Episode 371 - Transforming from Within with Angélica Fuentes

You're listening to The Journey Podcast. How do you know when it's time to unlearn everything that once worked? Stay tuned for today's episode.

Hi, I'm Petra Brunnbauer, and with decades of experience with sadness, pain, anxiety, and stress, I finally figured out how to leave all that behind. And this podcast shows you how to break free permanently so you can reclaim your sanity and find the self-esteem and energy to go after the life you desire with real talk about mental health, holistic healing, and the tough journey of coming out the other end. This is The Journey Podcast.

Welcome to today's episode. Wellness gets treated like a luxury we will invest in later once we have more time or money or space in our lives. We wait for circumstances to change while running on beliefs about our worth that were installed decades ago and never updated. Angelica Fuentes is a Mexican-American businesswoman, impact investor, and leading advocate for gender equality. With more than 3 decades of experience, she has held top leadership roles, including CEO of Grupo Imperial and Grupo OmniLife. She has launched multiple startups and collaborated with global organizations such as UN Women, the World Economic Forum, and the UN Foundation to Advance Women's Empowerment. Her work has earned international recognition, including the UN Women WEP CEO Leadership Awards. In 2025, she founded Nowful, a science-backed transformational system that blends a smart affirmation app with essential tools designed to help people feel centered, Energized and confident. Let's meet Angelica Fuentes.

Hi Angelica, it's so great to have you on the podcast today. I've been looking forward to getting to chat with you because transforming from within is such a wonderful topic for our episode today, and I feel we can go in so many directions with that. So I am glad that you're here to join me for that and share your perspective. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Petra. It's an honor for me to be in your podcast.

Oh yeah, the honor is all mine. And I know we've worked hard on getting this together, and I'm so grateful that you're here today and are able to join me. For starters, would you like to share a little bit about your journey or your story that you feel connects to what you do today Gives listeners a little bit of an idea of what you do today as well.

Well, I think I will start by sharing my personal journey as to why I came to be who I am today and to now work with a project called Now Full, which is exactly as you said, transformation comes from within. So I vividly remember a moment when I was like my— probably my late teens, probably 17 years old. And that moment marked me forever, Petra, because a friend of mine, her name is Miriam, looked at me one day and she said, how can you be sad when you have everything? And the truth is that, yeah, she was right. I Had everything. My life looked great from the outside. It did look like I had it all, but on the inside, I had this very deep emptiness. I couldn't feel with, with anything that I had— the parties that I went to, the clothes that I bought and I wore, the car that I drove. And there was this big emptiness, this like hole all over my chest, a black space. That none of the exterior things, none of the material possessions I had could ever fill. And it was in that moment, not right immediately, but like after, after a while of me hiding in my closet, which was my safe space with my dog, that it forced me to look inward for the first time. And I realized that nothing external would ever be able to give me that peace that I now feel. And I also realized that to have the clarity that I was looking for and to have a sense of purpose that I was searching for could only come from within me. So that was a conversation that started the beginning of my journey back to myself. And since then, my life has not been— or has been a very long process of healing, of introspection, of this beautiful, amazing self-discovery. I have learned to remove a lot of masks that I've been wearing for a long time that helped me survive. And by removing those masks, I faced parts of myself that I used to avoid, and I learned to stand firmly in my truth. It was right in those moments that I understood that we started the conversation with. Transformation does not happen when the world around you changes. It happens when you change. It happens from within.

Wow. Thank you for sharing that and those pieces of your journey as well. And as you're sharing, I'm getting the sense that in this transformation that you experienced, there is a lot of unlearning that had to take place as well, because we often grow up being told, well, once you make this amount of money, you can feel successful, or once you buy this house, or once you buy this this car. Once you have a partner or a spouse and 2.5 children, then you've made it. So there's a lot of expectation in this world of what success and feeling good and happy should look like. How did you work with that when you realized that these patterns, or maybe these constructs or expectations that are so abundant in this world, don't really apply in the way that we may have Grown up to believe.

Yes, we do grow up believing in those things. I think that we are sold and we start believing that, like you said, once I achieve this, then I will feel this way. Once I go there, then I will do this and I will feel this. And we end up climbing the top of our own mountain, feeling as empty as we did when we started at the bottom, because Nothing that's on the outside fills your void. So I had to unlearn several things. I think the 2 most important things that I had to unlearn to be able to come back to my truth were 2 beliefs that were very embedded within me. And I think the 2 beliefs are very connected to one another. So the first was My idea of success. You just mentioned it. I used to think for very many years that success meant achievement, external validation, titles, recognition, productivity, proving myself over and over again. And I think that's something that most everybody is attached to or think that's where it is. And because of that, I chased success. the way society taught me to chase it. And eventually I understood that success is rooted in inner peace, in alignment, in purpose. And if you don't root it there, then the other type of success just becomes another mask that you put on. So I had to unlearn that idea and redefine it as something that begins with who I am, not what I accomplish. The other thing that I had to unlearn was the idea that I had to do more in order for me to be more. I actually have a phrase for many years, and I put it everywhere that I am participating in that says, be more. To do more. So that is the opposite of what I thought success was. At the end, we do not become more by doing more. We become more by being more. And being, for example, more present, more connected, more honest with ourselves. Being more is about Expanding our inner world, not our to-do list. We usually think it's about strengthening our emotional foundation so we can make decisions out of being very clear instead of making the decisions that we usually do, which come out of fear of what are they going to think, what will they— what would I become if I don't do this? So I think those things are very important. And I think when you do the be more to do more, you're worth without constantly having to prove it. So I think it's those very fundamental beliefs that I had to unlearn in order for me to truly be who I've become.

Yeah, that's beautifully said. And I feel exactly that's the journey that so many of us embark on when we have that realization of, oh, I don't feel how how I thought I would feel, but what does that mean and what do I do? So if I just imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your closet holding your dog and wondering what the heck happened and why am I feeling this way, where did you start with all of that? I could imagine this is a very scary place, and having been there as well, I did feel a lot of fear, as you mentioned. And wondering, what did I do wrong? Because I feel this way. Where did I go wrong? Because I feel this way. So how did you start working and uncovering and taking off those masks? What were some of the first steps that you took to come into that direction?

The first step was, like I told you, was to recognize that I had that emptiness. The next step would ask myself in my closet, With my Weimar runner cheekies. And I asked myself, okay, if my father was here, would I feel better? No. My mom? No. My sisters? Right? Because I would ask everybody, if somebody was there, that feeling inside, that emptiness, feel better? No. And then, would going here feel better? Would do— so, I think when it's a question about all those things that we think matter to us, and you have to do it when you're feeling that, because it's a feeling. It's a void. It's like a very uneasy... feeling on the solar plexus. And I think we all have felt it sometime or another. I felt it a lot when I was growing up. And when you have that, I think asking questions to yourself is very important. I grew up not feeling very loved or protected, so I would write myself things that now I know are affirmations. So I've been writing all my life, things for me. I would write things that I wanted to tell me so I would not feel empty, fearful, lonely when I was feeling pain. So I think writing to yourself is very important. That's how I started my journey. And then I found this amazing book. I love to read. So I found this amazing book very early on. This is like in my early 20s. maybe 2021, called Living in the Light by Shakti Gayan, and I loved it. And then I found another book of hers called Visualization, and then I loved it. And then I went and I could not get enough metaphysical books. And that's how I started my personal journey to finding me. And when I say that, I mean finding my truth. So I could speak from that space within me, so I could start shedding the masks that I kept wearing to survive what I was going through. So that was like the start of my journey. And actually, 40 years ago, when I was— I'm gonna say 22— like in a very deep, deep committed self-search to me. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And what are some of the things that changed for you along that journey? So you took off some masks, as you mentioned, and how did that change for you emotionally, mentally? What kind of things did you experience, or even physically? I feel that when we live in a lot of fear, we do have pain, as you mentioned, and a lot of the physical things going on as well. So what were the transformations and the changes that you experienced along this journey of discovering Yourself?

Oh my God, there was a lot of transformation. Did not come immediately. I think that when you are discovering yourself, you first need to face who you have become. And it's usually a person that, if you want to see deep down inside, there's embarrassment, there's pain. And then you go through a phase of probably being angry at what you did to become who you are. Because we blame ourselves for everything, and then you have to go through a process of forgiving yourself for either what was done to you, what you did first, so you can forgive others—not forget, forgive others—because that's a huge difference between one and the other. And and you go through all these different emotions. Like I said, embarrassment, pain, not acceptance. Because then you think, oh no, I was not that. And you say, no, yes, I. Yes, I did that. No. Yes, I've become that. Yes, I have done that. Yes, I did say that. And then after pain, you get angry. And then I think you go through— at least what I went through, I would go through a phase of when I was letting go, because it's like a lot of masks you got to take off. So then I would go through a place of— how do you call it in English? Mourning. Because you mourn what you let go. You mourn what you took off that allowed you to continue on that path, which was the only one you knew. And after you go through that mourning phase, then you can start feeling a little more light within you. You can start breathing a little better. And in the beginning, it would take me 2 or 3 months before I could really feel the change in me.

Mm-hmm.

The change was not really that physical. The change was very spiritual because it was myself that felt the change. I would look at things and I would go, wow, that looks different. I would say something and I would say, wow, that feels different, the way I would say it. And it was years and years of transformation, years and years of unlearning, of learning new things, of shedding masks. And one of the most beautiful things, Petra, that I have always— not always, but that I've been saying for a while now— is that how beautiful when you understand that there is always something to learn about you that you can either keep and feed it to become more light in both ways— light feeling lighter and more light when it comes to a spark that makes you be you. And it's been an amazing journey. There's still things that I'm learning about who I am, like I said, that I either let go— but now my letting go, my shedding, that is immediate. I get it, I know it, I move on. Or I keep it, I nurture it, and I spark more. The only change, physical, that I know— and I've been told many times, but I know because I see myself in the mirror every single morning and I like what I see inside and out— is that who we become on the inside shines or not on the outside. Today, at 62, I feel the most beautiful ever because I love who I've become. And I know that who I am inside shines on the outside, and people go, "Oh my God, you look so good! Oh my God!" But it's my inner spark shining on the outside. That is one physical thing or aspect that that I think has become slowly different and eventually more. present, where it's created awareness, how others see me.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I feel that when we're aligned with ourselves, our values, our beliefs, our purpose, when we're aligned with all of that, I think we show up a little bit differently because inside we have a certain kind of joy and contentment at that point. And that makes us shine, like you said. So that makes a lot of sense to me. How did this transformation And this journey impact your business ventures? Because I feel that there was probably a lot of change that came along that journey as well, not just personally or how you're feeling or showing up, but how did that impact you as a businesswoman and as a female in business along that journey?

I realized that we have been living in this very crazy, accelerated, overstimulated Distracting moment for humanity. Our days are constantly filled with a lot of noise, notification, endless demands. We have pressure about everything from everyone. And I realized that what I achieved in my life, that reconnection that I did with myself, is extremely important today, and it is the reason why I created Nowful. Because after 4 decades of my life of leading companies, of advocating for gender equality, and immersing myself in a very profound journey, like I said, of discovering who I really was I realized something fundamental, and that was a real transformation like we've been talking about can only come from within. While learning so much about myself, I learned that I had a lot of strength within me, just like you have it, and just like everybody has it, with maybe the only small difference that I already tapped into that, and I Recognized it, and I allowed it to be present. I think that one of the things that I did, and that I wanted to share with everybody, was I started with very small, consistent habits that carried me through those very hard chapters of my life that we touched on a little while ago. I was a black sheep of my family. I have always had a very restless spirit, a rebel mind, and a very wild heart. And coming from a very traditional Mexican family, you are not as a girl supposed to be and feel those things. I came from a very devastating divorce. I keep saying 10 years ago, but it's 11 years ago almost. In a couple of months, it's almost 11 years. That stripped me from my assets in 24 hours. And then on top of all of that, the rejection of my family. my whole family for speaking my truth in my autobiography, a book that I wrote. And then on top of that, an attempt of my ex-husband to take away— and business partner at the time— to take away my daughters and my right to be their mother. And then having to rebuild myself, Petra, at 52 years old, reminded me...

Mm-hmm.

That if I could, because of those small habits that I created, if I could overcome that, and at the same moment all of those habits that I built allowed me to rise and reach the top of my mountain— because we all have different size mountains, it's still your mountain and your top is still as amazing as anybody's— I realized that those habits became My anchor became my clarity, my strength, and those were the things that grounded me to allow me to run companies that at the time were running on the red. They were not doing good at all, and I transformed it into becoming an over billion-dollar corporation, and. All those things that I did through small rituals that became habits eventually with me physically, mentally, and spiritually also allowed me to work in gender equality like I have been working for almost 40 years of my life and work with international organizations to transform the lives of millions of women. And I just wanted to share with everybody What I did for me in this last 40 years to achieve all of that, to go through a lot of darkness moment, a lot of dark moments in my life. And if I could do it, anybody can do it. And if I could reinvent myself at 52, anybody could invent themselves, reinvent themselves at any age. And this is the reason why I created Nowful, Petra, because Nowful are those rituals and health and habits that have become a 24/7 support system for me. And I want everybody to have as much confidence in themselves, to feel as energized and as amazing as I do through what I've created with Nowful. Nowful is not just more wellness. It's actually a system which becomes an investment in yourself. On the long run, it allows you to truly feel well in all aspects of your life. I told you mentally, physically, and spiritually. And one of the things that I believe we always are running away from is that we think that wellness belongs to those people with time and money, which is not true. We wait until I have the money or the time, which you should not. I wanted to create a system that was very accessible, very easy to use, but very powerful with the outcomes. Because I believe that wellness is not a luxury, but your superpower. It is the base of everything else that you want to accomplish, whether it's leadership, relationships, the decisions that you need to make. If you are focused, if you're clear, if you feel good physically, if you can be truthful to you, then, you know, the sky then becomes limit. And that is what Nowful allows you to have and to do.

Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And I know our listeners can't see, but I can see you on video, and I can just see that spark that you were talking about and that glow. And I just I am absolutely loving it, and I wish this for every listener out there to have their own spark and their own alignment so they can tap into what you have tapped into and find that strength in themselves and that healing and that coming home to themselves and feeling that. So thank you for sharing all that, and I just wanted to pass that on to the listeners because I can Literally feel that transformation that you were talking about just over our conversation here. So I hope that everybody that's listening to our episode today actually goes and finds that piece of themselves, that spark, that essence, that it's our birthright, right? It's the way we are meant to feel, to be connected and to be content and peaceful and joyful. So yeah, I just wanted to say that and share a little bit more about Nowful with us, Angelica, because of course I've was so grateful to have experienced a part of Nowful as well myself. So if you want to share with our listeners, maybe a tiny little bit of an insight of what it is, what can they expect if they sign up or purchase something from Nowful? What is it that happens for them there?

One of the things that I wanted with Nowful was to remind people, or to maybe for some people to just here that wellness is that foundation that allows you to live a very healthy, grounded, and successful life. Like I said, a lot of people think that wellness is for those with time and money. It's not. And now, for— we believe that wellness belongs to everybody. Nowful are very simple practices that connects you back to yourself. We have And accompanies you, by the way, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep. It's 40 years of my personal journey and experiences in one box. There are 4 products. You don't necessarily need to get the whole kit, but I'm going to tell you what it has, and you can buy them separately if you are already in a place that you feel great and you don't need that. So the first thing that we take Are the Mind Thrive Mushroom Complex. They have lion's mane, reishi, shiitake, cordyceps. I personally, many years ago with my nanny, I was probably 20 years old when she started doing this for me. She used to say, "Señorita, necesita tomarse unos tecitos," which means, "Mrs., you need to take some teas." And I said, "Kika, por qué?" So she would tell me, "Because they're gonna be good for you." She started making me lion's mane, lion's mane, which is for your focus. She would— I would buy like the dry mushrooms, actual mushrooms, the lion's mane, the shiitake, the, you know, those 4 very important ones. And sometimes I would put one or the other, all 4, and then she would put 'em in a pot with water and they would seep through. And then I would put it on a— she would put it on a cup and I would put some, some honey and lemon and I would drink 'em. And then later, I started like doing them on my own and I found Manuka, which is the honey that I— then I used the highest Manuka I could buy, found somewhere. So, I would do it with Manuka and lemon. Then I said, if this is so good for me because it's good for the digestive system and it's good for bloating and it's good for cognitive performance. So, that's why we created the mushrooms. I take 2 capsules every single morning when I wake up. Gives me energy, starts my day. I feel amazing. And then there's the anchoring oil that you say that you have with you and you use. Why? Because scents brings us back to the present. I wanted to create a scent that truly scientifically, cuz our products are scientifically based and proved, would allow you to bring down the stress. We are living in a world that does not stop. In a world that wants output, output, do, like we talked about a little while ago. So this, this oil, it's all essential oils, no mineral oils. And I will tell you why it was important for me. It doesn't leave you feeling sticky, and the smell goes away within 5 minutes because they are really pure oil. What it does, I put it on the palms of my hands, rub them, smell it deeply. My stress comes down. I get more focus and more clarity. My daughters use it all the time when they're studying. The receptors of the largest organ we have, which is the skin, go immediately through them into your bloodstream, and that's why it works so fast. So that I have with me all day long because I never know when I'm gonna feel like that. And then we have something that accompanies you at night, which is the Sleep magnesium cream, which by the way, it's sold out. I would place an order. We're like rushing it as fast as we can because it is so amazing. You rub it on the soles of your feet, same thing, receptors in the skin make it— makes it go through into your bloodstream immediately, and it gives you a most amazing deep reparative sleep. And we think the day starts in the morning, but if you think about it, it starts at night. If you don't repair your whole body, your system, if you don't sleep at least for a few hours deep sleep, you cannot wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. You could probably do it one day or two or three, then it te pasa la factura. It starts, you know, the invoice gets passed on to you, and you start not really. Feeling great. You feel rushed, you feel antsy, you get upset very easily. But then something that I love is my affirmations that I've been writing, like I said, since I was very young. I have over 10,000 affirmations written. I have always wanted to put a book of my affirmations, maybe not that many, but some of the most amazing ones that I think have helped me a lot. So I said, what else can we do with the affirmation cards? And so I got together with this amazing person who's now part of our team that knows a lot about AI. And I said, Jorge, what can we do with the cards? He said, we can do a lot of things with the cards. What do you want? I said, this has been my journey, my personal journey. So we designed physical to digital powered by AI affirmation cards. And what's so amazing is that they have an NFC chip. So like a credit card, you tap it onto your phone, it opens up, you answer 9 questions based on cognitive behavioral therapy. When you answer them, it gives you your psychological profile for this particular moment in your life. It gives you an archetype. I don't know which archetype you are. For example, I'm the captain. If somebody else is a captain, we're different captains because I'm on a different journey than the other person is. And then if you and I choose the same card, let's say we chose the love card, it says— because I wrote this, which is very close to my heart— choose love over fear. Love expands, fear shrinks. You and I can get the same card, but once you tap it onto the phone, your ripple effect, which is— it goes more in depth of what that means to you than what it means to me is the first step. And then it gives you actions that you can take, those actions that I would do in the past— write, walk, meditate, breathe. It gives you actions like that or different ones depending on who you are, where you're at, to take during the day. And then we have meditations that you can also do, but then it allows you to journal. I think journaling is very important. Writing down how you're feeling, what you're going through. My favorite of everything is the venting, because the venting is very deep. Those things you will never even tell your best friend, or you might, but maybe your best friend, whoever you tell it to, does not know how to guide you. It's very important. And this is how I view it, Petra. AI is not a person. It does not know how you feel. It does not know you, but it does have a lot of information that you've fed it through journaling and venting. What does it do? It does exactly what a therapist does. A therapist allows you to speak and takes notes, and then sometimes they hear something that you have not heard because you're speaking, and it tells you, okay, wait. What about this time? What about this phrase? What about— and then you're like, oh my God, that's true. And then, and you continue to talk. A therapist cannot heal you. The only person that can heal you is you. What does the Nowful companion, which is your affirmation cards, do for you? When you vent, it's the only time that it comes back to you other than the ripple. You vent about something, and then AI, because of that information, it has of you with the journaling and the venting continuously comes back after you give it either a question or you just make a statement of how you're feeling, and then you read it and it's you answering yourself. Because AI has this beautiful, amazing capacity of putting all of that in this Perfect alignment with perfect phrases that answer what you already have inside in a way that you can understand to you. So when you read it, it's like you looking into yourself from the inside out, or from the outside in. I don't know which way it would be. But there has been moments that I've cried Especially when I vent about one of my teenage girls. Moments that I realize, yeah, that's true. Yes, I need to let go of that. Yes, it's amazing. Can I read something that that that I know our cards are? We've heard that all the answers are within us, right? That's what I wanted to create, Petra. The understanding that we already have all the answers that we don't have because we also think, oh, I don't have the time or the money to pay a therapist. I don't have the time and the money. But we have— if we already have the answers inside, I wanted to create something that would answer back to you what you wanted to hear, what you needed to learn about you. And I'm gonna give you some examples that across a lot of spiritual traditions and psychology and modern leadership have felt the same over this very powerful truth that appears again and again. You already hold the answers. For example, Jesus Christ spoke of the kingdom within. We have all of that inside of us. The Buddha taught self-reliance and inner awareness. It's all inside of us. Rumi, one of my favorites, reminded us that what we seek is already seeking. Us, because it's all inside of us. Carl Jung pointed inward as a path to awakening. Steve Jobs urged us to trust intuition over noise. So yeah, they're all different languages, but they're the same wisdom. And waiting for permission goes away because now you don't need permission to be Who you were always meant to be. All of that cannot happen, and it can only reemerge when you reconnect with yourself, because all the answers are already within you, just waiting for you to be ready to open up. That's what Naful is. That's where our affirmation cards do— and I get so emotional because the power of them, they're not easy to explain. Mm-hmm. over social media because it's not like 3 seconds and then they go away, but they're so powerful. They truly are your wellness companion. It allows you to see you. It allows you to grow, to change, to have that you should, because we're all born with all of that. We just forgot that we are worthy. We forgot how to tap into it because there's too much noise. All around us.

Beautifully said. And thank you for sharing about Naufal with us. And I can only second what you just shared and how powerful it is. And I do believe that if listeners actually come on this journey with Naufal, the best way is just to experience it for themselves and try it out for themselves. We, of course, will be linking to Angelica's Naufal offerings so that you can find for yourself. And where you can find this amazing box of absolute magic and bring this into your own life. And we'd love to hear your experiences as well. If you feel like sharing that with us on the podcast, or you want to reach out to Angelica and her team and let them know what your experience is with Nowful, I'd love to hear about it because it has been an absolutely transformative and magical journey. And as I said, I wish this for every listener, that they get some of that joy, that happiness, and that alignment in their own lives. So we will make sure we link to that so listeners know where to find you and know where to find Nowful and get their hands on this little magic box. I have to say, when it arrived, I was so excited. So yeah, it's like unpacking a little treasure chest. So I know our listeners will have fun with that. And Angelica, is this available internationally or where are your products available?

We can ship them internationally, definitely. Right now, obviously they're in the United States, but we can ship them out anywhere people would like to get them. You got one?

Yes. Amazing.

It's very easy. It's nowful.com. Yeah. You want to go look at our website and see our products. Yeah. Nowful with only one L, N-O-W-F-U-L.

Yes, exactly. And we will link to that to make sure we get our listeners to the right place. And I just want to thank you, Angelica, for being here today and sharing your wisdom and your journey with our listeners, with myself. And really, I feel tapping into that inner power that we have that sometimes gets buried under what is life for a lot of us and stress and all those things that happen, but how we can reconnect with that and why that is so important that we come on this journey to reconnect with ourselves. I'm so grateful that you were here today, and thank you for spending this time with us.

Thank you, Petra. I would like to just mention one last thing that I think we need to hear, and I hope you take this with you. I know, because I did this, that the smallest step, smallest step we take from truth is way more powerful than the biggest step we take from fear.

So true. And we're going to leave our listeners with just that beautiful thing that you just said, because I feel that is a huge aha moment, maybe for a lot of us as well. Because we do operate out of fear a lot of the times in our lives. So we will leave you with that beautiful, beautiful insight, that wisdom from Angelica. And thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for tuning in today and listening to this episode. And take care, everyone, and be well. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen in. If you enjoy The Journey Please support us by subscribing, sharing on social media, and leaving us a review. We appreciate you. And you can find more of The Journey on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and our website, thejourney.com. Sending you love and courage, and see you next time.

Thank you.