From Friction to Flow: Rebuilding Integrity in Your Work with Tony Tenaglier

There's a kind of burnout that doesn't look like collapse. It looks like competence. It looks like showing up, doing the work, hitting expectations, and quietly wondering why it all feels off, right? Not broken, not failing, just misaligned. Today's conversation is for the high performers who aren't struggling to succeed. They're struggling to feel connected to what their success is actually building. Because here's the truth we're exploring. Sometimes the friction in your work isn't coming from your environment. It's coming from the gap between what you say matters and what your life is actually organized around. And closing that gap, that's where clarity begins to liberate. Welcome back to Catalyst Conversations, where we explore the intersection of leadership alignment and meaningful work. Today, I'm joined by Toni Tenaglia, whose work focuses on helping high-performing professionals rethink their relationship with work, not through a hustle, but through honesty. Toni helps people move from drifting or grinding toward building a craft. Toni, I wanna start here because your work speaks to a very specific kind of person, the one who's capable, responsible, high functioning, and underneath all of that, something feels off. Can you take us back to a time when you first started noticing that pattern? either in your own life or, uh, in the people you now work with? What was the moment where you realized this isn't a motivation problem, something deeper is going on?

Yeah, I guess a catalyst, if you will, right, is kind of your question here. But, uh, Desi, thank you for having me on the show. So I started off in, uh, aerospace automotive, uh, manufacturing years ago, and my boss at the time, when he was training me to be this quality engineer, he taught me that, you know, quality is in essence say what you do, Do what you say. So I said, okay, I don't know what that means, but it sounds good. So I followed along, we did some training, walked the floor, and as I learned, you know, say what you do is writing the procedures for how the operators are to do something in a process in a manufacturing sense. So how to get from A to B, the order comes in, how to process it, you know, how to set up the instructions, how to inspect it, how to ship it out the door. So that's saying what you do. Doing what you say is now, okay, now I go out and I audit that process and see if they're actually following their procedures, following the things that we talked about. And as I learned over the years, I was like, wait a minute, you can take a kind of like terrible looking process, follow this simple sort of formula, make it really perform. And I said to myself, well, my life, why can't I use that? And I said, okay, if I'm performing really well at work, Why don't I try to apply this outside of work? And that's kind of when the aha moment began.

Hmm. I love that aha moment. Let me ask you this. How long did you try to push through before you started questioning that system itself?

Yeah. So I'll say I was trying to follow the traditional song and dance, if you will, get a degree, get a job, get married. Let's just say I burned out hardcore. I tried to climb the corporate ladder, got fired. I, uh, tried to stick around for grad school in a program that I wasn't interested in and dropped out. It was called a failure at a job interview. And just, I mean, I guess at one point I was on a yoga mat, believe it or not. And I just realized it was like everything sort of slowed down as yoga teaches us. And I realized that, okay, good or bad, I'm still here. You know, and that was another kind of like awakening for me. It's like, okay, I was trying to grind towards what society's telling me to do. Not that the degree and a job and getting married are bad things. It's just that I was forcing them into my life, like just like out of college. I'm like, all right, let's do this. We're going to climb to retirement, some arbitrary age. And as I tried to like fight it to go faster, I actually— that's how I burned out. Hmm. So it took getting fired, you know, dropping out and actually breaking up with a woman and just being single all by myself in a state I didn't even know where I was. I was in Ohio. I grew up in New Hampshire. And just in that solitude, I was like, wait a minute, let's turn my life in this direction now.

I love that. There is something so powerful in that because I think a lot of people listening have normalized that feeling. They've built identities, whole lives around being reliable, productive, and high performing. And something that I know is they haven't paused long enough to ask, Is this actually aligned with what I respect? Right.

The problem is they're not even asked, right? So the thing is, we say, what do you do? And you immediately respond, oh, I do the thing that trades time for money.

Right.

And identity is beyond what you do. Right. And society doesn't help us understand ourselves because it's like, no, we want you to say your job or, you know, you're an entrepreneur or something, but you're, you're a mother, you own a business, you do all these other different things. Right. How do you integrate those conversations? I don't know. I think it's podcasts like this.

Right. I agree. Absolutely. Um, and one of the things, um, that I know about identity is that identity is not so much what you do, it's who you are and how you show up. So that's your identity.

I totally agree. So one of the things, Desi, that I've been loving exploring on my podcast, Work Sucks, But I Like It, is this concept of doing versus being. Right. We do a lot of different things. All of us are doing things because we're awake and alive. We have to do things to stay awake and alive, right? Whether it's getting up, fighting the alarm clock, brushing our teeth, driving our car, we're all doing things. The question is, who are you being? Like you said, that's such an important question today. And it's not an easy answer, right? It's a very, and it's some, it's intimidating, right? You know, I find myself going to the philosophy texts. I'm like, oh man, this is like overwhelming. Right. But I think just like what I've learned is just appreciating the smaller things. And what do I mean by that? So one of the things I've been doing for the past so many years with my brother, he's 4 years younger than me, and we live in, um, about an hour away, but each night we text each other 3 things that we're grateful for. And what it reminds me is that, okay, my brother taught me that he would always include his family. He would always include his work and just something fun. And as I was texting him these 3 things I was appreciative of, I'm like, oh man, these are all work-related. Like my lifestyle, like balance here. He taught me to like, okay, it's beyond what you do, Anthony. It's, you know, being with your friends, spending time doing yoga, going hiking or whatever. And so just being appreciative of these little things to me has helped me understand more of who I am outside of the work that I do.

I think that there is something So incredibly true and powerful in that. And absolutely, you're right. Most people in society are not going to ask you that question. And I think one of the things that most everyone relies on is being asked that question. Yet, you can give yourself permission to ask yourself that question.

Love it. Absolutely. And one of the things that I like to explore as well, it's like, Believe it or not, I feel like we don't practice our internal conversations enough. Our mind is always constantly spiraling, right? And everyone thinks, oh, I must be crazy because I have all these thoughts. No, you're just a human being. Like, that's how it works. But we have to practice channeling those conversations in our mind, or sometimes letting them just drift by like clouds overhead. And what has helped me over the years, of course, I've written books and I write for a magazine, um, but journaling. And I know it comes up and it sounds so cliché. And I was like, oh, journaling. I don't do that crap. But yes, for you listeners, journal, you need to journal and write it out. Don't be typing it out, write it out by hand. And that way you're practicing again, this internal dialogue that you're having. So when you start, and again, I say talking to yourself, it doesn't make you sound insane, but as you start talking to yourself and thinking about your thoughts, you're going to be in a better position to see where this conversation is going in your life.

Yes, I do journaling. I've got lots of journals over there. Uh, have you done, Tony, have you done the exercise of, uh, dominant hand journaling and non-dominant hand journaling?

I love that.

That's a very interesting exercise. It's supposed to be the conscious and the subconscious. Um, and it's really interesting what comes up when you, when you do that. And I think that just helps bridge the, the gap between who you are internally and how you're showing up in the world externally.

I will admit, when I first did it, my handwriting was so bad on my left hand that I could barely read it. But yes, I agree. The more you practice, right, the better you get at it. But I love that activity as well.

I think everybody who does that exercise— my handwriting was atrocious when I started with my non-dominant hand. It was so bad. I was like, I can't even read this. And my mentor at the time was like, it doesn't matter. You got it out.

It's the process. Absolutely.

It's the process. Tony, one of the things that stands out in your work to me is how clearly you call out misdiagnosis. Most people think their frustration is external. What are high performers getting wrong when they try and fix their work problems?

I think, you know, being in this hustle culture, right, we're so attached to the job title, we're attached to the money we're going to make, we're attached to how many people we're in charge of, we're attached to the car we drive. You know, it's always interesting to see, you know, in high performers when they really start to perform, in my opinion, is when they go from the extrinsic reward, which is part of the game, right? Like, I'm not saying that we don't do things just for whatever, um, but when they start to turn it inward. And I think that's— and again, this is kind of like, what do we mean by that? And I believe it to be beyond just saying passion because I'm so sick of like self-help, like, go find your passion and, you know, 4-hour work week and 5 steps to happiness. And it's like, there's a friction to work that we need to embrace. And I think the problem with society today, we want to feel no pain. We think that when we're feeling pain, we're not human. But if you look at an Olympic athlete, you know, she's running the whatever around the, I don't even know the events of the Olympic Games, but anyways, like the, the, you know, the, the event around the track. She's training her ass off, right? For that thing. She's in a lot of pain. She's sweating. Her muscles are hurting. But man, when she steps up, you know, ready to go on that day, running that event, you know, to win the gold medal, she's ready to go, right? So it's like, in our mind, we all see ourselves standing on the podium, but we forget sometimes that the hard work is required no matter who you are. People will say like, oh, I'm not a Michael Phelps, or I'm not a LeBron James. It doesn't matter. Like, you can be— I think it was an NCAA, you know, commercial— like, you can be a pro in something other than sports, right? So I like to use the term industrial athlete. So yeah, you're not Doing, you know, you're not an athlete, not playing sports, but you're still playing the game of work. You're still playing the game of life, if you will.

I love that term. Excuse me. Um, I think what you are pointing to, and this is probably digging a little deeper into it, the attachments that we place on things, that is ego.

Yes, that is ego.

And when you dive deeper into yourself, you're removing the ego. And that is going to contribute to so much growth and development in becoming a high performer and becoming a leader and becoming and showing up for your family the way you want to show up. It just, it speaks to the authenticity. And yet society oftentimes fosters ego. Right?

Why do you think— yeah, I'll spin it on you, Desi. No, I love this. Why do you think ego is getting in our way right now?

Oh, oh man.

Why are we even there?

Yeah, right. I mean, there's so many different avenues I could go down with this question. I think the biggest thing though is, you know, we see everyone around us. It's kind of like that competition mindset, right? We see everyone around us who has all of these things, these inanimate objects that they can attach themselves to and be proud of, at least outwardly. Maybe not internally, right? But everyone's got their own thing going on, but at least outwardly. And I figured that out with everything in my own life, right? Like, say, take my team, for example. I used to say I have a team of 10, or I have a team of 16, however many were on my team. Yet I was doing that from a place of ego. I wasn't doing that from a place of authenticity. And I am so proud to be in this Place.

Love that distinction.

Right.

I see something similar with my yoga class. So I used to say, it's my class, my students, they're not mine. I don't own the class. I don't own the students. Right. So I say, I'm just like, you know, I call it just the class, right? It's just the class on Tuesday night at 6 o'clock. That's all it is. And the students show up. Right. It's removing that attachment. Yeah. And I love it.

Right, right. It's one of the things I One of the primary tenets that I operate under is operate with intention in everything that I do and be detached from the outcome. And in doing that, I have removed everything that is egotistical.

Love that. But it's challenging, right, Desi, sometimes because we need sort of— we need the goal, right? We need to know what the outcome is going to be. But in the moment, we can't be so wrapped up in that goal, right? We can't be so wrapped up. But then on the other side, you hear it from an athletic standpoint. It's like, Picture yourself being standing on the podium, right? Picture yourself on the winning team. So it's like a very— it's tough. It really is. But that's the work of self-help, personal development.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. 100%. And I mean, I wouldn't be where I am today without going through the personal growth and development. I think it's so critically important to success. I would say 99% of what makes you successful is the work you do on yourself. 100%. Right? So I'm totally in alignment with this conversation. I love it. I think it's something that everyone should dive into. And I think the biggest thing that with personal growth and development that I often say is it's not a one-and-done situation. You can't go into it expecting to be fixed on the outside of it. Go into it expecting to pick up a tool and put it in your toolbox to save for a rainy day. When life happens, because life is going to happen and you are going to call on those tools depending on the situation you're in.

Yep. Love that. I also want to say too, that like personal development, I know it's personal, but it's not just a one-man team or one-woman team. You know, I've relied on therapists, you know, my girlfriend, my brother, you know, people around me, my best friend Matt. So it's like, you can use the people around you to help yourself grow. And I think that's kind of like intimidating sometimes to be like, oh, I got to work on myself. Well, yeah, but you got people around you cheering you on, you know?

Right, right. I mean, I can't count the number of mentors and friends that I've had that I've looped into that conversation. Right. And oftentimes, you know, when you're working on personal development by yourself, you're going to have blinders. You're going to have tunnel vision. You're going to skip things that are there because you just can't see them. And in talking it out with someone else is going to open your eyes to that. Right? So you can work on that particular story or whatever's coming up in that space.

But I have to admit, like, you know, and I totally agree with you, one of the things when I was first getting feedback from coaches, mentors as well in my life, it's like being open to that change, right? Because you have to let go of that ego like we just talked about. It's like, well, no, I don't need to fix this. I'm perfect. No, you're not. You're human, Tony. Like, so it's like you have to kind of— what I found to get feedback Is I've just attached everything to the breath. And I know I come from a yoga background, I teach it, I practice it as well. But just like in those moments where I know that are going to get stressful, I just take a nice breath in and a nice breath out. And that allows me to just calm down to allow this sort of like, you know, message to be received.

Right, right. It's all about receiving. And, and I mean, that's another thing. I mean, that's a whole nother conversation we can have. You can't force someone to change. They have to be open to receiving. I've known so many people who have been through so much trying times, whether it's from addiction or whatever else, but they won't get the transformation that they're seeking or that you want from them unless they're open to receiving it. If they finally hit that point where they're open to receiving.

Yeah, they need that again, that catalyst moment, right? Where's that aha moment for them?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, let me ask you this, Tony. In your opinion, why do people often default to blaming the environment around them?

I mean, I hate to say it. I mean, we learn from those around us, right? I mean, we learn from whatever. There's a lot of different factors today, right? Being online. But it's easier to blame other people than yourself, right? I mean, that's— so I've studied How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie for, I don't know, 20 years. I'm 38 years old now. I make it a point every year to read that book, listen to that book. And he just talks about how, like, you know, I think the opening chapter is like, you know, criminals just saying they're blaming everyone but themselves, but they're criminals. They're the ones causing the problem. And I guess, like, as a society, we just sort of, like, accept it in some sense, in some pockets, right?

Mm-hmm.

But I think it's just reinforced sometimes, especially on social media. You know, where it's like easy to sit there and hate like something or drop a comment and, you know, this and that. It's hard to do the inner work. It's hard to blame yourself. It's hard to take— I would say credit, but like take ownership that something went wrong, that something— it was your potential fault. But what's interesting, what Dale Carnegie brings up in the book is like when you realize that, like, first of all, we're all human, so it doesn't matter. We're all going to make mistakes. But when you own that, just responsibility of like, okay, I goofed up. It's actually sort of, I don't wanna say fun, cuz it's not fun to make fun of yourself, but it becomes sort of like, okay, I made this mistake, but now I feel like I can fix it.

Mm-hmm. Right.

And when you have that attitude, and I try to teach that to my team, you know, and it's like, okay, you're gonna make mistakes. Do not hide it. Do not blame others. I did have a conversation the other day. It's like, remember, we don't blame other people. And I'm not, you gotta just own your mistake and let's fix it. So it's personal. It's tough.

Absolutely. Absolutely it is. And what you're pointing to is actually another tenet that I operate on, which is take accountability for everything. Everything is your fault. And in that statement alone and that shift in mindset, you gain your power back. The problem is when you're blaming others, you're giving other people the power. So you don't have Anything to exact change in your own life. You're relying on others instead of yourself.

Yeah. I think the other thing too that I think about as well is like, you know, there's a story and I always forget the, the, the source, else I would cite it. But, you know, our thoughts, I think it was like Shakespeare, right? Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Right. So the example that I like to kind of share is, you know, a person gets a horse and they're all excited and they're like, yeah, I got this horse. This is the best day of my life. And the neighbor, she's looking over and she says, well, how do you know? Like, yeah, you got the horse, you're riding around, it's a great day. So a week goes by and this person's still, you know, happy and elated that they got the horse and the horse so playful that throws him off. He breaks his leg. He says, oh, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. My leg's broken. And the neighbor looks over and she says, well, how do you know? How do you know this is like a bad thing? And so a week later, you know, the local militia comes by and they're enlisting for the upcoming war. And this person can't go because they have a broken leg. Now, I'm not saying, you know, don't go fight and all that stuff. But the point is, like, you don't know if something is good or bad, right? So even though you might have screwed up, sometimes you don't know if that's good or bad. I've made mistakes where it kind of turned out to be an okay thing. Now, I've made mistakes where not so good. And we get a finding in an audit, you know, but that stuff happens too.

Right, right. I love this conversation. When does In your, in your experience, when does grinding become avoidance?

When does grinding— I guess, you know, especially well, in the context of hustle culture, that's a great question, right? Grinding become avoidance. I, I'm going to do a simple measure. You know, you know, for those of you working a 9 to 5 job, you're allotted 40 hours a week. And if you can't do your job in 40 hours, and you think you need to work 80, and you're grinding, You know, to get more hours in. To me, one, that's stupid because you're paid to do 40 hours. And the other question you need to ask is you need to ask your manager and say, why is this taking so long? Right? So do I need more resources or do you need to up your skills? Maybe you don't have the skills to do what you're doing, right? You got assigned the wrong kind of project or you need more help on it. Um, I think there's a lot of confusion with long hours being worked, you know, and that's why there's the lore of like, okay, the 4-hour workweek, which I understand what Tim Ferriss is getting at as well, to some extent. But, you know, I think it's what Parkinson's Law, where, you know, it's the amount of time that you allot, and then that's like when you're going to get the work done, if you will. I definitely butchered that, but that's the extent of that. So if I say I'm going to work for, you know, an hour on this project, and you really focus on it, you can do that. But if I say I'm going to do something for 80 hours, that's the wrong mentality. You're going to do it for 80 hours. So you got to change that sort of psychology, right? Say you're working 40 hours. And grind in that 40 hours. Do the work in that time.

Right. And I think what the— what you're pointing to there, Tony, is self-discipline. I was in a coaching program and they had me get a physical wind-up timer, right? And you set it for 30 minutes or an hour depending on what you're doing. And once that goes off, you are done.

Love it. Yep.

Right. It's about developing a habit. The analogy I use is it's like a bodybuilder weightlifting, right? Training. It's about developing the habit of getting it where it needs to be. And once it's so deeply ingrained, you can't function if those habits are not in place. And these habits that we're talking about are the ones that are highly beneficial For high performers, right? Because once those habits are ingrained and you don't hear your timer, your internal clock's gonna go, hey, you've been working on this for this long.

Yeah. I mean, you said something key there about structure. What's interesting, and I'll quote Zig Ziglar, he says, most people wanna be free. When you take a train off the tracks, it's free. It doesn't go anywhere.

Mm-hmm.

So we think that we need to have no structure. We need, we have all the time in the world, which we do. We have 24 hours, you know, and 7 days a week. But like you said, when you say you're going to do it for 30 minutes, you put the train on the tracks. Now you're getting somewhere. Now you're getting to your destination.

You'd be surprised at how productive you get in just that little bit.

I 100% agree. You see my calendar, it's all blocked out in chunks of what I'm going to do things.

I call mine a rainbow calendar.

I love that. I like that. Yeah, that's what mine looks like too.

It's all color-coded. I know what all the colors are. Um, Tony, you've built a framework. It's called the, the Friction to Flow Work Audit, right? And for someone hearing this for the first time, what does it actually mean to audit your work life?

Yeah, so, you know, I find that a lot of people have goals, right? So we know where we're going. We know we want to get whatever, zero scrap if you're manufacturing, or you're an entrepreneur, you want to grow your business. What I've realized is that, yes, we know to point B, the question is, what is point A? Where are we now? And so the Friction to Flow, you know, quiz that's available on my website at worksucksbutilikeit.com/quiz, it's free. Um, it basically gives you the language for where you're at now with your work, why you have this sense of friction. And hopefully what I found is like, it's okay to have these feelings and these frustrations, but what we need is to put language to that. We talked about, again, that internal dialogue practice earlier. And so this is a chance to start putting words to be able to articulate your frustration to work so you can take that next step towards that goal.

I love that. I love that. It's so good. So good. It's taking stock and being present to who you are in this moment with what you're doing.

Absolutely.

And it's so important to alignment. My favorite word, alignment, staying aligned with yourself.

But present, like you said, I mean, that's some of the— that's the biggest challenge. As you know, Desi, today working with teams, people are thinking in the past, they're thinking about the future, which is fine. There's a time and place for that. But we have to be in the present, right? We have to be in the now.

You absolutely have to be in the now. I heard a quote. I heard a quote that anxiety comes from thinking about the future. I forget who says it. Anxiety is derived from thinking about the future, and depression is about thinking from the past.

I love that. Okay.

Staying in the present is what will move you forward.

Yep. I love that.

And I probably totally butchered that quote, but you get the gist of it though.

Yep. No, no, no.

Yeah. And what I, what I really appreciate here is that this isn't about adding more effort in, right? It's more about building awareness of yourself primarily. And, and that's where the structure begins to support instead of suffocate. I wanna break down into one of your core ideas, the difference between drifting, grinding, and building a craft, because I think a lot of people don't actually know which one they're in. Can you walk us through those 3 states?

Absolutely. So those 3 states are basically derived from a psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. So he was a, basically did this study, they call him the father of flow. And some of you, you know, have heard of flow states where you're in the zone, right? Think of a, a project you might've been working on and it seemed like minutes went by and you're like, holy crap, 4 hours went by and I got all this work done. That's a flow state. There's a lot of stuff going on in the brain with all that. So anyway, so Mihaly came up with this stuff in the '80s and the '90s. He did this study and he derived this flow channel. And so how I thought about it was, again, sort of like my, I guess, 3-year-old brain here, my engineer hat. I said, okay, well, this is like a map to me. On the Y-axis, you can have challenges. On the X-axis, you have skills. And when you balance your relative challenge to skills, you find a flow state. So flow has 3 things. They call 'em the 3 antecedents to flow. Basically the things that put you in a flow state. You need to have clear goals, immediate feedback, and this challenge-to-skill ratio balanced. So to me, when you're a drifter, You are, you know, not on the flow channel. You are, uh, just drifting through work. You're there for just the paycheck. You're just scraping by in life. You're just doing, you know, you're drifting. You're just drifting.

Bare minimum.

Um, exactly. Thank you. Exactly. The bare minimum. Exactly. And for those that, um, are grinding that, so basically what he says, when you have too much challenge, And not enough skill in the particular thing, you get anxious, right? And so I find that to be our grinders. We're just like, you know, especially I think in the context of a 9 to 5, oh, 40 years till I retire, I got to keep grinding. I keep grinding. There's anxiety around that, you know, and it feels like you're not using your skills. You're just stuck in this sort of like rat race of just, I'm doing the same shit, different day. And so that's kind of the grinding aspect where you are. Your job is giving you enough challenge, but you don't feel like you're using your skills. So then let's flip it to the other side. Let's go down to where the skills are in the flow channel, where I'm saying, you know, someone's got a PhD and the job is like, you know, putting, uh, toothpaste caps on the bottle, you know, whatever. And it's like, okay, well, clearly there's not enough challenge for this person with all this potential skill. Right. So they're going to get bored. So the building a craft is really You know, to me, recognizing your skills and then the sweet spot of these things, when you can recognize your relative challenge and skill, that's when you find the flow state.

I think that is incredible insight. I love that. And I think it is so true. I mean, honestly, I mean, I'm not one to be put into a box, yet I can clearly identify where I am in that box. Right? Like, for me right now, I'm in flow state. I'm doing what I love and I am being challenged, right? I, I've got— my skills are being put to use. Um, so I love that. Um, the main thing— yeah, go ahead.

But just the thing with that, so what's important with flow is that— and I think this is where sort of our, you know, culture gets it wrong, the hustle culture gets it wrong, and corporate gets it wrong— Is that flow has 4 stages. So there's a struggle, release, flow, and recovery. And, you know, so basically those 4 stages are, say I'm working on, you know, a problem, right? And your boss, you know, has given you this report and the customer's yelling at you or whatever it is. So you're struggling to figure out, okay, what is the challenge here? What are my resources? Do I have the information? And you're kind of like grappling with this problem, trying to get a solution. Okay. You know that it's due by the end of the week. So each day you're going to work on it. So you struggle to get sort of the information together. That's phase 1. Then you take a break, you allow the brain to kind of sift through it, you know, and do its thing at the subconscious level. You know, you walk around the plant, you go take lunch, or you, you know, go to the water cooler, talk to your friend. Then you come back because your boss reminded you that you need to get it done. And then all of a sudden, when you started grappling with the information, you find a flow state. But more importantly, so then we'll have a happy ending here. So then we finished the report, we send it out. Perfect. But what needs to be reminded to, you know, corporates and also this sense of hustle culture and entrepreneurs is that once you find flow states, it's equally as important that you find time to recover. You do something, whether it be spending time with your family, doing yoga, going on a hike, getting off your phone, because again, that's so taxing. from a neuroscientific standpoint in the brain of what's happening in flow, your body and brain literally need the time to recover.

Right.

So, yes. And the thing that Steven Kotler says, one more point here, Desi, is that, and I consider myself guilty here as well, is he says there's a dark side to flow because we get addicted to it. Mm-hmm. It's a, they call, he calls it a flow junkie. So we're chasing these flow states cuz we're so excited, we're doing all this great work, but then that's where burnout comes in. Yeah. And I have to remind myself, you know, you joked about— I love it— the kind of the rainbow calendar. When I don't see enough purple and yellow on my calendar, I know I'm going to burn out. Why? Because yellow is my social time with my friends and family, and purple is my time to recover. And so when I have nothing but green and blue and I'm doing work, work, work, work to get in the flow, Tony's going to burn out.

Yes. And burnout is— oh, it's harrowing. I've been through it 3 times myself. Now I know my triggers, and I'm very much the same with my rainbow calendar. Um, for For everyone listening, I want to kind of break that down a little bit more simply for everybody. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting is drifting disconnects you from intention, grinding disconnects you from meaning, and craft reconnects you to both. And that's where work starts to feel like something you're building instead of something you're just enduring.

Love that. I love that.

Okay.

So like, yeah, love that. Perfect. Good.

Perfect. Um, at the center of your philosophy is something simple and not easy. Say what you do, do what you say. We talked about it in the beginning, right? Where do, where do people most often break that agreement with themselves?

I think it's this. Well, I, that's interesting. I was going to say saying, but then I thought it would be doing, but I'm going to go with saying, we're gonna go with my gut here. So saying what you do, and why do I say that? Because, you know, again, we talked earlier, as you mentioned, the importance of having this internal dialogue practice, right? Journaling, talking with a good friend or significant other about a conversation and just being allowed to share thoughts and feelings as they arise. Right. That's such an important thing. So I guess like, to me, I say, say what you do is where people kind of fall off because they're saying. Oh, I need this car. I need this house. I need this job. I need to make $1 million. I need to have 10,000 followers on Instagram or whatever. And yes, again, those are part of the equation for this, but it's like, to me, there's this sense of like resonance when you say something. And that's not, you know, quantitative. And I'd love for it to be one day. We can't measure each other's thoughts yet. We can see the electrical waves, but we don't know what the thoughts are. But anyways, like the only way I can describe is when you start, you know, practicing in this dialogue with yourself, with others, you start to realize this sense of harmony and resonance with the words you're saying in your body. So now when you start to do these things that you're saying, now you're starting to put the pieces together. And like you said, working towards this meaning, you know, in your life and your work.

Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Now, continuing along that line, when people break that agreement with themselves, how would they rebuild integrity without becoming rigid?

Yeah, it's funny because, like, you know, I'm very rigid in my— like the calendar, right? It's an example of being a little maybe too rigid sometimes. So one of my favorite drummers, Neil Peart from the band Rush, he says, never leave spontaneity to chance. And so what I love about that is you have to just sort of Allow for this sense of play. And I guess like where I'm going with that is people are so serious today. We don't wanna make, make mistakes and this and that, but we have to again remind ourselves that we're humans. We're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna fail. We're gonna look goofy doing it. And there's a quote I love to share from the book Laughter Yoga. And this study basically found that kids will laugh around 400 times a day and adults less than 15. And all that says to me is that kids are having a good time in their life and adults are miserable. And that's sad. It's a sad statistic.

And I mean, I, I love that concept. I work really hard to stay in those frequencies of love, joy, peace, enlightenment. Um, so I'm constantly laughing and I guess it would, it would almost equate to who you surround yourself with because if you surround yourself with serious people, you're gonna be serious a lot more of the time. If you surround yourself with fun people who get you, who are there with you energetically, You're going to have a lot more fun. And with yourself, you can turn everything into a game. That's what I do.

Yes. Love that. I love the gamified. No, absolutely.

Gamify it with yourself. Have a little competition with yourself.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

So fun. I love this because honestly, that's, that's the work. It's the work because clarity isn't just about knowing what matters. It's about organizing your life in a way that reflects And your background, I know we've talked about it a little bit, but I want to dig a little deeper. Your background spans marathon running, quality editing, creative work, which is a unique combination. What have those experiences taught you about discipline and long-term growth that most professionals overlook?

I think, you know, it goes back to this concept of motivation. Right. So marathons have taught me— I've run 12 marathons. And by the way, I'm not running Boston anytime soon. I'm not fast at all. I'm just happy that I'm standing by the end of 26.2 miles and I've made the cutoff time, you know. Um, so, but I do, I have enjoyed them. I haven't run them a little bit since COVID But one of the things that I learned from marathon running is really the discipline of having motivation when it fades.

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, even though motivation isn't permanent, I had to keep telling myself that it was. Right. And all it had to be was simply putting the left foot in front of the other. And again, that's so cliché. You read all the self-help books and Lao Tzu saying, you know, journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step. And you're like, whoop-de-doo. And I hit like and all that stuff on social media. But it's like when you're in the moment, it's like, it's that simple and it's that difficult. But I have to admit that like I've had support from friends and family, you know, to be cheering me on on the sidelines and knowing that they're at the finish line waiting for me. Um, but it's really marathon running has taught me that, you know, discipline is just digging deep sometimes to find the motivation to take that next step. Even when I didn't want to, I remember a time I was running in Alaska, it was Anchorage, Alaska Marathon. And it was like, I think it was in June. And for whatever reason, I had this asthma attack around mile, like 22. And I was just like, literally, I felt like I was dying. I couldn't breathe. And I just went back to, unfortunately, my friend had, you know, caught up to me at that point and was walking with me. And she just reminded me like, hey, get your inhaler out and let's take one step at a time. And that was it. And all of a sudden I did that for a mile or two and then I felt good. And then we finished the race running in. And so just like reminding ourselves that it's gonna be hard and we just have to just sometimes when it is too hard, drop the expectation. I know I wasn't gonna win the race. I wasn't gonna qualify for Boston. But my goal became, as it always was, to finish the race. And let's do that by taking one step at a time.

Right. I love that. Similar to, to that analogy, you know, one step at a time, I do— I take everything one breath at a time.

Oh, even better. Love that.

Right? Because it's not always about stepping forward. It's about thinking forward. It's about being forward. So take everything one breath at a time.

That also goes back to what you're saying too about the idea of presence, right? With that breath, now you become more present. So I love that. I love that rooting it to the breath.

Yes, yes, absolutely. There's a theme here that I pick up around sustainability— not intensity or urgency, but consistency rooted in something real, right? Kind of like what we were just talking about, me rooting it in breath, right? Or rooting it in something that is Solid. Right. And I love what you said about just digging deep to find that motivation because oftentimes it is hard. It's hard sometimes.

Yeah.

Right. And I think it comes back to that presence and alignment and what you said, resonance. Right. As long as you have that end goal in mind and being easy on yourself. Oh, For heaven's sakes, people are way too hard on themselves.

They are. But again, it's the phone, right? I mean, we don't have the six-pack abs, we don't have the beach bod or whatever we think we need because of FOMO, fear of missing out online. I hate to attribute that, but it's like everyone is unique, everyone has a potential, everyone has a gift,

right? Well, and it also leads into shiny object syndrome, which leads into FOMO. I mean, they're basically the same thing called something different. Um, yet one thing that I keep myself grounded in is I don't fit in other people's boxes. What those solutions are presenting to me while they sound good, I know aren't going to work for me because I'm present to who I am and how I show up. Yeah, it's great. Congratulations. This is working for you. It's not going to work for me. And I know that.

But I think that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, with the say what you do part, you're so clear because you practice saying in your mind what you're going to do, right? When people don't practice that, they're like, ooh, shiny object. Ooh, shiny object. But you're like, no, that doesn't align for me. I don't want the shiny object. I want this thing.

Right, right, right. And I think, well, my mantra for 2026 is simplicity over complexity. So really, it's dialing back to the foundational pieces that I need and going from there.

Love that.

Right? And I think that is something that a lot of people need to do because a lot of times their brains, their lives, they get way overcomplex. And at that point, you're overthinking everything.

But your breath reminder was perfect, right?

Right.

One breath at a time.

One breath at a time. I love that. If someone listening today realizes they're out of alignment, what's that first honest step they can take this week? Not the perfect step, just an honest one.

I think it goes back to, again, that being appreciative, just so we're not chasing the shiny object and thinking that we're missing out on those things. And just taking the time to write out 3 things today for you listeners right now that are frustrated with your work, uncertain, asking if this is it, write out 3 things that you're grateful for. Share that with the person and hopefully they share 3 things back with you and keep that going.

I love that because alignment isn't built in big declarations. It's built in small, consistent acts of honesty. It's where it's built. Tony, we're gonna head into something that is my favorite thing to do. It's lightning round. First instinct answers only. Ready?

All right, let's rock and roll.

A belief about work you've had to unlearn.

Hard work.

Mm-hmm. A sign someone is closer to building a craft than they think.

It's uncomfortable.

A habit that quietly erodes integrity.

Trying to appear a certain way.

One question everyone should ask themselves weekly.

Who am I being today?

What does meaningful work feel like?

Really harmony and flow.

I love that. And I want to close this out. I want to bring this back to something simple because through this conversation, we've talked about friction, we've talked about alignment, we've talked about growth. Underneath all of it is honesty and really authenticity. When you're honest with yourself and everyone around you, you show up authentic, you show up yourself. And honesty is about what you say. Matters, right? Honesty about how you spend your time and the willingness to close that gap. At Catalyst, we talk about clarity that liberates, structure that supports, and soul that sustains. And Toni, your work embodies that clarity, right? Is through seeing friction for what it is, right? Structure is through auditing and realigning your work. Soul is through building something you respect over time. So, Tony, my final question for you today, if someone takes one thing from this conversation, what should it be?

I'm going to keep repeating it, but just being appreciative. Once again, I just, I just believe that to be the thing because it goes back to what we were saying about shiny object syndrome and fear of missing out. Just appreciate that you have maybe an apartment. Appreciate that you might have a car. Appreciate that you might have a job. Appreciate that you might have a friend. Appreciate that you have a phone. 100 years ago, we never had a phone. You know, just appreciate the things you have today, not what's in your Amazon cart shipping tomorrow. Appreciate what you have today.

I love that. And honestly, I want to do a little mindset shift there for you, Tony. Repetition isn't a bad thing. The more you hear it, the more it will get ingrained in your subconscious. I know for me, when I have hard days, I say at least I have a roof over my head. I have food in my cupboards and I have my family around me.

Love it. See, right?

And then you move forward from there because you can only go up.

Exactly. Exactly.

And it's all, it all comes back to mindset. It's how you think about things. When someone comes onto a meeting with me and they ask how I am, I say, I'm always amazing. And I always get this look like, what do you mean? And I mean, it's a choice. It's a choice to always find everything amazing.

Yes.

Right.

I agree. I agree. I love that.

Awesome. So to everyone listening, you don't need to overhaul your life tonight. Okay. You need one honest decision and the discipline to follow through. Say what you do, do what you say. There, that's where alignment really begins. And that's where meaningful work is built. This is Catalyst Conversations, and we'll see you in the next episode.