Unbreakable Mind & Body

44. Trust Paradox: When to Leap, When to Play Safe

• Tiana Gonzalez • Episode 44

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Trust—it's the foundation of our relationships, our decisions, and ultimately our growth. Fresh from a week at PowerMonkey Fitness Camp in Tennessee, this episode dives deep into what happens when we're forced to build trust quickly and under pressure.

Through the lens of VO2 Max testing, where I guide people through their physical limits while they wear masks and run on treadmills, we explore the fascinating moment when someone must decide to keep pushing or pull back. That split second where pain kicks in, breathing changes, and the body starts to resist—it's where the most profound lessons about trust emerge. 

Those who excel aren't necessarily the most athletic; they're the ones who understand when to surrender to the process and trust both themselves and the person guiding them.

This exploration of trust takes a personal turn as I share a traumatic childhood swimming experience that fundamentally altered my relationship with trust. 

Whether you're facing high-pressure situations, navigating difficult relationships, or simply trying to determine if you should add more weight to your next workout set, this episode offers insights on balancing risk versus reward. 

You'll discover why healing yourself might be the most powerful contribution you can make to healing the world, and why slowing down and creating space for rest might be the counterintuitive key to building unshakable self-trust.

Listen now, and if you find value in these conversations, please leave a review to help others discover tools for building their own unbreakable resilience.

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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 am your host, Tiana, and on this episode, we're going to talk about trust. Now I'm fresh off the plane, back from Tennessee, back from PowerMonkey Fitness Camp. I spent about a week in the woods with my chosen family, with my friends, learning from the best coaches in the world, facilitating metabolic tests to the campers who opted to do that and to enrich and enhance their experience at camp. And this theme of trust came up quite a lot for me the whole week. Now, camp is an interesting dichotomy because I have to establish trust in a matter of minutes with each person that I am going to test. Now, for the resting metabolic test, it's a little bit less involved because the person is laying in a chair, they can close their eyes, and we record the data. But for the VO2 Max test, it's a whole different ball game. And so this is where this theme kept coming up throughout the week of building rapport in minutes, establishing some trust foundation and communicating. And in some cases, for me, I probably do over-communicate, but I love to share knowledge and information in a useful way, in a way that's applicable to each person in which I'm about to test, right? So for me, it's not so much about the athleticism of the person or their level in whatever sport they're in, or how successful they've been in their career, or how many medals they have, if they're a high-level or high-performing athlete. It's about the person. And it's about connecting with them in a way where I know that the words I'm communicating and the information I'm sharing is resonating. And it's becoming an integral part of what this person is going to choose to do during the test. And then also afterwards, when they get the report, when they get the data, when they find out what their heart rate training zones are, when they learn what their VO2 max is, and then they apply that information in a useful way to continue to improve themselves, to become the next best version of themselves, to improve their odds of having a fabulous, long aging process and just being around here longer. You know, longevity is something that a lot of us take for granted. A lot of us don't, but a lot of us do take for granted. Now, I want to keep the theme really at the forefront of this conversation. And I've talked about trust quite a lot on this show, particularly learning how to trust yourself, learning how to listen to your intuition, trusting your gut. But when you're in a situation where you're at the mercy of someone else's decisions, when you're in a relationship with someone that you love, or when you're in a high pressure situation solo, and you have to make a decision and you have to think fast, you need to have trust in order to do that. The people who I have found have had the best experiences with the VO2 Max test are people who are highly self-aware and also recognize there's a point where they have to let go, where they have to somewhat submit to the parameters or the variables in which we're dealing with. Now, if it's a first-time tester and this person has never experienced what this stimulus is going to feel like, it's somewhat interesting because I can almost pinpoint. If I was to record each person on video, I could almost pinpoint the exact moment where I see the shift, where I see the pain is starting to kick in, where I hear the breath really change, maybe the running gait changes if they're doing their test on a treadmill, which I would say probably about 90 to 95% of people do their test on a treadmill or an assault runner, which is the self-propelled treadmill. Uh there's a there's just a moment in time during the test where I see the click. And as someone who's done this for a number of years now and who has trained hundreds, if not thousands, of people over the last several years in various sports and various disciplines and different modalities, you know when your client, athlete, or the person in front of you is plugged in, when they're on it. And for the people who aren't, they're still gonna get a great test result and a great collection of data, and they're gonna have this valuable information to use and apply in a way that's helpful for them. But if we think back to even when we're younger, I've talked about this on a previous episode as well. When you're in a learning environment, it's really important that you feel safe and that you feel comfortable in the environment in which you are learning. Otherwise, it makes it incredibly stressful and challenging. So for me as a fitness professional, when I have a client who is questioning left and right every single thing I say, or maybe second-guessing, or questioning my approach, it becomes very frustrating because at first it may feel like, well, this person has trust issues, they don't trust me. But perhaps maybe it's about self-trust. Maybe they don't trust themselves. And so that's where the nervousness kicks in, the anxiety shows up. There's this fear knocking on the door, and it's saying to them, Oh, ask the questions, make sure you know, cover all the bases. We don't want any holes, we don't want any opportunity for slip-ups. And what that can do is paralyze the person. Now, the VO2 Max test is really interesting to me because you have these variables, you have these different things at play, and we are intentionally pushing that threshold and forcing the person into a very uncomfortable situation. It's momentary, but it's still very uncomfortable, and it's high pressure. And for the coaches and teachers out there that are a little bit hands-on, like me, you're sweating also. Your heart is racing, also. You're watching every hair on this person's head and looking at every single aspect to make sure that they are okay or as okay as they can possibly be at that moment in time while still maintaining the pressure. And it's very troubling at times and also scary. I would correlate it to perhaps a parent watching their young child, maybe it's a toddler learning how to swim. And I've heard from lots of parents as well as from swim coaches that you know, sometimes they they will ask the parent not to get in the water with the baby. They they want them to just stay on the side of the pool because the parent is more nervous than the baby. And it's a similar sort of situation here because I know at some point this person who trusts me is gonna feel pain. And I have to keep reminding them that yes, that pain is a little bit necessary, and yes, it's almost over, and yes, you have to trust yourself, and yes, you have to keep going. This is intense. Now imagine taking all of these different things that I just rambled on for the last nine minutes and add that you're on this fast moving piece of equipment, you have a pack on your back and a mask on your face. That's the intensity of that particular test. And it's so freaking awesome. Every time I test someone when they're done, when we're measuring their recovery, which is about two and a half minutes long. So yeah, you get to this point, you feel like you're, ah, I'm gonna crash and burn, right? And then the test is over, you can't rip the mask off yet. So you're grasping for anything, most likely hyperventilating. Head is, you know, you're slouched over, most people catching their breath, and you can't take that mask off because we have to record your recovery for two and a half minutes. And there is another part where this person has to trust. So I thought about this a lot between each test at night and on my ride home, and I knew I wanted to talk about this on this episode because there were so many times where I had to ask myself, am I gonna keep pushing them or are we gonna peel it back right now? And I only have a few seconds to make that decision, and the person cannot communicate with me verbally. It's through body language, it's through listening cues, it's through their eyes that I have to make that decision. And that leads me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is risk versus reward. Now, when I was a kid, my first experience with learning how to swim was tragic. I was eight years old. We were on vacation in Puerto Rico. I had never been on an airplane before. So this was the first uh trip of many firsts. We went to Puerto Rico, flew there from one of the New York City airports. I can't remember which one, because I was just a kid and it wasn't important. And this was in a time when you could eat a full meal on an airplane. Those days are long gone now. And I remember being at the pool at this hotel. We we went, we flew into San Juan at night, and we stayed in the city of San Juan that night, and we were planning to drive out west to my abuela's house. She lived in a small town called Barceloneta, which is due west of San Juan on the island, about 35 minutes, maybe a 40-minute drive, depending on traffic. And so we were at the hotel, and it was the next morning. We went to the pool. I had never swam in a pool before. And when we went to the beach, I only went in kind of like up to my knees. And I asked my dad, you know, to take me swimming, and he didn't want to be bothered with me. So he just said, no, go ahead, jump in. You'll figure out how to swim. And so I think the water was probably about four feet deep. And I couldn't stand up without it covering my head, but I remember jumping in and completely panicking. I swallowed a ton of water. I kept like trying to get my head up to the surface. I was really struggling, and my dad just stood there, and I kept asking him for help, and he just stood there and I asked him again, and he just stood there, and it felt like an eternity for me. And I was so scared. I was really, really terrified in that moment. And then eventually he got really pissed off and came over to the edge of the water and like put his arm out. And I tried to get to him and I couldn't get to him. And I don't remember if he actually jumped in the pool or if I eventually just made my way over to his hand and then he yanked me out of the pool. I scraped the whole side of my body along the side of the pool. And I was really upset and shaken and crying. I was disciplined right there in that moment that I was the problem. That I should have known better. And if I didn't know how to swim, why did I jump in the water? So this was like the worst gaslighting I had ever experienced. Because my dad knew I couldn't swim because he never took me to swim lessons and never properly taught me how to doggy paddle. And then he encouraged me to jump in the pool. And then I was disciplined for, you know, creating a commotion at the at the pool. There was no lifeguard, and you know, making him look bad. And that was really one of the first times where, you know, the trust between my father and I started to crack. It's difficult for me to tell this story because the level of fear and the amount of confusion I experienced in that moment was beyond. I was so traumatized. I didn't want to ever go swimming ever again. It was really hard for me to overcome that fear, and I was not gently parented at all. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I was mocked, I was made fun of. I, you know, I'm sure a lot of families have interesting ways of dealing with things, and that's just how my family dealt with it. There was a lot of dark humor, a lot of like, you know, ripping on each other. And that's really where the first, you know, trust being broken experience in my life showed up. Now, of course, there have been thousands of others over the years. I'm 47 years old at the time of this recording. So between me being eight years old and now, there's been a lot of that. And obviously, we learn through experience, through uh misfortunes and through loss. And I learned that I couldn't trust my dad, which also then translated into me not feeling like I could trust myself because I was challenged to just go ahead and jump in the pool. And I questioned my intuition, which said, don't do it, because you don't know how to swim. You're just doing it to impress your dad, and he's not going to be impressed. But you did it anyway. And there's a lot of layers here, right? But I think that this goes back and is related, this goes back to a lot of things we've talked about on this show. And I think it's also relatable to a lot of you that are listening, because we've all found ourselves in these situations where the pressure was put on you, you knew what the truth was, your inner being gave you a sense, you felt fear, or you felt excitement, or you felt ready to go, you felt confidence, and then it didn't go that way. And so then you were left confused and torn and not sure what to do next because you thought you were doing the right thing. And that happens a lot of times when we're facing tough decisions, when we're driving, and you know, maybe you're going a little too fast and you're about to miss your exit. Do you cut over or do you just keep going because you don't want to do something that might be risky or too risky? And so maybe you just opt to miss the exit, get off at the next one, turn around, and come back. And it's in those moments where you're being tested. And it's in those moments where you have to learn how to trust your gut. But you're only gonna learn how to trust your gut through trial and error, through making mistakes. There's been many times where I've been testing someone in a VO2 Max test, and maybe I didn't make the best decision. We still got great data. We still got a really favorable outcome. We still got information that this person is going to use and is applicable to their desired goals, and it's helpful. But maybe we could have squeaked out a little bit more time on the treadmill, or maybe I pushed a little too far, you know, that person that probably went and threw up after the test, or that was, you know, shot for the rest of the day. It should knock you out for a little bit, but it shouldn't take you out completely. And so there's always gonna be that risk versus reward conversation, and you're not gonna get a hundred percent right all the time. It would be nice, but that's just not how life works. So when you're flirting with that comfort zone, sometimes you're gonna get a win. Sometimes you're gonna get a lesson. Now, thinking more about trust, it's in those moments where you're truly being tested. For example, if you're training and you're doing a movement that's challenging and the load is heavy, and you're given a rep range, six to eight, okay? How do you determine if you want to stay at the same weight? It was really challenging, but you completed all the reps. Let's say you got all eight reps. Well, how do you decide if you want to go up or not? If you're doing three sets, are you gonna go up or stay? If you're doing four sets, are you gonna go up and stay? Are you gonna go up each round? Or are you gonna build? And if you think you're at that top weight, but then you finish the set and you think, ah, this is a little too easy. I should probably add a little bit more for the next one. You're gonna do that for sets two, three, and four, the same new weight, or are you gonna increase each time? So you see how even in a simple instance where it's about a workout and a completing an exercise and choosing the proper weight, the right dose for yourself, it gets involved. It's not really black and white, it's not really cut and dry. I actually said this to a client today, lovely lady, but damn, she asks a lot of questions. And I finally said to her, you ask a lot of great questions, however, I will not answer in absolutes. Most of the time, it's going to depend. So the answer to that question depends on all the other variables in the workout. We were talking about weight selection actually actually on an exercise, and she said, Should I just do this? Should I start here next time? And I said, It depends. How sore are you? What'd you do the day before? How long is this workout? How many exercises? How many similar exercises or movements in the same pattern are you going to do like this? Is it two hands? Is it one hand? Are you going to do three sets or four sets? So you see how it's never just black and white. There's levels, there's layers. It's complex. Just like you and me. We're complex beings. So to think that you can always think in these rational sort of terms in this space is not fair to yourself. But if we loosen control, if we think about things being a little more flowy, maybe softening the edges, maybe allowing for some margin where maybe you mess up, maybe you make a mistake, maybe you knock it out of the park. It creates a little bit of an easier vibe, right? Now I didn't mean to make it all doom and gloom when I was talking about my failed first swimming attempt, but that is a very true, very real, and very traumatizing experience that I had as a kid. A couple of years later, we wound up having a minor accident on a boat. Again, my dad was at fault, and again, I was the one who got hurt. So I've had a lot of trauma around water and swimming, being out in open water, being in a deep pool. It's been a lot for me to overcome. And these are things I don't talk about often, but they're very true. So when you're weighing risk and reward, and there's a there's a pressure cooker going on, there's a clock running in your mind, how are you gonna make a decision for yourself? How will you decide what you're gonna do? Are you gonna jump in the water or are you gonna play it safe? And then if you do make a decision and you execute, take action, you move, and it's not the best outcome. Are you going to beat yourself up or are you gonna learn and just brush it off, try to recover and move on? There's no right or wrong answer here. It's really just about how you choose to operate, how you choose to move through life, how you choose to treat yourself if you make a misstep, if you turn left when you should have turned right. And remember, it's not always about the destination. In fact, most of the things we do, it's not at all about the destination. We are sold the dream that it's the destination, but it's about who you have to become in order to get there. It's about the habits you're gonna create, it's about the discipline you're cultivating, it's about the quality of life improvements that you'll be making. It's about bettering yourself to then better serve the world. You've heard me say it before, and I'm gonna say it again. The best thing you can do to heal the world is to heal yourself. Do that hard shit, stop avoiding it and slow down. I recently told someone I don't really deal well with chaotic energy. So when people are like, Well, I'm gonna go here and then I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna go here and then I'm gonna hear, and then I'm gonna stop here, and then I have to come back here. No. I'm gonna do one thing today, and then I'm gonna come home. And that's my day. I fucking hate those days where you have to go here and come home. You gotta go there and come home. You gotta go over there and come home. I also despise, we're going on a tangent. You know, I go on these tangents every episode. I despise really busy weekends. Let me tell you something. I bust my butt. I really do all week long. I love what I do, but it's a grind. And so on my days off, which by the way, it's very unusual for people in the fitness industry to have two full days off back to back. That is unheard of. But that is why the company that I work with is amazing. So on my days off, I do not like to have too many things to do. Before I left for camp, I did a little consulting work with the same company that I went to camp with. We did a pop-up event in New York City, and then I had an event in New York City that night. So I schlepped in the car down and back, and then again down and back. I didn't drive on either trip, but it was a lot of traffic and sitting and people and stimulus, and I was cranky the next day. I just don't do well when all of my time is being taken. I really enjoy and value my alone time with myself, where I get to work on this project, the podcast, where I'm working on some other things, where I can watch Netflix if I want, or just sleep, rest, rejuvenate, paint. By the way, the same empty canvas has been sitting on the easel for a couple of weeks now. I think I'm gonna get to it tonight. I really do. But back to trust, being in your comfort zone, being in a learning environment that feels safe and weighing risk versus reward, the more you practice, the better you'll become at it. The more you do, the more you're gonna learn about yourself, the more you take action and move your body, the more you will figure out and find out. And it's only for your betterment. So the next time you find yourself in a situation where perhaps you're learning or you're working with a coach or a trainer, I want you to ask yourself if you're really pushing as hard as you can, and if you're seen in this environment, and if you feel like you can trust this person. Because those are really important things for you to consider. It's not always what you get out of an experience, but it's what you're experiencing. So that's the how. And that's what's gonna differentiate good from great, or great from amazing, or amazing from fucking spectacular. Not everything is gonna be fucking spectacular, but if you could find that, your life will be so much richer. So thank you so much for being here, tuning in, and giving me a little bit of your time and attention today. I truly appreciate you being here. I love that you tune into the show. And if you would do me a huge favor and give the show a review and some stars, I would greatly appreciate it. You can do that on any platform that you are tuning in on. And as always, I'll see you next time.