Welcome the Unfolding Podcast. I'm your host and friend, Yvonne Wink. Before we really get into today's episode, I want to pause for just a moment and actually get your attention.

Because sometimes even when we're listening, we're still on autopilot. You know that feeling when you arrive somewhere and think, how did I even get here? Or hours pass and you realize you've been sitting in the same spot, scrolling, thinking, surviving. So wherever you are right now, driving,

walking, folding laundry, half listening while your mind is somewhere else. I want you to hear this. You made it here. To the end of this season, to the end of December, to the end of this year, to the end of the chapter that asked more of you than you ever expected.

You didn't just survive it. You changed inside it. So thank you. Truly. Thank you for listening, for staying, for being willing to look at yourself honestly. Thank you for holding space for my story and for letting me unfold out loud without judgment. Well, mostly without judgment.

I see you. I see some of the comments. But thank you for choosing clarity over numbing. So encouraging. Thank you for choosing truth over pretending and presence over disappearing. Even when disappearing might have felt easier.

As the season comes to a close, I found myself reflecting. I do this a lot because standing at the edge of a new year has a way of doing that. And recently I caught myself asking a question that I couldn't shake. I was asking myself, am I walking into this new year into 2026 awake? Or am I about to slip into autopilot and just hope

Something magically happens.

And when I answered that honestly for myself, it shifted how I saw everything that came next.

And I realized that question isn't just mine. So I want to gently turn it toward you, not as pressure, not as a challenge, just as an invitation.

as 2026 comes into view. A new year, a new chapter.

You might ask yourself this, how do I want to meet this year?

more present, more intentional, more awake to my own life.

or maybe exactly where I am without forcing anything.

There's no pressure in this question, promise you. There's no right or wrong answer. Just curiosity and awareness.

And that's where real change begins. That's what this finale is about. It's a two-part finale. But it's about not fixing ourselves, not reinventing your entire life overnight, but waking up just enough to choose your next chapter with intention. Because

Here's the sitch 2026 is coming, whether we're ready or not. And here's the thing people don't realize. Most people don't start a new year. I know January 1st is coming in blah, blah, blah. know that, but they don't start a new year. They repeat the last one.

Just sometimes it's with a new sparkly planner, new to-do lists and checklists and New Year's Eve resolutions and a recycled storyline. And listen, that's not judgment. That's human nature.

thing is, autopilot, it's comfortable because, well, it's familiar. See, it lets you survive without having to really, really see yourself, without having to examine yourself.

But if you're here, if you've been with me through the door, ⁓ the summit, we've climbed the summit through the grief, the celebration and the unfolding. You didn't do all that work just to go back to default mode. I know that.

Not after everything you've learned. Not after everything you've survived. Not after everything you're capable

Early last year, before the book, before Bali, before the travel, before this podcast, I had a moment. I didn't know it at the time, but looking back, it was the moment I would say that I woke up.

I was still orbiting him, still trying to decode the chaos. I was still trying to love someone who didn't know how to choose me. Honestly, who didn't know how to choose himself.

And here's the part that I can laugh at now because, well, healing gives you perspective.

Brace yourself. I thought he was the problem.

What I couldn't see yet was that I was living on autopilot, completely out of alignment with my core values, with who I said I was, who I was growing into.

I want to slow this down for just a second here because this language really matters. So tune in. See when your life is congruent, your actions match your values. So what you say you want, how you show up and how your body feels begin to align.

There's less inner tension, not because life is easy and everything's coming at you and it's just all so, so nice and easy wrapped up with a cute bow. No, but because you're no longer arguing with yourself or living against your truth. That's congruent. When your life is incongruent, your actions and your truth are at odds. So there's a big fight happening.

You're saying one thing, but you're living another. And your body feels that disconnect before your mind can actually explain it away. It shows up as tension, fatigue, anxiety, or that quiet sense that something just isn't right.

That was me. See, I value, value with my whole heart, mind, body, and soul. I value peace. But there was none.

I value honesty and integrity. That's really important to me.

But I kept accepting half-truths and full lies.

I value respect and loyalty. And I kept allowing behavior that did not honor that. That's incongruence.

And here's what I want to normalize. See autopilot shows up in every one. So look in the mirror. You got it. Yep. We all do. It's not a character flaw. It's a nervous system response. And for me, autopilot was amplified by heartbreak and grief, specifically compound grief. I explained this several episodes ago, so I won't go into it too deeply here, but

I'll just cover it loosely here. So compound grief is when loss piles on top of loss. When your soul doesn't have time to recover or repair from one devastation, one heartbreak before the next one hits. When your system doesn't get a break in between the chaos. In that kind of grief, your mind, body,

and spirit doesn't shut down because you're weak. You don't numb out because you're weak and you're not motivated. It shuts down because you're trying to survive something. So compound grief hijacks the amygdala, the part of your brain responsible for fear and survival. And it throws your entire system into protective mode.

You numb out. It pulls you inward. It tells you, stop. This is too much, too fast. Do nothing.

So your system isn't asking, hey, is this aligned? Does this relationship feel safe? Is this the career I want? Is this the friendship or the friendship group? Is this good for my soul?

It's asking, how do I get through today only without falling apart?

And when you're living in that place, you're not making empowered choices. You're making familiar ones. That's why I was able to stay so long, tolerate so much. Maybe that's why you're able to stuff your pain and just keep moving forward.

Because when you're already grieving deeply, any type of grief, any additional loss reopens every wound that's been brewing below the surface.

Familiar felt safer than unknown, even when familiar hurt.

So I repeated patterns. chose familiar pain. I ignored the truth. Because sometimes chaos feels more familiar than stability.

And I want to be very clear here. This isn't weakness. This is what survival looks like when someone is carrying more than one person should ever have to carry at once.

I didn't give up. I was doing exactly what my body needed to do to survive.

And if you're listening to this thinking, that sounds just like me. want you to hear this gently. Your system wasn't failing you. was protecting you and life, God, spirit, the angels, whatever language you use, it taps you. just taps you on the shoulder. Tap, tap, tap. This isn't it. For me, it was.

Tap, tap, tap. You know better. Tap, tap, tap. Yvonne, you're meant for so much more. You deserve so much more. Tap, tap. Wake up.

And the loudest tap, my own heart breaking.

Sometimes heartbreak isn't punishment. It's the alarm clock. And instead of hitting snooze like I had been for years, I woke up.

not necessarily healed, not enlightened, just awake, awake enough to realize something wasn't making sense anymore.

Here's the thing about incongruence. You usually don't feel it until you're no longer in pure survival mode. Eventually living out of alignment stops making sense. Not because you suddenly become stronger or braver, but because your body and nervous system won't let you keep pretending anymore. There comes a point when

something inside you says. This no longer matches who I am.

And once that realization lands, not intellectually, but, but in your body, it becomes very hard to go back to what was. So I want you to think about it like this. Okay. It's like a bodybuilder just days away from competition, right? They've built their entire life around training, discipline, sleep.

Rest, nourishment, focus. And now imagine them suddenly just saying, you know what? I'm just going go out and party all night. I'm just going to eat garbage and I'm just going to sabotage everything. It wouldn't make sense, right? Not because they're judging themselves or being hard on themselves.

because their identity has already shifted. Their choices have to match who they've become.

That's what started happening to me. The life I was living no longer matched the woman I was becoming. And my body felt it before my brain caught up.

And this, this didn't just show up in one relationship. It showed up everywhere. I was staying past the expiration date. Have you ever stayed past the expiration date in, in friendships and dating? did. Even in my marriage. See, there came a point where both of us knew.

quietly and honestly that something had ended. Not dramatically, not hatefully, just truthfully. But instead of letting it end with grace, we held on. We had the death grip hold out of obligation, out of history, out of fear of change.

out of familiarity.

And when you stay too long in something that's already over, it doesn't soften. It hardens.

patterns I had been minimizing became undeniable.

And in that moment, I stopped negotiating with myself. See, because I asked for accountability. I asked for effort. I asked for growth. I asked for change and transparency, meaning, grow with me, do the work, meet me here, be honest. Basically, I said, shape up or ship out.

And he chose the path that required the least discomfort, the least accountability, the least change. He chose easy.

And here's the part I want to say without blame or bitterness.

I was trying to grow and he was trying to stay the same.

That doesn't make either of us bad. It just means we were no longer aligned.

Eventually, clarity didn't come as a feeling. It came through reality.

When I look back, honestly, the places that hurt the most, they weren't random. They were places where I felt misaligned very early on and I chose to override it. My boss, my, I would say that my, my body started to whisper it first, right? This doesn't feel safe. This isn't aligned.

But I explained it away. I gave the benefit of the doubt. I stayed curious when I probably should have been more cautious.

And if you ever find yourself asking, why do I keep getting hurt in the same way? This is a gentle place to look, not with blame, but with curiosity.

Where am I ignoring my own knowing?

because every significant pain in my life came from a person my system warned me about early on. You know what I'm saying?

Not loudly, not dramatically, actually very quietly. And the hurt, it didn't come from not knowing. It came from not trusting what I already knew. Because staying incongruent costs you your aliveness. It costs your health, your peace, your dreams, sometimes your money.

Think of all the therapy you've had to go to. And let's be honest, it causes a few wrinkles that have nothing to do with aging and everything to do with tolerating what you shouldn't have. Some things and some people just were so not worth it. They weren't worth the wrinkles. See, because it's okay to walk away from misalignment, from disrespect, from places.

where you have to beg for basics. What's not okay is staying in a loveless relationship, friendship, or situationship out of obligation or familiarity. Just because you don't want to rock the Especially when the boat has been leaking for years. I said what I said.

I've had to walk away from a lot these last few years, but each time it became my awakening. And once you wake up, once you feel the difference between surviving and living, you can't unknow it.

That awakening is what made me start questioning everything. Not just relationships, but the way we try to change our lives. It's what pulled me deeper into studying change itself. How it actually happens and why so many people stay stuck.

Because once I woke up to how incongruent I'd been living, I started asking a bigger question.

Why do so many people want change, but keep repeating the same patterns year after year? The same relationships, the same coping, the same cycles, sometimes for generations.

Make it make sense, right? I know. I thought the same thing. Why do we set intentions, make promises, swear this time, this time will be different and then quietly slide back into the familiar.

That's where my work as a coach met my real life. I've been teaching goal setting, ⁓ success coaching and identity work for years, long before this podcast, long before this season, long before my life cracked open the way it did.

And at the same time, I was learning it from the inside out, not from a perfect place, but from a real one. You're getting the real deal here. ⁓ Here's what I know for sure. Now, both professionally and personally, most people don't fail at change because they lack discipline. They fail because they're trying to build a new life from an old identity.

That's where resolutions come in, right? The resolutions usually come from pressure, from panic. I'm talking about New Year's resolutions. ⁓ It usually comes from pressure, from comparison, from the panic, from the quiet voice that says, I should be further by now. My God, I teach this. Why isn't my life perfect? So we make promises fueled by fear.

I need to fix myself. I need to do more. I need to be different, better. I need to do extreme.

Fear based goals don't last. promise you. know. Because I've set them many times, many years in a row. And I've watched hundreds of people, thousands of people do the same.

When I set goals from fear, they never stuck because fear is about avoiding pain, not moving toward truth. Fear based goals come from, can't stay here energy, right? this is not, ⁓ this is who I'm becoming. It creates this urgency. I'm like totally shooken up right now. My hands are in this. Okay. But it's just this urgency.

not sustainability. When I set goals from shame, they burned me out because shame says I'm not enough yet. So every single goal becomes about self punishment, right? You push harder, you demand more, ignore your limits until your nervous system waves the white flag taps out. That kind of change never lasts because it's built

on self-rejection.

When I set goals from comparison, I abandon them. Because why? Comparison is the thief of joy and clarity. The moment your goals are shaped by someone else's timeline, someone else's body, some other couple's relationship, or their success, they stop belonging to you. And it's hard to stay committed to a life you don't actually want.

You're just trying to prove something.

But when I started setting goals from congruence, from clarity about who I actually was, getting crystal clear on who I was, who I was becoming, how I wanted to feel, what I really wanted, that's when everything changed.

That's the difference between resolutions and goals with Goals with soul aren't about punishment. They're about alignment.

They come from knowing, you know, this no longer fits. And this is what I value now. This is the version of me I'm choosing to live from.

And when your goals come from that place, from your soul, they don't feel forced. They feel inevitable.

Here's the part people don't always love at first, and then they secretly love the most. Healing is often boring.

It's not flashy. It's not dramatic. It's not a montage. It's just consistent. Real change rarely comes from grand gestures. Like don't love bomb yourself, babes. It usually comes from small, almost unremarkable shifts. The kind that don't look impressive to everyone, but quietly change everything. Things like

Leaving a situation that hurts. Leaving a little earlier. Saying no. Sooner. Or just saying no period. No explanation.

Maybe it looks like drinking water, more water. Journaling one honest sentence instead of this beautifully perfectly crafted page.

telling one truth and just letting it stand. Catching negative self-talk and choosing a truer thought instead.

How about pausing before reacting? My favorite, treating yourself the way you treat someone you love. Would you talk to someone you love the way you talk to yourself? Think about that.

These moments don't look like transformation, big, loud transformation. They are transformation because every small congruent choice builds trust with yourself and trust is what creates real lasting change. That's it. Boring healing is peaceful healing and peaceful healing is sustainable. promise you those tiny shifts.

build trust with yourself. It's creating that real change because every time you follow through on one small tiny little shift, your nervous system learns, ⁓ all right, we're safe with ourselves now. I don't have to save her. We don't have to jump into survival mode again. That's how identity changes. Micro shifts. They're not just habits.

They're these tiny little identity votes. I'm lifting my hand right now. Each one is saying, this is who I am now.

Not because you forced it, because it fits. And this is why the tiny shifts matter. Not because they look impressive, not because they're changing everything instantly or overnight, but because they wake you up. Each small congruent choice interrupts autopilot. Each small honest moment brings you back to your body.

Each time you choose alignment over habit, you feel a little more alive.

That's how change actually happens.

That brings me to what this entire season has really been about.

This whole season has been about unfolding, not rushing, not forcing, not performing healing, just slowly, honestly becoming more awake in your own life. My intention was never to lead you somewhere. It was to walk alongside you. And I trust that whatever landed for you is exactly what you needed to hear this season.

The medicine in all of this is awareness. Because once you see where you're incongruent, once you notice where you've been settling, surviving, or overriding yourself, you don't need shame. You don't need fixing. You just start choosing differently.

Awareness is what gently, slowly turns autopilot off.

So before we close, I wanna pause together just for a moment and just take a breath. If it feels okay, maybe place one hand on your heart. Just take a slow breath in through your nose and even a slower breath out. No analyzing, no overthinking.

noticing.

I want you to ask yourself, quietly and honestly, where in my life do I feel most awake right now? And where do I notice myself slipping back into autopilot? There's no right answer here. It's just information.

Sometimes the most powerful shifts are the quiet ones. The pause before you say yes. The moment you tell the truth. The choice to rest instead of push. The decision to honor what your body already knows.

Here's a suggested journal prompt. Where in my life am I living in alignment? And where am I settling out of habit or fear?

What is one small congruent choice I can make this week?

Unfolding isn't about becoming someone else. It's about returning to yourself awake, aligned and honest. That's where the real change begins. Before we end, I want to leave you with this simple mantra today. Something that you can come back to when things feel noisy. Hand on your heart. Repeat after me. I choose alignment over autopilot.

Let that be enough.

Thank you, truly, truly, for walking this season with me, for sitting with the grief, for celebrating the growth, for choosing awareness over autopilot.

This is your unfolding and I'm your host and friend, Yvonne Wing.

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