You have been talking yourself out of your own wants for so long it feels like wisdom.

You call it being practical. You call it being responsible. You tell yourself you will get to what you want once everything else is handled — once the kids are settled, once the finances are stable, once the timing is right, once someone gives you permission.

Here is the truth: that moment is never coming. Not because you are not capable of it. Because you have been trained to explain your wants before you allow yourself to have them. And after enough years of doing that, the explanation becomes automatic. You stop noticing you are doing it. You just call it being realistic.

This episode is about what happens when a woman stops doing that. Not in theory. In real life. With a real client, a real decision, and a real shift that happened not when everything was perfect — but in the middle of a transition she was managing entirely on her own.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

1.The real reason capable, high-achieving women talk themselves out of their own wants — and why it has nothing to do with logic or practicality

2.Valentina's story: how a 65-year-old woman finishing her doctorate during an international move discovered that everything she had spent decades building was exactly what she needed to start over on her own terms

3.The Three Markers of the Joy Shift — the three observable, behavioral signs that the real shift has happened (not what a woman says, but what she does)

4.Why the dissertation being accepted was not the Joy Shift — and what the actual moment of change looked like

5.The difference between making decisions from desire versus making decisions from fear, and how to tell which one is driving you right now

6.What it costs you — specifically, concretely — when you don't stop apologizing for wanting things

7.The one 5% move you can make this week if any of this landed somewhere real

The Framework: The Three Markers of the Joy Shift

The shift — the real one, the one that sticks — does not announce itself. It does not arrive with a dramatic decision or a public declaration. It shows up quietly, in behavior. Kiley has worked with enough women to know that it always appears in three specific, observable ways.

Marker One: She stops explaining her wants before she allows herself to have them.

This is the first marker to appear and the subtlest. It does not look dramatic. It looks like a woman who says I want to do this without following it with but I know it's a lot or I don't want to be selfish or once everything else is settled. The explanations get shorter. The apologies get quieter. She catches herself mid-sentence and realizes she was about to explain herself to no one.

"You catch yourself mid-sentence and realize you are about to explain yourself to no one."

Marker Two: She starts making decisions from desire instead of from fear.

This one is harder to see in the moment. It usually only becomes visible in retrospect. You look back at a decision you made three months ago and realize it was the first one in years that came from what you actually wanted — not from what you were afraid would happen if you didn't. Fear has you waiting for permission. Desire has you planning before anyone gives it.

"Fear would have had her waiting for someone to tell her it was okay. Desire had her planning before anyone gave her permission."

Marker Three: She notices when she is disappearing — and she comes back faster.

This is the marker that takes the longest to develop and the one that matters most for the long term. The Joy Shift does not mean the old sentence disappears. It means you get faster at catching it. You notice sooner when you have gone quiet, when you have gone small, when you have started explaining yourself again. And you come back — not perfectly, not without effort, but faster than before.

"This is the Joy Shift: not the absence of the old story, the ability to see it and choose differently."

The Moment That Changed Everything

Valentina came to Kiley with a list. Not a list of what she wanted — a list of reasons why none of it was possible anymore.

She was 65. She was four years into a doctorate she had started believing she no longer had the right to finish. She was preparing to return to her home country — not because she wanted to, but because she had looked at her financial situation honestly and decided it was the responsible choice. The practical choice. The choice that meant she would not become a burden on her children.

She was so good at being practical, so good at being responsible, that she had almost convinced herself the dissertation did not matter anymore. That wanting to finish it was selfish. That the smart thing to do was to let it go.

Kiley asked her one question: What would it mean to you to finish it? Not what would it do for your career. What would it mean to you — in your body, in the part of you that started it in the first place?

Valentina was quiet for a long time. Then she said: It would mean I didn't give up on myself, even when everything else fell apart.

That was the shift. Not the finishing of the dissertation. That came later. The shift was the moment she named what it would actually mean to her — because once she named it, the dissertation stopped being an obstacle and became what it always was: evidence that she was still fighting for herself.

Who This Episode Is For

This episode will land somewhere specific if you recognize yourself in any of the following:

•You are the capable one — the one who figures things out, carries things, does not ask for help — and you have been using that capability to talk yourself out of your own wants for years

•You have a want you keep explaining away before you let yourself say it out loud

•You have been calling your settling "gratitude" and you know, somewhere, the difference

•You are in a transition — a move, a career change, an empty nest, a relationship shift — and you are managing it practically while quietly wondering if there is something you are not allowing yourself to want

•You have been waiting for the circumstances to be perfect before you let yourself start

•You look at your life from the outside and it makes sense. From the inside, it feels like someone else's house.

This Week's 5% Move

The next time you catch yourself starting to explain a want before you let yourself have it — stop. Just stop mid-sentence.

You do not have to change the want. You do not have to act on it. You do not have to tell anyone. Just notice the explanation and let it go. See what it feels like to want something without a disclaimer attached.

That is the 5% move. That is where this starts.

Try it once this week. Just once. Notice what happens in your body when you let the want exist without defending it.

Book a Free Clarity Session

If the Three Markers landed somewhere real for you — if you recognized yourself in Valentina's story, or if you already know which marker feels furthest away — that is exactly what a Clarity Session is for.

It is one conversation. The right questions. No pressure, no pitch. Just two women looking at what is actually going on and what your most aligned next step looks like.

Book here: calendly.com/kileysuarez/clarity-session-kiley

Are you ready to finally give yourself permission to want more? 🙌

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And if you haven't yet, take two seconds and hit the Follow button right here so you never miss an episode. It means the world to me, truly.

Whether you found this show on your own or someone who loves you sent it your way, welcome to The Joy Shift podcast family. This episode is not just for you. Please share it with every woman in your life who is successful on paper but still searching for something more. It could change everything for her.

It is such an honor to do this work alongside you. And please note: I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.

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She was 65.

She had spent her career teaching people how to use computers, back when most people didn't know what they were for.

She had been working on a doctorate for four years, and she was stuck.

Not because she lacked the talent, because she had stopped believing it was still hers to finish.

And then, in the middle of a life transition, she chose for herself.

She discovered something she had never considered.

That everything she knew was exactly what she needed to build something entirely her own.

Welcome to the Joy Shift.

I'm Kylie Suarez.

If this is your first time here, I'm so glad you found this episode.

And I have a quick ask before we get started.

If you listen to this show but haven't hit follow yet, take a second and do it now.

Here's why it matters.

When you follow a show, the algorithm delivers the best episodes to you first.

The ones people are sharing, the ones that are landing the most.

And I want you to get those.

So hit follow and let's get into it.

She came to me with a list.

Not a list of what she wanted, a list of reasons why none of it was possible anymore.

Her name name is Valentina, but that's not her real name.

I've changed it to protect her privacy.

But she is a real client I worked with, and I want to share her story today because it is one of the clearest examples I've ever seen of what happens when a woman finally stops apologizing for wanting things.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let me start at the beginning.

Valentina was 65 years old when she came to me.

She had spent her career in education and technology teaching people how to use computers back when most people did not know what they were for.

She was ahead of her time.

She had built a reputation on being the person who could take something complex and make it accessible, who could see where technology was headed before everyone else caught up.

And at 65, she had decided to pursue her doctorate.

Her research was focused on AI and education.

How technology could be used to support teachers, how the tools that were changing everything could actually serve the people in the classroom.

It was ambitious work, important work.

And when she came to me, she'd been four years into it, and she was stuck.

That was the goal she brought to our work together.

Finish the dissertation, get it accepted, complete the thing she had started four years ago.

But there was something else happening at the same time in her life.

Valentina had been living in the United States, and she had made a decision.

She was going to return to her home country, where she had Had a house where she had family already established.

Because she had looked at her financial situation honestly and decided that going back was the smart move, the responsible move, the move that meant she would not become a burden on her children.

I want you to hear the way I just said that.

She decided she looked at the situation.

She made the call.

This was not something that happened to her.

This was a woman doing what she had always done, Taking care of things, making the practical choice, being the responsible one.

And that is exactly where the problem was hiding.

Because Valentina was so good at being practical, so good at being responsible, that she had almost convinced herself the dissertation did not matter anymore, that wanting to finish it was selfish, that the smart thing to do was to let it go, move on and stop wanting something that felt too big for the life she was building.

If you are a woman who has spent her life being the capable one, the one who figures things out, the one who carries things, the one who does not ask for help.

You know what this sounds like?

You know what it feels like to talk yourself out of your own wants in the name of being practical?

It is a story you have been telling yourself so long it feels like a fact.

The story that says I am the one who holds things together.

My wants come last.

For listeners new to the show, what I call the sentence is a story you have been living inside so long you forget it was a story.

It feels like a fact, but it's not.

It's a sentence you can rewrite.

That was the sentence Valentina was living inside when she first started working together.

Now your version of this probably looks different.

You are probably not making an international move.

You are probably not four years into a dissertation.

But I would guess you know what it feels like to carry a want you keep explaining away before you let your yourself say it out loud.

I would guess you know what it feels like to be so good at being practical that you have forgotten you are also allowed to want things.

That is the thread that connects Valentina's story to yours.

Hold on to it.

Valentina came to me to finish her dissertation.

That was the stated goal.

Four years in, she was stuck and she wanted help getting unstuck.

But here is what I had noticed.

Valentina kept referring to the dissertation as something she needed to finish before she could move forward.

Like it was a box to check and obligation, the thing standing between her and permission to think about what came next.

And I asked her one question.

What would it mean to you to finish it?

Not what would it do for your career?

Not what would it prove, what would it mean to you in your body, in the part of you that started it in the first place.

She was quiet for a long time, and then she said something I have never forgotten.

She said it would mean I didn't give up on myself, even when everything else fell apart.

That was the shift, not the finishing of the dissertation.

That came later.

The shift was the moment she named what it would actually mean to her.

Because once she named it, the dissertation stopped being an obstacle and became what it always was, evidence that she was still fighting for herself.

We worked on the presentation.

We worked on how she told her story.

Not just the research, but the arc of it, the years of it, the weight of it.

And she presented her dissertation again, and it was accepted.

But here is the part of the story I want you to hear.

Because the dissertation being accepted, that was not the joy Shift.

A few weeks after the dissertation was accepted, Valentina was still preparing for her move.

She had made the decision to return to her home country.

The practical pieces were still in motion.

The question of what her life would look like on the other side was still open.

And she called me and she said something that stopped me completely.

She said, I've been thinking about my skill set and I think I've been looking at this wrong.

She had spent months framing her return as a step back, as the responsible thing, as the thing she was doing because it was practical.

And somewhere between finishing the dissertation and that phone call, she had turned it around without announcement, without fanfare.

She just did it.

She started talking about what she actually knew, technology and education.

Not as abstract credentials on a resume, as a specific, practical, in demand combination of skills that she spent decades developing.

She started talking about the work she could do, the training, the consulting, the bridge she could build between teachers and the tools they needed, the income she could generate that would be hers, not borrowed from her children, not contingent on a single employer, not dependent on a geography.

She was not asking me for permission.

She was not apologizing for the size of the idea.

She was just thinking out loud, planning, like a woman who had decided she was allowed to.

That was the moment I knew.

Not when she finished the dissertation, not when it was accepted.

The moment I knew was when she stopped seeing her move as just the practical choice and started building her future like something she was designing.

She had stopped apologizing for wanting things.

I have worked with a lot of women, and over time I have noticed that the shift, the real shift, the one that sticks, always shows up in three specific observable ways.

Not in what a woman says, in what she does.

I call them the three markers of the joy shift.

Marker 1 she stops explaining her wants before she allows herself to have them.

This is the first one to appear and it is the subtlest.

It does not look dramatic.

It looks like a woman who says I want to do this without following it with, but I know it's a lot or I don't want to be selfish or once everything else is settled.

Valentina did this on that phone call.

She did not preface her ideas with apologies, she just said them.

If you have been doing the work we talk about on the show, naming the sentence you have been living inside, tracing it back, asking whether it is a fact or a story you may have already noticed, this is one starting to shift.

The explanations got shorter, the apologies got quieter.

You catch yourself mid sentence and realize you are about to explain yourself to no one.

Marker 2 she starts making decisions from desire instead of from fear.

This one is harder to see in the moment.

It usually only becomes visible in retrospect.

You look back at a decision you made three months ago and realize it was the first one in years that came from what you actually wanted, not from what you were afraid would happen if you didn't.

For Valentina, this showed up in the decision to stop seeing her move as the practical thing and start seeing it as an opportunity.

That was a desire based decision.

She wanted to build something.

She wanted to be independent.

She wanted to use what she knew fear would have had her waiting for someone to tell her it was okay.

Desire had her planning before anyone gave her permission.

And marker three she notices when she's disappearing and she comes back faster.

This is the one that takes the longest to develop and it is the one that matters most for the long term.

Because the shift does not mean the old sentence disappears, it means you get faster at catching it.

You notice sooner when you have gone quieter, quiet, when you have gone small, when you have started explaining yourself again and you come back not perfectly, not without effort, but faster than before.

Valentina still has hard days.

She told me that there are still mornings when the old sentence is louder than the new one, but she notices it now and she comes back.

This is the joy shift, not the absence of the old story, the ability to see it and choose differently.

I want to be honest about something for a moment because we talk a lot on this show about what is possible when you stop apologizing for wanting things.

But we do not talk enough about what happens when you don't and here's what happens.

You get very good at a life that was never actually yours.

The explanations become automatic.

The apologies become invisible.

You stop noticing.

You are doing it because it has become the way you breathe.

And one day you look up and realize you have spent 10 years, 20 years building something that makes perfect sense from the outside and feels like someone else's house from the inside.

That is the cost.

Not a dramatic collapse.

Not a crisis.

Just a slow, steady disappearance.

The kind nobody notices.

Including you.

Valentina almost lived that story.

She was a few decisions away from it.

The version where she went back, let the dissertation sit unfinished, called it the practical choice, and told herself she would just be grateful for what she had.

She chose a different story.

And that choice is available to you too.

I want to ask you something before we close.

Of these three markers, stopping the explanations, making decisions from desire, noticing when you disappear and come back faster, which one feels furthest away from where you are right now?

Not the one you want to have.

The one that feels most distant.

The one that, if you are honest, you are not sure you have ever experienced.

I am asking because that marker is not a flaw.

It's a direction.

It is the next thing the work is for.

And here is one thing you can do this week.

The next time you catch yourself starting to explain a want before you let yourself have it, stop.

Just stop mid sentence.

You do not have to change the want.

You do not have to act on it.

Just notice the explanation and let it go.

See what it feels like to want something without a disclaimer attached.

That is the 5% move.

That is where this starts.

On Friday.

We're going to sit with that question together.

I'm going to give you three prompts, one for each marker, and we're going to find out exactly where you are.

Not to judge it, to name it, because you already know what naming something does.

It makes it visible.

And once you can see it, you can move.

Valentina finished her doctorate at 65.

She is using the expertise she spent decades developing on her own terms, in her own time.

She has started writing books for nonfiction, using her knowledge as a teacher and a computer expert to teach those that are not as skilled but want to learn.

She did not wait for the circumstances to be perfect.

She did not wait until she felt ready.

She decided, in the middle of uncertainty, in the middle of a transition.

She was managing on her own terms, that she was allowed to want what she wanted.

This is what is possible for you.

Knowing changes nothing.

Choosing changes everything.

That that is the Joy share if something in today's episode made you want to have the conversation where your own markers become visible, that is exactly what a clarity call is for.

It is one conversation, the right questions, no pressure, no pitch, just two women taking what is actually going on and what your most aligned next step looks like.

The link is in the show notes and if some if you are not already following the show, hit follow.

Right now.

We are here every Tuesday and Friday and I do not want you to miss what's coming.

I will see you Friday.

This is the Joy Shift with Kylie Suarez.