myself out of it, because writing a book isn’t easy. You have to have a passion for it. There’s a lot of time that goes into it, and then you have to launch it. So we did it.

We wrote the first book, which was identifying your head trash, and those are everyday emotions.
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So what we started to realize, and I knew with that client in particular, there are these emotions that get you stuck, and he had fear. He was too worried to be wrong, so we did nothing. And that was a problem. So HeadTrash is a compiled list of everyday emotions. There are seven: control, insecurity, arrogance, paranoia, anger, fear, and guilt. And if you hear these words, they’re very common emotions. I can have them all in one day. Even driving here in Miami, I probably have all of them in an hour because all these emotions rise up.

But not every emotion impacts you to not do what you need to do. And so what I realized is out of the seven, every time we looked at a person’s challenge, one of these emotions sat right in the center. And so we created this index called the HeadTrash Index to help people identify which one of these emotions am I really working up against? Because once you know it, you can manage it. It’s when you don’t know it, you make up excuses why it’s not you — it’s something else — and that keeps you from doing the right thing. So HeadTrash came to birth out of everyday situations that we saw leaders going through, and when we peeled back the onion to help them problem solve, and you need to know what the root cause is, it was one of these emotions.

And so that was really the first book. The second book was a couple years later, because as we worked with launching and doing a lot of PR with the book, I kept getting the same question. Well, what if someone else has it? How do you deal with someone else’s head trash? So that’s what the second book is written about. It’s taking head trash as you now are engaging with living with, or someone you have to kind of work with that has these one of these seven. And the first one is very business focused. So my stories that I talk about are real business situations. The second one is actually life situations, so a lot more people might resonate, because I talk about my background. I’m a Catholic, I’m Italian, and I have guilt as a neighbor. I mean, it sits at every table we go to, right? So there’s things that, as a personal side of us, these emotions impact us differently. So that’s the two books. And they do very well for both an individual or companies that are trying to figure out why is my team not making decisions? Because all head trash identifies is why decisions are not getting made. 

Okay. So this is fascinating. So you say there are seven of these emotions, which maybe we want to call them negative emotions, or I don’t want to label them because emotions are there for a reason. I wonder that, do we want to suppress these emotions or do we want to help them run their course? What are we trying to do? Are they negative in themselves or just in that situation? And how do we know that it’s not a valid signal from our nervous system that we should be aware, or be cautious, or do something different?

You know, Steve, it’s a great question, and to answer your first thought, we never want you to suppress emotions, that’s not healthy. And these emotions when not becoming trash are actually everyday lovely emotions. We should have a little control in our life. We’re all going to be a little insecure, that makes us want to get better, right? We’re not perfect. We all have fear, otherwise we’re reckless. So every one of the seven are certainly not negative until we make them negative, until we allow them to make decisions for us. Cloud our judgment, misalign our priorities. So then I call it the crossing the line. So when some emotion, ‘fear’, is with us, it keeps us on our toes and it makes sure we’re not reckless.

But when it crosses the line to head trash, it stifles you and has you not make moves, you stay still. That’s not going to help you. So how does that then translate into what do you do? Well,

I'd like to think about how to manage the emotion. So let's have it and it's going to come. So we can't suppress it.
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It’s human. But when you have one, for example, fear, I always say, well, think about it more as being cautious. So how I manage fear is I don’t let myself get caught up in this big thing I’m afraid of doing or saying or committing to. I look at it as small bite-sized movements. Everybody can take baby steps.So when you’re cautious, you take each step, but you’re still moving. So I go from a stop sign, which is what a head trash fear looks like to a caution flashing sign, whereas you are managing it so that it doesn’t manage you. And every one of these seven, I have the same methods that you can think about.How do I manage it before it manages me? But I don’t want anyone to suppress it, and they’re not negative until we make them negative. 

Yeah, that’s very interesting. I like this idea of managing, because sometimes you get stuck and if you can take a few small steps, then you get unstuck and then maybe you are more rational about the situation, you’re not overreacting. Maybe an emotion is an overreaction, and then you can get back to the balance and have a more reasonable assessment of it. That’s fascinating. So what are these different emotion? I mean, you mentioned some of them, but how do you manage these emotions? Are they all the same? So let’s say fear or insecurity, are they all managed the same way, or you need to do different things for each?  

Well, I would say first you want to identify, right? I do think these emotions are so casual. We have them all. So I can’t imagine there’s one person out there that has never felt one of these emotions. The key is to identify which ones catch us off guard, and really cause us the challenges or become our head trash. Once we identify it, then we have to figure out what to do with it, because it’s not leaving, and it is going to cloud our judgment. And that’s the managing part. So each one has their own route to manage. So on fear, I try to give people baby steps to gain confidence. A clear head and everyone can manage things small.

Not everyone can manage things really big, so we could probably get through the process. It’s like me and skiing. I learned very late. I look down at that mountain and I’m frightened every time, but I take little baby steps and I get down each mountain and as I go down and I look back up, I realize, wow, look what I’ve done. But if I looked up and all the way to the bottom and didn’t take baby steps and think, how am I going to get from there to there, I probably would stay frozen at the top. So it’s kind of in that same way. Another example is insecurity. Insecurity is something most of us live through. We always question, can I, should I? And insecurity is that negative voice that tells you’re not good enough. No, you shouldn’t do that. Are you sure you know what you’re doing? And I do think we all have that at some moment. I have it. When I meet a new client, can I help them? I always ask myself that.

And then the other side of me says, of course you can, because insecurity isn’t one of mine. But if it were, I would talk myself out of it. So how do you get through that? One is, first of all,

look at what you are comfortable doing and think about the things you're good at, not always the things you're not good at.
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And I always tell people, take out a piece of paper and write two lists. Here’s what I do well and why. Here’s what I don’t do well, and let’s focus on the well stuff.  Because if you pay attention to the positive things, your voice in your head starts to use positive words. And so that’s one example of managing say insecurity, is to be able to really be able to really have you not beat yourself up, but pick yourself up. Because what insecurity means is you don’t have self-confidence. So I have to work ways for people to get confident. In these little baby steps in the book breaks down each head trash by chapter and each one by how to identify. It gives you little basic tools to use, gives you quizzes to take, so you really get familiar with owning how to manage it.

And the last one I’ll give you an example of is anger, which is my number one. And anger doesn’t mean I’m mean and nasty. That’s not what anger means. Anger means we react. Someone who reacts to no. Or something that happened they didn’t like, and their immediate reaction to whatever discomfort they have is not nice, that’s anger. Where you kind of react and you don’t give yourself a chance to think it through and then respond. And so for me, I created something called the invisible zipper, which is zipping my mouth real fast. Because I could feel when anger is coming, especially with my 22 and 21-year-old, I could feel it from my pit stomach, ready to rise and out my mouth will say stuff that I can’t take back. But when I do this, because I have to be action oriented. Usually, people who react, use your action oriented, use their hands, show their emotions. They need to do something because they’re about to implode. So the “do something” for me is I zipper up, and that motion reminds me why I’m doing it. Okay. Don’t say it, Tish. This is not a good time. Those are not the good word. I wouldn’t be using those words. So I then talk myself out of reacting in that moment, because time will be a better friend to someone with anger than wasting time. 

Yeah. My mother always used to tell me to count to 10 before you say something out of anger.  

Yeah. And look, it’s true. My mother would say, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. So someone angry is allowed to be disappointed, upset, not happy. I’m not recommending you look past all that. What I am recommending is how are you going to say you’re angry, upset, or disappointed? That’s what’s going to impact the situation. 

Yeah, that’s great. I remember these stories I read about Lincoln, how he controlled his anger. I forget the names of the participants, but there were some generals who didn’t cross the Potomac and didn’t chase the Southern troops. They could have annihilated them and kind of ended the Civil War two years early. But he didn’t do it. He stopped at the river, and then the troops could recover. Those troops could recover, and it dragged out the war. And he basically, instead of reacting with anger, wrote a letter but didn’t send it, and decided it was a better idea not to alienate that general and to use some other approaches.

So that’s fascinating. Now, Tish I’d like to switch gears here and ask you about the opposite. I agree with you that when you have an emotion that holds you back, you want to really get out of this lizard brain so that you can more objectively judge the situation. However, the opposite thing is also happening with entrepreneurs, which is the shiny object syndrome. They get so excited about something they shouldn’t be excited about, or they should take a breath and create some distance between that thing and what they’re doing. What that causes, sometimes for entrepreneurs and business owners, they overwhelm themselves and then they create all sorts of chaos around them with their staff, because it becomes stop-and-go. They can’t sustain the effort, and then they lose momentum that way, or they essentially get themselves into a negative cash flow situation. So what is your thinking on that, and is your approach also able to handle this kind of overreaction rather than holding yourself back? 

Yeah. I would align the entrepreneur — which I am one, and I’m a culprit of this at times — with arrogance, because we’re not listening. So the one thing I’d always say to entrepreneurs, are you listening to what your people need, what your business is saying, what the market is saying? Because a lot of times we just run on our own theories, our own thoughts, our own energy. And you kind of need that as an entrepreneur. Being one myself, if I listened to everything everyone said, I may not have done half the things I’ve done. But I still listened, because it made me smarter and probably better prepared. I didn’t always take their advice. So

what I always say to entrepreneurs is: make sure you’re listening. Because if your company is struggling and you're not paying attention to that, then you're not listening.
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If the market is saying your product is not on demand, you may think it is, but it’s not, then you’re not listening. So I do think arrogance is one of those emotions that are shown in a couple of different ways. You could be arrogant, which is cocky, know-it all. And you know what? The good side of arrogance, the healthy side, is that you do have confidence and you stand up for yourself. You’re able to kind of really know the right thing or the right set of data, right? You do know it, so be confident about it. When you become a non-listener and you’re the only voice that’s heard, that’s that crossing the line we talked about. So with entrepreneurs in particular, they’re so sure this is going to be a home run that they stop listening — and that’s a form of arrogance.

Yeah. But also, some people say it’s also insecurity in disguise. 

It could be. I mean, a lot of these are what I call combinations. I call them a healthy cocktail, because there are two that often work together. So insecurity and arrogance can work together, because people are hiding behind a mask. There’s also control and arrogance — that can be a combo. These emotions sometimes overlap, which is why you really have to identify the root cause, which is why I created this index called the HeadTrash Index, because some of them look alike. And if you’re going to try to cure or manage arrogance, it’s going to be different from how you’d manage insecurity, right? So I want to make sure you work on the root cause of what’s driving it. There’s always one. Now, one may feed into having a combo, but there’s still the root cause. So the one with the insecurity root cause can be displayed as arrogance as one of the things they do, but it’s not an arrogant thing that they’re struggling. They need to build self-confidence in who they are. Then they’ll be able to shed the arrogant approach. 

Yeah, that is so true. But that’s a longer-term process to build up. 

Well, knowing what it is the key. I do say people should spend the time to get to know who they are. And I think people feel that’s a waste of time because they think, I know who I am. I see myself in the mirror. I know what I do. But the truth is, do we? And the only way you really get to know yourself is you start to look at how you impact others. How you impact situations you’re in.

You’ve got to be humble enough to step out of your body and watch what you do and how you do it, and then look at how that impacts. Because then you’ll start to navigate whether or not you really know yourself.
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That’s great. So what about when you are trying to fix the head trash of other people? Is this a different process? 

Well, it’s not necessarily fixing it. Again, we’re not going to have these emotions disappear, but when you identify them, you then can counteract and work with that situation. So if you know someone’s insecure, you don’t go in and poke and criticize everything they do. Perhaps, you go in and start to highlight that things that they do well, and tell them they don’t have to be great at everything, but you got these things you’re really good at. No one’s going to be great at everything, so you start having positive conversations with them. So yes, there’s a way to help manage with another person you’re sensing or identify they have it, but you’re not fixing.  

Yeah, you’re right. That was the wrong word I used. Yeah. So basically, there’s a process to manage that. Can you give an example? Let’s say someone is angry and they overreact to something. How do you manage that? How do you calm them down?  

Well, if someone has anger and I already know it, I would probably start off with, Don’t get upset. I’m going to tell you something. Let me finish it all the way through, because I have it all spelled out. Or we may not be able to do this, but I have another solution. Let’s talk about options. People who get upset, like me, who get an anger reaction, I don’t like when my options are done. I say when they’re done. I think there’s always a way, which is why my ‘Why’ is, if I see a problem, I try to create the solution unless we do a talking through it, right? So I do think someone with anger, you don’t get them to react, but you get them to converse and have a discussion. That would be the goal with them. 

Also, if they’re so upset about something and you’re coaching them, or a friend because you see they’re going to do something that’s going to be a problem, tell them write it down and then go read it one more day later and tell me if you still want to do that. Write down what you want to do. Journal the thing that’s bothering you. Before you send that email, write it out, minimize it, go back to it in a couple hours. I guarantee you over time your emotions settle. You’ll be able to read or think through a better plan. And so that would be the two ways I would look at someone with anger.

Yeah. I wish I did that in my early thirties. I sent some emails too early.  

Oh, we’ve all done it. We’ve all done it, Steve. When I was young, growing up in the dog business, it’s funny — we got dog-like names. I was called the pit bull. Now, that is not attractive dog language. I’ve had to learn not to be the pit bull. 

Sometimes it helps. I was called the pit bull as well. I was working with a capital markets team. I was still in Central Europe, in Hungary, and I was talking to the London traders. I was working on a bond issue, and they just wanted to blow me off because my idea was too small for them to spend time.  And I was just very persistent, and I overheard them saying, “Ah, this guy’s a pit bull.” But eventually they helped me, and the deal closed. So it worked out in the end. That’s awesome. So if someone would like to learn more about their head trash and they want to do this assessment that you mentioned, where should they go and how can they do it? And then also how can they contact you directly? 

Well, my website probably is the simplest and no one’s intruded. I don’t come after anyone that goes on my website. So if you want to safely navigate and learn about me, my website has everything from the HeadTrash Index, you’ll find it there to go take. There is my background and podcasts like this that I’ve done. A little history on the different client situations I’ve worked in. Testimonials about leaders that have worked with me. I do think step one, hit my website, it’s https://candor-consulting.com. Easy to find. I would say second is, I’m always open to talk to folks, so if you want to email me, I would love to hear from you, it’s tish@candor-consulting. And if it’s an emergency, look, I’m even open to have my phone out there, so you can find that as 610-613-4864. 

I believe the work we do is so critical in the moment. Sometimes you can save someone from making a big mistake just by giving them a rational place to talk through. And so I would say that the HeadTrash Index is simple. It’s about 25 or 26 multiple choice questions. You’ll get it immediately once it’s completed, your results, which tell you which of the top one you have with a little bit of a summary of what you might want to do with that. And again, when you get that, if you wanted to ask me questions, you can certainly email me. No one will solicit anyone, so don’t feel that you’re going to be inundated by thousands of emails or marketing. I really put it out there. There’s no cost, it’s very simple, very revealing, and typically accurate.

That’s fantastic. I’m going to do it myself when we hang up. Tish, thank you for coming and sharing your HeadTrash management framework. I think we called it ‘The mental Headspace Framework’. So you first have to identify your head trash, how it impacts you, and then manage the seven emotions. And I’m sure there’s more information on CANDOR Consulting that people can check out. So thanks for coming, and if you enjoyed listening to the show, make sure you subscribe and follow us on YouTube, on LinkedIn. And stay tuned because every week I bring a fascinating thought leader or entrepreneur on the show. So thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

Important Links:

• Tish’s LinkedIn
• Tish’s website
• Tish’s email: [email protected]