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'm Erica Voell, Decision Mentor and Inner-Trust Guide, and I help women and 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 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 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're in the right space. 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. Most of last week, our whole house was sick with a nasty cold or possibly the flu. All three of the humans in our house were sick except for the dog. Thank goodness Vince was well enough to be our emotional support dog. As tends to be the case. I struggled to talk without coughing, so I didn't talk and it was oddly such a relief. I didn't have to talk. My husband wasn't talking because he was struggling to not cough also. It was the quietest. Our house has been in a really long time. Every time I've lost my voice before I've worried. What if I can't say what I need to say in a meeting or to communicate with patrons at a public service desk? That was when I was working at the library. That was just such a worry for me. But this time as an entrepreneur, this time felt like such a relief. I didn't have to have any reason to talk, and most of my communication can be do, done through text or email. I had to cancel several appointments because I couldn't talk without coughing. But everyone was so understanding. One of those mornings I was sick. I had this dream about high school, and upon waking so much came rushing back about when I started to lose trust in my voice and what I had to say. In elementary school and most of middle school, I was considered one of the smart kids, but that was until I did not test into the honors level classes in high school. High school was a bit of a rude awakening for me. It was the first time I would raise my hand and would not have the right answer or know what to say and what I had to say wasn't good enough. I did great in science classes, but it was in my freshman English class that I started to feel like I didn't have anything important to say. My teacher was the cheerleading coach and she called on the athletes more than the rest of us, and I was starting to enter my alternative stage. I was dressing differently. I was listening to alternative music like the Cure and Depeche Mode, and a lot of the other music you would see on MTV's 120 minutes on Sunday nights. I loved to write and we had daily writings in that freshman English class that I loved. Sometimes they were about the readings for the day, or she would give us a prompt and I could express myself through my clothes, what I listened to, and also through my writing. Then sophomore year was the rudest awakening of all. I enrolled in journalism class 'cause I was so excited. My parents had met in journalism school and I wanted to go to journalism as a career. I started in journalism class and it was the first time I experienced a male chauvinist teacher. He was the baseball coach and elevated the voices of the guys in the class above the girls. After sophomore year it, I was one of the last girls in the class, except for our photographer who she spent a lot of her time out taking photos around the school. I became the news editor junior year, but it became clear that the baseball jocks who were in class were there for an easy A, and they were listened to more than I was. I. It was the first time I really questioned my voice and what I had to say, but I stayed in journalism class through the early part of senior year because I loved writing. I loved writing the news articles and I loved writing the feature stories about fellow students. I grew up in a family of talkers. Our large family gatherings were loud with lots of side conversations and people talking over each other, but at home we talked all through dinner, but it was not this ruckus larger family gatherings. But I learned something. I learned to talk to keep up with the conversation. I learned to talk to fill the silence, and still I continued to write through high school and in my English classes, my stories and my papers would get good grades. So I was shocked when I got to college and my A papers. In high school or now getting C's and D's. I learned that I used a lot of comma sp places. I tend to write as I talk, but I never learned how to fix those comma places. And as a freshman, I had declared my major as journalism and I wanted to follow in my parents' footsteps, but that changed about halfway through my first semester, freshman year. I had a TA that I really liked, and he told me one day after class when I had gotten a horrible grade on an essay, he said, I should reconsider my major because my writing wasn't good. I didn't know enough about TAs to know that this guy was probably only four years older than me and I wasn't confident in myself enough to know to brush off his comment. He was English ta and I thought if he knew my writing was bad, then I figured others would as well. So I did what any, IM impressionable freshman girl does, who is lacking in confidence. I changed my major. Looking back, I can see the patterns now. Every time I thought I had something to say, someone else's comment or grade would have me questioning myself, and I believed them over myself. I thought they knew better and knew something that I couldn't see in myself. As I progressed through my English classes and required Western civilization classes in college, I was continually greeted with less than stellar grades. I was grateful to eke out a C in some of those classes, even the papers, my parents helped me edit. I was getting Cs in. But my love of writing was slowly being killed off, and I began to not only question whether I had anything important to say in my writing. But also to say out loud as I didn't feel I had a lot to contribute to the classes that I took until I reached my next major of social work in my junior year. After graduation, I didn't have to do any writing except for form letters because I was an intern at Planned Parented for a while between my social work degree and starting my computer science degree. In my computer science program, there was very little writing that was not technical writing. No one ever mentioned comma places, but my love of writing had always been almost completely killed off except for random poems that I wrote here and there in my journals. So fast forward a few years and the dawn of personal websites and blogging, and I started to write again, it was more like a personal journal. But I really wrote regularly and I also married a former English major Shocker. It really astounds me that I married an English major, even though English had been a subject I struggled so much in college with and in library school, almost 10 years after graduating with my undergrad, I struggled with writing papers, but I felt like I was gaining some confidence back in my writing. My husband helped me edit my papers, and I'll never forget how proud I felt when he said that a piece that I had written for my book arts class was one of the best papers I had ever written. It was my personal history about reading how my parents and my grandparents instilled a love of reading in me. And after library school, I wrote book reviews for the library, but I was never considered a good writer. I found other ways to express myself through knitting and sewing and quilting. And then about two years ago, something shifted. I started my business and I had to write Instagram posts and I felt a pressure to start an email newsletter. But even still in the back of my mind, I didn't, didn't think I was a good writer because my Instagram posts didn't gain a lot of traction, no matter how much I posted. And my newsletter didn't really grow much. I was talking about human design and general life coaching topics. Usually whatever struck me that week, I tried following so many different templates that I had received from my business coach, but nothing ever felt like me. But if they worked for her. And others. Then I thought, well, I should follow them. I was also buying $27 prompt guides from various coaches hoping that something would stick, something that would sound like me. And then about a year ago, something drastically changed. I learned from a mentor, Julie Ciardi, that I have a unique voice based on my human design. It absolutely changed everything. Looking at the communication center, which is also known as the throat tells us how we communicate. For me, my center is undefined, which means it appears white on my chart. So I don't have a consistent way I communicate. Shocker! I felt so free and a huge boost of confidence. I had known that people with an undefined throat centers had an inconsistent way of communicating, but I had not known it in quite the same way. I learned that it's common for people with an undefined throat center to feel that they don't communicate well because they've either talked too much to fill the space or they feel that they, if they don't speak up, that they won't be noticed. I also learned that I do have somewhat of a consistent way that I communicate, and that's through my experiences. I speak from my emotions and feelings and expressing the emotional tone of the environment I'm in. I naturally say I feel not because I don't think something or believe something, it's just what naturally comes out of my mouth. Each number within the communication center expresses itself differently depending on which number is either attached to or pointing toward another center. So, for example, my daughter expresses herself through her mind saying, I think, and I know, well my husband, he has seven of the 11 gates. The numbers in his. Throat center. So he has multiple ways. He expresses himself through writing and art, his beliefs and his opinions. He tends to say, I think, and I am, and I have. And I know a lot of women who have both defined and undefined communication centers who don't trust their voices. I mean, is it any wonder in a world that can't stop talking and self congratulating itself for being the loudest with a president in the White House promoting misogyny and chauvinistic attitudes? It really makes me wonder how this is affecting the girls who are growing up today and the women who have come of age in the last 10 years in this culture of loud male voices. I mean, that's not anything new. But the tone seems to have shifted to shutting down women's voices as much as possible unless they're promoting the same hateful and hurtful messages that women should be quiet and compliant. Are more women losing the trust in their own voices? Are there girls in high school who are experiencing something similar to what I did? So what can you do to gain trust in what you have to say? If you don't trust your voice, if you don't think you have any-anything important to say, learn about your human design and what your unique way to communicate is. I'm gonna be sharing more about voice in the coming months. Because if we feel like we are always shutting into the void, we begin to wonder, do I have anything important to say? Does my voice even matter? I can assure you, you have something important to say. Everyone has something important to say. We all communicate differently, and as we move into a new era, different voices are going to become more prominent, not as these know-it-alls and these gurus and the loudest voices, but it's going to be collective voices rising up. We are seeing it happen in Minnesota with groups of moms and women who are standing up for immigrant families, not with one leader. But as smaller groups who are all rising together, we all have something valuable to share, something important to say, and learning your unique way of communicating can bring that confidence and that conviction to what you are here to share with the world. I know that this voice stuff does not live in isolation. It is one of the roots of the patterns we all develop, especially when we've been running on autopilot, when we've been overgiving. Saying yes, when we really mean no. Trying to be the version of us that makes everyone else comfortable and who we think we should be. In the Life Patterns Review. We look at it, all of it together. The roles you've picked up, the patterns you've repeated so often that you've stopped noticing them. We start to untangle what's actually yours and what you've inherited or picked up along the way. If you are ready to take a look, I would love to sit with you. You can schedule your review in the show notes. That's our episode for today. I hope you are well. Thank you for listening. Be well.