Welcome to the Unfolding Podcast, a space where we explore what it looks like to really trust yourself, say no without guilt, and live your life like it actually belongs to you. I am Erica Voell. I'm a Decision Mentor and Inner-Trust Guide, and I help women in midlife untangle from the life patterns of shape shifting and keeping everyone else happy. Claim how they are uniquely designed to make decisions and understand their unique strengths. Using human design as a lens, we clear the noise of conditioning so their no feels powerful and their yes feels true, and they can move forward without self doubt, guilt and pressure to prove anything. On this show, we have honest conversations about self-trust, boundaries, energy and identity, especially for women in midlife who are done living by the shoulds and second guessing themselves. If you've ever taken a personality test and followed the recommended path and still can't shake that feeling that you've been spending your whole life. Trying to fit in. When you really want it to belong, you're in the right place. You'll hear stories, insights, and tools rooted in human design, coaching, and real life. Not to tell you what to do, not like another self-help book, but to help you really hear yourself so you can stop overthinking and start making decisions that feel grounded, clear, and true. A friend who is a yoga teacher once told me that we can't always be growing, just like we can't always be inhaling. We need to exhale too. And a few months later, I was in a human design class and the teacher brought up how each of the different types grow for generators. It's like stair steps. We grow and then we plateau, and then we grow and we plateau, and then we get frustrated and we feel stagnant like nothing is happening in that plateau. But what's really happening is that momentum is building that feeling of frustration that nothing is happening. We need to manage our energy while we wait for that next thing to respond to. Our brains need that rest, and the plateau is actually needed for our next expansion, just like an exhale after we take a gigantic inhale, and I want you to hold that image of the inhale and the exhale, because I'm going to come back to it at the end. This last year has been a lot and I want to tell you about it. Some of you know my story. Some of you know that I left my job at the library about 10 months ago. Actually, it's been about 11 months ago. So let me go back and introduce you to a few people who have played a really important role in this story. In 2024, in August, I met with a new business coach, her name's Dallas. That was a conversation where she planted a seed about collapsing my timeline. I was not ready to hear it yet, and it actually shifted something for me that day. And then two months later, in October, I started working with Heather Wick, who you heard about in my last episode about business energetics, at first we were doing energy work together and I had no idea that a few months later, she would introduce me to the concept of business energetics and that it would completely change how I showed up in my business. Then in January, 2025, I started working with a career coach named Nic, and it was, I was thinking I needed a bridge job, some kind of interim role that would get me through the next few years until I could make that leap into coaching full-time. And she asked me a question that really stopped me in my tracks. It seems so simple. "Erica, what do you really want?" I have actually adopted some of that visioning work with my own clients since then. What do you really want and how does it feel to be in whatever you want? So I'm talking about time bending in this episode and it just feels like, it feels cra it still feels crazy to me. So how did I take a five year goal? Turn it into a nine-month reality. Honestly, I still don't know how this happened. I just know that there were a lot of things that happened that brought things to fruition that I could not have dreamed about two years ago. So let's go back to that conversation with Dallas that I had. She asked me about my goals in August of 2024, and I told her I wanted to be a part-time coach with a part-time job in three years. My five year goal was to leave full-time employment altogether and be a full-time coach, and she challenged me that day. She said "what would it feel like to get that three year goal of being a part-time coach in two years? I felt my throat close up. I felt my chest getting tight. And I felt this sinking feeling in my stomach, and I said, I don't know. I don't know how I would do that. Because what happened is, is my mind got involved and was like, oh my gosh, all these things, and I would have to do this and this and this, and I would have to get this step done and that step done. I knew I needed to leave the library sooner than three years, but leaving full-time employment felt like a completely different thing. That was the goal that felt five years away. But something happened that day when she challenged me. Something that I could not consciously do for myself because when I would think about leaving full-time employment, I would think about all the steps I needed to take. I was looking at square nine when I was still on square one, and she said, I'm just planting this seed. I want you to think about it. And then around that same time, we were in the middle of this huge reorganization at the library, and I was moving from a branch that I had worked at for four years to a pair of branches. That transition did not go well for me. I showed up every day and I was deeply unhappy. They talk about presenteeism. That was me. I also felt symptoms of burnout coming back. I felt like that every time I was making some headway. I was also meeting some resistance. I would get a project that I, that helped me feel needed, and it allowed me to dive deep into my love of spreadsheets and logistics and coordination. But I kept finding myself trying so hard to force myself to settle into this new role and this new place. But then as I was kept forcing it, like some opportunities outside the library started to show up. I was invited to be part of a retreat that was amazing, and I was so grateful because two of the women who I hosted it with are now former clients and dear friends. And the longer I stayed at the library, the more I knew I did not want to do library work anymore. It felt so misaligned and it had for several years. I mean, I burned out in 2022 and I was like, I was still there and I knew that I needed a change. And I didn't know what else I could do outside of the library world. I didn't know how to take my skills somewhere else. So my career coach suggested to doing informational interviews to help me figure out how I could take those skills that I had from computer science and library. The library world and how I could translate them to something else. So I would do an informational interview and I would just get this feeling that like I could never go back to a corporate job. And then I started having dreams of feeling trapped. My body was sending me these clear messages and I was like, okay, I need to listen to this because if I am feeling trapped in my dreams, then I'm going to feel trapped in another job. And then March 31st, 2025, I had a really hard day at work and it was another day of me calling my husband during lunch after a meeting, crying on the phone to him. And he came home that day and he said to me, "I think it's time for you to leave the library." I in my body and my mind had known it for a while, but I think I just needed him to be on board because I didn't, we didn't have a plan. I needed to have a plan to make that exit. And then a week later, I met with my career coach Nic, and she said something that I was not expecting. She told me that she was afraid that if I found another job, I would just repeat the same patterns that I had been repeating for years, that I would love the job I had for about 18 months, and then I would be right back where I started. So I would be unhappy. It would be a misaligned, and I would feel so depleted that I wouldn't be able to build my business on the side. And then two days after that. On April 10th, I met with Heather Wick, the business energetics coach, and she asked me a hard question that really made my stomach drop. She said, "Erica, what would it feel like to leave and not have a backup plan?" And immediately my brain went into all of the excuses. I can't do that. We have these bills to pay. We have this and this and this, and we gotta send my kid to camp. And money was my biggest excuse. And she said, I want you to sit with it for a while. And she did some energy work with me. And later that night, I started to feel like I could have a conversation with my husband. Not just that it was time to leave, but that I wanted to leave without something else lined up. I really wanted to focus all in on my business, putting all of my energy there and being in it full time, and he said something that I will absolutely never forget. He said, I trusted your intuition before with an adoption and needing to move to a new house, and I have to trust it again. I know that you have done everything you need to do and that you don't make decisions like this lightly. That just settled so much for me, and I, I remember just crying because I was like, oh my gosh, this is really, really happening. These were three conversations in 10 days. The day my husband said it was time to leave the conversation with my coach, Nic, that I would get stuck in the same patterns and that conversation with Heather. And everything changed everything. And the next day I went to work at the library and I had two people ask me, what is different about you? Did you get a haircut? And maybe 'cause my hair is short, but I just felt so much lighter. I felt like a whole different person overnight. I felt like I could take one step 'cause I didn't need to know all the steps to get to square nine. I just needed to take the leap between square one and square two. I did not give notice for four more weeks. But it gave me time to really envision what I wanted, and it's helped me start to really embody the new me and ask myself, who is 4K? Erica, what is she like and what does she do? So who is $4K Erica? $4K. Erica is the one that is making $4,000 a month. Which was my original monthly income goal, but it was a number that it would replace my library salary. But one thing, when I thought about $4K Erica, what I did not consider when I focused so tightly on that number was that my happiness, my sense of contentment, my mental health and my nervous system did not have a dollar value on them. I could not place a dollar value on them. Within a few days of making that decision, I got a new client and a month later I got another new client and it turned out that suddenly I had too many clients to keep working at the library, which was the goal originally anyway, and it was great. So often we think we need to be certain, we wanna know exactly how things will happen and what will happen. We think I will do that in five years, which is a someday goal. And then we have all these other things that we feel like we have to check off before we can make that goal. We feel like we need to have all of our ducks in a row, but I can tell you I sometimes the ducks are scattered all over the place and they can not be put into a row. And what if square nine isn't even where you want to be? What if getting there just means that you're following the same old patterns and doing what you think you should do? So what would it feel like for you to take one of those five year goals and to make it happen in two years or even one year? I want you to notice like what comes up for you. Do you feel like your chest tightening and do you feel your stomach just like dropping out and sinking? Or does your mind jump in and be like, you are freaking crazy. Who do you think you are? And then it tells you that anybody who is responsible would not make that choice without having all their ducks in a row. I totally felt like that, and I knew I had to do it anyway. And there are still days, honestly, that I think I am crazy and that I think, oh my gosh, I should go get a part-time job. And then later that day, something pops up to remind me of why I'm doing what I am doing. And I think about that yoga teacher friend and what she said about the inhaling and the exhaling and those years at the library burnout, the reorganization that just felt so chaotic, and the feeling that I was going nowhere. That was actually my plateau and my exhale. It felt eternally long and so slow and completely uncomfortable. And leaving was my inhale. It was this huge inhale. So if you are on a plateau right now and it feels like nothing is happening, I want you to hear this. There is momentum building under the surface. You might not notice it yet. But your exhale is preparing you for that next inhale. You do not need to know what square nine looks like. You can vision it. You can say, this is what I want. But the biggest thing is you just need to be willing to take one step from square one to square two, because you might meet something that says, Hey, square nine over here is a lot better than what you originally thought. So I feel like I need to celebrate. It's been one year since I made this huge life changing decision, and it has not been easy. It's been one of the hardest things I have done in my entire life except for being a parent to a now 12-year-old. But it's also been the absolutely most fulfilling thing I have ever done. The most fulfilling work I have ever done. I wake up on Monday mornings and I am excited to do the work that I get to do. I never thought that I would be excited about Mondays, and there are some weekends where I'm just like, I'm so excited for tomorrow. So I'm going to have three little parties for myself. I've already had one of them. As I'm recording this on April 1st, on March 31st, I celebrated the day that my husband and I agreed it was time for me to leave the library. On April 10th, I'm going to be celebrating that hard conversation with Heather and the even harder one with my husband that same night. And April 14th, I'm celebrating the anniversary of the first episode of this podcast. And the biggest one I'm gonna be celebrating is May 23rd, which was my one year anniversary from the day I walked out of that library for the very last time and ended my 19 plus year career. I thought I would be in that career for the rest of my life. And when I couldn't get out of it and I was feeling so stuck, I was like, I don't know what else I'm gonna do. So I want you to think about what is this milestone that you have to celebrate? Is there a date that when you made a big decision, or maybe something just clicked and you're like, oh, that was the day. Maybe you celebrate with a little dance party, if you're a dancer. Maybe you take yourself out for a cup of tea at your favorite cafe. Maybe it's lunch with a friend you haven't seen for a while. Do something to market. You really deserve to acknowledge how far you've come. I mean, we all keep wanting to grow and grow and grow and sometimes we need to exhale because otherwise we're just we, we can't explode. And I know it's been a really rough winter for a lot of people and it's been a rocky start to this spring, but I will be celebrating some things right along with you. There's gotta be something that you are celebrating, even the tiniest thing. And if what I shared with you today resonated, the patterns, the plateau, the moment of finally saying yes to yourself, that's exactly what we look at together in the Life Patterns Review. It's a free one-on-one session where we look at the patterns you've developed through all areas of your life. The ones you've developed to keep the peace and developed because you were running on autopilot when you were overgiving and saying yes when you really wanted to say no. Maybe you were trying to be the version of you that makes everyone else comfortable and who you think you should be. In the life patterns we view, we look at all of that together. We look at five areas of your life and the roles that you have picked up along the way. The patterns you've repeated so often that you actually might not even notice them anymore, and we start to untangle what's actually yours and maybe what you inherited or picked up along the way. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you would click the plus sign to subscribe and share it with a friend. Thanks for joining me. Be well.

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