Unbreakable Mind & Body

61. Find Your True Inner Voice

• Tiana Gonzalez • Episode 61

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0:00 | 15:28

What if the voice guiding your choices isn’t yours at all? We dive into the messy, liberating work of separating true self-talk from the scripts we inherited from family, culture, and perfectionism. 

I share how returning to pen and paper slowed my mind long enough to hear what mattered, and how a simple morning routine created space for clarity before the day got loud. 

From autonomy in relationships to recognizing when “self-sufficiency” is armor, we trace how to meet discomfort with curiosity instead of judgment. 

If this conversation sparks something, share it with a friend who’s rebuilding their inner trust. 

Send Tiana a text!

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Email: info@unbreakablemb.com

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Disclaimer: This show is for education and entertainment purposes only. This is not intended as a replacement for therapy. Please seek out the help of a professional to assist you with your specific situation.


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Unbreakable Mind and Body Podcast. I am your host, Tiana Gonzalez, a multi-passionate creative, storyteller, and entrepreneur with a fierce love for movement. This is our space for powerful stories and actionable strategies to help you build mental resilience and elevate your self-care practice. Together, we will unlock the tools that you need to create an unbreakable mind and body. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Tiana. This episode is all about your inner voice. About a week ago, I found myself inspired to grab my pen and notebook and start writing. This was early morning when I'm having my coffee. That I realized there's so much value in waking up earlier than I actually need to, so that I can have a nice steady rise and progression into my day before it gets hectic. Now, I write often, and since I've been doing the podcast, which is about 10 months now, I haven't been writing as much. It takes up time, obviously, and yes, it's so much easier and efficient to speak my words out instead of writing them down. But there is something very cathartic about pen to paper. And you've heard me mention this on previous episodes, I'm sure. What I'd like to do is share what I wrote. I'm going to read it verbatim, and then we're going to talk about it. The inner voice. Looking at it now, there's probably too much typed on this one pick for most people. So maybe I could unpack it further. Maybe someone else out there can relate. Maybe I need to sit with it further for me. Now that's the end of the piece. We're probably going on six years now. And he is somebody I used to see in person. Uh, however, he bought a house a little bit further away. And due to our schedules, we just can't seem to make it work to meet up in person. So it's an exclusively online relationship, and it has been one of the best things I ever did for myself. And I'll probably be with him for a very long time. I pay a monthly rate, and he writes all of my workouts, my cardio routines. He also handles my macro ratios. I share with him reports that I get when I do my blood work with my doctor, which I typically do three times a year. And we discuss how I'm feeling constantly. So we're in a season now where I'm maintaining my weight, maybe even trying to put on a little bit of muscle. And so I'm doing check-in photos with him on a weekly basis. And because of the holidays and where they landed in the week, I actually skipped a few weeks consecutively. So the last two weeks of December, I did not send any photos to him. So he was definitely due. And I don't have any shame or concern around showing my body on the internet. Uh, however, I also recognize that I want my message to be what stands out, not what I look like. So when I will share a photo of myself either in a bathing suit or in a, you know, form-flattering outfit where I'm showing my body, I tend to do that far less than I used to. Uh and recently with my check-in photos specifically, I may show a little teaser or put words over most of my body, or sometimes I'll make the photo blurry. So that so that's what I did here. I made this photograph blurry and I shared a bunch of different notes that I wrote literally right over the photo. And I posted it in my Instagram story. And I went back and looked at it a couple times and I said, you know, first of all, this is not easy to read. There's a lot of shit on here. Secondly, I basically just emotionally dumped. And I thought it would be a good teaching moment for my audience because I wanted to show that even I had my flaws, I had my insecurities. I still have them actually, not had, I have. Uh I do feel a lot of mixed feelings about a lot of things, just like we all do. And that yes, even though I am a coach and I have 30 years of experience, I have my moments as well. And so what I chose to do was to deconstruct that post further after I wrote this piece and I created a carousel just talking about all of these things a little bit more deeply and in depth. And I will say that the post got a lot of views, a lot of engagement, and that's not the only reason why I do what I do on social media, but it was a teaching moment and it definitely resonated with the right people because I did get messages and I had someone, maybe even two people, approach me in person that I see on a regular basis, and they said, Oh, you know, that post was really interesting because it showed that even at the level you've been at, you were a pro bodybuilder, uh, you've competed in various sports, you still have these mental and emotional little hurdles to overcome from time to time. And it is very true. And that's exactly why I chose to talk about it on the show here with you, because you can be so much further along than you once were in a journey. And even still, things that you thought were not an issue or a problem or a concern or a battle that you need to fight any longer, they may still bubble up. And the main message I want to give to you is don't beat yourself up about it. We're constantly in this, you know, process of becoming better, of reinventing ourselves. That's the word I was looking for, of leaving the old to the new. But I encourage you to slow down. I encourage you to take it all in. And even when you have these moments where you feel like, oh, I didn't think that was gonna bother me anymore. Well, guess what? Surprise. You know, I touch on this sometimes, uh, I have touched on it in my social media in the past, where, you know, I would recognize that sometimes we isolate ourselves or we remove ourselves from circumstances, places, people, and things in order to heal. And that's all well and good because I truly believe you cannot heal in the same environment that was tearing you down or ripping you apart. But if you never go back into it, or if you don't allow yourself to get close to people again, how do you know you're actually healed? How do you know what you still need to work on? So people who maybe experience a bad heartbreak and they end their relationship and they go into therapy, they take a sabbatical from dating, maybe they remove themselves from any and all dating apps. They stop going out, become a hermit. And you think to yourself, I'm great, I'm good, I feel amazing. Life's great. I don't need anybody, I don't want anybody. Nobody can compete with this beautiful life that I've built for myself. You know what's funny? I say this all the time to my partner because it's kind of true. I mean, I've done a great job up until we started dating of building a life that's fucking amazing and fabulous and doesn't conform to anybody's views and goes against the green. And, you know, I've quit my job so many times. I've reinvented myself, started a business, shut it down, started a new one, you know, all those iterations. And so through all of that, I've built a lot of mental resilience and grit. And I really like my life, I like my autonomy, I like to do for myself. There are certain things that I love the way I do what I do for me, and I enjoy it. And so it's been an interesting journey because sometimes he thinks that I'm just being tough or resistant to him or like I'm trying to be stubborn, and that's not the case. It's just I actually enjoy doing certain things for myself. But it wasn't until I put myself back out there that I started to notice, oh, you know what? I still have to work on some of these things because I thought these things were healed in me. They weren't. I was just not ever having to face them. And so that's a huge shift, right? You gotta put yourself back out there. You have to be willing to be vulnerable. You have to be able to face the critics or to subject yourself to some judgment because that's how you'll see what you still need to work on or what is still really bothering you. And it's not necessarily gonna go away, especially not the things that were ingrained in us from our early childhood years. But it's how we navigate them, it's how we respond to them, it's what we do with that information that allows us to decide what the next steps are gonna be. So when you think about your inner voice, just like the piece that I wrote, is it is it your voice truly, or is it something that you absorbed from family that you believe to be your own voice, but it's really not how you think and feel. And maybe you need to sit with that for a little while, maybe you need to contemplate that, maybe you need to start asking yourself some of these questions when you're alone. Now, I will say when you're constantly getting input, the podcasts, music, movies, Netflix, the radio, friends, social media, YouTube, TikTok, all of it is coming at you. You probably see thousands of uh pieces of data in a second, and your brain is processing it all. And the thing is, like it's when you do not have any distractions, the moments when you're in the shower, or maybe when you're washing dishes, for me, it's putting on my makeup, that the downloads come, and that's when you get the clarity, that's when you really start to understand. Oh shit, maybe this, maybe that. That literally happened to me today. I was washing the dishes and a thought came to me, and I said, Oh my god, this is really important. I never thought of it that way. And I had to call the person and say, Hey, I need to tell you this, it's really important. It just came down, you know, from up above or from inside my head. I got a download and I need to share it with you right now because it's super important. And it'll only take a minute. And I shared what I had to say, and the person was like, Wow, that's interesting, good insight. I'll think about it. And that was the end of the conversation. So when you find yourself feeling these things, maybe some shame, embarrassment, you're avoiding something. I want you to ask yourself, what the fuck is going on? What, why do I feel this way? And what can I do about it? And sometimes the only thing you can do is just acknowledge it and let it pass. So this episode is a shorter one. I thought it was a valuable thing for us to discuss. And I'd love to hear your thoughts, or if you want to share a story with me where you found yourself being very harsh and critical of yourself, and you were able to talk yourself off the ledge. Now, you can check the show notes to see how you can send me a text. You can also follow me on social media. My uh Instagram handle is down in the show notes. And I'm recently now on Substack, which is very cool. And I'm gonna talk about my motivation and what I'm looking to do in 2026 with my online presence in the next podcast episode. So please stay tuned for that. I appreciate you, your time and attention for this episode and always. This show would be nothing without you. I am eternally grateful that you choose to sit and have a virtual cup of coffee with me today, right now. I will see you on the next one.