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 trust how they are uniquely designed to make decisions, reclaim their authority, 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 or 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 have taken every personality test, followed the recommended path, and still can't shake the feeling that you've been spending your whole life trying to fit in when what you really wanted was to belong. You are 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, 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. There is a saying that there are two people you need to impress your 8-year-old self and your 80-year-old self. And while I find that really powerful and a good reminder, the self that's been coming up for me lately is my 13-year-old self. The one who felt like she didn't belong anywhere. The one who felt like the most awkward person on the planet, the one who didn't feel like she fit into her family because she didn't want to wear the clothes. Her mom picked out for her. She felt awkward with a perm that never looked quite as good as the popular girls. I mean, this was 1987, so the perms were all the thing. I have a few photos on my desktop that I scanned for an Instagram post about a year ago, and I left them there as a reminder that I don't need to impress her. I don't need to impress my 13-year-old self. That as awkward as she felt there is, and was nothing wrong with her. She was unique and I really want to give her a hug. To tell her that all the time, and the worry of trying to fit in will never help her feel like she belongs, that the friends that turned on her were never her right friends anyway. If I could save her from all the friend heartbreak. Maybe this part of me has resurfaced in the last few years because I have a daughter who's going to be entering middle school next year. She's 12 right now. I feel my job as a mom is to make sure and to reassure her that she's perfect exactly as she is. She doesn't need to gain weight or lose weight. She doesn't need to wear certain clothes. She doesn't need to suck in her stomach. She doesn't need to stand up straighter. She doesn't need to shapeshift herself into a more acceptable way for other people. Now, would I like a meal where we don't have to tell her to push her hair behind her ears so it doesn't get in her food? Yes. But my job as a mom is to help her see that she doesn't have to be a certain way, that she's not to feel worthy. My job as a decision mentor and inner trust guide is to help other women, especially those in midlife who have always felt like the black sheep in their family, or that there's something wrong with them, or that they've compared themselves to others their entire lives to help them see that they are unique. There is nothing wrong with them. Maybe the reason that they have felt like the black sheep and that they followed the should path was because their gifts have not been recognized and they haven't been made to feel that they have value. It's really feeling like it's becoming a mission of mine after seeing this pattern emerge during a panel with former clients. I didn't realize this until we were on the panel, how much they too felt like they had been the black sheep in their families, but it probably explains why we worked so well together and why I love them so dearly because I've spent so much of my life trying to fit in. I never felt like I belonged. There's a difference between fitting in and belonging, and Brene Brown explains this so beautifully. Fitting in is where you try to shape, shift yourself into fit into a box that maybe isn't the right box for you. Whereas when you belong, you can be whatever shape you want, whatever size you want, and be there. You feel this calm, you can be your full self and no one is judging you because when you never feel like you belong. It is such an awful feeling. And it started early in my life. I took not fitting in as a re reason that I was not worthy of love. I had cute outfits with matching tops and pants or shorts and separate clothes for school and separate play clothes. I had the haircut that my mom thought looked cute on me. I got the perm. I got the blonde highlights. Like I said earlier, it was the mid eighties, but one experience in ninth grade shifted something for me. It was the summer after freshman year, and I could ride my bike to the salon where I got my hair cut. My mom handed me the usual blank check to get the usual blonde highlights. But instead of the expected highlights, I came home with deep red hair. There were no highlights. It was full on color and I loved it. I got compliments at the salon from so many people. And I rode my bike home and my great-grandmother who lived with us told me she loved it. She was 91 years old and she said she had always wanted red hair. I felt so fantastic. And then my mom came home from work. It was the first time I remember being so aware of how concerned she was with what others would think of me and how it might reflect on her. She owned her own public relations firm. And I didn't have a lot of friends whose moms worked outside the home and it made me realize that she saw how put together we were, were reflections on her. And in some roundabout way on her business, this was not the first time she'd commented on my appearance. That's just part of my growing up, suggesting that I stand up straighter or suck in my stomach. It was something that I not only heard from my mom, but I heard from my grandmother regularly, but this time felt different. It was also the beginning of the stage in my life where I gave up on trying to be liked by the popular kids. Outside I would appear fine about being the weird kid, but inside I was crying. I would cry at home a lot. I just wanted to feel like I fit in. I wanted to belong somewhere. I kept telling myself I would find my people in college, and I did to a certain extent, but college came with a new set of expectations. There was an immense pressure to choose an acceptable career. It felt like the height of those expectations. Get into a respectable field, land a good job, make everyone in my family proud. I was the fourth generation to go to the University of Kansas, but college was the real beginning of my should journey, what I should do as a major, what career path I should take. Freshman year, I chose journalism and listened to a comment from an English TA that made me change my major. I decided to do social work because my mom's friend liked her job, and if she liked it, then I should like it because I really liked her. But this continued years of people pleasing trying to fit into boxes and jobs that never quite fit. It was exhausting. And at some point in my thirties, I sort of stopped caring, but deep down I longed for a friend group and a workplace where I felt like I belonged. It wasn't until I started to hit that stage of perimenopause where I started to let some of that living by other expectations go where I was like, I don't care. But really even then, a lot of the same patterns continued and it really got me nowhere but burnout. It wasn't until I discovered human design and that I'm designed a specific way with unique gifts, that I could start to release some of those expectations from other people. I wonder how many opportunities did I pass up because I was more focused on what others would think rather than what truly lit me up. How often did I hold back out of fear of judgment or disappointing my parents, or even worse, my grandparents. Think back to your 13-year-old self. Did they feel awkward? Did they have a fantastic hairstyle that fit the era? Or did you spend a ton of time trying to fit in? What message do you have for your 13-year-old self? If you could give them a hug and reassure them, what would it be? What do you want them to know? One of my messages to my 13-year-old self is that she is worthy and does not have to prove herself. It is one of my greatest life lessons and it shows up in my human design chart so clearly, and I, once I read that, I really, truly cried. I had never been told I didn't need to prove my worth, not in those exact words. It took a report from someone that I didn't know from me to understand. That my husband had tried to tell me that in certain ways, but I never really felt it deep within myself. And I really needed to actually believe it. I know that it will be a lifelong struggle, but when I have a rough day where I feel like I've tied my productivity to my worth, I can come back to the words that I am worthy no matter what I did today. I am worthy because I exist. We often notice the patterns that we've developed in elementary school between eight and 12 as we look back on ourselves, like when we were trying to be liked by our teachers or we took care of our younger siblings and being the upstanding kid who made the parents proud. Or maybe you felt like you were constantly disappointing your parents, even if they bragged about you in front of other adults, which I find is so weird. Those patterns, they carried us through our teens and our twenties. They evolved in our thirties and our forties, and somewhere around our early forties, that midlife crisis or that midlife calling. We start to see that these patterns become heavy, even if we can't see them ourselves, but we feel them. And by our fifties, we are really starting to try to untangle them to consciously work, to let some of them go, to shift those patterns, the untying of the knots that feel like they are ready to go, to allow us to stop giving a crap about what others think. But when we're stressed or sick, or at a family gathering or we get a text from a family member. What happens a lot of times is those old patterns will reignite and we think, haven't I already worked through this? It's completely normal, but each time it gets reignited, that fire of fury burns a little less a and for a little less time. Those stories carry a little less weight and have a little less grasp on us. So find a photo of yourself at 12 or 13, and I want you to look in your eyes, send them some love, and tell them it's okay to be different. It's okay to be themselves and that they have value for existing. And then turn around and tell yourself the exact same thing. You have value and you are worthy for existing in this day. So that's our episode for today. When you're ready to look at your patterns, I would love to invite you to a Life Patterns Review. We look at patterns you've developed through all the areas of your life, the ones you've developed to keep the peace and the ones you've developed that kept you running on autopilot. The ones that kept you over giving and saying yes when you really meant no. Trying to be the version of you that makes everyone else comfortable and who you think you should be. In the Life Patterns Review, we look at it all together, the roles you've picked up, the patterns you've repeated so often that you've stopped noticing them, and we start to untangle what's actually yours and what you've inherited or picked up along the way. So I hope you have a great day. Be well, and I'll talk to you next time.