Vivante Energy: How to Become a Fully Alive Woman in 2026

Wake-Up Call: Vivante

When was the last time that you felt truly fully alive? Not productive, not busy, not fine, but alive like every cell in your body was awake and you were completely inside your own life instead of rushing through it. If you have to think about it, this episode is for you. For almost two decades, I have chosen a word of the year. It’s not a resolution, it’s not a goal. It’s a single word that becomes the lens for how I want to live, the kind of energy I want to embody. And this year the word didn’t just choose me, it basically grabbed me by the shoulders and was like, “Tonya, wake up.” The word, vivante. It’s French. It means alive and not the kind of, I have a pulse kind of alive, but the kind of alive where you really taste your Wednesday morning coffee or you dance like no one’s watching, or when you kiss your lover and you don’t want that moment to end. You know what I’m talking about?

Well, there’s a quote by Rumi that I keep coming back to in my life, and I remember reading it for the first time and it stopped me in my tracks. It reads, “With passion, pray. With passion, make love. With passion, eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?” I mean, why? Why are we walking around like dead fish? We’ve been given this extraordinary unrepeatable life and yet so many of us are just going through the motions of it. We are sleepwalking through our own story. Well, for me, vivante is my refusal to do that. So, pull up a chair, pour yourself something beautiful because that’s what we’re talking about today, what it actually means to be a fully alive woman and the six shifts that change everything. Let’s dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image where our motto is simple. Elevate your self-image, elevate your life. I’m Tonya Leigh, your hostess, and I’ll guide you to become the woman who doesn’t just dream bigger. She lives bigger. Let’s dive in.

The Problem: Performing Life

Most women I know and I’m talking about smart, accomplished, extraordinary women, well they’re not living, they are performing living, they are checking off boxes, they are running the house, running the business, running themselves ragged and calling it a full life because the calendar is full, but full is not the same as alive. And then somewhere in the quiet moments when the house is finally still or when someone asks, “How are you?” And you say, “Great,” while something inside whispers, “But am I?” You know the difference. You know there’s a woman inside of you who is aching to come out. Not a different woman, but the real you. The one who got buried under decades of responsibility and the slow quiet agreement to make yourself smaller so everyone else could be comfortable. Well, I’m talking to her today. Did you know that this is the year of the fire horse in the Chinese zodiac?

And this isn’t just any year in the cycle. The fire horse comes around every 60 years. The last one was actually in 1966. You have likely never lived through this energy before and you won’t see it again in your lifetime. You see, the fire horse is known for passion, bold transformation and the kind of change that doesn’t ask for permission. It breaks old patterns, it burns what’s still, it moves fast and forward and without apology. The fire is about releasing. It’s about letting go of what no longer serves you, letting it burn the outdated stories, the roles that you’ve outgrown, the version of you that everyone else is comfortable with, but you are suffocating inside of. This is the year to let it burn. And then the horse is that bold, unapologetic forward motion because you know horses don’t tiptoe. They don’t ask for permission to run, they just do it.

It’s this energy of fire and forward release and run, and this is your year to claim that energy, so don’t let it pass you by. That’s what aliveness looks like. So, let’s talk about it. What does it actually look like when a woman comes fully alive? I’ve thought about this long and hard, especially because vivante is my word of the year. And I’ll be honest, I was tempted at first to talk about the easy fun stuff. Have more hobbies, stay curious, dance more, light the candle, wear the dress on a Tuesday. And listen, all of those things matter, but they’re actually the byproduct. They are what a fully alive woman does. They’re not what makes her fully alive in the first place. So, I had to go deeper and ask, “Why aren’t we doing these things? What is actually going on beneath the surface for women who feel flat and dull and like they’re watching their life through a window instead of actually living inside of it?” And I realized it comes down to these six shifts that you must make if you want to be a fully alive woman.

Shift 1: Step Into the Lead

Shift number one, you must step into the lead. You see, you have spent years being extraordinary for everyone else. You’ve probably built a career, you’ve raised the family, you’ve held everything together with grace and grit and a smile that said, “I’m fine.” And somewhere along the way you became the supporting character in your own story. Maybe you are known as the reliable one or the one who makes sure everyone else’s life runs smoothly while you’re running on fumes. Maybe you’ve managed everyone else’s experience while you’re quietly falling apart in the bathroom maybe with the door locked.

One of our members said it this way. “I was tired, overwhelmed, people-pleasing, self-proclaimed hot mess who had simply given up. I found no joy in my life and I didn’t have a clue how to make it better. I assumed that at 50 it was time to accept that I really was who everyone in my past said I was. At 50 years old, ready to accept that this was it.” And then she decided to focus on the one thing that affects everything else, her self-image. She joined the School of Self-Image. That’s my membership. It’s where we do this work every single day. And if anything in this episode is making you think, “I’m ready for this deep lasting change,” I’ll leave the link down below for you to check it out or you can go to schoolofselfimage.com/join.

But listen to what happened. She said, “Now, here I am self-possessed, confident, creative. I’ve received a promotion at work, a 20% raise, achieved, two extraordinary goals and am down over 50 pounds. I’ve rediscovered a passionate relationship with my husband of 29 years. He says he feels like he’s gotten his wife back. Best of all, I have become my own best friend and in doing so, discovered a really badass chick.” This is what happens when you stop being the supporting character and you step into the lead.

So, ask yourself honestly, “If my life were a film, would I want to watch it?” And if the answer is no, don’t spiral. Just change the scene. Stop curating a life that looks good to other people and start creating one that feels electric to you. And trust me, the people around you will benefit from this renewed, alive version of you. You are the main character. Start acting like it.

Shift 2: Fall in Love With What You Have

Shift number two is fall in love with what you have. This one is quiet, but it might be the most important shift on this list. You see, we can become so focused on what’s missing that you become blind to what’s here.

You are surrounded by things that you probably once dreamed of, prayed for, and you don’t even see them anymore, the home you live in. Well, do you remember when you dreamed of having your own place or the body that carried you through every hard season, every sleepless night with a newborn? Do you ever just thank it for still being here, for still supporting you? Even the fact that we all woke up this morning with air in our lungs and a heart that can feel, well, that’s not nothing. That’s actually everything. And you miss it because you’ve been trained to always want more, to optimize, to look at what you have and immediately think, “What needs to be fixed?” For example, you can walk into your kitchen and see the countertops that you want to replace and you don’t see that the meal you just cooked for the people you love. A vivante woman, a woman who’s fully alive, she still has desires, she still has goals, she still wants to grow and evolve, but she doesn’t do it through the lens of not enoughness.

She doesn’t abandon the present moment in pursuit of a future moment. What she does is she looks at her life right now, the real version of it and instead of grading it, she lets herself love it because it feels good to love what you have, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s hers. And listen to me when I tell you this. From years of seeing this in my life and my client’s lives, this kind of energy, this way of living, it makes it so much easier to create more to love. And that shift is where the magic starts. The moment you stop abandoning your current life for some fantasy one, something cracks open. You start feeling things you haven’t let yourself feel in years. And it’s not just a gratitude or appreciation, it’s this kind of tenderness for your own life and your own existence.

Shift 3: Turn the Volume Up

Now, for shift number three, it’s time to turn the volume up. This might be the most counterintuitive thing I’m going to say today, but you must stop protecting yourself from pain. Everything in our culture tells us to avoid discomfort, and then we numb it, we scroll past it, we pour a glass of wine over it, we work through it. We may shop it away. But here’s the truth. If you are unwilling to feel heartbreak, you are also unwilling to feel love. If you are unwilling to feel rejection, you are unwilling to feel belonging. If you are unwilling to feel grief, you have cut yourself off from the very thing that makes joy possible. You see, these aren’t separate channels. They’re actually the same channel. And when you shut one down, you shut them all down. And this is why so many women feel flat and numb, not because life isn’t offering you anything, but because you’ve turned the volume down on all of it to avoid the parts that hurt or potentially hurt.

You didn’t stop feeling because your life is boring. You stopped feeling because at some point, maybe after a heartbreak or a loss or a betrayal, you made an unconscious decision, “I am never going to feel that again.” And it worked. You stopped feeling that, but you also stopped feeling everything. One of the concepts that I often talk about is joie de vivre, the joy of living. And when I talk about it, I feel like people assume that what I’m talking about is this image of complete 24/7 ecstasy. But that couldn’t be further from the truth because if I’ve learned anything, it’s this. Living includes hurting and crying and rejection and laughing and heartbreak, all of it. The joy of living is about embracing it all because it’s actually our resistance to the hard stuff that causes us so much pain. We withdraw into our own little self-made cages to avoid failure and hurts and judgment and humiliation and rejection, and that’s when we miss out on truly living.

I want you to think about what would your life look like if you were willing to feel all of it? What would you go out there and do and experiment and try? What would you be able to create if you weren’t trying to resist potential hurt? You would probably be fully alive. So, it’s time to turn the volume back up. Let the heartbreak crack you open, cry at the movie, laugh too loud at dinner, dance even when you’re grieving, not because you’re performing positivity, but because you’ve decided that feeling it all is the price of admission for being fully alive and be willing to pay it because the hard stuff isn’t the enemy of a beautiful life. It’s actually part of a beautiful life. The depth, the tenderness, the ache, that’s the texture that makes everything else mean something. Without it, you’re just skimming the surface and skimming the surface is no way to live.

Shift 4: Be Here

Shift number four, be here. I want you to think about yesterday. If someone asked you what happened, you’d probably say something like, “I got up, took a shower, got dressed, had coffee, went to work, finished work, went and picked up the kids, drove home, made dinner, went to bed.” But that is not what happened. That’s just the skeleton of what happened. The real day was maybe the warmth of the water when you washed your hands or the light that was shining through your kitchen window at five o’clock. Maybe it was your child’s voice asking you something so mundane that in 20 years you’d give anything to hear again. That happened and you probably missed it because you weren’t here. You’re almost never here. You are most likely rehearsing some future conversation that may never happen or some future circumstance that may never happen, or you’re replaying a past one that you can’t change.

You are planning Friday while living Tuesday, and then when Friday arrives, you’re planning next week and the week after that. And then you tell yourself, “This is smart, this is responsible, this is how a grown woman operates.” But what it actually is, and I say this with so much love, is a life spent missing your own life. Think about it. Can you hear the past right now? Can your ears detect anything from yesterday? Can you hear next Tuesday? No. There is only what is here, the sound of my voice, the feel of whatever you’re sitting with, the breath you just took without noticing. That’s what’s real. That’s reality. Everything else is just a story in your mind and you’ve been so busy believing it and focusing on it that you forgot to live your actual life right here. And this is about your body too because a vivante woman knows that being in the present moment is about being her body, so she moves. Not for punishment, not to earn the right to eat, but because her body is how she inhabits the present.

Dancing in the kitchen because the music is playing and you feel alive. You walk because the air feels good on your skin. You stretch because it reminds you that you exist in three dimensions, not just in your head. Movement is how you stop living in your thoughts and you start living in your life. Now, some of you may be listening to this, especially if you’ve listened to me for a while and you’re thinking, “But Tonya, you talk about your future self all the time. Isn’t that living in your future?” And I want to be very clear, no, that’s not what it means. And this is coming from a woman who does love to plan, who does love to think about my future, but here’s the important distinction and it changes everything.

When we study our future selves, we are not putting our hope in tomorrow. We are not saying, “One day I’ll be happy, one day I’ll be her. One day life will finally be good enough.” That’s actually the trap. This idea that satisfaction is always coming later. What we’re actually doing is we’re using our future selves as a case study. We want to know how does she think? How does she carry herself? How does she move through the world? What does she believe? And if I know anything about doing this work for a long time, our future selves is a woman who is in the now embraces this moment. And the whole point is we bring every bit of that understanding of our future selves back to the now because she’s not someone you become later, she’s just a mirror showing you what’s available to you today.

There is no future moment that will feel more real than this one. There’s no arriving. And when you start living like that, pouring yourself into the now, everything becomes more vivid, becomes more colorful, the food tastes better, the love lands harder. Not because anything changed outside of you, but because you finally woke up to it.

Shift 5: Cut the Noise

The next shift is you must cut the noise. This one is practical and it matters way more than you think. You cannot come fully alive in an environment that is constantly pulling you back to sleep. The friend who never supports you and always has a little snarky remark whenever she sees you in person or the latest online drama that keeps you angry, afraid or anxious, the group chat where everybody is comfortable, no one’s growing. And anytime you mention a dream, the energy shifts to, “Well, that’s nice, but…” You know what I’m talking about.

Well, it’s all noise and it will kill your aliveness faster than anything else on this list. The people who are uncomfortable with your growth are not bad people. They’re just not your people for this season, and it is not your responsibility to manage them. You have spent years managing other people’s comfort and where has that gotten you? Probably not to where you want to be. If I’ve learned anything, it’s a vivante woman protects her energy the way she would protect her home. She has what I call a red velvet rope around her life. And this isn’t something she puts up out of arrogance, but out of a deep respect for the woman she’s becoming. To cut the noise you don’t have to have dramatic confrontation.

Sometimes cutting the noise is as simple as muting, unfollowing, declining the invitation or just not explaining yourself anymore. Stop explaining your goals to people who don’t have any. Stop defending your excitement to people who have stopped feeling theirs. Stop shrinking in rooms that were never built for the woman you’re becoming. What other people think of you is just noise. And noise only has the power when you tune into it. So, cut the noise, change the station.

Shift 6: Stop Waiting for Permission

And then finally, shift number six. This is a big one. Stop waiting for permission. This is where it all comes together, my friend, because you can understand all of this. You can nod along and agree and still not change a thing because of one belief, “I’m not ready. I need to lose the weight, fix the marriage, pay off the debt, heal the trauma, organize the closet, finish the course, and then I’ll start feeling fully alive. I’ll start living.” Do you hear what you’re saying? I need to earn the right to be fully alive. And here’s the thing, it probably sounds responsible, mature, disciplined even, but it is a trap. The most beautifully decorated cage you will ever sit inside because it looks like self-improvement, but it’s actually self-rejection. You are telling yourself you are not worthy of your own life yet, come back when you’re better.

Wanting to be ready before you begin is just pride wearing a humble costume. It’s the part of you that wants to congratulate yourself for having done the work before you allow yourself to receive the reward as if being alive is something you earn through, I don’t know, sufficient suffering. You don’t have to pass a test to be here. The entrance fee to your own life is just deciding to walk in it and fully own it. So, stop waiting until you’re a size six. Stop waiting until your bank account hits a number. Stop waiting for someone to tell you that you’ve passed inspection. Give yourself permission today, messy and perfect in progress today because readiness isn’t something that you arrive at.

It’s something that you decide. And every day that you wait, it’s just another day that you have agreed to be a ghost in your own life. Present, but not really there, going through the motions, but not really feeling or tasting any of it. I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to do that anymore. Here’s the thing. You don’t need to overhaul your entire existence to become a vivante woman. You don’t need to move to Paris although if that’s something you want to do, I will always encourage it, but all you actually need are these six shifts. You need to step into the lead and remember that you are the main character in your story. You need to fall in love with what you have. Stop focusing on everything that you think is missing or that needs to be fixed. You need to turn the volume back up, the joy and the heartbreak, be willing to feel it all because that’s what it means to be fully alive.

You need to practice being here. The only place your life is actually happening. You need to cut the noise, protect your aliveness like it matters because it does. And stop waiting for permission. There’s no more tomorrows, not when you’ve earned it, right now. This is the year of the fire horse and it’s asking you a very direct question. What are you willing to burn so that you can finally feel alive? And I think you already know. Leave me a comment down below and tell me which of these six shifts hit you the hardest. I read every single comment and I genuinely want to know what stirring in you right now. And if you’re listening to this thinking, “I need to be in a room with women who get this, with the tools and the support,” come join us inside the School of Self-Image. That’s schoolofselfimage.com/join. I like to think of it as the place where vivante women are coming alive.

Until next time, live vivante, my friend, and I’ll see you in next week’s episode. Cheers.