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July 14, 2025 24 mins

“I used to think consistency was the holy grail — that if I just kept going, I'd earn my way into alignment. But what I've come to unlearn is this: when rhythm breaks, it's not always a failure. Sometimes it's divine intervention.”

In this episode of The Unlearning Curve, I’m sharing the truth behind my unexpected podcast hiatus — not just a pause, but a powerful realignment. This is the conversation for every woman who’s been overdelivering, pushing through, and performing under pressure… all while quietly unraveling inside.

Together, we’ll explore:

  • Why hustle culture is so seductive (and so destructive)

  • What consistency really means in your second season of life

  • The link between nervous system burnout and creative shutdown

  • How universal timing, external redirection, and internal truth forced me to recalibrate

  • What sovereignty sounds like when it returns to the mic

💬 “I didn’t plan this break — I was called into it. By my body, by life, by something bigger than my own will.”

Whether you’re navigating burnout, redefining success, or craving a rhythm that finally feels like yours, this episode is a permission slip to pause — and rebuild from truth, not trauma.

🎧 Takeaway: You’ll leave with language, resonance, and tools to unlearn performance culture, reclaim your rhythm, and rise on your own timing.

🔗 Learn more at https://kathybaldwin.me

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to unlearn the crap and level up
your soulless calling.
My name is Kathy Baldwin.
And on this episode of the unlearning curve,
this episode is dedicated to all the women
like me, who've been holding it all together
for so long, staying consistent, over delivering, pushing

(00:26):
through, even when, and actually especially when, life
and your spirit and your own body are
begging you to pause.
You see, I didn't just take a break
from the podcast.
It wasn't a planned hiatus.
I was called into a reset by my

(00:48):
nervous system, yes, but also by external forces,
universal timing, and a deeper recalibration that I
didn't see coming.
I used to think that consistency was the
holy grail, that if I just kept going,
I'd find my way into alignment.

(01:10):
But what I've come to unlearn is this,
when rhythm breaks, it's not always a failure.
Sometimes it's divine intervention.
So in this first episode of season two
of unlearning curve, I'm sharing the real reason

(01:31):
I took a step back, what hustle culture
almost stole from me, and how I'm rebuilding
from a place of sovereignty, not survival.
If you've ever felt like the world expects
you to be a machine, and you're done
performing for gold stars that you don't believe

(01:53):
in anymore, this episode will meet you right
where you are.
Join me.
Welcome to unlearn the crap and level up
your soul is calling.
My name is Kathy Baldwin, I'm your host.
And on today's segment of the unlearning curve,

(02:14):
it also coincides with what is now what
I'm calling season two of this podcast.
Season two, as far as we're having a
multiple season instead of it being one progressive
show, which is originally how it started, but

(02:35):
also season two, as in the way we
talked about it in regards to us moving
into our second season, having a rhythm and
a flow to things.
You see, when I first started this podcast,
I believed that I needed to release a

(02:57):
show once a week, every week, consistently.
And I loved the structure, I love the
formatting, I love the consistency of it.
But what I didn't love was the amount
of stress and pressure it put on me

(03:20):
to constantly perform.
And I don't know if you've noticed, but
this show has had about a six week
hiatus.
It wasn't a hiatus that I planned.
It wasn't like any other TV show where
they say, okay, we're gonna have 13 or
26 episodes, and then we're gonna have a

(03:41):
break.
And then we're going to go into our
next season.
That's the way normal TV show production works.
I was looking for more of consistency, like
a radio show.
You know, you show up every single day,
and there's content there for you.

(04:01):
But I realized as a podcast host, and
as a woman who is in her own
leveling up and progressive state of life, and
in my personal third season of life, that
that didn't work for me.

(04:24):
And like so many things, we don't necessarily
come to these realizations, these epiphanies, all on
our own.
It takes information coming at us from external
sources, from life to mirror back to us,

(04:45):
or to stop us or redirect us or
however it comes about, for us to take
a look at this information and evaluate, is
this working for me?
You see, when I started my podcast, it
was an opportunity, it was exciting.

(05:06):
It was about me sharing the ideas that
I had brought forth in my books, Unlearn
the Crap and Level Up Your Soul's Calling.
It was about all of this fantastic integration
of information that I was just so passionately
excited to share.
But then I realized that that was the

(05:30):
old version of me.
And if I am going to talk about
leveling up, I need to be able to
really level up on my own.
And I had a lot of crap thrown
at me, and a lot of circumstances, relationships,
events, internal, external, all that I had to

(05:54):
take a look at, and make some really
good decisions.
And when I talk about how our universal
world is on frequencies, you can't shift channels,
you can't shift frequencies by staying static on

(06:17):
the same place in the same plane.
Unfortunately, we have these ingrained thoughts and feelings
that are built into our crap, into our
conditioned responses and automatic programming, the part of
us that is on autopilot.
And it takes these moments for us to

(06:39):
sit back and reevaluate.
And so I realized that this forced hiatus
was not about being a comeback.
Because I'm not coming back from anywhere.
I just had a rest.

(06:59):
I just had a little break.
But what I did do was recalibrate, what
I did do was purge some of that
leftover crap.
If I'm going to be honest, and come
here in vulnerability, and trend, full transparency, and

(07:20):
all the things that I believe in, you're
going to witness my own evolution as I
go through these stages.
And this podcast is probably going to end
up becoming a living, breathing witness to my
own evolution and my own recalibration.

(07:43):
I don't know if you realize this or
not.
But there is massive amounts of energetic magnetic
field changes happening within our physical and our
energetic world.
And we're all being called to level up.
And we're all being called to take a

(08:04):
look at the that crap about hustle as
a survival mechanism.
Because that belief was instilled in me, 80s,
90s, as a young woman joining the workforce,
as a first generation woman who was as

(08:28):
a Gen X, trying to navigate the corporate
world, and find autonomy and, and sovereignty and
my own personal alignment.
I was such a component of the hustle
culture.
I over delivered, I over gave, I over

(08:50):
produced.
And I created this belief in me that
said that if I wasn't consistent, and if
I wasn't outperforming, and if I wasn't over
delivering, and if I wasn't not taking a
break, because even in the corporate world, where
people were working Monday to Friday, I was

(09:11):
putting in weekends that weren't called for, just
so that I could produce at a level
that I had put my own expectations on.
Well, we all know that that created cortisol.
And it put me into a dopamine cycle
where I was constantly feeding that hustle culture.

(09:35):
I know cognitively, that that was damaging.
I know it because I had the breakdown,
I've been going through this massive five year
journey, that probably most of us have, because
let's be real, COVID was a massive reset
button for our world for our society.

(09:58):
And so part of what I'm unlearning is
that in order for me to produce a
high quality product with this podcast, that I
must work harder, and more and produce more.

(10:19):
I need to get into the things I'm
talking about all the time, which are the
universal laws of rhythm, of cycles, of being
within the best part of myself as a
human design manifester, as a Gemini, as a

(10:39):
woman Gen X, whatever label or energetic feeling
you want to put into it.
I don't need to perform all the time.
And so I took a look at this
hiatus that I was on because at first,
because it wasn't my choice.
It was external circumstances.

(11:01):
I felt, I'll be honest, I felt resentful.
I felt out of control.
I felt that someone was stealing my voice
or something was stealing my voice.
And now I look at it, as I'm
beginning this season two, and here it is
my very first episode of unlearning.

(11:23):
And I'm going to just be really raw
and vulnerable and intimate here and say, I'm
still unlearning the crap about the hustle culture.
I'm learning what it feels like to recalibrate
at a higher level, as what that frequency

(11:44):
feels like.
Because we are polar opposite within us internally,
our right brain, our left brain, the connection
between our brain and our heart and our
gut and how interconnected all of that is
in our world of both energetic and physical.

(12:08):
It's so complex that when we say we
want something more, we want a higher level
and we want to level up.
But we don't know what it looks or
feels like.
And our old systems are trying to hold
us back.
And that's what happened.
That's what happened for me.

(12:29):
I realized that I was feeling powerless.
And instead, when I took the opportunity to
say, No, I'm just leveling up.
And now I can show up at a

(12:50):
different level.
And I can produce and share and do
all the things that I want to do
within a nervous system that understands what it
feels like to go out of alignment, to
know what it feels like to be pulled

(13:11):
into a high stress place, to know what
it feels like to bring myself back.
To know that being in rhythm is actually
revolutionary.

(13:32):
Our world was built on cycles and rhythms.
And when we feel that things are happening
to us, this is an opportunity for us,
for me, to take a look and say,
What was I supposed to learn?

(13:55):
What was I supposed to do?
What was what was the message?
What was the unlearning?
What was the learning?
And for me, this is a new level
of my podcast.
I am going to do it five days

(14:16):
a week.
I have so much I want to share.
There's so many amazing people.
There's so much amazing content.
There's so much need for each and every
one of us to challenge our thoughts and
our feelings and to level up.
Our world is moving extremely fast.

(14:37):
It's changing in unprecedented ways.
I've talked about how we're seeing changes within
the Schumann resonance fields, which are the measurement
of our electromagnetic fields of the earth.
We're seeing changes in our environment, as far

(14:59):
as the oceans are changing their direction of
flow, which is going to change the winds,
which is going to change our energy.
And if all of these things within our
habitat, our environment are changing, we have no

(15:19):
choice but to be affected by it and
be changed by it and with it.
And so if we are taking a look
at where we are, if I am taking
a look at where I am, and where

(15:40):
I want to go, I have to do
it from a new place, a new feeling,
a new experience, which means I have to
reframe things like an external hiatus of my
podcast.
I have to take a look at this
and decide what do I want to do

(16:02):
with this?
Who do I want to become?
Is this in alignment with me?
What is ready to be released?
And I did catch myself, I did catch
myself still holding on to that hustle mentality,
instead of what does it feel like to

(16:26):
be in rhythm with my natural feminine essence,
the chaotic essence of ebb and flow, the
rhythm, the movement, the creation of not only
this podcast, and all the things that I'm

(16:48):
doing within it, because I'm building an entire
ecosystem.
What started as individual pieces of the puzzle
of my life, things that I thought were
disconnected and disjointed.
I'm now at a place where I can
see the integration and I can see the
lessons and the messages that have come from

(17:10):
each and every experience.
Positive, negative, just changing, just insights, just
experience.
I'm really, really excited about what's coming.

(17:32):
I'm really excited about the show outlines that
I've created for the season two.
I will build into this podcast, rhythm and
flow, so that I can live a life
of alignment instead of being tied to the

(17:53):
the expectations of being in this exact place
and moment.
I'm learning to create systems, there's a whole
back end that is being built to support
my new vision, my new level up my
new recalibration of who I am and how
I'm going to show up for you.

(18:17):
This unlearning lesson is not meant to be
the Kathy Baldwin show.
I'm sharing these thoughts and feelings and experiences.
One, to explain to you what's happened.
But two, to hopefully be a window, a

(18:38):
reflection into where you're being called to level
up.
What external forces are coming at you that
are making you feel powerless, or out of
control or angry?
What is it that the message is telling
you?

(18:58):
What needs to be unlearned?
And what do you need to replace it
with?
For me, this lesson of having a podcast
that is growing, I mean, do you want
to do you want to hear the synchronicity
about what how this all happened?
I don't know if you've been tracking some

(19:19):
of the successes or celebrations that I've had,
but the podcast just hit one year when
this happened.
The podcast had just hit 100,000 monthly
listens across all of the platforms, plus more.
I had hit a record of 75,000

(19:40):
lifetime downloads.
I was growing and everything was happening.
And then it just stopped.
And like I said, that stop came from
multiple places and situations.
And things were happening all around me.
And I was trying to hold on to

(20:02):
what was because I thought I was in
a rhythm.
But what I was in was stagnancy.
And I had hit a level that it
was that the lesson came long and hard,
that I needed to stop doing it the
way I was doing it.
recalibrate, readjust, reassess, and then come back leveled

(20:28):
up.
I feel so much better than I have
felt in a long time.
I'm smiling more than I have in years.

(20:49):
I am not getting swept away by the
currents of what's happening externally.
The chaos that's around me, I look at
it with fascination and curiosity.
And I try to see what I'm supposed
to get from this information and this experience.

(21:11):
That's what today's episode of the Unlearning Curve
is about.
What's happening within you?
What's happening within us internally and externally, that
we need to unlearn?
Because this episode of the Unlearning Curve is

(21:34):
about being able to articulate, to be able
to see with clarity, what's happening.
And take a moment to make some conscious
choices.
Because the conscious choices that we made a

(21:55):
long time ago, or even a short time
ago, are being called to level up.
And this is going to keep happening.
It's going to keep happening faster and faster
in our world.
And I'm getting better at recognizing that when
chaos happens on the external, it's because it's

(22:15):
calling me forward and upward.
And I share this experience with you as
a hope that you can start to articulate
and have self awareness of the chaos in
your own life.
And what it means for you.
And how you're going to use this to

(22:38):
level up your own life.
Because you are being called to level up.
We all are.
Our souls are calling us.
The world is calling us.
And we must bring our light into the
darkness and shed it around the world.

(23:00):
I know it sounds kind of utopiocic, if
that's a word.
But I truly believe it.
I've got a great week planned.
I am got some great thoughts and experiences
and learnings and stories and people to introduce
you to.
Welcome to season two of Unlearn the Crap

(23:21):
and Level Up Your Soul is Calling.
My name is Kathy Baldwin.
And this segment has been the unlearning curve.
I'll see you on the next time.
Until then, remember to challenge everything so that
you can achieve anything.

(24:03):
www.kathybaldwin.me. That's where the real magic
happens.
You'll find my books, my podcast, and all
the tools to help you reclaim your voice,
rewrite your patterns, and level up into the
version of you that you have been waiting
for.
Your soul isn't whispering anymore.

(24:26):
It's roaring.
And this, this is just the beginning.
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