74. Unbreakable Reintroduction

Welcome new listeners! This episode is a fresh starting point, sharing who I am and what I want this space to feel like. I connect my personal story to a practical mission: turn real experiences into strategies that build mental resilience, stronger bodies, and better self-care.

• the one-woman production and why I keep it raw
• growing up fast as a firstborn daughter and carrying armor
• using personal stories to offer lessons and reframes
• launching the podcast and thinking long term
• bodybuilding highs and health recovery lows that shaped my coaching career
• calling out fitness misinformation 
• why strength training supports longevity and independence
• redefining training failure and real-life failure as useful data

Get in touch with me (see the show notes below). 

If you want the deeper lessons behind strength training, join my newsletter called Between Reps: Building the Unbreakable Woman. Check it out HERE

Instagram: www.instagram.com/tianamoves

Website: unbreakablemb.com

Email: info@unbreakablemb.com

Grab my new Strength Training Program: HERE

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.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Start Here

SPEAKER_00 0:07

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 is a special episode because I have realized that I have a lot of new podcast listeners. Welcome. And I want to do a new introductory episode for you. So what has been happening is recently the show has been getting a bit more uh traction and people asking me where they should start. And I've been sharing the very first episode, which I dropped March 11th, 2025. Now, of course, it's still a great episode. It's still true because it's my story. However, I feel like, well, if I send somebody the first episode, do they feel obligated to start there and then continue in a linear in a linear pattern, going from one to two to three, and so on and so forth. And truth be told, the first episode certainly is not my best work. So what I want to do here is reintroduce myself. And for the new people in the room, I'm so excited to have you here. Now, if you want to go back and listen to the very first episode, please, by all means, I would be very grateful. But if you want to just follow along on the journey right now from where we are at, I drop a new episode every Monday morning. Sometimes I'll throw out a bonus episode if I happen to feel really inspired or moved, or there is something that is uh pulling on my heartstrings and telling me, you know what, we really need to talk about this and publish it immediately. Now, this is a one-woman show, and I do everything on my MacBook in my apartment. I do not have a fancy setup. I invested a little bit of money in some equipment, so I do have a microphone, headphones. I also at one point had another microphone and a pop filter and a different pair of headphones that I was using, but I have found that the setup I'm using now is optimal for me. I live in an apartment building in the suburbs of New York City and I live in a small city. So occasionally you're gonna hear my neighbors or traffic outside or sirens. And when I first started publishing this show, I used to either stop and edit things, or I would just completely wait until the noise was done and then start recording again. Sometimes I do that, but most of the time you're just gonna hear it very real, very raw, and very unedited, unfiltered, because I believe that authenticity is the gateway for true connection. And my desire for this show is for you to feel like we are sitting in the coff in a coffee shop having a very, you know, intimate, deep, meaningful conversation. Or maybe we're at a lounge or a bar or something. You pick, you pick and imagine whatever vibe you want. But either way, I want this to feel like it's just you and me, and that's all that matters. So, introduction. Where do I begin? Well, let me tell you what I'm up to now, and then I will fill in the gaps with some parts of my story that may be interesting or may give you uh some insight into my character and what has brought us together to this conversation that we're hosting on the Unbreakable Mind and Body Podcast. So, my name's Tiana Gonzalez. I'm a native New Yorker. I have moved around a lot when I was a kid. I did a little bit of living in New York City and a little bit of living in Westchester County. I actually was born in Long Island, which is also a suburb of New York City, for those of you not familiar with the Northeast. And I had an interesting childhood, a lot of uh excitement and drama, and it certainly made me who I am today, in the simple fact that I had to grow up pretty fast, and I had to learn how to keep my head below the radar and survive. And when you are a firstborn daughter like me, sometimes that can heavily influence how you make decisions for yourself, for your future, and it can have a negative impact on the way that you see other people and whether or not you trust them. And so I moved through the better half of my life with this very thick armor on the outside, being tough, having to face a lot of challenges, make decisions that were probably well beyond my years and level of maturity at the time. And yet there I was making these decisions. For example, at 12 years old, my dad went to prison, and I was the one who was the gatekeeper and the coordinator for his visits, for sending him packages, for getting letters. And now that I think about it, it just probably really was not the most appropriate thing. But I would not have wanted it any other way. So I had to sort of undo a lot of the narratives that I was carrying around as I got older and realized, wow, I actually was deprived of a lot of experiences that young women have because I was too busy worrying about my dad instead of him being worried about me. Now, if you stay tuning into the show week after week, you will hear me weave in a lot of these stories in the episodes. But this podcast is actually not about me. This podcast is a platform for me to share with you here's what I learned and here's how it might help you. That's the game here. Every single episode of this show is designed to share a truth, to share lessons, to share experiences, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. And I will then offer you solutions or strategy or a way to reframe how you see things so that if you find yourself in a similar predicament in the future, perhaps you can call upon what you heard on this show and apply it in your life. That is the main thing here. And I will say right now, this show is primarily a one-woman show. I have not done any guest interviews just yet, but that could be something I do in the future. I work as an in-person trainer at a very nice gym not far from where I live. I train people exclusively, one-on-one and in person. And I recently started a new business because I wanted to do something official with the work that I'm creating here on this show. So I started the podcast and officially launched in March of 2025. And then in February of 2026, I got my LLC for this brand and have submitted applications for a few copyrights for different things that I'm working on to protect the brand, to protect the name, and to think big picture long term. When I started the podcast, I had no plans of being an entrepreneur again, and I'll share with you a little bit about that in a second. Um, but sometimes we are called to do things, and even if we can't really see the full picture, you know that you just have to take the next step, especially if it's something that like keeps coming back, whether it's in your dreams or in conversations or in the work that you do with certain topics, certain things, certain instances. And so when that happens, you've got to listen. And so that's really what happened with Unbreakable Mind and Body LLC is that I had this great podcast, and people would ask me, okay, well, like, can we work together or do you have more stuff coming out? Do you have merch or a book or you know, anything at all, some type of workbook or um lessons or any sort of tangible product? And so not really knowing where this is gonna take me, I realized, yeah, you know what? I gotta get the LLC just to protect the brand so that when I decide to make choices and do these kinds of things, I'll have the brand already in place. But that's a beast in and of itself. If you've ever owned your own business or done your own small business venture, you have to get all of the legal stuff in place, you have to make sure you have uh protection of your assets, you also want to have an official bank account. And so, you know, there's a lot of steps that need to be taken. It's not difficult, it's just you need to make sure that you're mindful of all those things. So, why in-person training? Well, I will tell you through my own trials and tribulations uh and lessons that I learned after competing in bodybuilding for many, many years, going through my own journey with my health and the roller coaster ride of, you know, being lean and stage ready and then gaining the way back and then being lean again and back and forth. I realized through those experiences that there was a lot of misinformation out in the world. And I knew that I could be the vessel to share this message with women to one help prevent them from making the same mistakes and choices that I made many years ago, and two to help them trim the fat because the industry as we know it today preys on people's insecurities, whether they're talking about weight loss drugs and medications, whether they're talking about, you know, what eating clean means or sharing misinformation about perimenopause, menopause, HRT, TRT, supplements, the list goes on and on. And it is a vast and wide wild, wild west jungle out there. So if I could use my voice to maybe help somebody else, then it was critical that I did that. So that's why I chose to get into fitness um as a formal means of income and as a career. Back around 2011. I didn't actually take the leap and leave corporate America until 2013. Because I'm a planner, I always like to make sure I have all my ducks in a row and I understand what I'm getting myself into before I just run into something blindly. But even the most careful people and even the most planning, having the most plans and preparation, you're still gonna make a lot of mistakes. You're gonna still learn things the hard way and you're gonna get your heart broken. So it's not about avoiding those things, but it's about preparing yourself when those things do come and they will. How will you respond? How will you react? So after taking this twisting journey in my career, going through engineering school, then I worked in engineering, then I worked in the pharmaceutical industry in their operations department, then I got into commercial real estate, and I thrived as a commercial real estate property manager. I really loved that career, but I got burnt out with it. I was also bodybuilding all of that time as a hobby. So it was during my time as a property manager and then going through my own health issues post-competition that I realized there is something to this and I need, I need to answer the calling because women kept reaching out to me, sending me emails or text messages, or stopping me at the gym and saying, You, you know about this. I need your help with something. And it was incredibly overwhelming to say the least. The reason for that is because I went through a huge transformation where I got very lean for a show, then I stayed lean for a few more, then I gained some weight, then I got lean again, then I got really lean, got my pro card, and then I ballooned up. And I spent the next three or four years working on getting my health back in order. I really did a number to my system. And so it's through that period of time, those three or four years where I was still chipping away, trusting the higher power, knowing that I wasn't gonna be stuck there forever and just stepping one foot in front of the other and only worrying about the task at hand, that I was able to get results. And so those results really speak for themselves. So when someone's looking for a coach or a trainer, you want to know their story and you want to know that they can relate to you in some way, shape, or form, and that maybe they've been where you are right now. So they're probably the best person to get you out of that space that you're in and heading in the direction that you desire, whether it's to put on muscle or to lose a few pounds of body fat or to compete in an event. That's why it's important that you find someone who walks the walk. So after being in fitness and doing that with a lot of different ways, meaning, like I worked in person, I had an online business, I worked at a boutique studio, and like that looked very different. Every couple of months it was changing, which is common for people that work in the fitness industry, by the way. And typically speaking, especially if they're working somewhere and they're not getting a higher percentage of the commission rate from their personal training sessions, more like more than likely they are traveling to people's homes to do private sessions, they teach a couple group classes in addition to the training, or they hop around to different establishments. Like, for example, they may teach a boot camp at one place, they may teach a Pilates class somewhere else, they might do um like a kids' program, and then they work a full-time one-on-one training gig at a gym. And that's literally exactly what I did for many years. While in addition, I also had a business that I have now dissolved doing one-on-one online coaching. So I did a lot of work in front of the computer way before the pandemic and where everybody was working remote. So by the time that came, I was very burnt out with it. And I decided after, I don't know, maybe a year or two after the pandemic, I was like, okay, this industry is really saturated. I want to go back to using my degree, to using my brain, to not having to be in front of a camera every single day to create content, obviously. And so I went into construction. And there was a period of about 15 months where I worked at three different construction companies in a row and then realized this isn't the right fit for me. Took a summer off and then came back to training. One-on-one in-person training is my jam. I absolutely love it. I love what it can do for my clients. I love how we can turn a negative situation into a positive. It's not the cure, but it's something that can help someone feel a little bit better, you know, feeling better when they leave as opposed to when they first started the session. And it also gives me a ton of ideas for things to talk about on this show. So it's through connection that I will remember different stories, and then I share my stories here, and that cultivates more connection. And then I see people and they'll talk about the things that I shared on the show. And so you see how this is a never-ending cycle of sharing experiences with each other and creating connection through being vulnerable. Now, vulnerability is something that a lot of people are very uncomfortable with. And I guess because of things that I've been through in my life, I'm okay with being a little uncomfortable from time to time. So being vulnerable has never been an issue for me. But one thing that has been an issue, and it is part of the reason why I actually came up with the idea for this podcast in 2022, but it didn't actually launch until 2025, is because I didn't want people to hear my stories and feel sorry for me, or to think that I'm sitting in my victimhood because I can't get over certain situations. I'm still talking about them so many years later. And that was my own judgment of myself. I was gaslighting myself, I was telling myself, nobody cares about your stories, nobody wants to hear what you have to say. Why, why, why do you think you're so interesting? Isn't that insane? Like I would never let someone else talk to me like that, and I would never talk to someone else like that. But my inner narrative and the way I was speaking to myself was so harsh. And I can happily say over the time between when I had the inception of this show idea and when I launched, I did a lot of healing work. I did a lot of peeling back the layers, sitting in the discomfort, meditating, going through my emotional and mental archives to really come to terms with and make peace with parts of myself that I didn't really love or that I didn't really understand. So on this show, you're gonna hear me talk about things from a conceptual level. You're also gonna hear my fun little stories, like the one I shared about my boyfriend when I was in college throwing a fit in the bagel shop and disrespecting my mom. I broke up with him three weeks later. Of course I did. But you'll hear stories like that, but then you're also gonna hear me talk a lot about my career and how I feel about certain things in the health and wellness space and what I believe to be the gateway to longevity. I might as well talk about that right now because it's the premise of everything I do. And that is that strength training is the chef's kiss. It is the gift, it is the golden goose egg. If you can get two or three sessions at a bare minimum of strength training, I am not talking about no class, and I am not talking about uh an at-home workout using five-pound dumbbells. No, no. I'm talking about lifting some real heavy weight, stimulating muscular hypertrophy, getting yourself to the point of fatigue and exhaustion, which can sometimes be inferred as failure, and we'll talk about that in a second, what failure means, because it's actually a good thing. Two or three times a week, at a minimum, you are gonna live a much happier and healthier long life. As you get older, you will still be thriving, you will still have more um independence versus somebody who's been a victim of skinny talk and they just want to be tiny and small and they don't want to lift weights. You are choosing to be weak, you are choosing to be frail, you are choosing to make sure that I have to carry your weight if we're in a disaster or if there. An emergency you are choosing to be the weaker person in the room, and I don't really love that. Why would you want to be the weak person in the room? Why would you want to have to rely on somebody else? Why would you want to have to ask for help to put your luggage in the overhead storage bin on the plane? No. We want to do that ourselves. So when we talk about failure, and we're talking about it in the sense of exercise, failure is that point where you feel like you just can't possibly do any more. And it's a good thing. And failure in real life is also a very good thing. Because if you fail at something, it means you actually had the guts to go out there and do something. It means you actually had the courage to try. It means that you were willing to put yourself out there and subject yourself to people's opinions and thought processes, or whatever people want to say in the comments on your social media, or when you get negative feedback and reviews, but you use that as constructive criticism to make yourself better. That is a wonderful thing. So you're not paralyzed by the thought of failing. So you're not paralyzed by the thought of not winning. Because when you reframe it and think of, well, I'm either gonna win or I'm gonna learn. Those are both wins in my book. So I hope that for my new people here in the room, this episode was helpful for you. You can catch me uh primarily on Instagram. I also have a newsletter on Substack. And if you check the show notes, you'll see how you can get in touch with me. Give me a follow. You can send me a DM. You can also send me a text message or leave me a voicemail, which is really cool. So check the show notes for all that good stuff. Uh, I love all things strength training, particularly for women. I believe that becoming the unbreakable version of yourself is the most important work that you could ever do. You will learn a lot about your own character, who you are, what you're made of, what you can handle. And I'm here to tell you it's probably way more than you actually think right now. So thanks for tuning in. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate your time and attention as always. And I'll catch you on the next one.