The Woman Who Refused to Stay Broken: From Survival to Unstoppable.

You've literally lived through what most people will never go through or even be able to recover from. What would you say is the biggest lie that high achieving women like yourself still believe about resilience? That burnout is fine. That burnout is part of the progress and it's not.

The chasing the will, the go, go, go, the lie of I'm fine and I'm drowning at the same time. That is the biggest lie that high achieving women tell themselves. I have to be the person that does all the things or I will not succeed. And you learned that probably the hardest way possible, right?

Welcome to the Unblocked Woman podcast. I'm Amy Sanders. For years, I believed the next level of my life and business would come from a better strategy, working harder, figuring out that perfect plan. But eventually I saw the real truth.

The biggest ceiling in our lives is not strategy. It's identity. The patterns we don't see, the subtle ways we play small, the version of ourselves that we keep defaulting back to. Even when we know, we're capable of more.

This podcast is where we bring those patterns into the light. We talk about identity, leadership, growth, and what it actually takes to become the woman who can truly hold the life and business she wants. No fluff, no performance, just honest conversation about stepping fully into your power. So go ahead and subscribe and follow the show.

And remember, the moment you see the pattern, you can finally break it. Welcome back to the Unblocked Woman podcast. I'm your host, Amy Sanders. And today I am excited to bring a guest speaker to our podcast today.

I met her, gosh, it's been probably what, like a year and a half ago. I met her in what we call a pod. We were part of this like big mastermind summit that was coming up and we got separated into all these tiny little pods and they were smaller, like less than 10 women in each one. And I got to know her on like a deeper level than everyone else, like in the bigger numbers.

I think there was like 50 or 100 people that had been brought in. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be here. And I'm so excited to be here. And I'm so .

And I'm so excited to be here. And I'm so And when I met her, I was just like completely struck by how she's handling life, the things that she has been through, and how she continually serves so many different people, youthfuls, like you name it. And her story is going to blow your mind because she, like, I really am like, whoa, whoa, I can read her story. It's not going to do it justice.

So I am here to welcome Andy Byers to our podcast today. Welcome. Welcome, Andy. I'm so excited to have you.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. So Andy, you have been in combat. You have gone through all kinds of chronic illness.

You still are battling. You have also, did you have a heart attack? So many things that you have lived through and you're still here and you're still serving. So I want everyone to hear your story.

But before we even dive into your story, I want to ask you this question. You've literally lived through what most people will never. Go through or even be able to recover from. What would you say is the biggest lie that high achieving women like yourself still believe about resilience?

That burnout is fine. That burnout is part of the progress. And it's not. The chasing, the will, the go, go, go, the lie of I'm fine and I'm drowning at the same time.

That is the biggest lie that high achieving women tell themselves that I have to be the person that does all the things or I will not succeed. And you learned that probably the hardest way possible, right? You learned that the hardest way, which is what I want to dive into next. Tell everyone your story.

So it starts with a lot of compartmentalizing that I'm fine. It's 16 years of I'm fine. I'm fine. Go, go, go.

Miss dependable, very high achieving active duty across the threshold of my job on March 10th, 2020. I crossed the threshold of my job and seven minutes later, I collapsed. It's sentence and cardiac arrest for the eight minutes, a long ICU stay and a lot of rehab. Subsequently, I am blind and deaf on my left side while the heart attacks were happening.

We were having quite a few strokes of the optic nerve and my eye didn't recover and my ear suffered too. But that's the traumatic part of the story, I suppose. But it's also the most amazing part of my story. Most traumatic and most amazing.

So let's dive a little bit deeper into each of those. So yes, it's traumatic. Like, well, you just had a cardiac arrest. You're now in the hospital.

Today, as we're speaking, you have you're blind in an eye, you're deaf in an ear. So how did that affect you? How did you recover from that? And then let's also talk about next after you do that, we'll talk about how that's become your most amazing part of your story as well.

Okay. At first, it was hard. I'm not gonna act. I can't say that I wasn't angry.

I spent a lot of time angry. And the why is this? Happening to me phase of the traumatic part. Like, why do these things keep happening?

And at the time it was happening, you would think that you would be surrounded by the people that care about you, or at least you thought so at the time of my cardiac arrest, when I was in the hospital, I realized all of the people that I worked with and we were friends. I realized how small that circle became because they realized how sick I actually was so sickness in and of itself is isolating. And then I added the heart attack. So my, my military career for a bulk of it.

I. I kept to myself that I was chronically ill. And so I was always let's go. I can do it.

And I overdid things and I said, yes, way too much. And it was partially because I was covering up the fact that I was sick. And if I say that I can't do it, you may be onto me, right? And that kind of looks different.

They don't treat you very kind when you can't do things because it's about the mission. So I spent a lot of my career hiding how sick I really was until I could not hide how. Sick I really was. I have a heart attack, right?

I'm mad at God. Like why is this happening? And at the same time, I'm glad that it happened in that, in that time, I have never heard things clearer that I heard them on the recovery side of a heart attack. And it's like really hard to describe to people what happens when you were partially transitioning or what that transition looks like, but to be on the other side of it, it's like a pretty amazing thing.

I could. It's like a traumatic thing happened. And on the other side, I'm still here, right? I realized that I spent a lot of my time telling the exact same lie to people.

How are you doing? I'm fine. Fine was always easier than saying I am sick or this is going on and I need help. Fine was easier.

People accepted fine. Yeah. It's easy to accept fine because it's just, it's just like the American language. How are you?

I'm fine. Yep. People, people love fine. They were okay with it.

My face. I always tell people. You can tell when people are lying, when they smile because your eyes and smile don't match. You can't lie when you're smiling.

The eyes will automatically do things and you're genuinely happy, right? But when you're like faking a smile, it looks fake in your eyes. It looks like you're detached. Yeah.

I got to spend a lot of time with me in rehab and I realized that I didn't actually really know me. You know, I never really knew me. I knew of me prior to my military career. And I didn't know for 24 years, I did whatever, you know, you're going here, you're doing this, you're going to wear this.

When I transitioned out of the military, I think that was the hardest transition of my life because they don't prepare you for what it looks like afterwards, you know? And so. Bad. When you say they don't prepare you for what happens afterwards, what happened to you afterwards?

So afterwards struggled with, it's, it's really weird. I did not know how to dress myself. Because I've literally been in a uniform and boots for 24 years. I worked and then I come home and I put on sweatpants and you come home and you bathe and you put on pajamas or maybe you have to run errands, but I didn't know how to dress dress for me.

So if I needed to go out in a corporate America, I was struggling in my closet. I had sweatpants, hoodies, because I barely actually got to wear clothes. I was always in a uniform. So when I wasn't in a uniform, I wanted to be in something comfortable, but they don't prepare you for your identity shift.

That's so much when you transition at the same time, you're not allowed to have an identity of your own when you're at the duty, you give up I for us, right? So the, I, the last identity I knew was 19 year old. I was in the military. I knew I wanted to have kids.

So I did that young. I knew I wanted to get married. So I did that young. So I didn't have like the young adult, the typical young adult life.

I was already married with a kid, you know? So when you also say. That became like. A big blessing that wake up call and, and everything on the other side of that.

What did you learn? What was your biggest lesson going through that? That healing is in the pause. I was always too busy to spend time with me.

The heart attack forced me to spend time with me and, and ask myself why I was doing the things that I was doing. And did I even really want those things? Those achievements that I was chasing or was I like in this horrible cycle of pick me and see me. And I realized that I was very detached from the things that I was chasing.

I was chasing them. Because I needed to, because my counterparts were nails, right? And so when you go up for promotion, it has to be stats so that you can get promotion points, but my counterpart parts were always nails. And so I think I went above and beyond to prove that I could do things better, more efficient, all the things so that you could see me enough to go.

She's worthy of promotion, right? But then years of that go by. And it really messes with your sense of self-worth when you're passed over because you're like, I'm doing. All the things that you told me to do when we transition out, when we're doing all the things that you told me to do and said that we will be, it'd be a smooth transition, essentially, most of the time, it's only a smooth transition.

If you're transitioning into a government space, it's the same space. You just flip sides, you know, but going out into like corporate America, it's different, it's different and it's a kind of a hard transition. And so once you entered corporate America. I know you're a coach.

We're going to talk about that, too. So what did you do? You had to learn how to dress yourself. You had to learn how to show up differently.

It's like it wasn't structured anymore. You got to know you. What did that look like? Well, it looked like post resume.

I went on a couple of interviews and I was sitting in spaces that I already knew I wasn't happy. You know how you like walk in the things you already know this isn't for me. So I walked in and I'm like, I don't know that this is for me. Like I could see.

The military drills and processes and process improvement. Yeah. So when I was interviewing for things, I could see where the processes were like not in alignment with me. And I'm like, this isn't it.

So what does that look like now? Right. It looks like, OK, Andy works for Andy because there was too many things for me to change or want to change. And it started out that way out of fear.

I was like, well, if I get this corporate job right on my end, I'm always looking at the benefits package because I have to write. I don't have to disclose that I'm chronically ill, but I am. So I always look at the benefits package in case I get sick because I can't control that. Right.

Yeah. And I realized that there was a lot of places pretty much everywhere that the benefits package would not support what I needed it to support if I got sick and I still needed my household to run. Yes. That's the part that they don't prepare you for when you transition.

Like they go, you have free health care if you go to the VA or you can pay for health care. Right. And they have to be able to pay for it. Yeah.

I think that's one of the things that I was really surprised about is we're going into a corporate space. And for me, I was going into a corporate space and I have I have PTSD. There was a lot of things that was setting me off that they were just being themselves. But it was a lot of things that was causing recall that I couldn't turn off.

And so it went I guess you work from home for a little while and I could do that and that was fine. But it didn't make me happy. It didn't make me happy at all. So what has so now let's let's talk about what you're doing now.

You're actually doing a lot of things. Yes. You're doing a lot of things. So you went to work for Andy.

You're like, OK, corporate America is also not it. I love you talked about alignment because it's a lot of the work that we do here with Unblocked Women is if you're not in alignment, things just really are not working for you. Yeah. Because that misalignment, it matters.

And so it feels icky. But a lot of people keep going anyway. A lot of women keep pushing anyway. Yeah.

You excited to come home. You're now coaching. You're coaching youth. You're coaching adults.

Let's talk about just everything you're doing now. For Andy. So I sat in recap, right? You have a lot of time because you can't do anything.

And what got put on my heart, it was just the word that just kept coming. It was uplifted. And I was like, OK, and I wanted community engagement. So uplifted became a thing, right?

And I work with women and youth in sports and all aspects of life, health and wellness, life in general, you know, nutrition, whatever, in all aspects of holistic wellness. And I tell you, when I made that shift, right, which was literally the scariest decision that you make, like, I'm not going to go in a corporate America where I know that money is going to happen on X amount of days. The scariest thing for you to do is go, but I don't want that because it doesn't make me happy. And then walk away from essentially what people assume is security, right?

And so I've had my business for a while, still trying to dabble in corporate. And what I was fear. I was terrified that if I just said, no, I can't. Yeah.

I cannot make this work, that it wouldn't work. The minute I said, I'm going to do this full time. It was like people were waiting for me to do it full time. It's the conversation.

And it came natural uplifted, started with conversations in my kitchen with you. Yeah. It's random conversations. And then it was conversations with humans in the grocery store where they would see me in passing.

And then it became conversations and event spaces. And what I realized is that I have a gift and that gift does uplift people, right? Like the same thing that I was scared of, or I fear it to be too much is the very thing and the very reason why people work with me. Let's also talk about with the youth.

You're giving me like the bird's eye view. I want you to actually tell people like what you're doing with the youth, because it is, it is incredible. And it's something that's also, I would say unique, like not a lot of women are doing that. Why?

Like why you're like, okay, I'm going to work with these kids. Okay. I love that you asked that question because no one's actually ever asked me that question. So I love that.

I'm like, I want, I want some depth here, girl. Give it to me. So I work with, I'm a coach in all aspects. So youth sports, volleyball, track and field.

And it started with my daughter. My daughter was my very first iconic athlete. I had a vision and I was like, I see it. And she enjoyed running.

And I was like, okay. Then I impromptu decided I was going to have a camp a couple of years ago. My daughter was getting, she was home from her freshman year of college. Okay.

And I was like, Hey, are you bored? If I was to host the camp, would you be down to help? And she was like, yes. And the iconic eight became the iconic eight.

I have followed those kids throughout their high school careers. Now they get mindset moments for me on a very regular basis. The conversations in my kitchen with them is the reason why uplifted exists. But every aspect of wellness, we have real conversations and we do real emotional regulation because that's the thing that's missing.

They have all the feelings. They know where to let them out. And it's not that they're always acting out is that they have all the fields and no one to listen without judgment. And so we listen with no judgment.

If they're injured, they get to see me for rehab because I do rehab as well. So they have their rehab sessions and we do breath work and we have mindset moments and they, they want to invite me into their lives. And that built, it became a second group, the second year, different athletes, but they had big brothers from the previous camp. Okay.

And during that camp in the middle, I was getting kids going, are you going to do another one? And they're excited for the summer. I just, I wanted to give back to the thing, like to the community, what I got and track and field and volleyball saved my life. I had an amazing coach and she saw when I was struggling, right.

And she may not have never said anything, but she always made me feel safe for if I wanted to talk, she always knew. Right. And I, I know that I have that gift. I can feel it when something's off.

And so I'll reach out to my iconic eight. Hey, you'll pay. And then we, it opens the door for real conversations. They're scared about what happens after high school.

Right. And I get it. I love that aspect of what I do because it means that I catch them before they're 40 year old me, right. I have catched them before they're on the hamster wheel where they can learn to regulate.

They can go, I don't like this and get their point across without it being aggressive or it being deemed aggressive. Right. And that's the thing that brings me the most joy. That's why I was like, we have to talk about this.

And I want you to tell me, I mean, with the work that you're doing with the, you, that is changing that generation with the people that you work with and showing them that the path that you've taken doesn't have to be the path that they take and showing them that there's a space safe or I'm saying that wrong, that there is a safe space to talk about their emotions. Yes. I'm so glad that things are changing in the world right now to make that more open. But you are, you are being a facilitator for those conversations, which I think is just so incredibly important.

It started kind of as me joking, Hey, you look like you got something on your mind. You want to come over here and lift heavy stuff and put it down. You don't have to talk to me, but you can come and lift heavy stuff and put it down because exercise and door could reduce stress. That's how it started.

And they would come and they would lift and they would just start talking and they would just, and I was like, okay, do you feel better now? Yes. You feel better. Stress is reduced and you feel stronger.

You did something. You did something productive with the emotion while you had it. And I think that literally is the thing that brings me the most joy. I know that there are right now, 25 emotionally intelligent young adults out there.

Such powerful work. I love everything that you're doing. Okay. So you talk about your chronic illness.

I know you haven't really said everything that's that you are struggling with, but you are still in the trenches with that and you're still picking yourself up every single day. You're motivating other people. Before we hit record, you basically said, Amy, I just want to continually help people as long as I'm here. Yes.

What's driving that? What would be that? What's driving that? So, you know, you never plan to die, right?

So the heart attack kind of set me off a little bit because that morning I literally lied to my daughter. I'm fine. Mommy's fine. I was crying.

I had lied to her, went to work. The next time she saw me was an ICU because I had a whole heart attack, right? The last thing I said to her was a lie. Can't live like that.

It hurt my heart because when she saw me, the first thing she said to me was, lie to me. You're not fine. And she wasn't wrong, right? And so I don't know why I'm chronically ill and I don't know particularly why I had this sudden cardiac arrest.

Nobody can explain that. No man can explain why I'm here, but I am. Yeah. And what I know is that my gifts can't die with me.

Because they've already done that once. I've already died. Right. I've already died.

This has already happened, so. So that's already happened. I shouldn't do it again. So, and that's me being like so transparent.

Before the heart attack, people knew I had a business. They knew I had a brand. I was very, very quiet about what it was that I was doing, right? And it's partly, you know, growing up, I felt like if I was telling you what I was doing, I wasn't being humble.

I wasn't being modest. I was taught. You're bragging. Be humble, be modest.

I had to unlearn that. And the heart attack helped me unlearn that. Helped me unlearn that quick. The information can't die with me.

I am a plethora of information. Yeah. And it can't die with me. And I didn't spend the money for it to die with me, but it has already done that once.

And I don't get a chance to do it again. And I tell myself that every day, period, good days, bad days, you don't get a chance to die where that gift stays with you. The thing that I said in ICU. It was, okay, God, I get it.

Whatever it is that you want me to do, I'll do. And I literally mean that. I know when I'm in alignment with something and I won't move unless I'm aligned. I don't say yes unless I feel aligned because I said a lot of yeses when I really meant no and I was really feeling icky.

The hardest word to say is no, but the most liberating words you'll ever say is no. Yeah. Sometimes you say no, you feel amazing. Yes.

And that it's okay. I was born, I always call myself a recovering people pleaser because I was born, I was born to say yes, especially to men. A man asks you a question, regardless of how you feel or say, whatever's happening in your body, just disregard it. You say yes.

So a couple more questions for you. I appreciate you being honest on this podcast episode. Who do you believe that women become once they stop operating from survival? You were operating from survival.

You had a freaking heart. Attack, right? Then you changed your life. So who do you believe when women actually do this work, when they become regulated, when they step into their full expression and self, like who do you believe they become when they stop that survival mode?

Not to sound cliche, but you become unstoppable. And the reason why you become unstoppable is because you are no longer your mountain. Love that. You are no longer your mountain.

Mic drop. You're somewhere on another path, maybe going to approach another mountain that you'll be able to climb. And get over, but you're no longer your mountain. So you become unstoppable.

You do become unstoppable. And I know that you've seen this firsthand and you're a force that's continually, continually gaining even more momentum with what you're doing. I know I felt that for myself, which is why I love the unblocked woman. So what does that mean to you?

Being unblocked as a woman? For me, I am living my most authentic life and it happened in my mid. Being unblocked is you being able to walk in. A space and be unapologetically you and be loved just as you love others for you to be, for you to have discernment and to actually listen to it.

When you have discernment, you're actually listening. You're never misaligned. Having discernment is amazing, but it's even better when you actually listen, right? When you actually listen.

Can't walk off the ceiling and then not act. Yeah. So you coach adults too. I wanted to hit on the women or on the, on the youth, but you also coach.

Adults. So what does it look like with a woman? She's listening to this podcast. She's like, Andy's my girl.

I'm going to have all of Andy's information in the show notes as well, but what does it look like when you're coaching them? What kind of healing do you do with these clients? We do a lot of things, but we, we start with the mirror moment where we pull back the veil. What does fine mean to you?

Like, honestly, what is fine? What are you settling for that you've always been settling for? And we work through that. There's a lot of.

Talking and a lot of planning on how for, for me, it's really hard to like, in case what it is that I do, but yeah. Yeah. Holistically on the end. Right.

We do a lot of breath work. You do, we do a lot of releasing of things. But I work with a lot of high achieving women and a lot of them are entrepreneurs or future entrepreneurs, right? What I know that my brain works really good at.

And so depending on the type of person that I'm working on, the woman that I'm working with, if she already had a vision. Throughout. Her time with me, by the time she graduates from me, she, her website's done and her digital downloads are done and all of those things. We hand you over the thing that you've nurtured while you decided to heal because you decided you were going to heal.

A lot of the clients that I've worked with have ended up with products because as they were healing, the ideas were coming, they were actually listening and they were not to be cliche, unblocked and they're unblocked was happening at. Hey, it's not cliche. What are you talking about? It's unblocked.

You actually. You can see the things, right? Yeah. They were 100% unblocked.

It was happening at weird hours of the, of the night, which I told them was going to happen. I was like, the thing is you can't, you're going to force it and you can't, you'll know because it'll be the thing that you can't stop thinking of. It'll be the thing that you're, you can see from A to Z. You could see it full circle in this actual picture and you won't be able to stop thinking about it.

And so I'm watching a lot of women have that moment and it is so beautiful to see, like I'm watching women return home to themselves so that they can be a better support to people when they have the capacity. And sometimes we don't always have the capacity. So beautiful. It's incredible.

I want you to keep going. I mean, not, not, of course you're going to keep going, but I'm just saying, can't stop. Got to keep going. And like I said, everyone that's tuning in her show notes, her information is in the show notes.

I'm like now tripping on my words. So in closing, what would be one last? Nugget of wisdom you'd want to leave with the woman who is just starting down this path or maybe she's overcoming something that has just been hard. She's in the trenches.

What would you tell her? First, I will tell you that healing is in the pause. And a lot of times we say that we're too busy and it's because we don't want to sit with us, right? Five minutes.

Start small. Start small and spend five minutes with you, right? Because you can, it takes five minutes to go to the restroom. We can spend five minutes with you.

And then that five minutes remind you that you have. Gotten through harder thing or hard things before, after every storm, the sun comes out again. The thing is that we can never avoid the storm. We try to, we try to avoid and plan around.

You can never avoid your storm. And the only way through it is through it. And so understand that through it, it is so sunny over there. It's just.

Sun does come out. The sun does come out. It's so sunny over there. It may be a little.

A little bit rough. Okay. For the woman listening to this, I need them to know that they deserve to heal. Yes.

I love that. We all deserve to heal and everyone has their journey. One thing I wanted to add as we close is I've now coached. So I don't know how many people I've coached at this point.

Hundreds, right? And if you, if you include fitness, thousands and thousands. And as we get older, you and I are both in our mid forties. I think we're the exact same age.

I think we. I think we are. I think we're the exact. Same age, but it's interesting because the most interesting people in the world have interesting stories, right?

And of course, and they're, they're the most interesting people because of their interesting stories, which I categories you are in that category, but also everyone has been, some people have been through more. You're on that list, but everyone has been through hard. It is part of the story. When you're in your mid forties, life has happened.

You've been through it. And I love that you also hit on the fact that you found this in your. Mid forties, like this whole new chapter of your life that feels so good is happening now. And hopefully, hopefully we both have a long way to live still, you know, you said, I don't know what this looks like for me, but in the meantime, I'm going to keep, I'm going to keep helping people the best that I can.

This is literally mid forties. It amazes me every single day. It's the best I've ever felt about myself, period. I can look in the mirror and be like, I love you and smile and giggle.

And I take selfies now, silly photos. I used to not do those things. Like I was always afraid or ashamed to do those things to show that I had a personality and 24 years. I didn't remember what my personality was.

It has been so fun to rediscover me. Yeah. It was the best thing that I could have ever done for me was to pause and date me to rediscover Andy. What does she like unattached expectations?

Start there. What do you like? Even if nobody else does anything with you, do you still like it? Can you do it by yourself?

Start there. That's what I did. And it was. Yeah, it's amazing.

It's like, I've actually loved being in my mid forties. I was like, this is not bad. This is actually awesome. And I love myself deeper than I ever have.

And so I, so I want that for everyone else who's tuning in, but just know that you're on your journey. We all have been in high highs, low lows. The sun always comes out. So with that, thank you so much for being on the podcast, Andy.

It's been a pleasure. Yeah. Keep fighting the fight. We'll be back here next week, guys.

Another episode. Take care. And we'll see you then. Bye.

Thanks for listening to the unblocked woman. Listen, you don't rise by waiting. You rise by leading. So if this episode sparked a shift, send it to a woman who needs to hear next.

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