Welcome to the Unfolding Podcast. I'm Erica Voell and I am a Decision Mentor and Inner-Trust Guide, and I work with women mainly those in midlife trust, their inner guidance. Understand their unique strengths and stop saying yes to what drains them. Using Human Design coaching and reiki, we clear the noise so that there are no feels powerful and their yes feels true. This week, the background energy in Human Design is the gate of struggle and every. Six days, we change the background energy based on where the sun is at. So like if you think about the zodiac, it moves into the different zodiac signs. In Human Design there are gates, and so the sun is in different gates every six days. And this gate, this gate of struggle, is asking us big questions around meaning and purpose. And honestly, it's like the season for me, the season of messiness and trying to let things work their way out instead of trying to figure it all out or trying to fix it. So I wanted to share some of the behind the scenes of what's been going on lately. It has been five months. Five months since I left my library career of over 19 years, and this has been like the biggest lesson of my life. Like I went to school, I have two bachelor's degrees, I have a master's degree. And still, this is the hardest I think I have ever worked. I had a pretty structured job as a librarian. I had a schedule of when I needed to be where, especially when I was on the public service desk or at weekly or monthly meetings or meetings that just got scheduled as blue, but it did not prepare me for the freedom. And the messiness or even the weird abstract painting that being an entrepreneur often feels like. When I see people, they always ask me, how are things? Don't you love working for yourself? And part of me wants to be like, yes, I love it so much, and paint it all rosy and say how it's so lovely. And the truth is. I don't think I've ever worked harder in my entire life. I've been seen as a hard worker by my employers, but this is a whole different kind of hard, this is like roses and shit. Many times all in the same day, and that's the part we don't talk about enough. When you're in these like big leaps or making these big changes in your life or you know when your life is transitioning. If your kid is graduating from high school and they're moving out of the house, we tend to see like the end result or the pretty photos on Instagram. But what we don't see is the messy middle. I feel like a lot of people are in this messy middle right now. I mean, our country feels like it's in the messy middle. And if you are in your own version of a messy transition right now, I just wanna say you are not alone. So many of us are going through this. This is the stuff that most people don't post about, but it's where the growth really happens. I have highs and I have lows, but even on those low days, I would not give up what I am doing for anything right now. I feel like I get to do something. I love so much that I am willing to risk failure every single day, and I have had plenty. One of them was a podcast episode I recorded not too long ago, and I used the wrong microphone setting. It sounded terrible. On top of that, you could hear our dog barking and my daughter yelling in the background. My husband's like, well just release it. And it was, it was so bad, but I could not release it. I couldn't even listen to it myself because like I could not stand hearing the dog barking or my daughter yelling, and it was like, oh my goodness. So I had to rerecord it. And actually that second recording was so much better and I'm learning to be okay with these mistakes to be okay and that know that these frustrations are here to teach me something. I was so frustrated that day that I had made that mistake and I thought, oh my gosh, I have wasted my time. But now I double check the settings every time I sit down to record. And there have been others. There have been some days that I just have to shrug it off and be like, well, that didn't work, and step away or even laugh about it. My daughter doesn't want to hear the stories, but I love telling them to my husband because I feel like, see, I'm trying. It's not working and I'm still here and I'm still doing it. One of my coaches, Dallas Travers once said that owning your own business many times is like failing in public, and I could not agree more. We tend to fail in public, but how often do we actually share those failures? We tend to like hope that no one will notice and slink away. But why do we feel like we need to pretend that it's all working out? And maybe social media has like, made it that way. Maybe we just have a, a very uncomfortable relationship with mistakes and failure in this country. Like, are we afraid that if we share things that aren't perfect, that people won't want to be with us? Or won't want to work with us? When really I'm noticing that the failures are what connect me with other people. But the failures don't make for pretty pictures on social media. Like how do you show that your kid is melting down? Like nobody wants to show that. Parenting coaches sometimes show it, but not always. One of my biggest lessons in the mess this year came from something that didn't even get off the ground. In August, I was trying to launch a group. You know, I'd had great success with one-on-one clients, but no one signed up. I had my pity party for about a day, but I also was like, I don't feel like this is a defeat. There was some sting, and after that subsided, I put on my big girl pants and I reassessed, like, where was my energy in this? Was I all in or I was only half in? And was I only creating this because it was like the next step of what I should do? I know I've talked about this before, but like shoulding on myself, really, I was shoulding on myself big time. I should do this. I've had good success with clients. I should do this group. But when I really tuned in, I realized I totally half-assed the launch and halfway through I was losing steam. I had written and prescheduled all of my launch emails ahead of time. So from the outside it looked like everything was going as planned, but inside it wasn't. I felt myself checking out each day when nobody was signing up. And as time went on, I realized that I had created this because like I said earlier, I thought it was what I should do. It was like the next progression of what you're supposed to do. I've had good success with one-on-one clients, and I should take the same approach with a small group, right? Which is always when things don't work out is when we should on ourselves. So as I dug deeper into this reassessment, I really came to realize why my energy was deflating. When people weren't signing up, I was beginning to doubt myself. I was beginning to doubt whether or not I could even do this. What became really clear was I didn't think I could give my clients the deep attention that I know that they value and that they deserve, and the more I reflected after the launch. The more I realized I was trying to shrink something that's so deep and so powerful in a four month container with one-on-one into a smaller container, and it did not fit. I love my one-on-one work. I love the one hour together and the work we get to do. But I wasn't sure that I could support people to do that in 20 minutes of coaching, and I know that that affected how much I was reaching out to promote the group, even when I wasn't aware of it at the time. That launch flopped but I know it's not because I'm a bad coach or because no one wants to work with me. It didn't work because I was pushing. And as a generator, when I am pushing, this is my sign to pause because what with pushing comes frustration. It gets into that unhealthy side of my Human Design, and it only leads to frustrations. I am designed to respond, but when I'm pushing, I am not responding to things I am trying to initiate and push them through, and things don't work out well. I realized I wasn't just pushing, I was trying to force something into being that didn't feel right. I wanted the sales page to be beautiful and perfect. I wanted the emails to resonate deeply with people, but they didn't resonate with people. They didn't resonate with the people I wanted to join my group, and now I know that that's okay. Because it made me see that when I'm trying to bring something into the world in a perfect way and have those perfectionist tendencies, it could end up not being the right way for me. So I've retooled and I'm really noticing what is calling me in. And as a Human Design generator, I am meant to respond, like I said earlier. So I've been noticing what is my body responding to? What is really lighting me up? What is one of the things I need to share because I have in my Human Design. A profile of a 5/1, which is like offering practical solutions to people, but also that deep dive. One of the most powerful parts of Human Design is it shows you how your energy flows naturally. And when there is resistance, that's an invitation to notice when things are off. So for me, pushing always leads to frustration. Responding feels like an oh, it feels true, and like things are really in flow. And I love sharing what I've learned about Human Design with others. You can ask my friends, you can ask my family. I talk about it a lot. It's also the key tool I use in coaching, and as I've been working with a Human Design coach for business, I am learning so much. I feel like it's taken what I can share with clients to a whole other level in just a few months. So I started creating workshops and I started creating them last spring because that was like a response that was coming up. I reached out to a local spa and she's like, Hey, would you like to to offer a workshop. And I was like, oh, I would love that. So I've done a few in person that I have loved and now I am moving them online with the intention of them being like a preview of what is bubbling up, what is coming, and this time when I have felt myself pushing. I'm pausing and I'm stepping back and I'm asking myself, am I creating this workshop for me or am I creating it to share with others? Just really being curious. And so I held my first free workshop last week and I promoted it on the podcast and I put it out to my email list. And once again, what do you think happened? No one signed up. Now, I could have made this like about myself, and I could have quietly canceled the workshop and been like, nobody wants to hear from me, or that it's another thing that's not working. Instead, I got really curious and I paused and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna reach out to some people and see if they will come so that I can record this. For something that's coming up in a couple weeks. And then I have that like really good energy and they came and they supported me, and I know that even though it was my first free workshop, there will be a lot of momentum. This was just the first in the series that are leading into something that I'm so lit up about that's coming at the beginning of the year, and I will talk more about that in a minute. We always want things to be this linear path. Like just a nice steady line. We don't want any switchbacks, we don't want any falls. We don't want any drama. But that's like, not really how it works. That's not how life works. I mean, you have your ups and your downs, but it's really how we want it to be. I mean, I love a good step-by-step process and I'm quickly learning that while I want my business to grow steadily, I'm also gonna have lulls and I'm gonna have areas of contraction. And just like a friend who's a yoga teacher told me like, you can't just inhale. We need to exhale. We need that contraction before we can inhale and expand again. I mean, we can't all be like Veruca salt in Willy Wonka where we will if we continue to inhale, like we'll just blow up and explode and pop. Like we need to inhale, but then we also have to exhale. It's not physically possible for us to continue to inhale and inhale and inhale. It's also not possible for us to grow without some sort of plateau or contraction. I mean, that's what makes our growth sustainable. Like we grow a little bit and then we come to a stair step, flatten out plateau, and then we grow a little bit more, and then we have a plateau, and then we grow a little bit more. That's what makes our growth sustainable. But after those hard places, when things are smoother, are where we can look back and see how much we've grown. I talked about in my last episode about like thanking your past self and those footprints in the sand of like how far you've come. That launch in August was just like an exhale before an inhale. Like I can see the steps I took that got me to where I am now and my next launch will be so much better. I could feel a shift happening during Eclipse season in September. So like the launch didn't happen. But then I could feel some shift happening, and so now I'm like learning and taking notes. So the workshops I'm doing now are leading into something that's coming in January, and it's still in this co-creation phase. It's gonna be around Human Design, it's gonna be about using it in your life, but it's gonna be in a different way than my one-on-one coaching. It's like a perfect compliment to one-on-one coaching, and it will be accessible to anyone who wants to learn, but isn't ready for that deep one-on-one coaching. It's like nothing I've ever done before. I have never tried something and then built it as I go and using other people's feedback to help me. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to be like building it by responding as opposed to pushing. Because I know that the more I stick with something that really lights me up, then the more magnetic I become and the more aligned people will find me. And I will just keep going. I am still in that messy middle of it, and I'm still figuring it out. But the difference now is that I trust that I'm exactly where I am meant to be. I'm not supposed to have it all figured out. It is going to unfold at the right time, and I will have to be patient and trust the next step will get me closer to where I wanna go instead of trying to like have this roadmap with my destination, with everything all mapped out to the very end, which means that you know, there will be a road closure and I will have to reroute. So if you are in that messy middle, this messy place where things are not quite working out like you'd hoped. I don't want you to assume that you're on the wrong path. You might just be having to take a bit of a detour. You also might be shedding what is no longer fitting you. I mean, fall is the perfect season for shedding things. For releasing what's no longer serving us. If you're in the northern hemisphere, you can see it in all the trees that are releasing all the leaves. Those leaves are no longer serving them, and they are letting them go. So what is something recently that did not go the way you had planned, but it taught you something anyway, or maybe it worked out in a better way? I want you to reflect on that. I will be sharing more in a future episode about what's coming up in January as it comes together. And in the meantime, I want to invite you to schedule a Life Energy Audit with me. It's a guided check-in to see where your energy is going. What's working and what's quietly draining you. This is a conversation to help you reconnect to what matters. 'cause if you've been feeling stretched thin or stuck, or You've gotten to this place where you just don't feel like yourself, this call is a good place to start. And then all those workshops I've been talking about, they are linked in the show notes. There are two workshops in November. One dives into the Human Design centers and like how your energy flows throughout your whole system. And then the second workshop is one I am so excited about. This is about diving into the fears, where they show up in your Human Design chart and how they are holding you back. I would love to see you in any of the workshops. You can come live and if you register, you will get the replay. So go ahead and register. You can find it in the show notes. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you would follow the show, give it a like, leave a review, or share it with someone you know who needs it. Be well, and I will talk to you next time.