Unbreakable Mind & Body

46. Do less to get further

• Tiana Gonzalez • Episode 46

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Tired of telling yourself you’ll “figure it out” while your to-do list grows louder than your own thoughts? I’m sharing a different playbook: do less, move slower on purpose, and buy back your time so progress stops depending on willpower. 

From corporate conditioning to solopreneur burnout, I walk through the hard truth I learned the slow way—your system is only as strong as your ability to delegate, simplify, and trust yourself to act before you feel ready.

We dig into the cost of constant notifications and the myth that more information equals better outcomes. 

Whether you’re an entrepreneur juggling every role or a professional swimming in process and meetings, this conversation offers a calmer path to results—less hustle, more intention, and a clearer line between what only you can do and what should be handed off. If this resonates, subscribe, share it with someone who needs relief from “do more” culture, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

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Website: unbreakablemb.com

Email: info@unbreakablemb.com

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, I am going to encourage you to invest in yourself. That's right. I am so frustrated hearing people say, I'm just trying to figure that out. You are wasting time, my friend. And the thing about it is, is that life is impermanent. Everything is fluid, and you gotta just let things flow. They ebb and flow in and out. Life is a living and breathing thing. It is not stagnant, it is not square, it is not finite. So in this day and age that we are living in, we are in information overlord. We are constantly being dumped on with advertisements, with marketing, with sales, with emails, with notifications, with text messages, we're even getting phone calls about purchasing things or donating to things. How do you have time for yourself if you're constantly being slammed over the head with all of these notifications? Then kids are busier than ever. They have more activities, they have more hobbies, the schools are getting parents more involved. And so we are living in a generation or in a time where in our culture everyone is busier than ever. And I am here to challenge that, and I am here to tell you to please slow down. I'm here to tell you that you don't need to do more and you don't need to be more. Now listen, I'll never tell you to be less, because fuck that. If you want to be more, be more, but let's take the pressure, the unnecessary pressure off of ourselves because you are enough just as you are, just the way you are right now, with all of the tools that you have at your disposal, all of the knowledge, all of the information, your skill set, your unique touch, and the way that you do what you do. That is enough. Okay? Let's take a deep breath in. I want you to breathe in through your nose and hold it. And exhale. Let it out, let it out, let it out, let it out, let it out. Doesn't that feel good? I have intentionally focused for the last, I would say about 15 years, slowing the fuck down. Literally slowing down. So much so that I don't care if I take pauses when I speak, if I drive in the slow lane on the road. Not always. I mean, I am a New Yorker and I do have a little bit of a speed demon inside me from time to time. But generally speaking, I try to keep it chill and I take my fucking time. If I need to be somewhere early, guess what I do? I wake up extra early because mama's not rushing. Okay. We have our coffee ritual. Sometimes we journal. Sometimes we listen to a Spanish podcast because we are doing comprehensible input every day. Sometimes we just sit with our thoughts and we put our supplements in the little supplement holder that we take with us throughout the day with all of our vitamins and nutrients. We pack the lunch, we take our sweet fucking time because that is how we want to begin the day. Maybe that doesn't work for you. That's okay. But I'm here to encourage you to find ways to improve the quality of your life and to let go of this feeling that you need to figure everything out. No, you do not. Instead of beating yourself up because you know you're capable of figuring out that workout plan or figuring out what kind of foods to eat or figuring out what recipes you want to make this week. And guess what? It's already Monday and you haven't even gone food shopping. So how's that working for you? Okay. Instead of doing all of that, what if you found ways to save you a little bit of time? What if you found people in your immediate network? Or what if you had things at your fingertips that could help you solve the problem that you're facing or overcome the challenge or maybe give you back your time. See, when I was working in corporate America, I was brainwashed into believing that in order to make a healthy income, in order to make a living, now I live in the Northeast. We all know it's a very expensive area to live in. And what works here is probably a lot more of a demanding career or job and income level than in other parts of the country and certainly in other parts of the world. However, we're here, okay? I'm here, and I have uh understood this assignment for a long time. If I want to just have a somewhat simple, humble life, I still need to knock it out of the park. I still need to be making six figures, and I need to keep my shit tight and on lock and budget and not go crazy shopping and spending. I would rather work more, earn more, generate more to live comfortably than downsize my life or scale the back on the things that make me happy. There was a period of time when I transitioned from making six figures in corporate America to owning a personal training business online and working at various gyms and boutique studios. And I did need to make some compromises, which included moving in with a roommate, uh, sharing common space, uh, making my life more simple as far as the things I was spending on food, cutting back on going out to eat, cutting back on the uh lavish coffee drinks and the frequency in which I participated in those things. And I did that for a number of years and it worked for me. But going back to the income thing, so you know, I've always known you have to work hard to move up the ladder, to make more money, to get new responsibilities, to work hard, to move up the ladder, to get a promotion, to get new responsibilities. And you know what? It never ends. And so I had this thought process that in order to maybe be a six-figure uh entrepreneur or even a seven-figure entrepreneur, which I hope and pray one day that I get to, I have to do more. But guess what happens? When you're a sole proprietor or a solopreneur and you are doing all of the things in your business, you become the bottleneck. Or actually, let's let's keep it real. I'm talking about me. I became the bottleneck. So I had this fabulous online business that I quit a very comfortable six-figure income salary job to pursue. And then I became entrepreneur broke. And entrepreneur broke is very different from salary broke because when you're on a salary and you work for a corporation, you know that at least there's another paycheck coming. Maybe it's this Friday or it's next Friday. When you're entrepreneur broke, you're broke. You're maxing out your credit cards, you're selling things on various websites, you're selling things on Facebook Marketplace or eBay or pawning, or you're trying to get real gritty, grimy, and creative and come up with a digital offer that you could just slap up online and hopefully get some bites and make a quick, fast cash injection. And I realized this is not the way. I cannot possibly be doing all of the functions. I was getting so caught up in content creation and being on social media, working to grow my following, to get more engagement, to get conversations going in the DMs, to then pitch an offer or to get people uh booked on a discovery call. I also was doing all the lead generation, all of the marketing, all of the invoicing, the contract negotiations, the client management, keeping the clients happy, and then also the work within my business. So it was a lot of things juggling and very overwhelming and stressful, and I was doing it all myself. And it was kind of at this point where I didn't think I was truly earning enough on a consistent basis to outsource anything, but I also knew that I needed to either outsource something, get a business partner, figure out another way, or shut it down because I was getting burnt out. And the thing of it is, I probably should have hired someone way before I wound up retaining a business partner. And yes, did I give up some of my hard-earned money? I did, but in exchange, I got a beautifully laid-out website and app. It was customized, it made communication with my clients so much easier. It handled a lot of the client management things in the operation, such as keeping track of my leads, keeping track of clients, the contracts, their invoices, the billing, and of course the actual meat and potatoes of the work we were doing together, the execution of the program, and a place where we could house all of the client updates, photos, and messages and communicate with each other. So, yeah, I gave up a pretty decent portion of the income I was generating in exchange for that, and I felt it was well worth it. But I also still felt like there's gotta be another way. I would see very successful online trainers killing it financially, and I wasn't even close to that. I also suffered tremendously from imposter syndrome because I felt like I didn't understand how some of these other people were so successful, and I knew they were killing it financially because they were working on the same platform, but with perhaps a different business partner. So my business partner was a business partner to me as well as a team of other trainers, and each of us had our own style, flavor, uh, and branding, but the actual functionality of our apps and our platform was pretty similar. And so, yeah, I did know their numbers. It wasn't like I was just imagining this, I was comparing myself. I remember I went out to dinner with a very successful investor, and he was asking me like about my business, and he's like, wow, that's so great. You must be killing it. And I kind of just looked at him and was like, Yeah, it's also really stressful and very fucking scary because if a couple clients decide they don't want to continue, I'm out, you know, and I lose out on that, and I have to keep the pipeline going, and I've got to refill that spot, and I've got to keep my foot on the gas at all times. And I'm sure some of you know when you feel like you have to constantly keep your foot on the gas, and if you let up at all, your whole body goes into shock and everything just crumbles to the ground. That is a weak system, that is a weak infrastructure, and it needs some help and support. But you've got to be willing to get out of your own way. And so I say all of this about my online business because I hear it almost daily with some of my clients, my friends, and my close network where people will say, I just need to figure this out. But they've been trying to figure something out in their life for weeks, if not months. And the truth of the matter is there's no amount of information that's gonna help you cross that line. There's no amount of learning or courses you can enroll in or reading you can do, or YouTube videos you can watch that's gonna actually be integrated into your life, into your current situation, and then accelerate you towards the goal you want to get to. That's not how it's gonna get done. And doing more isn't also not the answer. In fact, I'd say, how do you do less to reach the goal? Now, for some people listening, I know you're an entrepreneur, you're a small business owner, you get it. You also understand that this is really scary. For some of my folks that are listening that are working in nine-to-fives or they work for a large corporation, or you know, they're not necessarily the one making all of the decisions. How can you do less? Well, you can find ways, perhaps, and this is work-related, you can find ways to delegate some of the tasks that are maybe really time-consuming that you're not that great at. Why do you need to learn every detail of every process when you could hire someone who can do it faster and better than you and give you your time back? So I think you know where this is going because I work in fitness and I help people overcome their fears, get out of their own way, and move some of their shit off their plate onto mine so that I can help them get to the finish line or at least move in the right direction. And I understand some people really love to learn, they want to know the details for their own edification, they want to understand all of the processes. And I'm here to give you a gentle nudge and to tell you no, you don't, you don't need to know every step, you have to trust the process. But the folks who question every which way you do something in every turn, they don't trust themselves yet. And the only way you're gonna trust yourself is to actually do the thing first and then you build the confidence. You don't get the confidence and then do the thing. That is not how it works. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a dear friend of mine who was toggling back and forth on making a very big life-changing decision for years, and I kept telling him there's no guarantees, but your life or your quality of your life will improve if you do X, Y, and Z. And I can guarantee you, you'll be happier, things will look better for you, but there's no guarantee what that will consist of or how your life will look. You just have to trust it, and that's very scary for people who are not accustomed to taking risks. People who invest or people who gamble, they only do things a certain way, and when you're nudging them to take on a new perspective or try it differently, it becomes very uncomfortable. Now, I said gamble, and perhaps that's not the right word, but even people who gamble, they they have enough experience within the realm in which they're playing, whatever game it is, or if it's an event, where they're pretty good, they've got a skill set, they've seen the trends, they know how to predict, it's still risky. And here's the thing if you do nothing, that's also risky. If you've listened to this show before, you have heard me say this time and time and time again. When you are choosing to do nothing, you are actually choosing to go backwards because life is continuously evolving, life is continuously moving forward, and even the state of the state is a progressive sort of energy. There's things evolving and changing, and even just to stay up to speed with the status quo, you actually need to be willing to change and adjust and flow a little bit. So if you're somebody who's suffering, if you're someone who's suffering from analysis paralysis, if you feel like you don't know which way to turn because you have so much information spinning in your head, my suggestion would be to brain dump, grab pen and paper, and just let it all out onto a piece of paper. Oftentimes, that simple exercise helps clear some space for you. Something else you could do is quiet the noise. I had an Apple Watch for years and I loved it. And I wore it consistently for about four years. And in the spring of 2024, I realized that I was very bad habit. It was like so unhealthy, where I was constantly checking my Apple Watch to look at notifications. Even if my phone was on do not disturb, if I saw, let's say, the message number increase, I would immediately go and check it. So I thought to myself, well, what's the point of me having my phone on do not disturb if I'm always checking it? So I did away with the Apple Watch, and it really helped me gain some clarity and establish more peace in my day-to-day and in my life. And if you're somebody who loves to learn, that is a beautiful thing. But I want you to ask yourself, do you really have time for that? Yeah, it'd be nice to be a student of life and to be a student forever. But if you are feeling stuck and your doctor is telling you, well, you need to do this in order to avoid getting on medication and you have a follow-up appointment in three months, we got to light the fire under your ass a little bit because you only have three months. You do not have time to figure out how to do something. You just need to do it. So you need to relinquish that control. You need to get somebody who can do that the work for you and just give you the plan to follow and coach you through it, tell you what to do, and give you the cues and the tips and the pointers so that it becomes an integral part of your life. But you still don't necessarily need to know every detail on all the ins and outs. So today, I challenge you. At some point today, I'm challenging you. I want you to sit down, do a brain dump, get it all onto that piece of paper, all the things running around in your head, all the things you want to do, no judgment, get it down, get it out, and then start to look for some trends. Are some of these things overlapping? And then are some of these things things you can outsource or things you can hire an expert for? Now, I don't want to assume that you have a huge budget to do that, and I don't want to assume that you don't have a budget to do that. But if money was no object, just what if would you still be doing all of the busy things that you're doing? We can from time to time have our groceries delivered, we can from time to time drop off our laundry, and maybe those are things you do enjoy doing because you like the laundry detergent you use, you like the way you fold things, maybe you appreciate picking out your own fruit and squeezing it and making sure it's ripe and it's just right for you. And I can appreciate that, and I love the simplicity of a slower-paced life. But again, if you're on a time clock, maybe you don't have time to do all of those things every day, every week. Maybe once in a while you can get support, you can buy back your time, and that's worth a lot more. So remember, you do not need to do more, you do not need to be more unless you want to be. But you are enough and you're fully capable of making the changes you want in your personal life, accomplishing the career goals, hitting the health and wellness goal, finding that relationship you've always dreamed of, and you don't have to figure it out. You simply need to exist and then get people in place in your periphery that can support you, encourage you, guide you, educate you, train you, coach you, and simplify your life. If you enjoyed this show, please do me a favor, get in touch with me. You can check the show notes for how to do that. And if you loved this episode, please give me a review and a number of stars. It goes a long way and it helps the show get more visibility. As always, I appreciate your time and attention. And I'll catch you on the next one.