Unbreakable Mind & Body

47. Keep Showing Up

• Tiana Gonzalez • Episode 47

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What if the difference between stuck and steady is simply refusing to stop? We dig into the messy middle of consistency—the days you don’t feel inspired, the moments your work feels small, and the temptation to quit before anything compounds. A tender listener message arrives right as doubt creeps in, and it hits like a sign: stories matter when they help someone feel less alone. 

That reminder sets the tone for a candid look at motivation, discipline, and the quiet power of micro actions that stack into visible change.

We talk through the nuance: when showing up is the bravest choice—and when it becomes a performance that costs more than it gives. 

If your feelings shift like weather, let them inform you, not drive the car. 

Consistency isn’t glamorous, but it’s honest—and it’s how you earn a life you don’t want to escape. Listen for practical strategies, relatable stories, and a straight-talking push to keep showing up, especially when no one’s watching. 

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Instagram: www.instagram.com/tianamoves

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.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Tiana, and on this episode, I'm gonna keep reminding you to keep showing up. Listen, sometimes we're not in the mood to do things. Sometimes we're not inspired, we're not motivated, we don't feel good about it. And I'm here to remind you that even on those days, you owe it to yourself to keep showing up. Now, much like a lot of my creative pursuits, sometimes I am at a loss for what to talk about on this show. Sometimes I just feel like, is this gonna land? Is this message too woo-woo in outer space? Am I too much in my heart right now? Is the message clear? Are these topics relevant? Am I going down memory lane to share valuable stories or am I living in my past traumas? And I really do sit with myself and I explore these questions. And the truth of the matter is I have a list of emergency topics that I can fall back on. If I feel like I'm at a loss for something to talk about when I hit record. If you've listened to this show, you know a lot of what I talk about and what we sit with here is just about working through some of the stuff we've been through and reframing it to make it helpful, to make it useful, to assign it some value so that we can become better versions of ourselves. My mission when I started this show earlier this year was to get a lot of these things that I've been carrying around out somewhere. And I was hesitant to write a book because one, it takes a long time. Two, when someone is reading your words, they cannot necessarily feel the vibration or understand the energy that you're speaking in or that you're sitting in when you're expressing yourself. But when you're listening, it's a different ballgame. And I thought, you know, I have a lot of cool experiences. I have some not so cool experiences too, and things that have truly taught me and shaped me and helped me cultivate the life that I have now. And I am blessed in the sense that I live a life that makes me so happy. I don't feel like I need to run away from it. I don't feel like I need to get on a plane and cross an ocean and be away from work for three weeks. I I really love what I do. I love the people I work with. I love the people I serve. I I love the friends and the loved ones that I have close to me around me in my life. And so for that, I don't feel like I have to escape, but I'm lucky. And I attribute that sensation, that feeling, that energy, that vibration to the simple fact that I've really sat with a lot of my shit and reframed it and looked at it in a different way, and looked at it in a way that it could be helpful to me. I've given a lot of these really hard lessons value, uh extreme amounts of value because all of those things shaped me into the person that stands before you today or that is speaking to you today. And I love her. And I'd like to challenge you to ask yourself, you know, do you love yourself? Do you love the life you live? Do you love the people that you have surrounding you, the circumstances, the situations, the places and things? I mean, listen, there's a lot going on out in the far world that is scary. And if you let headlines consume you, it will eat you alive. But how can you make your immediate life experience a little more golden, bring a little more sunshine, and have a better day? And that's ultimately what I'd love to accomplish here on this show with you. So on those days when I feel like, ugh, I've got nothing to talk about, I don't know what to say, I find something. And ironically, earlier today, I was telling someone very special to me. We were sitting at the table talking, and I said, you know, I don't know what I want to do with this show. It's feeling a little stale to me. And don't you know, about an hour later, I was walking in my own apartment door and I looked at my phone. I see a text message from someone, and I read it to myself, and it was very sweet, very tender fan mail. I'm going to read a segment of this message. Of course, I'm not sharing the whole thing or the identity of the person because that wouldn't be cool. But here we go. Hey T, I've been struggling a bit lately. With winter settling in, I'm feeling it even more. I'm not sure how to put this into words, but your podcast has been hitting me in ways that actually make me feel good about how I've been feeling over the last 10 years. August marked my 10-year anniversary of being divorced. It's wild to think how fast that time has gone and how much has changed since. I feel inspired and creative, yet somehow depleted in my faith in humanity at the same time. I know the season for me is about shedding what no longer serves, and I'm craving real connection. Thoughtful humans. It's scary but exciting too. I'm going to skip a little bit more uh from this message and then jump down where she says that she was sitting in a cafe listening to the episode Who Deserves Your Unfiltered Joy? And it landed. It landed hard. I have to say, that message really struck me because she sent it close to around the same time where I was literally saying out loud, I'm not really sure what I want to do with the podcast. Maybe I want to take a little break, maybe I want to wrap up this part of the season and call it the end of season one. I don't know. And then I get this message, and it's just confirmation, it's like a kiss from the universe that I have to keep going. Because the show is making an impact because my stories do mean something. And when I set out on this mission, I didn't have a number of people in mind. I didn't have a monetary amount that I wanted to make from the show. In fact, I don't make anything doing this show. This is a passion project. Maybe it'll make money one day, but right now it's a very small, cute little thing, and I like it that way. But the message that I received today really got me thinking about how important it is to keep showing up, even when you don't want to, even when you're tired, even when you're not motivated, even when you don't have the discipline. Because it's what you do in the dark, it's what you do when no one's watching you, it's what you do when no one's paying attention. Day after day after day, you make these massive shifts through the culmination of micro changes. Similar to putting on muscle or building strength or competing in a bodybuilding show and getting stage ready. It's a very long, slow process. And if you blink, it's like from start to end when you blink, it's a huge change. But the day to day it feels very mundane, routine, monotonous, repetitive, and it's fucking boring, especially bodybuilding shows. Bodybuilding shows are exciting for some people, but for many of us, it's like, oh, here we go again. And I'm sure for many people in their own specific craft, they have something similar where it's not necessarily difficult in the execution of what needs to get done, but it's the uh pressure cooker or the strict diet or the limited energy stores that really make it challenging. And it is a slow, steady process. But consistency with anything is really the key because that's how you catalyze change. Now, sometimes when you keep showing up, it's a little extra. And there's times when it's it's not of value when it's actually detrimental. For example, during the lockdown in 2020, I was doing a live complimentary workout on one of the social media platforms, and I lost my sister-in-law in September of 2020. And I remember the day of her service, it was the same day of the week that I was hosting the live. And her service was during the day. The family, you know, did a little something after. It was a really hard day for my brother. And I had my live that same day at 6 p.m. And I remember I still showed up and the workout was, I forgot part of it. The workout was a little bit mishmash. I just wasn't on my A game. And I still did it. And I think I had maybe 15 people show up and they did the workout, and they said, you know, thank you so much. And it was only at the end where I said, you know what, today was a really hard day, and this is a vulnerable share, but there was a death in my family, and the services were today, and I probably should have taken today off. So if I felt like I was off, I apologize. This is the reason why. And it was afterwards that I realized, you know, I didn't have to do that. And maybe if I had given myself a little bit of space, it might have been better the next week. But you live and learn if you're lucky. Another time where I probably didn't need to show up, even though I thought I did, was after having surgery in 2015, the anesthesia really zapped my memory for several weeks. And I was studying for an additional certification for my job. And I remember reading the same page probably, I don't know, five, ten times, getting to the bottom of the page and saying, What did I just read? Because I don't remember shit. And it was only after a day or so when the doctor called to check up on me and I asked him, Did anything we do, we did affect my memory? And he said, Well, the anesthesia. And I said, Oh, good to know. So maybe I didn't have to show up and continuously try to read the same textbook page and study, study, study because I wasn't retaining anything. But again, I learned my lesson. So I want to ask you what are the things that you're doing in your life that maybe are your routine, they don't excite you, they don't fill your cup, but you know that if you stick with it, the end game, that's the important part, and that's what you're focused on. Like building muscle or getting stronger. One of the things that used to drive me nuts when I first became a coach and I was working with athletes that compete in bodybuilding shows, is how common it would be for people to jump from coach to coach to coach. And I grew up in a different time. I grew up in a time where you had somebody in your corner and you stuck with them for a fair amount of time. In the bodybuilding world, if you work with someone and you don't love the outcome, let's say you compete and you don't love your results, so you fire that person, you get a new coach. The new coach is starting from scratch and is getting the benefit of what you've done with the previous person, but they're still trying to figure you out. And so when you jump from that person to another person, it's like you keep re-instarting from the beginning. And it's hard to tell if the second coach is the one that really got you that better placing or that better physique, or was it the third coach? Because everything is compounded upon it upon each other. I don't know if I'm saying that right. So even if you have a different coach right now, if you worked with someone in the past, or if you worked with several people in the past, the work you did with those people is not lost. It's still a value. It gave you your foundation. And I struggled heavy duty with the notion of people switching coaches all the time. I really didn't understand that. And I had a hard time grasping it because that's not the world I came from. You hired a coach and you stuck with them long term. You gave them the opportunity to showcase you and get you to that peak condition for your show. And they took some credit in the win if you got a win or in your high placing. And yet we live in a time now where people will say, Well, like, well, how'd you do it? How'd you stick with it for so long? Because you just did, as opposed to constantly changing your mind or picking a new goal or jumping from I want to do a powerlifting meet, and then I also want to run a marathon and I want to do them at the same time. Whoa, we're gonna have a major conflict here. Because those are two very different goals, two very different ways to train for those events and Godspeed. But that's just an example. So if you feel like, man, I keep having to start over with something, well, stop stopping. That's another thing that's super common in the gym is I'll I'll meet people who have said they've done so many diets in the past or they've lost the weight before, or they've had this dream physique more than one time in the past, but they keep losing it. So, what do we need to figure out as far as what's what's not keeping you involved in the program? What's preventing you from showing up? And then let's dive into that because that's what really needs to be changed. That's what needs modification, that's what needs to be examined further as to why you are either choosing not to or you're incapable of sticking to the fucking plan. I don't know if this episode is all over the place, but it makes sense to me. Keep showing up, keep doing the fucking thing. And it doesn't have to be like revamping your whole lifestyle, it does not have to be moving to the other side of the world, it does not even have to be changing your job, starting a business, or entering a bodybuilding show, none of those things. It could be something smaller or something of less pressure. But if it's important to you, then you got to keep doing the work, you got to keep showing up no matter how you feel about it in the moment. Because your feelings are not real. They come and they go. They kind of come in with the breeze and go out with the breeze. So you can trust your feelings, but you shouldn't necessarily live by them all the time because it could be misleading. I appreciate your time and attention. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. Thanks for being here. If you'd like to send me some fan mail, there's a way to do that. You can check the show notes and it'll say send me a text. As always, I appreciate you. And I'll catch you on the next one.