July Wrap-Up & Reflections

In the finale on alignment, Hannah wraps up a month-long exploration of what it truly means to live aligned. Alignment isn't about finding a missing puzzle piece, fixing yourself, or chasing social media buzzwords. It’s about remembering who you were before the world taught you to disconnect for survival.

Hannah breaks down the subtle ways we abandon ourselves, how survival patterns (like over-functioning, peace-keeping, and people-pleasing) can eventually cost us our peace, and why real alignment often whispers instead of screams. Plus, she shares personal reflections from her recent session with Jess, her experience navigating a spiritual awakening, and an actionable 30-minute challenge to help you start coming home to yourself today.

Key Takeaways

• Survival vs. Alignment: The roles that once kept you safe (the caretaker, the dependable one, the high achiever) served a purpose, but staying in an old version of yourself after your nervous system no longer needs her leads to misalignment.
• How We Self-Abandon: We learn to prioritize being liked over being honest, being needed over being supported, and being productive over being present.
• The Quiet Whisper of Alignment: Fear, anxiety, and urgency scream—alignment whispers. 
• Awareness is Just Step One: Recognizing a pattern doesn't mean it instantly disappears. 
• Internal Alignment vs. External Success: What you do for a living or how successful you look on the outside doesn't automatically mean you feel aligned on the inside.

The 30-Minute Alignment Challenge 🕯️

Join Hannah and the Hatrack community in our monthly alignment practice!

The Setup: Find a quiet space for 30 uninterrupted minutes. Light a candle, get comfortable, turn off tech, and grab a journal.

The Questions to Ask Yourself:

• What do I need today that I’ve been ignoring?
• Where have I been saying "yes" when I really mean "no"?
• What part of me is asking to be heard?
• What does my body physically need right now?
• If I stopped trying to become who I think I should be, who would I naturally return to?

Follow along on social media as we post daily targeted prompts around boundaries, identity, and coming home to yourself over the next month!

Connect & Share

• Submit Your Questions: Have a question or situation you want addressed on the air? Send in your Hatrack Questions for upcoming episodes.
• Share the Love: If this episode resonated with you, screenshot it, share it on your stories, or send it to a friend who might be carrying a few too many hats right now.
• Leave a Review: Please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform—it helps our community grow!

Follow along!

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Do you ever feel like you're juggling a million versions of yourself and still dropping the ball? Like you're switching hats all day. Professional partner, friend. And no one really sees what it takes to just be you? Yeah, me too. Welcome to Hat Rack with Hannah. I'm Hannah, therapist, entrepreneur, author, podcast host, and also a mom, partner, daughter, friend. Basically, a professional hat wearer. I created this space where you don't have to minimize what you're carrying or rush past it. Because the truth is, you can have big dreams and feel overwhelmed by the roles it takes to hold them. Both get to exist. Here we slow it down, call it what it is, take some hats off, and figure out what actually belongs in your rack. So take a deep breath. You can set something down here, and let's get into it. Hello, Hat Rack with Hannah listeners. Thank you for returning. I'm your host, Hannah, and we're going to wrap up our alignment series today. And I want to start by saying, I think this is going to be a theme that is just in our work, right? And a part of this community and podcast for eternity. So although we're wrapping it up for the month and moving on to different topics, I think you're going to see this being intertwined in the conversations that we have in the future. And so I just want to name that because this is a really important practice. So throughout this month, we've talked about alignment in a way that probably is different than what you've seen over social media. Alignment has become one of those buzzwords we hear, and it's attached to success, abundance, relationships, careers. You just need to find your alignment. But what if alignment isn't something that you find? And I think that's what we've been exploring. Alignment is something you return to. I don't believe we're born disconnected from ourselves. I think life teaches us to disconnect because we need to disconnect in order to adapt and survive. We become who we need to become in order to stay safe, to belong, to succeed, to be loved, or to avoid disappointment. And somewhere along the way, the version of ourselves that once knew exactly what we felt, wanted, and needed gets really quiet. And it's not because she's gone, it's because she's learned it wasn't always safe to speak. So you're not a missing puzzle piece. One of the biggest misconceptions I see with this topic and in my practice in working with humans and being a human, honestly, is the belief that we're somehow incomplete. People saying things like, I'm trying to figure out who I am. I just don't know myself anymore. I feel lost. And while these feelings are incredibly real and valid, I don't actually think that you've disappeared. I think you've accumulated layers of expectations, responsibility, trauma, people pleasing, achievements, survival. Your authentic self isn't hiding because she left. She's waiting underneath all these layers of who you've had to become. And that's a very different perspective. Because if you aren't broken, then you don't need fixing. Instead, we need remembering, reconnection, permission to come home to yourself, identifying ways that we've abandoned ourselves. So survival isn't the same as alignment because many of us became incredibly skilled at surviving. Maybe you became the dependable one or the caretaker or the peacekeeper, high achiever, one who's never asked for help or the strong friend, right? One who always knew what everyone else needed. Those identities probably have served you and serve a huge significant purpose. In fact, they may have helped you survive seasons of your life that were genuinely difficult. But surviving and living aren't the same thing. And sometimes the very qualities that protect us for years begin costing us peace. And what once kept us safe can eventually keep us disconnected. And that's where misalignment begins. Not because you've become the wrong person. Because you've stayed in an old version of yourself long after your nervous system no longer needs her. So what we learn is to prioritize without even realizing it, many of us start measuring our worth by external approval instead of internal truth. And we become choosing things that help us stay accepted rather than connected. For example, we learn to prioritize being liked over being honest. How many times have you swallowed your opinion because you didn't want to hurt someone's feelings or you were afraid of how they would think of you? How often have you said I'm fine when you absolutely weren't, regardless of the reason? Sometimes honesty feels risky because somewhere along the way, we learn that honesty could cost us love, acceptance. So we edit ourselves, shrink ourselves, make ourselves easier to digest. And then we wonder why we're feeling invisible or voiceless. We learn to prioritize being needed over being supported. This one shows up so often, especially for parents, caregivers, helpers, therapists, entrepreneurs for many people in many roles. We become valuable because we're useful. We're the ones people call on, depend on, count on. But somewhere along the way, we stopped asking ourselves, who's supporting me? Because needing help starts to feel like failure instead of being human. And the irony is that constantly being needed can leave us incredibly lonely. We learn to prioritize being productive over being present. I talk about this with my clients and my humans all of the time. Like, how many times does the checklist take priority over doing the activity with your kiddo, or just being in the moment with a client or a friend, or checking boxes, crossing things off, being busy and successful, right? Or we're always constantly available. But productivity isn't the same thing as fulfillment. You can accomplish everything on your to-do list and still feel so disconnected from yourself and burnt out. Presence asks something completely different of you. It asks, can you actually experience your own life while you're living it? Or are you constantly racing towards the next thing? Alignment often sounds quieter than fear. And I think that's often why it's ignored. Fear screams, anxiety screams, people's opinions scream, social media yells at us all the time, urgency yells at us, right? But alignment usually whispers. It's that quiet feeling our body that says this isn't it, or this feels like peace, or I know what I need to do. I'm just scared. That's why slowing down really matters. And I know I sound like a broken record, but taking the time to actually just be is where we find the presence and where we hear the alignment. That's when we get that space of this is peace, or this is actually what I need to be doing. Slowing down also doesn't magically fix things, but it's because it's difficult to hear yourself when life is constantly shouting over you. It gives you a minute to hear. I really want you to carry through with you these reflection questions. Where have I stopped listening to myself? When did someone else's expectations become louder than my own intuition? Am I making decisions from peace or fear or comfort? And I put fear and comfort together because we've also identified this month that although something might be comfortable, that does not mean it's aligned. Not five years from now, but today. And remember, alignment isn't about becoming someone new, it's about removing everything that convinced you that you had to stop being yourself in the first place and figuring out where you've abandoned you. Speaking of self-abandonment, I really want to discuss this concept and how it relates to alignment a little bit more. Misalignment often isn't about losing yourself, it's about moments where you choose to leave yourself. Self-abandonment can really look like saying yes when you mean no. This can be to big or small things. Hey, I don't have time to go do that. So no, I'm not coming. Or no, I can't commit to this. Ignoring your body's signals. If your gut is saying, hey, I don't want to work with this person, and you decide to anyways, and it's not going well, that was your body saying, Hey, I don't have a good feeling about this. Staying quiet to avoid conflict. As a social worker, I part of my role is disrupting systems and systemic issues. And I see so many social workers being really quiet around difficult scenarios instead of speaking up. Racism, human rights issues, politics. We stay quiet so we don't have conflict, or so no one gets a bad perception of us. That can be a form of self-abandonment. Overfunctioning because you don't trust others to show up. Personally, this is where I connect the deepest. I overfunction nine out of ten times and would rather take something on myself than getting support. I didn't grow up that getting support was a bad thing, but I did get praise when I took on more. And so that's something that's been deeply ingrained in me. And also I see the results I want when I do things myself, but that just means I'm always burnt out. Ignoring your own needs until resentment appears. I see this with couples I work with all of the time. I'm just gonna keep doing these things and not ask my partner for support. And then I'm gonna get mad when things aren't happening that I think I should expect of my partner. An important thing to remember here is patterns of self-abandonment develop for a reason. And we need to identify and figure out what those reasons are. And most of the time, logically, we can name them all day, but it doesn't mean that you're abandoning yourself any less. And so when we learn what those reasons are, we need to start navigating can I do this in a way where I align more with myself instead of away from myself. Most of the time, is there ways that we learn to cope and connect and survive? But the question isn't why am I like this? Instead, I really want the question to become when did this pattern become necessary for me? And how do I shift it to align more for me? A really huge point that was important for me this month. I want to feel aligned always, right? But that's just not what life is. I think I was able to identify more ways that I abandon myself versus looking at how I align. I'm one of those people where I can really feel through and find where I align fairly quickly, thankfully. But I ignore a lot of self-abandonment. And so for me, finding those spaces and areas where I get to start evaluating is so important. And I'm really excited that we were able to dive into this concept a little bit more and also highlight just how the small ways we abandon ourselves are so important to realize in order to become more aligned. I absolutely loved talking to Jess this month. And I hope y'all can understand why we did a part one, part two. Her work is just completely transformative. If people just knew what their frequency code was, they would really understand why they do the things they do and what their mission here on Earth is. And I just feel like that knowing and having something that can help give purpose is so important. And I loved working through that with her and giving y'all the example of what that looks like using my frequency code. It was really fun to also get to sit in that chair and learn more about what that meant for me. And it was pretty incredible how well it aligned. And I hope that y'all got to see that. I loved also the normalization in our conversation around spiritual awakenings. I think oftentimes that is also buzzworded, but they can happen throughout your entire life. And I think it's just a space and time where you have more openness to dial into something that feels really good to you. Jess was explaining how I'm in the middle of my own spiritual awakening, and I can for sure feel that happening. And I am just learning, along with my audience, the deeper alignment levels that are coming into play in my life and allowing me to do the things that I want to do. And it's very clear to me that this awakening is happening for me. The most important thing we learned this month, though, was really the importance of slowing down enough to hear ourselves, just not being a part of urgency culture, not being a part of the social media all the time and taking the time to just really breathe, be with your thoughts. I was watching the tonight show literally last night, and some director was saying how he's not on social and he doesn't do tech. That is how he comes up with all of his ideas, is he actually takes the time to be in his brain. And I think so many people in 2026 would be like, oh my gosh, that's wild. That's ridiculous. I can't believe someone does that. That is how we create is being in our brains, being in our minds. But I think that's so often associated with now I have to remember my traumas, my grief, my bad experiences that we don't also remember. That's where creativity grows and thrives. And so taking the time for you to just be with your thoughts, recognizing the signs and synchronicities that Jess and I were talking about when you take that time. When she was reading my frequency code, and I was realizing the things that were connecting for me, it was so important to realize oh, wait, there is this community aspect for myself, but there is also this hermit aspect to myself. And I'm so involved in the community pieces that I do not hermit enough or take the time to be silent enough to really give my brain room to run. And that time gives me the ability to feel those signs and synchronicities, and same with the connection, but like that it's was dual-pronged, was so important for me to realize. I also love how she highlighted like the difference between external success and internal alignment are so different. We were taught how to be successful and how to show up in the world, whether that was survival or expectation or learned behavior. What you could be doing for work, for example, might not have anything to do with your alignment. And I know that's not always a choice, but it's finding the spaces where we do align. A conversation with Jess really drove that home for me. How she's been doing that and living so authentically and where in my life I can also do that. One thing that stood out to me is this idea that alignment isn't about becoming someone else. It's about removing the layers that keep us disconnected from who we already are. When we talk about alignment, we're talking about coming home and we're talking about reconnecting. She really got us into thinking and reflecting on what happens when we stop performing or what happens when we trust ourselves, and what happens when we allow ourselves to want what we actually want. Other highlights for the month were hat rack questions. I still have some pouring in from this alignment series. Big key takeaway points from those questions this month are really starting with that curiosity and not pressure when it comes to who am I and what is my alignment, and reconnecting to yourself through small choices, noticing what fuels and energizes you, and letting yourself have preferences again, even if it's as small as what are we doing for dinner tonight? And actually giving your opinion. You don't find yourself all at once. You need to rebuild that trust with you. And also, we discussed with one of our listeners am I aligned or just comfortable? And a big part of that is alignment isn't always comfortable. And comfort can really keep us in familiar patterns that don't serve us. So it's requiring honesty in our lived experiences and asking if things are peaceful or just familiar. Or am I choosing love or fear? Or does this support who I am becoming and wanting to be? In that same vein, talking about patterns that we keep returning to, right? Out of comfort, fear for what have you. But one of our listeners brought that up is I know I'm returning to the same things. And I think it's important to name that awareness doesn't always immediately equal change. When you have that awareness, that's the first step. And then it's okay, what do I do with that? What are my next steps now? I know this pattern doesn't serve me. How do I change it? How do I want to change it? Patterns are also protective. We want to understand why we're protecting ourselves. Is this a learned behavior? Is this an expectation? Is this something I'm making myself do so I have acceptance from someone else? Familiar also doesn't always mean healthy. So sometimes we're evaluating health and peace and what we've sacrificed or what we need to sacrifice to maintain healing is noticing sooner and returning faster, but also acknowledging that we can also notice and not make moves and not make them fast, and that that's also okay too, and giving ourselves grace in the healing process. Naming compassion creates change better than shame. So when you're going through these evaluation processes and trying to shift patterns or identify comforts, shadow work does come up in these spaces, like we talked about with Jess, and that's okay. But we need to then dive into that shadow work to understand it better, to create more compassion for ourselves instead of letting the shame win. I really have noticed that I've been overextending, like I said, in so many areas. I run three businesses, I wear all the hats, right? And so I think I really need to choose me and shifting how I navigate things to feel more aligned and give myself that quiet time that we've been talking about. And so I have recently revisited the whiteboard, which is how I do things, to give myself more space. And I'm really excited about it. It hasn't happened yet, but I'll be initiating it pretty soon. I have a plan. Awareness step one, plan step two. So I'll be doing that soon. And I'm very much so looking forward to it because I've also noticed at the beginning of the month I took a vacation with my daughter. And in her nap time, I had quiet time for me. And that time is so imperative. And I'm just really excited to have more of it. Also, it's made me reflect on a lot of old patterns and things that have been showing up for me in my work. And when I say my work, I mean my personal therapeutic work. As I've said before, I believe every therapist needs a therapist. And there's a lot of work when it comes to alignment that's a constant thread that we work towards when we have to realign. The biggest questions I've been asking is where can I reevaluate where I've been misaligned and abandoning myself? I've been doing this work along with y'all, and it's been feeling really good. One of the questions I asked myself was like, what hat have I been carrying that I'm really ready to put down? And I think for me, not giving myself enough time managing all these businesses, I expect myself to do it and I time block and I totally believe in time blocking, but I think I've revisited how I'm going to do that and giving myself more admin time to be able to work on my business. I am really good at working in my business, which means like seeing clients and doing those things. But I often don't take the time to work on my business, like having dedicated hours, just work on procedures, work on follow-up, work on social media, like those types of things. And so, really reevaluating that has been a priority for me this month. So I'm really ready to put down the hat of not doing the admin work that I need to do and then feeling so overwhelmed at the end of the week when I haven't had time to do it. I also think Jess was like, Hannah, you're in a spiritual awakening right now. And so alignment for me right now has been really looking like welcoming opportunities that just click. Writing my books, for example, starting a Denver Whole Body Collective, working with my clients. These things always feel good and click. Getting more time with my daughter always feels good and clicks in my partner, right? Something I'm still learning, and I've said this a few times, is just this is a process that doesn't end. For me, alignment and misalignment are always going to be a thing because of my learned behaviors, and that's okay. Managing all the hats is fueling and fulfilling and amazing. And it also is challenging. And so giving myself more compassion and grace and time to just be with me. Before we close the month, I am going to do a little challenge with y'all. It's going to be on social media and it's going to be our alignment challenge. And we're going to monitor it over the next month. We haven't done anything like this, so it's a little bit different. We're going to create a practice and it's going to focus on alignment and share with me your results on social media. Step one is I want you to get into a quiet space for 30 uninterrupted minutes. I know. I want you to light a candle, get comfy. And then I want you to ask yourselves these questions. And I'm going to post them on social too. So you don't need to remember them. The questions are, what do I need today that I've been ignoring? Where have I been saying yes when I really mean to say no? What part of me is asking to be heard? What does my body need physically right now? If I stop trying to become who I think I should be, who would I naturally return to? These kinds of questions invite someone to slow down rather than immediately fix. So I will share all of these questions and way more that target certain things like boundaries, identity. I'm going to pick a specific day and do them every day of the week for the next month, maybe month and a half, and just see what people are getting from that. And I want to continue us all on our alignment journey. So thank you so much for spending this month exploring alignment with me. If something from this conversation resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with me, send it to me, send it to somebody who you know. Also submit your hat rack questions. Continue to. I love hearing them, and I'm excited to answer more. The truth is, we're all hearing so many hats, and sometimes we need each other to remember when it's time to put one down. Please share this with everyone you love and care about. Share the clips, share the pod, review us, DM me with thoughts and questions. And I really appreciate y'all. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. And I look forward to our next month of conversations. Thank you.