Who Are You — And Who Did You Learn to Become

Growth isn't always about becoming someone new, it's sometimes just about separating who you are from what you learned you had to be. And this is where those frameworks become really useful. Not because they define you or put you in some blocks, but because they give you more information to work with. Welcome to the Unblocked Woman podcast.

I'm Amy Sanders. For years, I believed the next level of my life and business would come from a better strategy. Working harder, figuring out that perfect plan. But eventually, I saw the real truth.

The biggest ceiling in our lives is not strategy, it's identity. The patterns we don't see, the subtle ways we play small, the version of ourselves that we keep defaulting back to even when we know we're capable of more. This podcast is where we bring those patterns into the light. We talk about identity, leadership, growth, and what it actually takes to become the woman who can truly hold the life and business she wants to have.

No fluff, no performance, just honest conversation about stepping fully into your power. So go ahead and subscribe and follow the show. And remember, the moment you see the pattern, you can finally break it. Okay, I want to do something a little bit different today.

Because if you've been tuning in at all, you know that I talk about the mirror and just kind of throw that term around. And if you follow me on Instagram or on Facebook, you've probably seen it. Maybe you have even gone to the website. I don't know.

But what I was realizing today when I was on a run is I realized that I've actually never sat down and told listeners why I built it and what it actually is. More importantly, why I think something like this needed to exist and bring it into existence. And something that I've learned after all of these years of coaching women is that when it comes down to women, most women don't have an information problem. And I want you to think about that.

Most women know when they shouldn't send the text or when they should. You know when you're overthinking a decision or when you're people-pleasing. You know you need to raise the price or have the conversation. You know when you're procrastinating.

You know when you're doing the thing that you said you weren't going to do anymore. And sometimes you're literally watching yourself do it in real time saying like, here I am doing this thing again and yet I'm doing it. So my point is that awareness, especially in today's world, has become something that like people are aware. But why do we keep doing the things that we say we're not going to do and we just keep doing them?

It has fascinated me for years. I remember when I was teaching fitness classes and personal training and I was in my early 20s. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this.

The women that I was working with then were similar to my age. So they were younger women. And I would give one woman a protocol and I would give another woman a protocol and they'd be essentially the same. They should get the same results with the same workouts, the same type of nutrition.

Of course, it might vary a little bit. But it would be like one woman would totally succeed and then the other woman wouldn't even drop a pound. Like nothing would change. And what I came to learn is that, I mean, it had something to do with the protocol, but more importantly, it was what they believed about themselves and the patterns that they were running in the background were essentially crippling their results.

It fascinated me. The question, why can some incredibly intelligent, capable, self-aware women know exactly what she's doing? Sometimes, even when she's doing it, and yet she'll repeat the same pattern. I have watched women over the years read the books, go to therapy, hire a coach, listen to the podcast, journal about it, understand exactly where it came from.

And then a couple weeks later, that woman's doing the same thing. She's doing the thing that she brought to therapy or listen to the podcast about whatever. But the problem is knowing your pattern and changing your pattern, are two very different things. We can know all day long, but how do we actually change it?

And that question is what led me into deeper identity work. It's what made me completely fascinated with the Enneagram. And it's also what made me start looking into human design. And eventually it's why I built the mirror.

So today I want to pull back the curtain and I'm going to explain what the mirror actually is, why I built it, why I chose to incorporate both the Enneagram and the human design. And most importantly, why understanding your patterns, what that actually means for your growth. Because this episode, it's not about the mirror, it's about you and why you keep doing some of the things when you know better. And so let's dive in.

With that intro, let's dive in. So I talk about, patterns a lot around here. And this is why. Most of us are trying to change our lives at the level of behavior, meaning that you'll tell yourself, I need to stop procrastinating or I need to stop overthinking.

I need better boundaries. I need to be more confident. I need to stop caring what everyone thinks about me. I need to be more consistent.

And then we will try to fix that specific behavior. So we buy a planner or maybe we make like a more intense morning routine. We start writing the affirmation every single day, hoping that it will land. Maybe we promise ourselves that we're not going to go do that thing again.

But I'm much less interested in what you're doing than I am in why you keep doing it. Because there's almost always a pattern underneath the behavior. The thing that you're doing, you're doing because of a pattern. So let me give you an example.

Let's say that you're building a business and you launch something and it doesn't sell the way that you expected it to sell. So the obvious problem is my launch didn't work. So you start solving that problem. You start thinking, maybe I need a new offer.

Maybe my messaging is wrong. Maybe I should lower the price. Maybe I need to build a whole different funnel. Maybe it's my niche and I need to change my niche.

Maybe I need to fire somebody. Maybe I need to do this. I need to start over. Your mind starts giving you a million things that you can do differently about that.

But what if it's not actually the thing that we need to look at? What if it's not actually about the launch? What if every time you experience uncertainty, your pattern is to immediately distrust yourself? That's different.

That's not a launch problem. That's a trust problem. Those are different. We're now not just talking about the launch.

We're talking about what uncertainty activates inside of you. Maybe your brain learned somewhere along the way that if I'm not getting immediate evidence that I'm doing it right, then I'm probably doing it wrong. And so you change direction. Maybe you change direction too quickly.

And then six months later, you shift again. A new offer, a same pattern, a new relationship, same pattern, new goal, same pattern, new year, same pattern. Things don't change. Your circumstances can change completely while your patterns stay exactly the same.

And that's the frustrating part is you see it happening over and over again in your life and it can literally make you feel like you're crazy or something is wrong with you. This is what I call the default identity loop. Something happens. You interpret like what happened through what you already believe about yourself or other people, what you believe about success, safety, money, relationships, whatever it is, and that interpretation creates an emotional, response you will always respond from the emotion the emotional influence and that creates a result and then your brain looks at it and says see i knew it and that's how your identity gets reinforced when your brain tells you see i knew that thing was going to happen your identity locks in yep yep i knew it was true so let me make this simple i kind of just like blabbered it out there but let me put this in like a really easy scenario here so say that you send someone a text and they don't respond that's the circumstance but your brain doesn't leave it there instead your brain creates meaning around it she's upset with me she's ghosting me maybe i said something wrong i'm being annoying i shouldn't have sent a text and your brain as it's coming up with all of these thoughts starts breeding some anxious feelings so you send another text or you start explaining or maybe you start apologizing or you spend the next two hours replaying the conversation in your head and what you should have done differently and eventually as you keep sending some texts the person does get annoyed with you because they keep getting all these texts and you haven't even thought for two seconds what might be going on in their life maybe they just can't respond right now but because you have continually spammed them they're annoyed and so your brain now goes to see i knew she was upset with me loop complete identity updated and yet the circumstance didn't actually create the pattern the meaning you attached the circumstance is what activated the pattern and that's why awareness does matter so much and that's why it's so important to be aware of what's going on and to be aware of what's going on we need to be aware of how we're showing up we need to be aware of what's happening in our brains but until you can see the loop you think you're responding to reality to what's real but that reality is only your reality in your little tunnel vision you're responding to your interpretation of reality and unfortunately we can't change a behavior that we can't see and you can't fully understand a pattern if you only look at the behavior so then the question for me became how do we understand why different women create completely different meanings from the exact same circumstance and that is what got me really interested in the work that i do today here's what's just seriously wild to me you can have two women experience the exact same event and have two completely different reactions to it and you can have two women experience the exact same event one gets rejected and thinks okay that's not my door those aren't my people another gets rejected and thinks i'm not good enough one gets criticism and gets curious as to why and then the other gets criticism and spends three days trying to prove herself same circumstance completely different internal experience why why does this happen that's where tools like the enneagram start becoming really useful to me and my clients and i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to lie to you and that's why i use the enneagram with every client i coach so let's talk about the enneagram for a second if you've ever heard of the enneagram or you've taken one of those online quizzes and thought cool i'm a three and then you've moved on with your life let me explain why i actually care about it so the enneagram there are nine different personality types and honestly with any personality type there it becomes even more complex but here's what's useful for me and my clients i'm not nearly as interested in what you do as i am in the motivation underneath it just like i was saying two women can do the exact same thing for completely different reasons and have different results so let's look at it through the enneagram let's say that two women are incredibly successful both of them same behavior success one may be driven by a deeper need to prove her value through achievement which has equaled success and another may be driven by a desire for security and she's handled that through success but maybe a third woman may genuinely just love the challenge and the experience of building something and yet it's the same result they're all successful but what's happening inside of them is very different their internal patterning shows up differently even though it looks the same outside or maybe you can take people pleasing i feel like that's just always a huge one with women two women can say yes when they want to say no but one may be trying to earn love by being needed which is why she says yes all the time one may be trying to avoid conflict and that's why she says yes even though she really wants to say no one may be afraid of being seen as selfish and so she says yes she doesn't want to feel selfish and another woman may believe that she is a person who doesn't disappoint people good women don't disappoint people and so she says yes the behavior tells me something the motivation tells me much more that's why i love the integrate the enneagram it's the motivation behind what you're doing it gives us a language for the strategy underneath the behavior it answers questions like what are you trying to get what are you trying to avoid what feels threatening to your identity and what happens next and so she says yes the behavior tells me something the motivation tells me much more what happens when you're under stress what strategy have you learned to use over and over again because somewhere along the way it worked and i want to emphasize that last part your patterns they're not random most of them made sense at some point they protected you at some point maybe they helped you read the room to keep you safe maybe the achievement that you push so hard for would get you attention so that's what you keep doing maybe ease being easy going has come in handy for you and i want to emphasize that last part your patterns they're not random so now you're easy going everywhere maybe anticipating everyone else's needs helps you feel valuable so you continually do it maybe staying in control has helped you feel secure the problem isn't that you developed the strategy the problem is when the strategy becomes automatic and starts running situations where you don't actually need it anymore where it's like not helping you anymore so here's the mic drop that i want to share with you today so here's the mic drop that i want to share with you today so here's the mic drop that i want to share with you today so here's the mic drop that i want you to fill in your entire body a pattern can protect one version of you but it can literally imprison the next one that's why i don't want you judging your patterns i want you to understand them get curious why do i keep doing this thing once you understand the why you're doing something you have more power to decide whether you want to keep doing it but here i'm going to share with you a pattern that i want you to understand is another piece that i was interested in i didn't just want to understand the patterns a woman has developed to stay safe in her environment i wanted to understand the way she naturally operates when she's not trying to be everybody else when she's actually being herself and that's when human design became really interesting to me and i added it to my work and started using it with my clients human design is a process of learning how to be yourself and how to be yourself and how to be yourself and how to be yourself and how to be yourself and how to be yourself human design is a different lens and honestly it's also complex just like the enneagram so i'm not going to spend this whole episode teaching you about human design because we'd be here for like six hours or more but here's why this mattered for me human design gives us a framework for looking at things like how you naturally use and experience energy how you naturally make decisions how you interact with the world and where you may be susceptible to conditioning and there are different types of human design there's generators there's manifesting generators projectors manifesting manifestors and reflectors there's different authorities profiles and centers there's actually a lot to it but i became fascinated because i kept seeing women who were exhausted because they were constantly trying to operate like someone else but we're unique we're not meant to be like that we're not meant to be like that we're not meant to be like that we're not meant to operate the same and then if you go one step further think about how much advice we consume from other people wake up at 5 a.

m never wake up at 5 a. m hustle harder actually slow down do you have your five-year plan never mind follow your intuition with instagram you should post every single day and then someone says only post when you feel inspired and then that energy is gone post will go further make decisions quickly maybe sleep on every decision run it's good for the heart except for don't go too far too fast slow running is better on the body but if you want to qualify for boston you better run fast actually let's start walking with a weighted vest because you're going to burn fat faster than running and you're going to keep your inflammation down don't do peptides actually peptides are really healthy and they're changing the world so you should do them right these are just a few things that you can do to help you that are happening all the time around us so no wonder why we're confused we're like constantly being told that there is one way to be successful to make decisions there's one way to build relationships there's one way to lead create work and live but what if there isn't what if part of alignment is learning how you operate understanding yourself at the deepest level that is what we're was interesting to me because suddenly we had two different lenses the Enneagram was asking me or the Enneagram was helping me ask what strategy have you learned to use to stay safe and what's driving this behavior and we could answer that question when we understood that human design was helping me ask how do you naturally operate when you're not forcing yourself into somebody else's way of doing life and then on top of that the identity work was asking who have you decided you are because of all of it that's when I felt like we were getting somewhere with my clients not everything about you needs to be fixed just some things need to be understood and that distinction mattered to me a lot so why I put them together I wanted to explain that too before we dive into the mirror because that's the part I want you to understand most I didn't put the Enneagram and human design and then into the mirror because I wanted it to feel fancy and have all the bells and whistles and I definitely didn't do it so that the mirror could split out or just spit out like this personality report and tell you that you're special and that you're different from everyone else and I definitely didn't do it so that the mirror could split out or just spit out like this we don't need another personality report I put them together because I wanted another layer of context I wanted to start realizing that when we look at one framework alone we can miss things the Enneagram helped me understand the strategy that you've developed the human design can give me another lens for how you naturally make decisions and how you move through the world identity work can help us understand the beliefs the stories and the patterns you've reinforced over time and then we get to ask one of the most powerful questions I think a woman can ask which is what is actually me and what have I learned to become what is actually you when you look at all of this information what did you learn to become because it's how you got love or approval or safety or success you what did you learn to become in order to belong what did you learn to become because everybody celebrated you when you were that woman when you were the responsible one or the successful one the easy one the strong one I am so sick of people telling me I'm strong like okay I'm strong I'm physically strong I'm mentally strong I'm emotionally strong yes but I feel like that was the identity that the entire world has put on me I'm like there's a lot more to me than my strength But I carried that identity for a long time with armor. Now I don't like to wear it. What was something you learned to be because you had to be it?

The one who never needed anything or the one who fixes everything, the one who keeps everybody happy, the peacemaker. The one who always knows what to do. At some point, you wake up and think, I don't even want to be that woman anymore. I just said it.

I don't want to be known as the strong woman. I want to be known for more. I want to be more. There's more to me than that.

And there's more to you than that. That's identity work. Growth isn't always about becoming someone new. It's sometimes just about separating who you are from what you learned you had to be.

And this is where those frameworks become really useful. Not because they define you or put you in some box, but because they give you more information to work with. And I also want to say something here because I think I have seen people misuse both of these systems all the time. Your Enneagram number is not an excuse.

Your human design is also not an excuse. I've heard, oh, well, I'm a three, so of course I overwork. It's fine. I'm a three.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm a projector. I can't do that. I haven't been invited in properly.

No. Or, I'm an eight, by the way. That's just how I am. Others just need to deal with the fact that I'm an eight.

No. Please don't take a tool designed to create self-awareness and use it to build another cage around yourself or give excuses for mistreating other people. That's not what it's about. Self-awareness should give you more choice and more freedom, not fewer choices.

That's the entire point. These aren't boxes. They're mirrors. They give you another angle from which you can see yourself.

And then you decide what you want to do with that information. So once I started looking at women through these lenses, the identities, the patterns, the motivation, natural decision-making, conditioning, all the things, I kept running into one really frustrating problem. Women could see the pattern beautifully when we were talking about it together, and then life happened, and we weren't together. I've coached women for years, and one thing that happens inside coaching is that you have this incredible conversation.

She sees herself. She gets it. She has this breakthrough. She writes everything down, and she's like, oh my gosh, I do this all the time.

And she leaves feeling completely clear. And then Tuesday night happens. It's 1047, and her husband says something, or her kids do something. She gets an email.

She checks the bank account. Someone doesn't respond. The launch isn't working. Whatever happens.

Maybe her boss sends a weird Slack message. Whatever. And then suddenly, she's not sitting in a coaching session with me calmly examining her pattern. She's inside it.

Her nervous system is activated, and her brain is making everything mean all kinds of things, like making meaning all over the place, going 400 miles an hour. And that old strategy that her brain has used before to stay safe comes back online, and that is the moment that I've been interested in. Because it's the one, like, there's, because, okay, it's one thing to understand your pattern when you're calm, when everything's going okay. And you can look at it through a very calm lens.

But it is another to catch it when it's happening. Patterns are easiest to interrupt when you catch them, when they're happening. And I kept thinking, what would happen if she had somewhere to go right then? Not next Thursday when she has a coaching call again.

Not when she remembers which workbook the exercise was in that she could go do. Because by the way, when you're in those moments, you're not thinking about that. Your brain is offline. What if she could open something and say, okay, here's what's happening.

Help me see this clearly. And what if, it was that thing, that the thing that she was able to talk to actually knew her. Not in a creepy way, but it knew information that she had given it. It knew her Enneagram, her human design, her patterns, her previous conversations, the things that she's been working through so that you're not starting at zero every single time.

That was the idea behind the mirror. I wanted to build something that could help women see themselves more clearly. More clearly in real time, when the things were happening, when they were frustrated, a place for them to go and for them to be fully open and honest and for it to reflect back to them what it sees. Not how to tell her how to live or not to replace her therapist or her coach.

Not to make every decision for her like chat. It was actually the opposite. I wanted women to become, better at trusting themselves. The goal of the mirror isn't to make you depend on it.

The goal is to make you more fluent in yourself. The goal is to help you build deeper self-trust. That's why I call it the mirror. Because a mirror doesn't tell you who to be.

It shows you what's there. So let me give you an example because I think it makes more sense when you're in real life. So let's say you open up the mirror and you say, my business has been slow for two weeks. I think I need to completely change my offer.

Okay, maybe you do need to change your offer. The mirror isn't going to pretend strategy doesn't matter. It's also not going to bring you all these strategies. But maybe you've had enough conversations that the mirror sees that there's a pattern emerging.

And every time your business feels uncertain, you start abandoning your own decisions. So you look for a new strategy, a new change direction. You ask 12 people what they think. You start comparing yourself.

All these things come up. And suddenly the question isn't only, should I change my offer? But now we can ask, is this an aligned business decision? Or is uncertainty activating an old pattern of self-distrust?

It now becomes a completely different conversation. Or maybe you just come in and say, hey, my friend hasn't texted me back. I think she's upset. And the mirror can help you slow down that loop.

It can ask you what actually happened. What are you making it mean? What evidence do you have? What evidence do you actually have?

What pattern might be activated here? What would the most self-trusting version of you do next? That's what I love about the mirror, is it helps you become her. That's what I wanted.

I don't want to give women more answers or more confusion. I want to help women ask better questions. Better questions create better awareness. Awareness creates choice.

And the moment that you see your pattern, you can simply, have options. And that's the difference. Instead of this is just who I am, you start saying, oh, there I go again. And I love that moment because there's no shame in it.

It's almost funny sometimes. Of course my brain went there. Of course I want to fix everything. Of course I want everyone to be okay.

I know this pattern. And now I have a choice. That is power. Growth is not about becoming some perfectly healthy person.

It's about becoming a healthy woman who never gets triggered. We're going to get triggered until the end of time. Sorry, but that's what's going to happen. You're probably going to have times where you overthink things.

You're probably never going to get over people-pleasing all the way. At least I don't think I will. Growth is not becoming someone perfect because that doesn't exist. Growth is about increasing the space between the trigger and the automatic response.

Growth is about noticing it sooner, recovering faster, and increasing the space between the trigger and the automatic response. Growth is about understanding yourself deeply enough that when an old pattern shows up, you don't immediately hand it the keys and say, here, you take over now, you drive. That's not what we're talking about here. Healing doesn't mean the old pattern never knocks.

It's going to come knocking. I promise you that. But it means that you stop automatically opening up the door and letting it take over. That's what we're doing here.

That is what we're doing here. That's what my entire body of work is built around. It's around awareness, alignment, and abundance. Awareness always comes first.

You see the pattern. You recognize the pattern. You understand where it might be coming from so that you can separate it. You can separate that circumstance from the story that you keep telling yourself.

And when you're able to do that, once you can see it, you can choose alignment. What do you choose for yourself? Not what does fear choose, not what does your conditioning choose for you, or the old version of you that just automatically chooses. I'm saying, what do you choose now?

What do I choose now for me today? That's alignment. Abundance? Abundance is not just about the money.

It's about what becomes available when you stop spending so much of your energy repeating patterns that keep recreating the results. The results that you don't want in your life. Abundance is about making different decisions, having different conversations, setting different standards, having different relationships that actually fuel you. Abundance is about letting go of abandoning yourself every time because you're avoiding discomfort.

It's about trusting yourself. And as you make different choices and start doing new things, you create a different relationship. You create a different relationship. You create a different normal.

An abundance of life. That is the work. The goal isn't to stop having the patterns. The goal is to stop letting unconscious patterns make those decisions.

Consciously. And that's what I want for women. Not perfection or choice or another label for you to slap on yourself. Well, I'm an Enneagram 3 and I'm a generator.

That's not what we're saying. It's deeper understanding so you have more choice. So you can make more choices. You have more self-trust.

You are the one that has to live your life and I want you to love it. I want us all to love it. Okay. So in closing, as I've just been TED-talking your ear off, I want to give you something to do with this episode.

This week, I want you to catch one pattern. Don't try to overhaul everything or change your entire personality by Friday. That's not what we're talking about. I'm asking you to catch one pattern.

Notice yourself when you're having a bigger reaction than a circumstance seems to warrant and then pause and ask yourself what happened. As you pause, look at just the facts. Only the facts. Just look at the facts.

Try to take emotion out of it and then ask yourself what you're making this mean. The next thing is I want you to ask, what do I want to do because of that meaning? And is this response aligned with who I'm becoming or is it familiar because of who I've been? Write those questions down.

What am I making this mean? What do I want to do because of that meaning? And is this response aligned with who I'm becoming? Or is it just familiar because of who I've been?

Put them on your phone. Use them. That little pause before you respond, that, is where your power lies. Don't judge.

Just catch. And catch it early enough to choose. So here's what I want you to walk away with today. You are so much more than your patterns.

You are so much more than your Enneagram number or your human design chart. And you're more than what has happened to you, what has brought you to this moment in your life today. You are more than the strategies, you developed to get through everything that you have gotten through. All of those things are information and that information is powerful when you use it to create choice instead of another identity that you have to live inside.

That's why I built the mirror. I wanted women to have a place where all these pieces could come together in real time. Your patterns, your Enneagram, your history, your human design, the things you're working through, the conversations you've had, all of those things so that you can see yourself more clearly. Because sometimes when you're standing inside the pattern, it is hard to see.

You're inside it. It's hard to see. Sometimes you need a reflection, someone or something to hold the mirror still long enough for you to look in and say, oh yeah, there I am. And at that moment, then you get to decide, do I keep doing this or do I choose something different?

And as you repeat that over time, that's how you change your life. So if you've been listening to me talk about the mirror and wondering what the heck it actually is, that's it. It's not there to run your life. And it's definitely not chat or Claude.

It's so much cooler. It's seriously so cool. But the mirror is there to help you see what's running your life. It's not going to tell you who you're meant to become.

It's just there to help you. So if you're curious about your own patterns, your own blueprint, or what might be happening underneath the surface of what you're dealing with right now, go try it. By the way, your first three sessions are totally free. So just go try it.

And you get to take the, if you don't know your Enneagram or your human design, no problemo. You can take the quizzes for free inside it as well. There is a link in the show notes to the mirror. Or you can just go to amysanders.

co4. Mirror. Anyway, bring it something real. Not some fake coachy question.

I want you to let go of that. I want you to bring it the thing that you're actually overthinking or that's weighing on you. Maybe it's a decision that you can't make or a conversation that you're avoiding. A pattern that you keep doing over and over and you're like, I'm just ready for something different.

Bring it those things and then see what comes up. And if you have an aha moment, I want to hear about it. Send it to me on Instagram. Nothing makes me happier than hearing what's working for other people and hearing women discover more about themselves through this work.

It's like nothing lights up my soul more. So if you have an aha moment, make sure you reach out to me on Instagram. I would love to know. And just save this episode because I think you're going to want to come back to it and learn a little bit more or just re-listen about the Enneagram and human design.

And if there's someone that you think would be interested in this episode, make sure you send it on to them. If you're not subscribed, make sure you do so. And then I will be, I'll be back here next week. But for this week, don't judge the pattern.

Just notice it, understand it, and then choose something differently. With that, take care. I will see you next week. Bye.

Okay, before you go, don't let this become another episode that you listened to, loved, and then did nothing with. Take what came up for you today and bring it into the mirror. Bring it the decision that you're overthinking, the conversation you're avoiding, the pattern that you keep repeating, or simply say, here's what's happening. Help me see what I can.

The mirror knows your patterns, your enneagram, your human design, and it remembers the work you've already done. So the reflection is personal to you. Find the mirror in the show notes or at amysanders. co forward slash mirror.

And until next time, see it, shift it, and become magnetic.