800 Hours Back: Toni Will on Corporate Burnout, Alcohol-Free Leadership, and Building a Rebellious Success

What if the problem isn't that you can't handle the pressure — it's that the system learned you would?

Toni Will is the General Manager and Governor of the Kalamazoo Wings (ECHL), a TEDx speaker, Ironman triathlete, founder of the Empower Her conference, host of the Women In podcast, and author of the forthcoming book Rebellious Success (August 11, 2026). She is also 2,000+ days alcohol-free — and she'll tell you exactly what that gave back.

In this episode, Natalie and Toni pull apart the architecture of corporate burnout from the inside out — not as a personal failure story, but as a structural one. Because Toni didn't burn out because she was weak. She burned out because systems quietly learn who will catch things. And Toni always caught things.

What they cover:

• The three traits that cause things to land on your desk — no memo required
• Why the most dangerous corporate burnout looks like success (the four-stage cascade you need to know)
• The identity dimension of the Trust Tax — and why it costs more than hours
• What 800 reclaimed hours a year actually builds
• The difference between being indispensable and being promotable — and why they actively conflict
• How removing alcohol didn't just change Toni's health — it changed her operating system
• The Responsibility Reset: how the same traits that routed everything to your desk can redirect it

If you have ever looked up and realized everything is running through you — not because you were assigned it, but because the system learned you would handle it — this episode was made for you.

"You are not burning out because you are weak. You are being routed to — because you are trusted. Those are not the same thing."

Take the free Trust Tax Diagnostic — 5 minutes, no fluff, just clarity on where you are: unceilingzone.com/trust_tax_diagnostic-page

More from Toni Will

Website:  https://www.toniwill.com/resources

Book Pre-Order:  Rebellious Success — available now on Amazon and major retailers

Podcast:  Women In

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I want to ask you something before we get started. Think about the last time something landed on your desk that wasn't formally yours. No memo, no meeting, no one sat down and said, We've decided you'll be handling this. It just arrived because the system learned quietly, automatically that you'd catch things. Now think about how many times that's happened. That's what I call the trust tax. And today's guest has lived it at a level most people never will. In a 10,000-seat arena, is one of the fewer than five women in the world. In the world, who holds her exact role, carrying the weight of a professional sports franchise, a family, aging parents, a company she was building on the side, and a relationship with alcohol she had not named yet. She didn't burn out because she was weak. She became the system. And she had to learn the hard way how to stop being it. Tony Will is the general manager and governor of the Kalamazoo Wings in the ECHL. She's a TEDx speaker and an Iron Man triathlete, founder of Empower Her, and host of the Women in Podcast. And the author of the forthcoming book Rebellious Success. Out in just one month from now, August 11th, 2026. And she's one of the most honest people I've ever had in my guest seat. One more thing before we dive in. If anything in this episode lands somewhere specific for you, I want you to know that there's a free diagnostic at UnseilingZone.com. That's U N-C-E-I-L-I-N-Gzone.com. That will tell you exactly where you are in the trust task cascade. Five minutes, no fluff, just clarity. The link is in the show notes. Now, let's go. Tony, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a very specific reason, not just because of what you've built. And you've built a lot, but because of how you've built it. And you've led in baking and economic development. And now a professional hockey as a general manager and governor of the Kalamazoo Wings in the ECHL, which I had to look it up myself. Let me know if I have this right. East Coast Hockey League.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yeah, that was originally what the ECHL was when it was started in 1988, but now it just stands for the ECHL because we're all over the US and in Canada.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Okay. You got the roots right. You got the roots right. That's great. And so now you're the first women in the league history to serve at on the executive committee, which is amazing. You're a TEDx speaker, an Iron Man triathlete, which is amazing. Founder of Empower Her, host of Women in the podcast, and you are putting out a book in August, Rebellious Success. Coming out August 11th, 2026. That's a lot.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

That's amazing. It is. It is, it is. And I always tell people I'm not usually doing them all at the same time. So uh but that's me.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

So here's what actually made me want to talk to you and bring you on this show. You choose to remove alcohol from your life, not because of that things were failing or falling apart, but because you wanted more clarity, more presence, a deeper connection to yourself and all the things that you're building. And what followed wasn't a smaller life, it was a sharper one. And that is what I'm really curious about. We talk a lot about the show about the idea of high performers who they don't burn out because they're weak. They burn out because systems quietly learned they'll carry everything. And I can only imagine with all the different things that you're doing, how that can land on you. So your story lives exactly inside that idea. So what I want to start off with is at the beginning. So my first question is you lead in an environment in the Hockey League where pressure and visibility never fully turn off. In those systems, something specific happens to most capable people. The work just doesn't land on them, it routes towards them quietly, automatically, without anybody deciding. Did you ever, ever reach a point where you looked up and realized I became the system and everything is running through me?

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yeah, I such a great question. Yeah, I think so. I mean, so here's the thing about minor league sports, but in particular hockey, because that's a world I've lived in for over 11 years. These are small businesses, but they look grand on scale because when you come to a minor league professional hockey game, you're in an arena with thousands of people. So it can look like there must be hundreds of people making this happen. But but it's not like that. So my front office has 10 of us. There's just 10 full-time. And there's me and then my team. And we're split into the sales side, revenue generating, and then creative, who is helping bring to life different sales strategies, our social media, our mascot, our game production. And so everything literally funnels through me to them. And so what's really important about this is creating processes, creating strategies and doing it consistently. And one of the things that I coach too with my coaching clients is the success is actually in the mundane, it's in doing the same things every day, over and over, because then they get easier and the brain knows what to expect. And so, yeah, they funnel right through me, and things that I don't even expect, or I'm like, I don't know how to do that. I guess I'm gonna figure it out. So we're building a new arena here in Kalamazoo that opens up in a year and a half, which is really exciting. But it's like Tony, we need a whole new pricing structure because now we're selling sweets and sweets and premium products in this new arena. And I'm like, okay, don't know how to do that, but I'll figure it out. And so, yeah, that's just one of many examples of things that I've had to figure out along the way. Okay, pause.

SPEAKER_02 6:15

Did you catch what just happened there? Tony didn't say anyone assigned her the arena pricing problem. She said it landed on her desk because she was the person in position to figure it out. That's not a job description, that's a routing pattern. And I want to slow down and explain exactly why it happened. Because the reason is not random. There are three characteristics that cause things to land on your desk. Not because you raised your hand, not because someone decided to take advantage of you, but because of who you are and how you operate. The first is that you are outspoken. You think out loud, you speak first. When the room goes quiet, you fill it with a question, an idea, or a direction. That visibility is a magnet. The system sees someone who will move. The second is that you can handle ambiguity. When the path is unclear, you don't wait for a memo. You create the map. You take the fog and you make it navigable. That competence tells the system, send the uncharted problems here. The third is the proximity to power. You understand how people in authority think. You know what matters to them, what concerns them, what would embarrass them. So you're not afraid to pick up the pieces because you already know where they're supposed to go. No instructions needed. Now here's the other side. There are people in the same organization who don't catch those problems, not because they're less talented, but because they operate differently. A second guess before speaking. Ambiguity feels risky when you can't read where leadership is headed. And without that proximity to power, picking up an unclaimed problem can feel like overstepping, not leading. So the system makes a quiet, unconscious calculation. It routes every time towards a person who is outspoken, ambiguity tolerant, and power adjacent. That's Tony. And it's probably you. Now here's the reframe because this is where it gets interesting. There's a framework developed by Kaylee Ingram at The Wiser Technologies, and it maps the seven distinct ways people engage with decisions. The achiever drives towards outcomes, the analyzer demands evidence, the collaborator pulls in the voices, the deliverer sequences for execution, the explorer opens up options, the guardian protects against risk, and the visionary anchors everything to long-term direction. Every profile is a strength. Every gap, when you don't include it, is a risk. But here's what the trust text reveals. When one person, the achiever, the deliverer, the visionary absorbs the decisions, the rest of the team stops developing the muscle, the analyzer stops pushing for rigor, the explorer stops offering options, the collaborator stops surfacing input, the machine is moving. So, by speak up, the person who is speaking up becomes indispensable. And indispensable is not the same as promotable. Here's the arc we're going to trace through this entire episode. The same traits that route everything to your desk can redirect it. Speaking first doesn't mean carrying it along, and it can mean naming it and directing it. Handling ambiguity doesn't have to mean solving it yourself. It can mean creating the container for your team to solve it. Knowing how power thinks doesn't have to mean being the one who acts. It can mean equipping others to act with the same clarity you have. That is true leadership. Not the elimination of your strengths, it's the deliberate distribution of them. And that's what we're watching Tony learn. And she'll tell you exactly what it cost her before she got there. And I love the, you know what? I guess I'm gonna figure that one out.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Mo That's my that's my whole like the beautiful uh intro you gave me. I didn't know how to do any of that stuff. And quite frankly, there was probably a point where none of us popped out of the womb and said, I know how to podcast. I mean, because it didn't exist when you and I were born, right? So there were there was always a starting point where we didn't know how. The question I see people struggle with is believing in themselves to learn. And so I'm constantly building the plane while flying it. Constantly. I don't know, I'll figure it out, and I find other experts that know how that walk the path before me, and I go ask them, will you help me figure this out? And absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Was there ever a time when you thought I cannot keep like I cannot just take on one more thing to figure out? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, there are things where I would say this isn't a word probably, I don't think it is. They're not figure outable, and they're really more about choices. And so there's been several times in my job, because my job is public facing, where and I'm one of a very few women in the world that do this job, like I think there's less than five of us, where my safety has been called into it's been a concern. And I'm five foot two, I'm middle-aged, you know, I'm not like imposing. That's scary. But most people general managers are men, they're you know, they're they're taller, they're stronger, they're you know, they're more respected. And so my credibility is always called into question. And there are times where I'm like, I can I keep doing this? Is it worth it? You know, like psychological or safety in general is at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. It's down there is the base for a reason. And so that's where I, you know, I have to speak up or I choose to speak up. I choose to balance that. Cause uh I always like to say, is that a hill I'm willing to die on to determine what battles I fight and what ones I don't? And that's one I certainly is important. So yeah, that's a a real life vulnerable example of stuff that I deal with. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

I want to sit with what Tony just said for a second because it's not a small thing. When we talk about the trust tax, we usually start with the workload, the routing, the unclaimed decisions, the cognitive load. But there's a deeper layer, and Tony just named it. When you're the one, the very few women in the role that has historically been held by men, the tax isn't only operational. You're not just carrying more work. You're carrying the weight of proving that someone like you belongs in the room at all. That is the identity dimension of the trust tax. The cost isn't paid in hours. It's paid in self-trust, in the quiet erosion of your confidence, in your own judgment, your own read of the room, your own sense of whether what you're feeling is real. And what makes Tony remarkable is that she didn't disappear into it. She asked herself consciously, is this the hill I'm willing to die on? That's not a resignation. That's a woman who has learned to sort through what is hers to carry from what is not. There are three categories of responsibility in the trust tax framework. Role responsibility, what your position formally requires of you, outcome responsibility. That's the results you influence but you don't fully control. And emotional responsibility. How others feel, how they react, and whether they follow through. Only the first category is fully yours. The moment you start carrying the third category, that is, how others feel, how they react, and whether they follow through, as if it were your role responsibility, absorbing other people's credibility gaps, their fears, their organizational dysfunctions, that's when the trust tax goes from expensive to devastating. Tony is sorting in real time. We're going to watch her get all the way through it. Thinking about this, was there ever a time when you felt like you were disappearing in all the responsibility? Or how did you keep that balance?

SPEAKER_00 14:35

No, it's hard in this job to feel like you're disappearing from the responsibility because so much of it is public. And so by that I mean, um, you know, I'm I'm speaking at uh, you know, groundbreakings, I'm speaking at radio stations, I'm speaking at my local alma mater to help the next generation, you know, start to consider what their lives look like. And so there's a lot of this where you're not really disappearing publicly. I think more of the struggle can come at home. The part where I think I'm disappearing at times and I have to be really intentional about is at home. Because my day job, and I say day job because I have, as you read in my bio, I have all these other projects I'm working on or my businesses. And so I had to be really intentional about okay, I'm super ambitious woman, career minded. Um, I want to help make a difference, but this is where at home is where I really tend to disappear because it's a little easier. It's harder in my in my uh pro hockey job. So it's it's quite the balancing act that I don't do very well most days. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

It how do you deal with do you like ever get hard on yourself for feeling like the balance job I don't do very well?

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Yes, I do. There are moments where I'm like, gosh, Tony, but you know, I'm in a different stage of life too. My kids are um 24, 22, and my youngest is 19. Two of the three are out of the nest. Oh, and my 19-year-old's in college and you know, gone all the time, has her social life and her job and schools. But that wasn't that I mean, I've been doing this role for 11 and a half years. So if you do some easy math, the kids were, you know, not little. So I've had uh the one there's so many great things about pro hockey, but this level of pro hockey, I'm like, all right, you guys are coming to the game tonight. They got to be part of all of this with me and come to work when I'm working nights and weekends. And it's a cool play. I mean, who doesn't want to go to hockey games in Michigan? And that's you know, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I live. So it was it all worked out in that sense. But there have been times over the years where I'm like, I kind of wish that I didn't I wasn't so ambitious and have all these dreams and goals and and and you know, that that age old question, am I selfish? And and I address that stuff in my book because I believe so passionately that it's not true. Like, just because I became a mom didn't mean I had to stop everything I was doing. That was my choice. Some women stay home. I tried it. I tried it with my son and I did it for a year, and I was like, I cannot, I love you, but it's mom's gotta go to work.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

So yes, so with everything that you've done and everything that you're doing, and I totally relate to mom's gotta go to work. Well, yeah. Um, for high performers, burnout never looks like a collapse. Instead, it looks like someone who woke up already running, things are getting done, hits their numbers, shows up, and at the end of it, they can't really tell you what they decided to do versus just moving through the events and through being in the mom. Did you ever feel like you lived that that version where performance was intact but something underneath was missing at all?

SPEAKER_00 17:40

So I definitely run through phases where I look back on my life and I'm like or uh at certain seasons in my life and think, how the heck did I do that? And I'll give you an example that I think a lot of middle-aged people can relate to. My mom was very ill with Alzheimer's and she passed away 15 months ago. And this was in not this past hockey season, but the hockey season before. And so they I live here we all still live in my hometown or at the time did. And so she was in a memory care facility. My dad was taking care of her, he's in his 80s trying to do this, she's slowly dying. I'm like, you know, and I'm trying to balance all this. You know, my daughter's a senior in high school. Yeah, so you know, my d I'm worried that my dad my dad's health is exceptional, but you a caretaking can take a toll. So I'm I'm concerned about that. I've got my the hockey team being like the the fandom around that, the the safety was an all-time not great space in terms of what's happening with me on social media. And so it's just I look back and I'm like, how the heck did I do all that? How did I balance all of that? I think at that point it is, it's it's what you described. Burnout isn't like some big neon sign that's blinking saying warning, warning, warning. It's not like your check engine light coming on.

SPEAKER_02 18:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

It's it's more in signals for me, which was having a very hard time sleeping. It's a big one for me. Another one for me is being really emotional, like crying a lot. I'm not a big crier, but I think I was so worn down um and forgetting things. That's not like me either. So there were just telltale signs in my nervous system was just out of whack. So that's a real example where in hindsight we considered well actually when I was in it, I considered taking some um like a family leave to take care of my aging dying mom. But I didn't, and I wish I would have to take care of myself, but I didn't because of the pressures. And no one I I like to say this, no one at work was saying Tony gotta be here. Not one person.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

They would have been like, You do and they were, as a matter of fact, go do what you need to do. But I could have removed that layer of pressure and just said I'm and I it doesn't have to be three months, it could have been a week of of family, you know, medical leave or a month, whatever. But I just I couldn't let it go. So I learned a lot in that and um about burnout and about my inability to walk away from this of my career, even temporarily. There's just a lot of pride mixed with ego, and um, I'm still trying to untangle all those.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

She just said the thing. Let me say it back to you in case it flew by. Burnout doesn't come with a check engine light. By the time the warning would appear, by the time the performance drops, by the time the exit interview happens, the organization has already lost that person. They lost her at stage two. They just didn't know it yet. Here's the four-stage cascade I use in this work. Stage one is absorption. You're catching everything, performing at the top of your game. It looks like engagement. From the outside, it looks like leadership. Stage two is vigilance. You're still delivering, but your brain has shifted into permanent scanning mode. Always bracing, always anticipating the next thing that will route to you. The outputs haven't collapsed, but something underneath is still running on high alert. Stage three is disconnection. The work is still getting done, but you've gone quiet on the inside. You're not bringing your best self anymore. You're protecting what's left. Stage 4 is exit or erosion. Either you leave and everyone is surprised, or you stay and give the organization a fraction of what you're actually capable of. What Tony described, the sleeplessness, the emotional overwhelm, the forgetting, those are stage 2 and stage 3 signals. In the terrifying part, she said no one at work was asking her to stay. The pressure was entirely self-generated. That is what the identity dimension of the trust tax does. It makes capable women their own demanding supervisor. If something just shifted in your chest while I was saying that, that's information. That is your nervous system telling you something in your calendar hasn't caught up with you yet. There's a free diagnostic at unskillingzone.com, links in the notes that will tell. You exactly which stage you're in. It takes five minutes, and knowing where you are is where the redesign begins.

SPEAKER_00 22:07

Don't skip it. That knotted up Christmas tree light quandary I'm in half the time.

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SPEAKER_02 22:13

Yeah,

(Cont.) 800 Hours Back: Toni Will on Corporate Burnout, Alcohol-Free Leadership, and Building a Rebellious Success

SPEAKER_02 22:14

I I and I appreciate the fact that you said, hey, there is no check uh engine check light. And then there's these in visibles, not invisible, they're visible. You you can feel it and you and you're like, it's so easy to ignore it because you're thinking, gotta do this, gotta do that. What was the thing that finally made you name it? Like you named it in hindsight. And I'm glad that you named it in hindsight and you're calling it out here because there could be listeners that are actually going through that. And maybe it's time for them to say, you know what? It's okay. You can take some time.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

Yeah. I I look at this now and I'm like, okay, my dad, he's not gonna live forever. I know this, and it's not to be like depressing or like martyr or anything, but that's just the reality. He's 83. I will do it differently next time. And that's the thing. I went through it once, I learned, and I know I will do it differently. Um, and taking more time for me. I've been working for 25 years. I don't have anything to prove. And part of this as a woman, at least this woman, me, is that I feel like I'm constantly trying to prove something, like constantly trying to s I mean my my resume is kind of funny to me because it's just me trying to prove and prove and prove. Who am I proving this to?

SPEAKER_01 23:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Well, clearly it's something missing in me. And now I'm entering the stage of my life where I'm like, I don't need to do that. I don't want to do that. Yeah. Let me just be. And so I've learned from that experience I will do it differently the next time. You know, and if you are going through something like this, because you know, being at least for me in my late 40s, that being sandwiched, we're sandwiched in between raising our kids and taking care of our parents, that is hard. I don't know about you, Natalie, but nobody taught me about that. My parents never talked about that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

Nobody taught us about this. That sentence is still sitting with me. We prepared for our careers. We prepared for motherhood, more or less. But this season, the season where you're holding your mother's decline in one hand and your daughter's senior year in the other, while also being the person your organization cannot function without, that season was not in the syllabus. And this is exactly when the trust tax becomes the most dangerous because of the emotional responsibility category. The weight of how everyone around you is doing, whether your dad can manage alone, whether your team can hold it together if you take a leak. That category is not yours to carry, and it's the hardest one to put down. The three responsibility categories again, because they matter here more than anywhere. Role responsibility, it's what your position formally requires. You own this. Outcome responsibility are the results you influence, but don't formally control. You share this emotional responsibility. It's how others are feeling, whether others follow through, whether the system holds. That was never formally yours. Tony's regret, I wish I would have taken the leave. That's not a weakness, it's wisdom she's handing you in advance. The organization would have been fine. She told you herself. No one was asking her to stay late. The only person demanding her presence was her. That's not ambition. That's the trust tax running so deep that it had become identity. Hear what she's saying and give yourself permission to hear it about yourself too.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Right. Or that or that I was so selfish because I was living my life. I didn't stop to consider it. So that's why I I really call that out and and I'm vulnerable, vulnerable about it, because I would have done it differently for sure.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

Yeah. We had my my father-in-law lived with us for a short period of time. He we decided to take him in because we were not so sure that he could take care of himself. I mean, she pretty much did everything. You know, he got he didn't even know how to operate a coffee maker. And so he moved in, and then shortly after that, he had a stroke. Um, and it impacted his throat muscles, which meant we had to be very careful about what we fed him. Unfortunately, we learned that the hard way. My husband and I love rice, and we made rice. He aspirated the rice, got a lung infection, and there we go, we're in this like cycle. Um, and just watching my husband, who we decided he was gonna be the stay-home take care of dad person because it was his father, and even at that was so stressful. I can't imagine we didn't at that time have our daughter. I can't imagine having kids and the parents.

SPEAKER_00 26:50

It's immeasurable that stress. It is, it is you know, you talked about the TEDx I did, and I remember being like everything was like these different like I gotta get through this, and meaning TEDx was a remarkable experience, but it's a lot of hard work. And I remember thinking, I hope my mom doesn't die right before this, you know, because she was really sick. I hope, you know, what if she does? How am I gonna handle this? And it was just a super stressful. Well, that I did that in October 2024. She didn't die until February, but you just don't know. Yes, you know, and every time I would travel for speaking engagement or for work or whatever, I was like, I started to make decisions based on her health. And so I actually stopped traveling. I think I stopped in November of 24 and I didn't travel again until after she passed because I would try and travel and then something would happen, and I'm like, I gotta get back. And it just wasn't, and then there were things with um some of my my son that he's been struggling with addiction, and so I there was stuff with that, and it was just like how much can one person handle? And it feels like when that question about funneling through me at work, yeah, but everything's funneling through me at home too. And so it's like the funnels, there's two of them, and it's a lot.

SPEAKER_02 28:08

Two of them, two funnels coming at you. So in 2020, you made the decision to live alcohol free. Not because things were falling apart, but yeah, we just talked about all these things funneling towards you, but because you wanted more clarity, more presence, more connection to what you're actually building. What did removing alcohol reveal about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Why did you make that decision? Yeah, so alcohol to me was, you know, I I mean the simplest answer is I just didn't like my relationship with alcohol. And there, you know, there's this picture out there that either you can drink responsibly or you can't. And the reality is there's this giant middle ground and it's called gray area drinking. There's about 2.3 billion people that live in this space. And literally billion. And anyone that drinks is on this scale of, you know, take it or leave it drinkers, or if you go all the way to black, because it's gray is in the middle. Um, and if if this is a a spectrum, the the black side of this spectrum is physically addicted individuals to alcohol. The the that this gray is tough because there is no big moment. Like again, there's no blinking sign, there's no check engine sign that says you should stop drinking. There's no stick you can pee on that says, yes, you have a problem with alcohol. Like, you know, and so it's just this inner whisper, like when you start to think, hmm, something's off. I don't like that I'm drinking every day after work. Is that normal? The glass of wine, and then I would have, you know, the bottle would become boxes, and then the boxes for me slowly became blackouts. And I'm like, I don't think that's normal. Um and then when I would try to stop, it didn't work, or I'd make deals with myself, like every glass of wine, I'd have a glass of water. Our culture tells us differently. Our culture tells us that sexy, cool, successful people drink, or overworked, overstressed moms drink, or drink to celebrate, drink to to be sad, whatever. Our culture tells us all these stories, and a lot of us buy it. I never questioned it. And so I I just didn't like it. And I wanted to figure out a way to try and live alcohol free. So I put myself in a 30-day timeout, which I'd done before, but this time it was different. I was like, it was just that whisper was pretty loud. It wasn't even a whisper anymore. And so I put myself in a 30-day Tony timeout. This was at the beginning-ish of pandemic, and I wanted a methodology that was more modern thinking. I wanted some different, more just more modern way of thinking. So I Googled, Am I an Alcoholic type of stuff, because I didn't know. And um, this naked mind popped up, which is a book by Annie Grace. And so I I read the book. She had a live alcohol experiment where you take a 30-day break. I'll join that. I started to follow the breadcrumbs and um I I added a few more weeks on. Like I just started lengthening. And then by the end of 2020, I I think I was what, two and a half months or three months where I had been drinking. And I like, I think I'm gonna keep going. But I knew if I need if I wanted to stop long term, and I don't say forever, if I wanted to stop long term, I needed to like tell on myself and be out about it because I love a good loophole. So I decided for me, I was going to try and remove the stigma, even though I'm just one person and I was gonna talk about choosing to remove alcohol publicly, and I posted that up on social media on day 80 of when I quit drinking. When a lot of people were drinking their faces off because it was a pandemic.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Right.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

And it was scared and we were locked in our houses, and so I and I haven't looked back. And it's been, I don't know, I think it was last month I celebrated 2000 days, and I keep track of it and I hit those milestones and I share it and continue to speak freely about it because um I hope other people that feel this way know they're not alone. Because we all think we're the only ones that are doing these quote unquote aw awful things. No, we're just not living in line with our core values. So let's find people who are and use them as inspiration.

SPEAKER_02 31:59

Well, so going back to the funnels, the two funnels, the family funnel, the work funnel that was coming in. Did do you think now that you look back and you're more clear about you, do you think that those funnels had a play into the drinking at all?

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Probably. I I think that when I look back on the drinking, I I I think everything played a role. I I think the biggest piece was I assigned alcohol a lot of responsibility in my life. So if I'm stressed at work, guess what'll fix it? Alcohol. If I'm looking to meet new people because I'm going to a conference, how do I meet new people at the bar with alcohol? If I want to have a nice quiet night at home, who can I hang out with and watch TV with? Alcohol. You know, I assigned it a lot of roles in my life. And for me, the biggest one was to have fun. That was my number one reason I drank was to have fun. So basically it was just like socializing in a reward type. I gave it a lot of reward responsibility. And so I had all these beliefs of what alcohol was giving to me, but what it was really doing was taking a lot away. It was chipping away at my self-esteem, my self-respect, my self-worth, my self-value. And I just didn't like that person. I did not live in line with my core values when I was drinking. I just felt icky and not and not just emotionally icky, physically icky, icky icky. And I just was like, no. And so by quitting, I had so much more clarity on what the heck my core values were, because I probably couldn't have articulated what they were to you back then, except maybe health and wellness. That was a big one for me, which is hilarious when I look back because I'm like, well, if health and wellness is a core value of yours, Tony, why are you drinking your face off? Because alcohol, and this is just an interesting fact for everyone to know, and wine in particular, is a class one carcinogen. So if you drink one bottle of wine, and how many of us have drank a bottle of wine of our lifetime? It's only four glasses, a lot of us. You have smoked 10 cigarettes, the equivalent of 10 cigarettes with one bottle of wine.

SPEAKER_02 33:56

Whoa. So that's amazing. So and I haven't thought about that.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

It's like literally poison. You got it. It is, it's ethanol. I mean, that's the thing. The the scientific, this is just science. This isn't Tony Will's opinion. It's ethanol. It is what fuels your car, your airplanes, your mo your lawnmowers. So what um what surprised you most about who you became without alcohol? What surprised me most? Um, gosh, this would be a great question to ask my husband because it's hard. He he would tell you because he was with me before I stopped drinking and then after. I think what surprised me most is how much I like myself. And I mean that in the most grounding, humble way. I think women in particular were really hard on ourselves. We wish we were thinner, smarter, better hair, better skin, you know, like funnier, all these things. But I actually like who I am when I removed alcohol and got to understand who that what really made me tick and what made me happy and sad and passionate. And I just like how I'm showing up in the world now, and I'm not apologetic for who I am. So I just I'm just Tony. So if you saw me right now, we're podcasting, I'm the same person you'd see at the grocery store at a hockey game. There's no two versions of me, and there used to be that. There's probably multiple versions, but I'm just one Tony, and I'm really authentic and genuine and grounded and relatable. I just get it. And um, I wouldn't have understood that had I not struggled with alcohol.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

How did it change um change how you handled pressure, conflict, or decisions or or shift your actual work?

SPEAKER_00 35:36

Yeah, it did. So I tend to be someone that's pretty reactionary. I can be defensive. And I think I was defensive because I was insecure at my root. Like I was saying, it was chipping away at all those selves, self-value, self-worth, self-esteem. And so I was always kind of defensive. And now I've really learned how to step back and observe myself and look at how what my thinking is and how my thinking plays into my behaviors or my spoken word, the language. And I I respond now. I don't react, I question my thoughts. Is that thought really real, Tony? No, it's just a thought. Thoughts don't are not directives. You don't it does not tell you what to do. You're allowed to think it, and that's what the brain does. And so I really step back and observe, pause before I do anything. And I'm much calmer, I'm much more confident, I'm just much happier. And I'm just a quirky goofball Midwesterner girl, you know, doing what she loves, talking about it.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

So it sounds like what you basically did is change your systems instead of reacting to everything, you pause. And um, that's actually what I am hoping that high performers do because here's what I find so precise about what Tony just described. She didn't just get sober, she built a new operating system, the prefrontal cortex she's talking about. That's your executive function. Judgment, long-range thinking, impulse regulation, the part of you that can tell the difference between a real emergency and a pattern that just feels like one. And it goes offline under chronic stress, not sometimes predictably, reliably offline. Which means the high-performing woman who is absorbing more than her share, running two funnels simultaneously, always racing for the next thing to land on her, her best thinking is the exact resource being eroded. Tony's shift from reaction to response, from defensive to grounded. That wasn't a personality change. That is what happened when she removed the thing, suppressing her nervous system, and replaced it with self-knowledge. Now here's the trust tax parallel. And I want you to catch it. The routing didn't change because Tony got smarter. It changed because she got clearer. She could finally see which problems were actually hers and which ones had accredited silently over 11 years without anyone declaring them. That's the responsibility reset. Not setting better boundaries in a vague aspirational way, seeing more clearly and redesigning the system around what you can actually see. The same capability that made you the routing destination can become the thing that liberates everyone around you if you use it to redistribute, not just absorb. That's where we're headed. For me, to see something just sitting there or a ball about to drop, I'm like, I try to catch it myself instead of seeing the system. So it sounds like to me that alcohol helped you to see the bigger picture a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

For sure. But it was really studying and understanding the brain thought work. You know, I've read, I read my age every year. I'm a constant learner. I'm curious. I want to know why, why, why. And so I learned all these things so I could really uh dig into myself to become the version I wanted. And I don't always get it right, but boy, I can tell when my prefrontal cortex goes offline now. When my lid flips. Not in an angry way, although anger could be part of it, but I can tell when I am when I used to think I was thinking clearly. No, like when something triggers me. It happened last week where I got an email from my boss and he asked a question. Excuse me, felt def I immediately felt defensive. I knew my prefrontal cortex went offline because my claws wanted to come out, and I'm like, stop, Tony, what are you doing? And it is, it's in that space.

SPEAKER_02 39:40

That's great. So you've like I mentioned at the very beginning, you've done so many things that me most people just talk about wanting to do. Like I would love to be a 10x speaker as well. And do those things and travel and give presentations. The two-man iron well, I'm not into triathlons, but I am into a good tennis or pickleball tournament. Yeah. Was there a season where from the outside everything looked completely intact, but internally something felt unstable or disconnected? And based on what you learned from your drinking, how would you what would you advise women to do if they're feeling that way?

SPEAKER_00 40:20

Yeah, I think the one of the big things to point out in this is all the outside of the Iron Man's, the TEDx, M Pauker, which is my conference, my book, Rebellious Success, My Coaching Business, Women in the Podcast, all of that was built after I quit drinking. So I want to point that out. None of that existed until I quit. Wow. So, and and this is another interesting fact that for me, when I quit drinking, I gave myself about 800 hours back a year. And that's from thinking about drinking, actively drinking, and recovering from drinking. Whoa. I took those eight, yeah, I took those 800 hours, and you can see how I built what I built. Wow. So that that right there is a message for anyone to take with them. I shed alcohol. 800 hours a year.

SPEAKER_02 41:06

Let that live somewhere in your body for a moment before I say anything else. Tony didn't find more time. She reclaimed time that was being consumed by thinking about drinking, by drinking, by recovering from drinking. She removed the thing that was draining the reservoir, and what was left became a CUDEx talk, the Iron Man, the conference, the podcast, the book. I want to ask you a version of that question. What is draining the reservoir right now? Because for some of you, it's substance. But for many of you listening to this show, it's a substance. It is the 47 messages you answered that were your answer. It was the meeting you run because nobody else will hold the room. It's the crisis you de-escalate before anyone else notices there was a crisis. It's the standard you quietly, visibly, because the ultimate of watching something fall can't stand up. That is the customer. And it has a cost measured not by your energy, but by your power. The research on this is striking. A burned-out manager, the one who is still showing up, still in every meeting, still technically delivering, generates over $10,000 a year of lost productivity. That's the person the organization doesn't think about losing until it does. So here's the question Tony is really handing you. What would you build if you got your hours back? Write that down. Seriously, pause this and write it down. And then go take cut path. It's free. It takes five minutes. It's at Uncealing Zone U N D E I L I N D Zone.com. Like the ceiling over your head. The link is in the show notes. It will tell you exactly where the cascade you are because you cannot redesign what you never described. Language is the lover, so start pulling.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Other people could shed other things. It could be TV, it could be social media, it could be grocery shopping, it could be cleaning your house and hiring it out. Because the one thing we have, everyone, doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, it doesn't matter your gender, race, your religion, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. It's the greatest equalizer, it's time. So what are we gonna do with this? And so I shut alcohol, I put all that over here. And that's how I've been able to build all this, and by talking about it too. So I didn't keep it to myself. And by talking about it, I talked to my employer about it too. As they say, okay, I'm gonna start this business, I'm gonna do this stuff because it's very public. This side of it's public too. So I think that distinction is is really important. So because when I built all that and I have been done drinking, I don't, there are days where I feel overwhelmed, but it goes back to the basics, and I was sh. Join my staff this day. I made a, I mean, it's just a simple to-do list. And if you're not watching us, you're listening. And I know for me, when I get overwhelmed, a to-do list is coming out, which isn't my everyday. My calendar's color coded, all these things. So I have all these processes in place. And it was from quitting drinking that allowed me to build all the things and not get to a place of burnout. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 44:22

That $800 uh hours is sticking with me. And let's just talk a little bit about rebellious success. What is the core argument that you want readers to walk away with when they read this book?

SPEAKER_00 44:34

The core argument is this there is not one way to be successful. It's not a linear path. You're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna have failures, you're gonna um, you're gonna question yourself at times, but there are multiple ways to be successful and multiple definitions of success. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 44:52

Now, so for the leader who's listening right now, the one who woke up already running this morning, carrying the pressure that nobody fully sees, what do you want them to understand about leadership? Success, as you just said, there's no one way for success. And what is actually worth carrying for them?

SPEAKER_00 45:07

Yeah, I would ask, I would have this person say, Can I identify my five or six core values? Can I answer that question? Like honestly, because it starts there, because then you start to know who you are. So start with that. Do I have the skill set to observe myself? A lot of people think they're self-aware, but we're not. And you know, so it's it's thinking about these things. A lot of it is up here and pointing to my head. It's it's it's thought word and it's asking ourselves these questions and answering them honestly. And then saying, Who do I need to bring into the mix to help me get to where I want to be? Because you cannot do this alone. You cannot do this alone, whether it's a coach, a therapist, a friend, a clergy person, we got to start speaking this stuff and saying it out loud because it's nothing until you start talking about it.

SPEAKER_02 45:55

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining Unsealing You podcast. I really appreciate you being here. We'll um share a link to your website.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

How do they can folks like grab this book as soon as it comes out? So they can pre-order it now on Amazon or any of the book outlets, Books A Million, all the but if you go to Tonywell.com, you'll see it all there. But pre-order it now and then it'll be in your in your mailbox August 11th. So you don't have to like put it on your calendar.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

There you go. That makes it easy. Systems, right? Systems, exactly. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, Natalie. If this conversation landed somewhere specific for you, if there was a moment where something shifted where you thought, that's me, those are my two funnels, that's my check engine light that never came on. I want you to do one thing before you close this episode. Go take the trust tax diagnostic. It's free. It's at the unsealingzone.com, like the ceiling above your head, U-n-C-E-I-L-I-N-G zone.com. The link is in the show notes. It will ask you 12 questions. It takes about five minutes and it will tell you exactly where you are in the trust tax cascade right now. Early stage, mid-stage, or late stage, and what that means for you and what comes next. Because here's what I need you to know before you walk away from this episode. You are not burning out because you're weak. You're being routed to because you are trusted, because you are outspoken, and ambiguity doesn't break you. And you understand how power moves. Those are not flaws, those are exactly the traits that make you the most dangerous person in the room when they're deployed correctly. The trust tax is not your fault, but naming it, that part's yours. Take the diagnostic, see where you are, and let's start building the system that's actually worthy of what you're capable of. I'll see you next week.