Hello and welcome back. ask you something. Have you ever noticed something strange about the things that we say we want most? Think about it. Peace, joy, confidence, healthier relationships, a bigger life. That promotion, that trip, that body, that bank account, that business idea that keeps whispering to you at night. See, we say we want these things. I know I've said it for years. I've wanted these things. We pray for them. We openly and actively talk about them with friends and family and we journal about them. We visualize them. We, you know, we even, have you ever sat and just doom scrolled on Google flights, mapped out countries and where you were getting mapped out your entire itinerary for the summer? and you just never hit go purchase. Yeah, because when life actually starts moving us in that direction, something inside us hesitates. almost like part of us is resisting it. Ooh, ouch. Hey, I'm assassinating myself. I'm calling myself out right now too. So don't think that I am attacking you. What I want to call out today is that we interpret that resistance as proof of something. We all do it, right? You say you're going to do something, you say you're going to start the business, you say you're going to book the trip, and then as you start moving closer to that, you pull back. And then we say that that resistance is some kind of proof of something. Maybe I'm not ready. Maybe I'm not capable. other people's dreams come true, just mine just won't come true in this lifetime. Maybe that life isn't meant for me. Maybe I'm meant to live paycheck to paycheck. But recently, I had a moment that made me look at this idea or this question very differently. Welcome back to the unfolding podcast. I'm your host and your girl, Yvonne Wink. Well, I wanted to share, so I was sitting in a workshop last week with a incredibly beautiful, talented, wonderful, sweet woman that you will be hearing from soon. I'm basically forcing her to be my best friend, and to be on our podcast. So she's going be on an upcoming podcast. So get ready. You guys are going to be mind blown. She's amazing. But anyway, okay. During this conversation. she looked at me and said something that stopped me dead in my tracks. And those of you that know I'm going a million miles per hour, that's difficult to do, stop me dead in my tracks. But she said something. She said, you needed to fall in love with that narcissist. I was like, girl, bye, stop, stop, hold up. Wait a minute, let me put some boom in it. But I was like, excuse me. What? Stop it. And she said, yeah. He was the only person who could fully crack your heart wide open to finish that cracking, right? So that you could see the power of vulnerability in real time. And when she said that, something in me, I felt it. It was like a light switch, but it shifted in me instantly. Has that ever happened to you? Has that ever happened to anyone? Say yes or something in the comments. I wish someone was here. That'd be so fun. I'm gonna do an open mic night somewhere so people can talk back to me. But has this ever happened when someone says something and it lands in a place that you didn't even know was open? before. So if I'm being like truly honest here, I had never had my heart broken quite like that before. I had never experienced that level of like, I call it diabolical level of manipulation, that level of emotional toxic and chaos, that level of dishonesty. I had never. ever experienced that before. And the truth is, I've never needed to learn that lesson before. Didn't even know it was a thing. I read about it, I saw friends here and there and I go, gosh, why is she in that toxic thing? So yeah, I was a little judgy. But I had never had to learn that lesson before because I had never been involved with someone like that. Someone who was... who was genuinely calculated, so disconnected from empathy, someone who, looking back, was never really there to love me in the first place. I'm able to say that now. He was there to take, to manipulate, to control the narrative. And when it ended, I truly thought, I'm gonna spend years healing from this. I expected it to harden me. I expected to walk away just very protective and very guarded, more cynical about men, because you've been around me. You know I like to talk about the men's. But I was shocked because something surprising happened instead. that whole disaster and heartbreak, it caused me to soften. And you know, that kind of confused me at first because I thought heartbreak was supposed to make you tougher. But what I realized was this. I didn't die when he chose someone else. My world didn't end. It all didn't come crashing down. actually happened was I became incredibly clear. Clear about the difference between good men and bad men, green flags and red flags, right? Clear about the difference between love and manipulation. Clear about what I will never ever tolerate again. So that experience didn't destroy me. It sharpened my discernment. Sometimes that's what heartbreak actually does. It wakes you up. not just to the pain of what happened, but to the truth of what you actually deserve. And when I really sat with that realization, I saw something even deeper because the truth is that relationship wasn't actually the first thing that cracked my heart open. That was the moment I, the moment that I guess I could say that my heart truly, truly cracked open was losing my mom. When my mom passed away. That was the moment that I felt, I first felt that armor bust open. The moment I realized how much protection I had built around my heart just to survive. Losing her opened something in me that I had spent years guarded by. just years guarded. And this relationship, as painful as it was, pushed that opening even further. and hearing. this woman say what she said, it made me think about something very differently. What if some of the people who have hurt us the most, right, came in like wrecking balls and crushed our hearts, our souls, ruined our reputations, talked poorly about us. What if some of those people who hurt us and did that type of damage aren't meant to stay in our lives? take up space in our heads, in our hearts. This is friends, lovers, coworkers, situationships. Think about it. What if they're not just mistakes? What if they weren't sent to destroy us? What if they were teachers our soul needed to meet in order to grow, to blossom? Trust me, when I first started to really break this all down in my brain, I was like, nope, that's not the lesson here. Until I sat back and I scanned all the way back, back into career choices, friendships, friendship circles, even loose acquaintances. But people who arrived not to complete our story, but to crack something open. inside of us, to wake us up, to wake up the parts of us that had been sleeping for years. So naturally my next thought after she says this, I'm sitting across from her and I'm thinking, I'm really thinking all of this in my head. Okay, now do I owe this man royalties for my upcoming book? Should I thank him in that way? Nah. Anyway, what, okay, there was a realization that came out of this after our meeting. And I sat with what she said, something in it. it landed in my soul in a place that I just couldn't ignore because that relationship truly did smooth out the rough edges that I didn't even know I had. See, my whole life I was deemed hyper independent as my mother would call it. She often would make fun of me and laugh and say, since you were six years old, no one could tell you what to do. We couldn't dress you, we couldn't comb your hair. You just, had your clothes laid out the night before. You were, I was not allowed to touch your hair. And so late years later, I'm looking at pictures from, you know, field trips and I'm like, why woman, why did you let me leave the house with a polka dot shirt and striped pants? And my ponytail lopsided and she would say, well, Yvonne, that's just who you are. You are, you're a hyper independent. You've always known exactly what you want, what you're going to do. And there's nothing or no one that can stop you. And so this all made sense to me as I'm sitting across talking to her, I'm realizing I was the overachiever, hyper independent, leave me alone. I can do this all by myself. And I loved the softening that happened and the rough edges that I didn't know I had watching them get polished. And strangely, I noticed that it was preparing me for things that I had been praying for, things that I've been dreaming about and things that I've been calling into my life. But here's something, I guess, some uncomfortableness, is that a word? Or I'll use it. Some uncomfortableness that I had to face. So, because of course I wanted love. Who doesn't, right? Of course I wanted loyalty and I wanted safety from these past partners. Of course I wanted to be admired and adored and validated. But when I got really honest with myself and I let those words land in my bones, I'm not sure I fully ever allowed that before. I'm not even sure I believed I deserved it. Oop, yep, I kept going deeper. I did, I kept going deeper with that. And that made me ask an even deeper question. What if we truly want the things we say we want, and I mean all of us collectively, but we don't allow them, right? We stop them, we block them, we sabotage, but we also get to say, but hey, no, I want that. I really want that. I'm striving for that. I'm headed in that direction. but we actually don't allow that to take place. I wanna talk about a system, right? So we have these systems that trained us to wait, right? I don't wanna get into like the masculine feminine too much, but I am gonna do a podcast on that. today was more of like when me sitting with this question, the more I noticed something else, this was the deeper question, because the world trains us to wait to be chosen. Think about that. The world trains us to wait to be invited, certified, credentialed, ready. We're trai
