In this first episode of 2026 on the Heart-led CEO Podcast, Anacani Walters shares the real story behind 12 Days of Magic, a project that began as a personal reset during a chaotic holiday season and evolved into a powerful portal for dreaming audaciously without shame.

Blending AI image prompting, digital vision boarding, and nervous-system-safe self-reflection, Anacani explores how technology can be used in a values-aligned way, without losing our humanity. She reflects on her own complicated relationship with money, survival, and safety, and explains why her desire for wealth is rooted in freedom, family, and repair...not ego.

This episode is for heart-led women entrepreneurs who feel overstimulated, stuck, or disconnected from their dreams, and are ready to reclaim the permission to want more while staying grounded, ethical, and embodied.

🧠 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

1. What 12 Days of Magic really is, and why it was never meant to be a traditional “challenge”
2. How AI image prompting and digital vision boards can reduce shame and self-doubt
3. Why distance from your dreams can block motivation and clarity
4. How nervous-system safety impacts goal-setting and follow-through
5. A reframed conversation about money, wealth, and freedom for heart-led CEOs
6. A powerful reflection question to help you reconnect with desires you’ve minimized

⏱️ Episode Chapters / Timestamps

1. 00:00 – A season of overstimulation, old money stories, and survival mode
2. 00:31 – Welcome to the Heart-led CEO Podcast
3. 01:34 – Grounding, New Year reflections, and nervous system regulation
4. 02:38 – The origin of 12 Days of Magic (and why it wasn’t a launch)
5. 05:40 – AI, digital vision boards, and values in the age of cloning
6. 11:32 – Money, safety, and the desire for freedom
7. 15:23 – How audacious dreaming creates real-world shifts
8. 17:33 – Enrollment status, reopening timeline, and next steps
9. 21:18 – Final reflection and invitation to the community

❓Answering Common Listener Questions

What is 12 Days of Magic?

12 Days of Magic is a nervous-system-safe experience that combines AI image prompting, digital vision boarding, and soulful reflection to help participants reconnect with their desires and dream audaciously, without shame or overwhelm.

Is 12 Days of Magic open for enrollment?

Enrollment for the first live round is currently closed. The program will reopen at the end of the month.

Who is this episode for?

This episode is for heart-led women entrepreneurs, wellness professionals, and creatives who feel overstimulated, disconnected from their goals, or unsure how to dream big without guilt, especially in a fast-moving AI-driven world.

What is the main message of this episode?

Dreaming big isn’t the problem. Feeling safe enough to want what you want is.

🌱 Reflection Prompt

What desire have you been minimizing because it felt “not practical,” too much, or unsafe to say out loud?

Sit with it. Write it down. Take it on a walk.

This is where real transformation begins.

🔗 Next Steps

1. 12 Days of Magic → Reopens at the end of the month
2. Clarity Catalyst Calls → Open year-round for women ready to turn desire into aligned action https://empowerherwave.com/clarity

1. Heart-led CEO podcast
2. Women wellness entrepreneur podcast
3. Digital vision board with AI
4. AI image prompting for business
5. Money mindset for women entrepreneurs
6. Nervous system regulation and goal setting
7. Audacious goals for heart-led business
8. Ethical AI for creators
9. Dreaming big without shame
10. Aligned business growth for women

I didn't mean to create a challenge.

I literally was trying to survive a season of a lot of peopling, a lot of stimulation, and a lot of old stories coming back up about money, safety, and what I'm allowed to want. And somewhere in the middle of that, something just opened up.

So today I want to talk to you about dreaming big and living audaciously in a business and in life without shame. 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 Heart Led 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 and and your life, you are in the right place.

Let's get into today's episode.

Hello, my beautiful friend. Welcome back. Happy New Year. This is the first episode of the year. I'm so excited to be here with you.

And I want to tell you about the real story behind my 12 days of magic. And if you're listening for the first time, welcome, my beautiful friend. Know that this is a safe space.

But before we go deep, I want to just take a moment to ground ourselves for a second. Because sometimes New Year's can be fast moving, a lot of excitement, a lot of adrenaline. And sometimes it can also be a little stressful.

So take a nice deep inhale through your nose into your beautiful belly, up into your ribs and your chest. Roll your shoulders up, back and down as you slowly exhale through your nose. Jaw softens.

And then give yourself the little inside hug as you bring your belly button up and in. Okay, so here's what happened. Originally, the 12 Days of Magic was not supposed to be like some big old launch.

And to be honest, it wasn't actually supposed to be anything at all. It was something that started as a Thing I wanted to do literally just for myself.

I wanted really a simple, soulful way to also combine my ability to teach AI.

And I wanted to specifically focus on AI prompting and introduce vibe coding without this feeling of being tacky or intimidating or what everybody else was pretty much pushing out.

And I also wanted to create a digital vision board because I had been doing versions of digital vision boards and vision board work for years, and I wanted to do something a little different this year. So I thought, I'm going to do it and I want to do it my way, and why not combine all of this if I'm going to do it anyways?

So I was like, why not invite a few people to come with me? And that was it.

I literally just came up with the idea maybe a week before Christmas, or maybe one or two weeks before Christmas, I decided I was going to build it live. I was going to have no shame about it. It was going to be whatever it was.

And I knew that I had the skills to make it really fun and something worth people's time. The one thing that people didn't know was on the back end, I had a house full of people. Like, the holidays were happening.

I had my household goods coming in, finally arriving after being almost like suitcase life for what, 10 weeks? Two days before my mom arrived. And literally, I think it was like four or five days before my brother, a family of five, arrived.

We had to unpack basically an entire house, figure out how to squeeze it into our current house without it being chaotic, and mainly just to set it up so that everybody had some kind of place to sleep. And while life was happening, the holidays were happening. Excitement.

I needed something that felt like mine, like a little quiet corner that I could come to. Almost like coming home to during all of this chaos because of the fact that I knew I was going to, at some point, possibly get overstimulated.

And it worked like.

But while I was building it, I started paying attention to what was happening within the AI space in general, because I'm obviously in the AI space more than most people that I work with, like, way thousand percent more. So it's always in my face. It's consuming my feedback, and it was like thousand percent supercharged.

For whatever reason, everybody was launching workshops and challenges and master classes, and it was consuming literally my entire feet. It was all I was seeing. And that was this huge spike that was teaching, literally, people how to clone themselves.

And while I was watching all of this happen, I really had to take a step back and just kind of Pause.

I did participate in a clone yourself challenge a few weeks prior, and I had to pause and take a step back because I started feeling not good in the inside as I was starting to see what was unfolding.

Not because AI is bad, you guys know I love AI but because I needed to ask myself, like, real honest questions, like, where do I stand with this superpower of cloning yourself? What are my values here, the ones that I want to uphold? And what kind of relationships do I want people to have with their future selves?

Because I'll be honest, I personally do not want to live in a world where. Where we outsource our humanity.

I'm all for using AI at a very healthy scale to save time, to simplify, to support you when you're repeating the same things over and over and over. But there's a line between support and replacement. And that's when it started to really click for me.

That's where something really shifted and I had to take a step back and stop my cloning process from a video's perspective because it was really something that didn't feel aligned with where I wanted to be in the space. I wanted something like 12 Days of Magic to not be about escaping reality. I didn't want some fantasy cosplay.

I didn't want people to feel like they were going into something that was going to create this look, rich esthetic. I didn't want people creating versions of themselves that hides themselves. I wanted this embodied imaging, prompting creation.

I wanted people to place themselves realistically and honestly inside the life that they desired. I didn't want pretending. I didn't want bypassing.

I didn't want apologizing because instead of cutting out magazines or borrowing someone else's reality, which is what I feel like old vision boards somewhat had in the background in the back end. Vision boards are just essentially clippings.

They're a way to bring imagery into your dreams of what you wanted, whether it was for the year as like a New Year's resolution or for your life. And I've always been infatuated. I'm a visual learner. I've had books where I've, you know, even on stage have shown proof that it works.

Everything that I have in some of my journals, especially the ones where I took the time to really plan out down to sketching some version of it. And then I looked back and I'm like, o M goodness. I actually have all this, like, it came to fruition now. Fast forward.

I started using stock imagery when I stopped subscribing to magazines because I was being conscious about the environment and saving trees. But that's what it used to be. Sitting around with old magazines, cutting it up and having that be the process. And for some people that still is.

But the reality is that newspapers magazines are no longer as widely available. And the ones that I do have, I am not willing to cut up because I've been saving them for reasons. So what am I doing?

I'm now transforming the superpower of AI cloning image prompting, using the new advances in AI imagery to help people visually place themselves inside the future that they want.

And that to me matters because it removes the distance from what we tend to attach to of it's not possible because the point of being audacious and dreaming big, it's scary. And it pushes us outside of our beliefs, our limitations and the unknown. And that can be really, really scary.

It also can bring up negative thoughts, negative feelings about desires, feelings of unworthiness and things like that. And I wanted a place where it also distance where shame loves to live, basically.

Now here's where it really got personal for me because since I was building it live, I had to myself go through it. I wanted to not just build something and have people DIY it. I wanted to be part of it with them. I wanted them to see the transformation of me.

I wanted to be vulnerable and I wanted to create it for myself. Like I did this because I wanted it for me. And so they were going to see it in real time.

I had hiccups with the app that they got to see really be built out, which was another layer of the vibe coding so that they could see what's possible from that end too. And it was like this multi layered, amazing thing that I just had no idea that was going to come to true. Like being.

And I had a complicated relationship coming into this with money, as many heart led entrepreneurs do. And my complications are actually probably deeper than most because I have actually been homeless. Like I've lived in survival mode.

I carry a lot of humility from that experience. But for a long time, dreaming big didn't feel safe. Saying out loud that I want to be wealthy, I want to be a millionaire.

Always felt like I would be judged or I judged myself if I said it out loud or even reflected that I wanted it. Wanting comfort felt like I was betraying where I was coming from and wanting more somehow always felt selfish.

And during the 12 days, because I did it myself, I finished the entire 12 days I had this moment where it just clicked I don't want money for the ego. I want money for freedom. And I need you to hear me when I say this.

When you're homeless, when you've been homeless, the whole cliche of money doesn't buy happiness thing does not hit the same way. Because when you're in those positions, guess what? Yes, money does buy happiness for us. It depends what happiness means for you.

Because money buys options, money buys space, money buys safety.

And I want the freedom to tell my husband he has options, that he doesn't have to stay in the military longer than he wants to just because he feels that it's the only way to take care of us. I want the freedom to give my son the best of everything. The best support, the best schools, the best opportunities for without fear or judgment.

And I want the freedom to fly my family together because I can.

Like this last Christmas, my mom and I were talking and it has been over 12 years since my mom has had all three of her kids together for Christmas in one place. This year would have broken that streak, but my little brother had to work. And let's just say that my little brother had to work for money.

Like it was a money thing. He could not leave. Like he counts on that income. How amazing would it be for me to be like, brother, take the time off. I got you. I want that freedom.

I want the freedom to take my husband and my family to Jamaica. Because guess what? He hasn't been back in over 20 years. A lot of that's been logistics. He's been deployed, military life.

But a big part of that has also been financial. And that's not greed. Guess what, my love, that is honesty. That's repair. That's peace. That's my safety.

And as I started to let myself see those things, like really, really see them without judgment, something wild started to really happen. For those of you who have been in the 12 day challenge with me, you know what I. My deep desires are. And my body started changing.

My mind started rewiring itself literally within these 12 days. First of all, I have been on more hikes in the last week than I have in four years. All of a sudden, I want to juice, like all the time.

I am craving fresh juice. And I'm not talking about like fresh orange juice, like, I'm talking like true green juices with carrots and ginger and all of the works.

And I want to do yoga again. I think about it all the time. I think about yoga in the morning, I think about yoga during the day.

I think about yoga at night, I want to spend more time with my family, and I'm actively making the effort to make it happen. I want to walk away from work without guilt, and. And it felt like my nervous system finally got the message of all of these wants and desires.

Okay, we're going to do this. Guess what happened? I didn't need external or internal motivation.

My brain started to rewire itself towards the possibilities of what I was putting down in my journaling, what I was speaking out loud during my recordings, and what I was putting into pictures instead of obsessing over the how it just became my reality. It was taking these micro steps, these changes, and it was just happening. And that's what 12 days of magic has become.

It did not become a challenge, which was the initial intent. It became a transformational portal back into my ability to dream audaciously without shame. And I just invited other people to do the same.

Now, truth be told, enrollment is currently closed for the first live round. So if you're listening to this and you're having some serious fomo, just relax. Practice what my coach calls Jomo, the joy of missing out.

Because I know for a lot of people, it was during Christmas and New Year's.

And although I'm not inviting you into it, like today, at this second, I want to let it be an invitation to integrate what I was just talking about, because real transformation needs room for this openness. I wanted to talk about how I created something out of curiosity, out of my own personal desire, and then show you what really happened.

Like, I built this entire amazing, robust app live less than 30 minutes a day. And it was fun for me, and I enjoyed the process, and I got a hell of a lot more than what most people probably expected me to.

Now I will tell you that I am reopening it at the end of the month. The actual real challenge, the 12 Days of Magic.

And if you're listening to this and it did stir something in you, I want you to do one thing this week. It's not a big thing. It's a real thing that I want you to do. I want you to ask yourself a question. What desire have you been minimizing?

Because it felt not practical. Maybe it felt too much, or it felt like you'd be judged to say it out loud. What desire have you been minimizing? Because it felt not practical.

Maybe it felt too much, or it felt like you would be judged to say it out loud when really it just hasn't felt safe yet. And I want you to sit with that maybe write it down, say it quietly, go for a walk.

Because once you let what comes, comes, that's where I found out that magic really begins. And if you want support, turning that desire into clarity, like real steps, real direction, that's not overwhelming.

That is what the 12 days of magic can be. But that's also where my clarity catalyst calls are for too. So you don't just talk about dreams.

You actually get to map out what's next in a way that your nervous system can actually hold. And that's it. This is your permission slip as of today to start dreaming big.

To start dreaming audaciously and carry that audaciousness into everyday life. You've heard me say it. Forever is today.

As a medical person in emergency medicine, surgical oncology, children's hospitals, I have first seen and witnessed that life can be very, very short. As always, my beautiful friend, thank you for taking this time spending it with me, listening to me. And here's your permission slip.

Dream audaciously. Forever is today. Continue to be you. Continue to be beautiful. Continue leading from your heart and 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 it. 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 a fellow heart led women entrepreneur so that we can build this movement together. Until next time, keep leading with heart.