What does a heart condition at 25, a Marine Corps Marathon, and your flat Instagram captions have in common?

More than you think.

In Episode 59 of the Heart-Led CEO Podcast, Anacani opens up about the real reason she was diagnosed with two heart conditions in her mid-twenties — not laziness, not genetics, but depletion. A lifestyle that looked great on the outside and was hollowing her out on the inside. And two doctors who never once connected the dots.

Twenty years later, she is watching the early warning signs show up again. This time, she catches them. Because this time, she has her why.

This episode is the opening of the Overflow Arc — a series of conversations about what it actually looks and feels like to lead from full.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why the empty cup is a business strategy problem, not just a self-care conversation
• The real reason Anacani caught the warning signs at 45 that she missed at 25 (hint: it is her son and her husband)
• Why "forever is today" is more than a saying — and why she forgot it when she left nursing
• The 3 signs your cup is running empty right now in your business and your life
• Why depletion masquerades as imposter syndrome and doubt
• What overflow actually is — and why it is a source, not a reward
• A preview of what is coming on July 8th with pleasure coach Tiffany Yelverton

Quotable moments from this episode:

• "My body finally sent me the medical bill."
• "Your why has to be louder than your habits."
• "Forever is today."
• "That is not imposter syndrome. That is depletion wearing the mask of doubt."
• "Magnetism is not something you can manufacture. It comes from your flow, which comes from overflow."
• "You cannot fill a cup that has holes in it."
• "Overflow is not the reward. It never was. It has to be your source."

Resources mentioned:

• Overflow Audit (free 5-question PDF): Join the watch list https://empowerherwave.com/turned-on-ceo-page
• July 1st Live Event — The Turned On CEO with Tiffany Yelverton: Anacani's personal Facebook page facebook.com/usaf4fprincess + YouTube — no registration needed, just show up live
• Tiffany Yelverton: enticeme.net
• EmpowerHER Biz Collective (free Facebook community): facebook.com/groups/empowerherbizcollective

Connect with Anacani:

• Instagram: @empowerherwave
• Website: empowerherwave.com

If this episode landed for you, subscribe so you never miss one, leave a review if you feel called to, and share this with a woman who needs permission to stop giving from empty.

At 25 years old, I was really doing everything I thought was right.

I was eating well, I was training for marathons.

I had just run my first marathon and I was in what I would call the best shape of my life.

Six months later, I was diagnosed with my first heart condition.

Six months after that, my second.

And it wasn't because I was lazy, but it was because I was empty.

And nobody connected those dots for me then.

So today, I'm going to connect them for you.

So grab your cup of whatever's keeping you grounded and let's dive in.

Welcome to Heart Led CEO, the podcast for women wellness entrepreneurs who are ready to build, scale and automate their businesses without sacrificing their soul, sanity or authenticity.

I'm Anakani Walters, a nurse turned entrepreneur, military spouse, first time mama in my 40s, and a recovering burnout survivor who's making it a mission to help heartless women just like you create thriving businesses that really feel good, do good, and give you the freedom that we all deserve.

Because here's the thing, you don't have to hustle harder to succeed.

You don't have to drown in tech overwhelm or try to do everything alone.

And I'm here to give you the.

Strategies, automation, tools and mindset shifts that will help you step fully into that leader, CEO and impact maker that you are meant to be.

If you're ready to grow your business in a way that aligns with your values, values and your life, you are in the right place.

Let's get into today's episode.

Hello.

Hello, my beautiful friend.

Welcome back.

I am hoping that you are doing fantastic today and I am here sitting with my warm coffee and I'm really glad that you're here for this one because we are going somewhere that I really needed to come back to today.

We're going to start with our body first because that's exactly where this episode is going anyway.

So, one hand on your heart, one hand on your belly.

Close your eyes if it's safe.

Inhaling into that belly, expanding the belly, then the ribs, then the chest.

Shoulders up, back and down as you exhale.

Chest, ribs, hugging your belly button up and in.

One more time, inhaling through your nose, belly, ribs, last little breath into your chest.

Shoulders up, pushing them down as you exhale from your nose all the way down.

Giving yourself that little belly hug.

Beautiful.

Okay, so I decided that we are starting there because I wanted to talk about something that has been creeping in and we are starting with my body and specifically my heart.

Some of you might know my original story and why I was crowned the Burnout Queen.

Some of you are brand new here, but either way I want to tell you because it's the whole reason behind this episode.

So when I was 25 years old, I was working what now looking back, I can only describe as really unholy hours.

Like not something that should have been, but I did anyways.

Now I was a clinical coordinator in a surgical oncology practice.

And most days I was there anywhere from seven in the morning and sometimes all the way up until six at night.

It was your normal Monday through Friday clinical hour job.

And it just depend on how many patients who was there, what I still needed to get done before.

Remember this is before we had like real electronical medical records.

It was a private practice.

We were doing everything written, all paper charts.

And so you can tell if you're in the medical field, it takes a lot of time, sometimes if you're really thorough, to get everything prepared for the day ahead so that you know exactly what you're walking into.

And then a few nights a week I was actually a bar back at a wine and bistro down the street from my condo.

And every other weekend I was pulling 12 hour shifts in a hospital operating room.

Now there were weeks.

Now you can kind of big picture it.

I went 12 days without a single day off.

And to make it worse is that on the days that I did get off, sometimes I still said yes to the night shifts at the bar back.

And I was young, I was in my twenties, crazy ambitious, but in my mind I called it grinding it out.

I called it grit, I called it drive.

I called it this dedication for a better life.

Now the one thing is that physically I was actually not always in the greatest shape.

If you would have looked at me a year before I had run that first marathon, I was overweight, I was not exercising.

I was having the typical 20 year old party life, staying up until 2, 3 o' clock in the morning, counting on my fingers if I went to sleep right now, this is how many hours of sleep I would get before I have to wake up to go to work tomorrow.

I wasn't exercising, I was smoking cigars, I was drinking, I was partying, I was eating fast food.

And for whatever reason, when I was getting close to my 25th birthday, I decided that I wanted to run a marathon.

And I was like, okay, for my 25th birthday I'm gonna run a marathon.

Why?

I have no idea.

Because clearly I was not in any type of shape to even run down the street.

But something got in me.

I told my mom and she said, yeah, right, you've said that before and you never did it.

I don't believe you.

Now I don't know if she did that on purpose, but anybody who knows me knows that the best way to get me to do anything is to tell me that I can't.

And then I just get it in me to prove you wrong.

And I think we already went over this in a previous episode.

Remember this is in my 20s before I was well equipped and know that that is not like something to be proud of.

But it was my working mechanism and so I did it.

I trained and I gave myself more than six months to train for the marathon.

I was really dedicated, but understand that my health was not where it needed to be.

Most people thought, there's no way she's going to be able to complete 26 miles.

If you don't know what a marathon is, it's 26.2 miles that you have to run in a certain amount of time.

And I signed up for the Marine Corps marathon in Washington D.C. now, when I first started, those first few weeks of running were harsh, you guys.

I was literally carrying change in my pocket just in case I needed to take the bus home because the street back to my apartment at the time was all at a massive incline.

And that was literally how out of shape I was when I was starting.

But I did it.

I ran the marathon just over four hours.

And in my mind, physically, I was in the best shape of my life.

Better shape than I was even when I was in the military in basic training and put that together with a 20 year old mindset.

I thought I was unstoppable.

Now six months later, I was diagnosed with my first heart condition and then six months after that my second heart condition.

So I want to be clear, I was still training at this point when I got diagnosed.

Like I was still doing everything right.

I had continued running.

It became my like coping mechanism for de stressing at night.

But what was really happening is that I was running on empty on the inside.

And my body basically finally sent me the medical bill and they ran every single test that they could think of of why 20 year olds end up with these kinds of heart conditions.

Because it wasn't like some minor heart condition.

My heart conditions were severe and everything came back completely normal.

And they just looked at me and said, hey, you're just part of the 6% of young people with unspecified hypertension.

Here's your medication.

You're going to be on it for the rest of your life.

Have a good day.

Have a good life.

And I was like, what the shit?

No.

I had no medical history to signify this type of diagnosis.

I knew my health style, my lifestyle before had running in the marathon wasn't the best, but it wasn't like excessively bad to the point where this would be it.

I wasn't morbidly obese.

I was obese considering my BMI.

But y', all, I was maybe 180 when I first started training.

I was probably down to like my 130s when I ran my first marathon.

I'm 5ft.

And so I was like in the best shape of my life.

When I looked at pictures, I was like, gosh, I wish I could still have that body kind of, you know, mentality.

I was not like.

When you looked at me, you're like, there's no way.

How do you have two heart conditions?

And just the doctors, they couldn't connect the dots.

And they didn't connect anything to stress, to my workaholic patterns, to my unresolved trauma that I was carrying, to the lifestyle that looked great from the outside but was basically eating me up on the inside.

They just kept increasing my medication.

No, look at the backstory.

No, look at my real life on what was going on in the inside.

They just looked at, like checking the boxes.

And I knew that it wasn't the whole story, but I didn't really understand.

I was 25, 26 now, and all it was was this feeling on the inside that it couldn't be just that.

So fast forward 20 years later.

Now I'm 45 and I'm watching though the early warning signs that I had experienced back in my 20s showing up again now.

The weight shifting.

Okay, meaning, like, I'm starting to feel like I'm in perimenopause.

I'm fluctuating in my weight.

It's starting to increase, but I'm also not drinking enough water.

My daily yoga practice has disappeared because I'm squeezing in business tasks during daycare hours instead of actually doing any type of yoga.

I'm not eating like I normally would.

It's been a huge transition from going from like a Japanese based diet and food food chain to now the American one.

And the difference really between now and before is that at 25, I had nothing anchoring me to slow down.

Like, nothing.

I was single.

I was on the other side of the United States from all of my family.

But now I have two things that stop me every single Time I start to drift back into those old habits that were drowning me, my son and my husband.

Now I'm building this business because I want to have a better life for my son, my husband.

But I also want to be a better parent.

I want to be present for him in a way that actually matters.

I want to be there to drop him off and pick him up and go to all his play dates and go to the park.

Not just physically in the same room, but actually there's not.

Just at night when I get off from work, which is what I watched my mom have to do.

And I want to give my husband a choice.

Like he served this country as a United States Marine.

He just celebrated his 28th year in the Marine Corps this week.

And I want to be the reason that he gets to decide when he is done on his own terms and not because the military says so or because he feels the obligation.

When he's done, even if it's a 29 years of service, he knows that he can walk away.

And financially.

I got him because we built something together that gives him that option whenever he's ready.

Those two are my.

My main why.

And when I have them front and center, I make different decisions every day.

I walk away when I need to.

I catch the warning signs before they become this big crisis that I then have to deal with.

And in my mind I have to remind myself, like, what is the point of working this hard if I do not actually have what I'm working towards?

I have to constantly ask myself that, is this worth it?

And I want to say one more thing before we move on is that life is crazy short, you guys.

I know that in my bones in a way that I thought I would never forget.

Because when I was in a nursing, I would always say, forever is today.

I said it every day because life was so fragile.

It was always in my face how delicate life was, how short it could be for some of the most beautiful people.

You do not work in surgical oncology or emergency medicine without understanding how fast things can change.

But because I had stepped away from the field, I slowly started to forget it.

And I'm saying it now again.

Forever is today.

Because I really want you to hear this.

This month has just been tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.

Some people close, some people I knew, and it's just like, what the heck is going on?

And I really want you to hold that.

Because your why has to be louder than your habits.

Because your why is what saves you when your old patterns try to pull you back and they will try.

They always do.

The empty cup does not just affect your business.

It affects your life and the same life that you are building the business for.

Because I want to get practical and I don't want this to be some type of a lecture.

I want to leave you with things that you can actually really use today, just like always.

So for me, the three signs that your cup is running empty.

Okay, in your business, your personal life, or both, you just need to listen and self reflect.

Maybe it's not going to be something you can do in this one episode, but it is something that I definitely want you to just sit with.

Number one, your first sign is that your content feels flat.

And it's not that your content is bad, or it's wrong, or it's just.

It's flat.

You're doing the thing.

You're.

You're posting, you're creating the content.

You're going through the motions, saying the right words, but you don't feel any of them.

It's not exciting, it's just another thing to do.

And here's the thing, your audience feels that too.

Magnetism is not something that you can just manufacture.

It has to come from your flow, which comes from overflow.

So when you're on empty, that translates into all the things that you're creating.

Everybody can feel it, even if it's not something that they can physically see.

They'll see it in your content.

They'll see it in your day to day.

They'll see it in your reactions.

For me, sometimes it comes out in my food.

My food will be like affected in terms of my cooking.

My husband can know when it was a bad day because the food will taste like shit.

So the second sign is you're saying yes when you mean no.

And this is a big one to clients who are not the right fit, or to a timeline that don't work for you or your family, or to a price change that makes you cringe when you hit send like you're saying yes because you feel like you cannot afford to say no, or you feel obligated to say yes.

That is your empty cup talking.

That's not some type of discernment that you've just built over the years.

Don't ignore it.

Sign three is that you are tired of your own message.

Like, you know your stuff.

You believe in your work.

You know that it works.

You know that this is what you were called to do, but you're bored of talking about it or you don't want to talk about it.

At all or worse.

You're starting to question whether it's even worth it.

If this is something that you were even supposed to do.

Is this something that maybe you should just forget, Leave it to somebody else who can probably do it better and go back to something that's more predictable and that's easy to mistake as an imposter syndrome, but that is depletion, wearing the mask of doubt.

So if any of those are landing, good, because guess what?

What do I always tell you?

Awareness is power.

And awareness is always where we have to start.

For me, I became incredibly self aware and in tune with my body.

Now I'm 45, I'm not on the original medications that I was told that I was going to be on for the rest of my life.

I also got pregnant, which is really where the magic started.

Because it forced me to really look at the things like poor stress management, workaholic tendencies, trauma that was unresolved, all of that compounded for decades and nobody actually ever asked me any of the questions that would have just led to what seems like just a common sense direction to go.

So instead of an empty cup, I want to offer you overflow.

And it's not a reward that I want you to feel like you have to earn after you push through something long enough, something that you just have to grind through, something that you have to earn.

It has to be the source that you were always supposed to lead from.

So in yoga, if you're a yogi, you know, we have tapas, it literally means discipline, but not the punishing kind.

You guys know this.

If you study yoga from that perspective, especially if you're a yoga instructor, it is the contained, intentional, sustainable inner fire that we're supposed to kindle and build and maintain so that it purifies without burning you out.

And tapas was never about doing more.

It was always about bringing more presence to what you actually do.

The overflow becomes the leadership that we were meant to have.

And the common misconception is that this will come when you have more time, when you have more resources, when you get more energy because you can sleep more or rest more.

But until then, you have to grind it out.

Because that's all the stuff that in your mind you have to have before you show up powerfully without the push.

But that's not is choosing to lead from the fullness available to you right now, not from what you're supposed to have in a month or 10 months or a year from now.

That is what is leaking from your current cup.

That mentality.

And when you stop leaking in the wrong directions, you start to fill your cup easier.

And then you can serve from the overflow.

Because you have to remember your why before you open your laptop, before you look at your phone.

Because when you protect like your morning practice, the same way you protect your client calls by putting it on do not disturb, or when you're building that business system that gives you just enough margin to notice when things are shifting, well, you do the same thing for your body before your body sends you that bill.

For all that interest that is accumulating behind the scenes, when you get in the practice of leading from your overflow, you're not just creating a sustainable practice, like a business or a sustainable life that you actually can feel like you can live through for the rest of your life in happiness and contentment.

You're actually transforming everyone that you are touching, from your family to your clients to yourself.

And the reason that I really wanted to bring this up is not just because I'm seeing it within myself and because I'm self aware that I want you guys to also come on the journey and be self aware too.

But on July 1, I'm actually going live with my friend Tiffany, and she is a pleasure coach.

And together we are hosting something that we are calling the Turned on CEO.

And I know that that name might make you raise like some eyebrows.

Like what?

Etocotti.

But here's what we are actually talking.

We're talking about what happens when a woman stops operating from this survival mode and starts actually leading from genuine overflow from like this pleasure, from being fully tuned onto her life, her work, her body, her purpose.

It's not going to be this wellness conversation that you typically hear.

This is truly a CEO conversation.

So if you're ready, I want you there.

We're going live in YouTube and my personal Facebook page, but we're also going to be repurposing the audio in the podcast, so you'll catch it here too.

And before July 1, you can go ahead and reserve your spot so that you get notified so you don't miss out on being there live.

But she actually has this beautiful free gift that she's created for you.

And then I will also be giving you an overflow audit that you can have.

Just a really quick exercise just to see exactly where you are leaking energy in your business right now.

Because again, you cannot fill a cup that has holes in it, y'.

All.

So I want to bring it back because I want you to focus on what I actually want you to carry because we talked about a lot.

The first thing is one.

The empty cup is a business problem and a life problem.

It's not one or the other.

When you are depleted, your magnetism, your creativity, probably your revenue and most likely your presence at home will all shrink together.

Number two, three signs that you are running on empty.

Your content is flat.

You're saying yes when you may know and you're losing connection with your own magic.

It's not judgment, it's awareness.

Number three, Overflow is not the reward, it never was.

It has to be your source and it starts with knowing your what.

Why?

You have to keep it front and center.

I don't care if you have to put it on a post it note.

I don't care if it has to be in a framed picture, but it has to be there all the time and you need to build a business that actually serves the life that you are fighting for, not trying to live a life that you fought for.

Your one action step for today is to just sit with what we've talked about and just honestly self audit yourself because we're going to fill that cup back up together as we continue in the next few episodes.

Remember my beautiful friend, Forever is today and as always, continue to be you.

Continue to be beautiful and continue leading from your heart.

I will catch you in the next episode.

All right, beautiful.

That's a wrap on today's episode.

But before you go, let's talk about something really important.

You are not just another entrepreneur trying.

To figure things out alone.

You are a wave leader.

Someone whose work is meant to create real impact, touch the lives of others and make this world better.

And I want you to know you don't have to do it alone.

If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to keep this energy going inside of my free Facebook community.

Empower Her Biz Collective.

It's where we take these conversations deeper with live trainings, tech walkthroughs and real heart centered support from other women wellness entrepreneurs who really get it.

So if you're ready for community, clarity and support as you build your own business with heart and ease, I'd invite you to come and join us.

You'll find the link in the show notes and hey, if you love today's episode, make sure to subscribe, leave a review if you feel inclined and share.

This with with a fellow heart led.

Women entrepreneur so that we can build this movement together.

Until next time, keep leading with heart.