Healing The Gap

What if the real barrier between your calling and your clarity isn’t a lack of faith, but a nervous system still trained by old battles? Coach Tara invites you into a candid, hope-filled conversation about identity dissonance—the space where your spirit knows who you are, but your body remembers who you had to be. Through honest storytelling, she traces the cycle of producing, shrinking, and second-guessing that so many ambitious women of faith carry, and shows how shame, fear of success, and people-pleasing masquerade as strategy.

We dig into the difference between pressure and preparation, and why stepping into purpose without self-awareness turns holy work into performance. With Romans 12:2 as the anchor, we treat renewing the mind as progressive pattern change: interrupting survival responses, retraining your inner world, and letting your choices agree with what God already said. Expect practical tools—guided breathwork, the “holy pause,” and journal prompts—to help you respond instead of react, calm a dysregulated body, and reframe rest as safe rather than suspicious. We talk regulated leadership through the way Jesus moved: stepping away, delegating, praying, and acting from alignment, not anxiety.

If you’ve ever loved God yet froze when it was your turn, this conversation offers language, strategy, and gentleness. You’ll learn to measure obedience instead of outcomes, build emotional and spiritual capacity, and trust that God finishes what he starts. Give Him another yes, not to hustle, but to steady, repeatable agreement that brings your nervous system and your faith into the same story.

Listen, breathe with us, and then try the prompts: Where am I still in survival mode? What would change if my body agreed with God’s word about me? If this spoke to you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a woman who needs the reminder that she’s becoming.

Transcript

Where Faith Meets Real Life

Speaker 0:00

Hey hey, it's your favorite shifter story coach, Coach Tara, and you're listening to the Her Authentic Voice podcast. This is where faith meets real life, where shame gets silent, and where your story becomes your strategy. Today's conversation is for every woman who knows she's called and anointed. Yet she still feels stuck. You're out here serving, you're trying, you're doing the things that God told you to do. You know, you're obeying, you're giving, but deep down there's a disconnect, and you can't quite explain what's going on. This episode is all about being caught but feeling stuck. So by the end, I want you to see how your mind, your nervous system, and your faith all determine how you move from calling to clarity. So let me start by sharing a part of my story. There is a season where I was heavily producing, I was publishing, praying, just pushing, serving, I mean constantly on the go, but I still felt disconnected from the thing that I was building. So actively and outwardly, I'm producing, but inwardly, something was missing. I was helping others amplify their voices, find their voices while quietly questioning why my voice felt so shaky. I battled the fear of success, not just failure, because you can have a fear of success also. I wanted to be seen, but when visibility came, I shrank back. And that was a cycle. I was like, I'm like a turtle. I keep sticking my head out, my neck out, and then I go back in. I stick it out and I have success and I go back in. I mean, it was a vicious cycle. What was happening? What was happening was my survival strategies, those patterns that once protected me, they no longer matched the woman that God was shaping. I was outgrowing the version of me that was built for survival, that lived in fight or flight for so long. God was calling me into my identity, my sure identity of who he called me to be. But here's the part that I had to confront. I realized I was building rooms for others while living homeless inside myself. You hear me? I'm building for others while living homeless. I could uplift, I could encourage, I could advocate, I mean, for everybody around me. But when it came to trusting my own voice, I hesitated. I questioned, I waited for someone to confirm what God already said about me. It's like I couldn't move. But that's what healing does. Like, healing will start to expose the gap between who you were taught to be or who the trauma taught you to be and who God created you to become. And you have to lean into the process so you can get to the other side. I was in a place of identity dissonance. And identity dissonance happens when your spirit knows who you are, but your nervous system still remembers who you had to be. You get it? Does that make sense? Like you've renewed your mind on paper. You know how people say on paper, you're my type. You've renewed your mind on paper. You know the scriptures, you speak the affirmations, you're speaking life into yourself and all the things, but your body hasn't caught up. So your nervous system is still associating rest with danger. To associate rest with danger is insane, but it does. Even sitting still, it's like uh I should be doing something. It almost feels shameful to just sit still. You feel like you're not doing enough. Your nervous system is seeing peace as being suspicious, like, what's going on here? Why is it so quiet? Why is this? Oh, the other shoe is about to drop. You know, you start thinking things instead of just enjoying the peace. You're tensing up as you move toward purpose. That's why you can still love God, yet still sabotage opportunities at the same time. And you can still feel anointed, but yet and still freeze up when it's your turn. It's not that you don't have belief or you don't have faith. That's that dysregulated nervous system trying to protect you from a future that looks nothing like your past. Amen. You hear me? Because my future looks nothing like my past. Uh, my present looks nothing like my past. Let's be clear. Romans 12, 2 says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind and amplified, it talks about progressively changing. It's one of my favorite scriptures because it's a dismantling of the old and a rebuilding of the new. So it's a progressive changing of renewing your mind, and it focuses on your godly values and your ethical attitudes. So it's not just about new thinking. No, when you transform, you are interrupting patterns. You're retraining your mind, you're retraining your inner world to agree with what the Lord says about you, agree with what your book in heaven states about you. Your nervous system records experiences the way scripture records our truth or God's truth. I think about us being walking epistles, and that even as we're living every day, we are scriptures. As we read about Mary and Joseph and Peter and Paul, that people can read about us. They're reading about Tara and Cassandra and Monica. You know, they're reading about our lives. So your nervous system is recording your experiences. And some of those experiences may be wounds. So you may have wounded memories, even though you're living in this new reality of who God has called you. He saved your life. He said, You have great purpose, and I need you to do X, Y, and Z. But you're still operating out of your wounds and out of your trauma. The healing is the work of bringing your body into agreement with what God has already spoken about you. Because when he tells you that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, you may reject, like, uh, no, but I know a little bit too much about myself. So I don't think I'm that dope. You know, you may start shaming yourself instead of leaning into who he's called you to be. It can be scary because you can be caught, but that don't mean you're prepared, right? Being caught does not mean you're prepared. So when you step into the calling without a self-awareness of where you are and who you are in that moment, you create pressure instead of leading into the peace. And then what happens is you start performing. You're performing, it's not even authentic, you're performing and it's already yours. You are already who God called you to be. You have everything inside of you, but you begin to measure outcomes instead of just leaning into obedience. You tend to, well, how is that gonna work? And what is gonna happen here? And who and that you have all these questions. Just be obedient, just move as God told you to move, you know, and shame will start shaping how you think every day. You won't be able to make a decision, you're in the middle, you're afraid, you know, and you're like, this is who I am, and it's just my personality. No, you're afraid, you know, you're people pleasing, you're distracted, then you start causing your own delay in your life. You start believing you're unqualified, but it's not even that, it's really your body telling you, hey, there's some areas that are still unhealed here, even though you are making all types of justifications, all types of excuses. You're explaining it away as discernment, and I'm waiting on God, and you're saying a lot of things, but really you're not prepared. You're just not prepared. You know, you get offered an opportunity, but instead of being excited about it, you feel anxiety about it because you know you're not prepared. Because being unprepared is scary, it feels unsafe. And then you can get up there, and now you're visible, and now you're open to not only applause, but you're open to criticism, you're open to being misunderstood, right? It's not you being afraid of the responsibility of the call, but your past and the things that happen is starting to like rear its ugly head into your present, and it's interpreting your present for you. Even though you're not in present danger, you're not in the present situation of trauma, what you've already been in is starting to interpret it, your present as if you are, right? So trauma conditions you to react, not respond. And then you react from a place of survival. So now you're not even able to strategize and prepare correctly. But I thank God for the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit restores your capacity to think clearly. The Holy Spirit allows us to discern and to be wise and to pause. There is power in the pause, so we pause intentionally and reflect, and then we start to act from a place of alignment and not anxiety, a place of alignment. So let's slow down a bit. Let's slow down. And I don't know where you are. A lot of people listen to me in their cars. So even if you're driving, I want you to take a deep breath. And I'm gonna take it with you. Let's slow down because I've said a lot. We're gonna inhale to a counter for, we're gonna hold it to a counter for, and then we're gonna exhale to a count of four. Alright? Inhale. Hold now ask yourself Where does my nervous system tell a different story than the one God is speaking about me? Is it in opportunities that's coming your way? Is it in your purpose? Is it in your love life? Is it in your ministry, your leadership? Where is shame rearing his head? Where is fear and anxiety telling a different story than the one God is speaking? And when you get an opportunity, I want you to write it down. Because one thing is for certain that awareness is a doorway to healing. And healing is not optional for a woman of God, it is not optional. You cannot walk in kingdom authority while living in emotional captivity. And I lived in emotional captivity for a long time, so I know what I'm talking about. Jesus didn't just come and preach deliverance, he modeled rest for us, he showed us what regulated leadership looks like. He showed us how to move, how to pray, how to step away, how to rest, how to delegate, how to be bold, how to be kind, not nice, not to be performative. He didn't show us that way. So I want you to be so encouraged that you're not behind. Because right now, even in this moment that you're listening to me, you are becoming. You are becoming who God called you to be. And every layer of healing is actually preparing you to carry your calling without you falling or collapsing under it or being so afraid that you don't pursue it. You have work to do, you are necessary, you are needed, and our nervous system can lie to us. It's trying to protect us, but even in that protection, there is truth of God's word. We can't just stay in a place of perceived safety and comfortability. We can't. That's why God heals us. It's not just about praying and worshiping and going to church. God wants us healed emotionally. And there are a lot of people who are in churches who are not healed emotionally. Our calling requires capacity and mental capacity, emotional capacity. It requires authenticity. And he's doing a good work. We can be confident that he who has begun a good work will perform it until the day that he returns. We can be confident of that. Because God does not start your healing and then just leave the rest to you, like, all right, you on your own now. No, what he'll do is bring something to your attention. He gives you an opportunity. Hey, this is what's going on with you. I'm here with you. I'll help you, I'll strengthen you, I'll walk you down. But it does require some work from you. He's not in a hurry now because he wants you to be whole. But it does require your participation, not just your complaining, not just your woe is me, and I don't know, and or even like me poking, how I will poke my head out, do something, and go back in. Out in, out in, afraid of success. What does that look like? You know, what type of responsibility would I have with that? I don't really want all of that. And God is like, it's not about that. I've called you to a higher calling, I need you to do these things, and just like you, He needs you to do these things. Amen. What are you gonna say? Give him another yes today. Give him another yes if this message is touching something deep in you. I want you to lean into that. I want you to slow down enough to heal these patterns that started to self-sabotage. I want you to build emotional and spiritual strength because you need to be confident in your assignment. And transformation doesn't happen through pressure, it happens through repetition, it happens through recognition, it happens through awareness and accountability, and it happens through partnering with the Lord. So before you go, I want you to take time to reflect and ask yourself, where do I still live in survival mode? Where have I caused confusion in my life? Ask yourself, what would shift in my life if my nervous system agreed with what God says about me? What do I need to release so I can move forward freely? And let God meet you right there. I am an advocate for journaling, for processing my life, processing my days, asking myself questions and answering them. I want you to go a little deeper this week. And I want you to share this episode with a woman who needs it. Leave me a rating, a review, and make sure you subscribe so we can have more conversations. Also support the show. You can support me with as little as $3 a month. Every seed helps me to keep these conversations going. And all the links will be in the show notes. Thank you. Thank you for being vulnerable. Thank you for allowing yourself to breathe, allowing yourself to receive. And until next time, remember to live, love, and be authentic. This is Coach Tara, your favorite shift your story coach.