Pull Up A Chair: Following The Clues Back To Yourself

Have you ever looked back at your life and realized the pieces were connected all along?

 In this solo episode of Big Talk at the Table, Joni Leigh invites you to pull up a chair and slow down for a conversation about unclogging — the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual clutter that keeps us stuck in survival mode.

Sharing her personal journey from nonprofit burnout to RV life in Rockwood, Tennessee, Joni explores how God was leaving "clues" all along — not to reinvent her, but to lead her back to herself. If you've ever felt lost between the responsibilities, the busyness, and taking care of everyone else, this episode is your permission to pause, listen, and start asking the hard questions.

Key Moments

• [0:00] — Cold open: Joni's love of a good mystery (Dateline, 48 Hours, 2020) and how life's clues work the same way
• [1:55] — Welcome to Big Talk at the Table — today's topic: unclogging and following the clues back to yourself
• [3:38] — The realization: "God wasn't hiding the answer from me. He was leaving me clues."
• [4:24] — How busyness became a distraction from hearing her own heart
• [6:28] — The power of "What if?" — six reframing questions that changed everything
• [7:32] — What survival mode really looks like (hint: it often looks successful)
• [8:30] — "Being busy all the time is not the same as being fulfilled." — The two truths Joni had to learn the hard way
• [9:24] — The RV journey: downsizing, the empty storage unit photo, and what it really meant
• [11:16] — Rockwood, Tennessee: when the quiet became deafening — and transformational
• [13:13] — Joy, creativity, wonder, peace: the parts of herself she thought were gone forever
• [14:40] — Three Questions to Unclog Your Life:
  1. What am I carrying? (emotionally, mentally, spiritually — not just physically)
  2. What am I avoiding? (busyness as a shield from grief, disappointment, loneliness)
  3. What am I no longer listening to? (your body, your dream, God's whisper)
• [17:50] — Voice journaling tip for ADHD brains: "My thoughts get above my hand"
• [19:12] — Why the podcast exists: a place to slow down, hear yourself again, and catch God nudges
• [20:25] — Celebrating tiny wins like we celebrate babies' milestones — and why the Hive community was built for this
• [21:47] — "The answer you've been searching for isn't lost. It's been buried inside you."
• [22:16] — Invitation: Join the 31-Day Unclog Your Life Challenge

Three Questions to Journal This Week

1. What am I carrying? — Beyond the physical: guilt, resentment, fear, other people's expectations, the pressure to keep everyone happy.
2. What am I avoiding? — What does your busyness keep you from feeling or facing?
3. What am I no longer listening to? — Your body? A dream you've convinced yourself is too late? God's gentle whisper?

Tip: Try voice journaling if writing feels too slow — just open your voice memos and talk it out.

Resources & Links

 Join the 31-Day Unclog Your Life Challenge 

• — www.jonileigh.com

 Join the Hive Community 

• —  https://www.facebook.com/groups/thehivecommunitybigtalkatthetable

 Follow Big Talk at the Table 

• on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JoniLeighOfficial

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Connect with Joni

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Episode Closing

"You are loved. You are valued. You are worthy. Keep making your magic. Keep remembering your worth. And what if? Start asking yourself that question. What if? And no, there's always a seat waiting at the table right here for you. Until next time, remember — you got this." 

If my content has encouraged you, made you smile, challenged you to think differently, or helped you feel a little less alone, you can support my work here.

Every contribution helps me continue creating the podcast, sharing stories from the road, producing free resources, and building a community where people can find hope, encouragement, and practical tools for moving forward.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in this mission. And thank you for helping me keep a seat open at the table for someone who needs it. 

www.buymeacoffee.com/jonileigh

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Okay, so I have always, always loved a good mystery. Dateline 2020, 48 hours. I'm going to tell you there is something about those shows, because I don't watch a lot of TV, but those kind of episodes where the pieces seem so unrelated, right? And you but they put little clues and they're scattered throughout the episode here and there. It's kind of things that really don't make sense at the moment, but then somewhere towards the end, you suddenly realize that they were all connected. All these clues and everything was connected along the way. It may take them two hours to connect them, and for you to connect all the clues by the end, but you do. And just a side note, they could have done that in less than two hours, but they like to drag you along on the journey, don't they? So I started thinking that boy, our life is a lot like that, isn't it? Because when I look back over the last few years, I can see clues everywhere. Little god nudges, little clues, they were dropped all along the way. So for those that you don't know, I started a nonprofit and left it and retired after 15 years. I was completely burned out. I was downsizing my life. I moved into an RV. I learned to live with less. I learned that there was something special about quiet moments, and there were some questions that I just couldn't answer. And at the time, none of it made any sense. But they were all clues. And to be honest, a few people thought I was completely nuts. And to be perfectly honest with you, I did too, actually. I thought I was searching for my purpose. I thought I needed to figure out what was next. But I didn't realize was God wasn't hiding the answer form from me. What I realized was God wasn't hiding the answer from me. He was leaving me clues. He was leaving me little God nudges everywhere. And slowly, quietly, and gently, he was leading me back to myself. Welcome to Big Talk at the Table. I'm Joni Lee. I'm your host, and today I'm inviting you to pull up a chair, slow down a little bit, and have an honest conversation with me about clearing the emotional, busyness, mental, physical, spiritual clutter that sometimes just keeps us totally clogged up. Because if you've ever felt like you've lost yourself somewhere between responsibilities, the busyness, and taking care of everyone else, I want you to know, friend, you are not alone. Maybe you're not lost. Maybe you've just been living in survival mode so long that you've stopped healing and hearing and listening to yourself. And maybe the clues have been there all along. So today's episode, I'm the guest. Solo episode today, and we're gonna be talking about unclogging. Today we're gonna be talking about following the clues back to yourself. So we're gonna start with the clues were there all along, and they really were. They're going to tell you what happened. But I start doing that before the episode even ends. And it's probably now because I'm looking for the clues in my own life too, where before I really wasn't. Mysteries, once you know the ending, you can go back and then go, yeah, that makes perfect sense. I see how this worked out to this, and then they showed this, and then that led to that. So once you know the ending, it's easy to go back and put it all together, isn't it? Sometimes the season in my life, I feel like that's kind of what I'm in, and that's kind of what I'm doing. Because looking back, I could see how God was inviting me into something long before before I even knew or even understood what it was. For a while, I was searching for purpose. I was looking for a new direction. I was actually, to be honest with you, probably looking for a different life. And what I realized was that this season, it really isn't about me reinventing myself at all. It was about me coming home to me. I was coming home to joy, I was coming home to peace. I was coming home to the woman that I was created to be in my life. And it was before my life got so full, so noisy, so demanding that I couldn't even hear myself. And I didn't even know what my own heart wanted anymore. Honestly, I missed a lot of clues at the beginning. A lot. And it wasn't like God wasn't leaving them for me. He was. But there were so many distractions and so much noise going on in my life. There was no way that I could have picked up on those clues. I wore responsibility like a badge of honor, and I wore it good, let me tell you. I had everyone else's needs before myself. I was solving problems, I was putting out fires, I was making sure everything was held together, and I did it, and it was second nature. It was almost like breathing. I could I was doing all of those things. And I realized that my busyness wasn't really a strength. I was holding everybody else together, but I was letting myself down so much. I didn't realize it at the time, but I just kept getting pushed farther and farther down on that list where suddenly I was at the bottom. And I know so many women, I know you understand what I'm talking about. We tend to put everybody else before ourselves. We tend to make sure everybody else's needs are met, and it gets to a point where we're at the bottom of the list, we don't even know what that feels like anymore, or who we are anymore, or what our needs even are anymore, right? So as life became full, responsibilities started piling up, people needed things, there were bills to pay, there were commitments to honor. My seasons simply just started to be, I just need to make it through this day, or I just need to make it through this thing, whatever that thing was. And then I felt like once I made it through the day, or once I made it through that thing, okay, it's gonna be better. There's gonna be a change, there's gonna be a shift, I'm gonna start putting myself first. That never happened. That season just kept repeating itself over and over and over again. And as I was coming out of that, there were some new questions that kind of started to the surface for me. And it wasn't why am I so tired or why this or why that? It was what if? And I want you to stay here with me for a minute because what if is a powerful, powerful start to any sentence, isn't it? What if life isn't supposed to be this heavy? What if I'm not exactly lost? What if all of the dreams that I have actually are just tucked away somewhere in there and they're not actually gone? What if this exhaustion isn't really a badge of honor? What if constantly being needed wasn't the same as living with a purpose? What if God wasn't asking me to become something new? What if he was inviting me back to the woman that he created me to be? What if? Those questions didn't bring answers though. They did bring something very important. They opened a door for me that made me curious, that caused me to slow down long enough to actually pay attention. And maybe that's part of this mystery. Maybe we didn't lose ourselves all at once. Maybe we just slowly drift away. And all along God is patiently leaving us clues, leaving us god nudges, and wanting to lead us back to home. So, what can survival mode look like? I think a lot of us women, I think we're in that mode for most of our life. Survival mode doesn't always look messy. It actually sometimes looks successful, which is crazy, isn't it? Because you would probably think that it would look like utter chaos. If you're in survival mode, it's chaos. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it does look successful. Sometimes it actually looks like you're a very productive person and you are totally in survival mode. Sometimes it looks like you're serving everybody, you're helping everybody, you're the dependable one, and you're checking off all of those boxes, right? Checking them off. And you look like you are totally got it together, and yet underneath you are in survival mode. Because around you, everybody thinks you're doing great, you look great, you're productive, you're successful, you're doing all the things, but deep down inside, you're in survival mode. But you start to think that you're okay because everybody thinks you're okay. Being busy all the time is not the same as being fulfilled. I'm gonna repeat that again because that was one that I really had to learn. Being busy all the time isn't the same as being fulfilled. Surviving is not the same as living. I'm gonna repeat that one again because that was one I had to learn too. Surviving is not the same as living. I think a lot of women, us women, become experts at just functioning. I think we become like stellar, we are stellar actresses at it. We are so good at it. Underneath all of that functioning, we're at what lies? Exhaustion, disconnect, loneliness, overwhelmed. And it's not because we're doing anything wrong in life, but because we've been carrying so much for so long that we don't even remember what it feels like not to carry that, not to have that. So I want to tell you about a little piece of this story, my RV journey. And this is something that totally surprised me. Yes, I downsized, yes, I gave things away, yes, I simplified my life, but that's not really what I didn't expect was God just was not uncluttering my home. One of my most favorite pictures that I posted on social media, and the one that got the most reactions to it, is a picture of an empty storage unit and me standing with my arms wide open like this. And it's a success. That's what people see as a success, right? That's uncluttering your home, uncluttering your space. But I have to tell you, that photo and that feeling was more than just uncluttering a storage unit or uncluttering my home. I didn't really realize how much noise I had been living with my whole life until things really started getting quiet. And that picture to me is way more about what happened to me internally than it is about the stuff that I just let go or sold or gave, got rid of, gave away. That photo, that photo at the time, I didn't know what that photo actually meant. And it took me through the very first season of my RV life when I was in Tennessee. And I have to tell you, I didn't go far. My family was very close to me. I had family in Knoxville, I had family in Nashville, and I was kind of plunked myself in the middle between that. Don't know why I picked that place. God just kind of Rockwood, Tennessee, kind of jumped out on the map at me, and I thought, let's go there. They have mountains, they have water, I can be surrounded by the things that I love. It was a small little town. I was very excited to be starting this journey. And I honestly thought I was gonna hit this journey with the ground running. So many ideas, so many things God had put on my heart. I was gonna, you know, I was gonna be recording. I knew I was gonna start a podcast, and I knew that I was supposed to write a book, and I knew all of these things. But I have to tell you that season in Tennessee, that season was very uncomfortable for me. And I'm gonna tell you why. It was so quiet. God put me in a season and a place where I had so much time, so much downtime, so much quiet time. And for a person who's been busy their whole life, people pleasing, responsibilities, putting out fires, doing all the things, that was really hard. It was really difficult because I used to be had a schedule, I had responsibilities, I had deadlines, I had people that needed me. I had always something to do, or I had always somewhere to go. And now all of a sudden, all of that was gone. And you know what there was? Space. And honestly, it felt weird. It actually felt like it was almost deaf, it was so quiet, it was almost deafening to me. Like it was so strange. It was just a feeling that I hadn't had before because I had spent most of my life determining my worth by you want to know what? What I had accomplished. So this felt like I wasn't accomplishing anything. And I honestly said to God, you wanted me to go on this journey, you wanted me to do all these things, and you literally put me in the middle of Tennessee where there's nothing. There is absolutely nothing. Turned out to be one of the most greatest experiences of my life. I've met some of the most wonderful people there. And I think that I felt though for a while, because I wasn't doing anything, or I thought I wasn't doing anything, I didn't have any value. And I I confused carrying everything with being strong, right? That's what my mind had always told myself. All of these things that you're carrying, all these people that need you, you're the strong one. God was showing me something different. At this time, he was not asking me to prove anything to anybody, but he was inviting me to rest and sit in it. And a little by little, slowly and surely, I started noticing things again. Things I had completely lost. Joy, creativity, wonder, curiosity, peace. And I started noticing dreams that I had tucked away way, way back inside of me. Parts of myself that had been buried underneath years and years of responsibility and survival mode. I realized I wasn't lost after all. I had just gotten disconnected. And that's when I started looking at the clues of my life a little bit differently. And you're gonna recognize some of these. Burnout, the longing for simplicity, my decision to downsize, which really wasn't mine, that was God's, but I accepted it. Moving into RV life, that was a big clue. Because I could not even imagine why God was trying to put me in an RV. Learning to live with less was a clue. Walking away from things that no longer fit me, the desire for slower morning, slower starts, quieter days. None of these things were random clues. None of them. But they were clues, and they were leading me toward becoming someone completely different than who I was. They were leading me back to myself. And honestly, I think God was there whispering all along. I was just way too busy to hear him. I want you to understand something. The season before this season of my life was a season that I am so proud of. A season of building, a season of serving. It was a season that I know I needed to walk through to get to this season and this part of my journey and this part of my story. So as I've been walking now in this season, there are three questions I keep finding myself asking. How can I keep unclogging my own life? Number one, what am I carrying? And I really want you to sit with this and I want you to ask yourself the same question as I'm talking about this. What are you carrying? And I'm not just talking about physically. I'm talking about emotionally, I'm talking mentally, I'm talking spiritually, because a lot of us also are carrying other people's expectations. I know I was for a very long time. I couldn't live up to them. I was carrying guilt. I was carrying resentment. I was carrying fear. I was carrying the pressure to keep everybody happy. I was also carrying the pressure and belief that I had to do it all to do that. And the weight of that became absolutely unbearable for me to carry. One day I realized how exhausted I was and I didn't even know why. So I really want you to think about that. What are you carrying? And number two, the number two question that kept coming up was what am I avoiding? That's a big one. Because this one is never fun. This is one where you're gonna be like, click, we're gonna turn her off because I don't want to, I don't want to go down that path, right? Because busyness sometimes becomes a distraction. It becomes a distraction so you don't have to deal with whatever it is that you don't want to deal with. You want to avoid it. So staying busy is the best way for that distraction to happen, right? Because as long as you're moving, as long as you're doing, guess what? You don't have to feel, you don't have to, you don't have to think about it, and as long as you're helping somebody else, guess what? You don't have to be helping yourself. So if you stay busy, I think the thought is you don't have to sit with your grief, you don't have to sit with your emotions, you don't have to sit with your disappointment, you don't have to sit with your loneliness, you don't have to sit with any unanswered questions. And I'm not speaking that of judgment, I am speaking it out of compassion because, girlfriend, I have been there. I have done it too. I used to say so busy so that I didn't have to deal and I didn't have to think about. I was in complete avoidance and avoiding tons of things. And we don't need to speak them all out loud. You do to yourself, but I don't need to tell you what I was avoiding. I'm sure what you're avoiding is totally different than what I am. But once you start to heal from that, that's where you become brave. You become brave enough to sit with all of that. And that stuff is heavy too. So think about it. What are you avoiding? And then question number three. What am I no longer listening to? Are you no longer listening to your body? Are you no longer listening to your heart? Maybe it's that dream you've convinced yourself that it's just too late. Maybe it's God's gentle whisper that you're no longer listening to. Or maybe it's that quiet voice inside of you that keeps saying there has to be more than this. Not for you to do more, not for you to achieve more, but more peace, more joy, more freedom, more alignment, and more of the life that God intended for you to have. So when I talk about this whole journey and I ask you these three questions, I really want you to sit with those. Maybe journal. As you're listening to this, if you're driving in the car and you're not able to journal, afterwards, maybe just voice journal it. I do a lot of voice journaling to help me because I don't sit down and actually write. Having ADHD, a lot of times my thoughts get above my hand. So I'm constantly thinking of the next thing I'm gonna write. I can see you shaking your heads out there. For those of you who have ADHD, you understand completely what I'm talking about. But voice journal. I found that to be so awesome for me to stay in a rhythm, to come back, to reflect. I'm able to talk more about how what I'm feeling, what's kind of coming to the surface. So I'm gonna encourage you to voice journal and voice journal these three questions. Because maybe this whole journey isn't about reinventing yourself. For me, I thought it was. I thought that my life, I was so attached to the nonprofit that I had built, I felt like I needed to reinvent myself. And in order to reinvent myself, I felt like I needed to get away from the place that I lived and the place in my community. I didn't. That's not what this was about. It wasn't about reinventing me. It was following the clues that God was leaving all along to become the woman that He had created me to be. And I was searching for something that was never missing. It was just buried so deep inside of me, underneath all the years of noise and all the years of responsibility and living in survival mode for so long. And to be honest with you, that's why this podcast exists. It's a place for us to pull up a chair, it's a place for us to slow our roll down a little bit. It's a place for us to start paying attention to us again, to ourselves, to our heart, to our story, to what God nudges. That's what I want to get through to you guys. It's a place for us to sit quiet enough to understand God nudges us all the time. It's a place for us to see dreams that maybe we've neglected, or maybe that we just thought couldn't be dreams anymore because it's been too I'm too old, it's too late. I want this to be a place where we can celebrate wins. And I want to talk about this for a second. I'm here, I'm able to visit with my grandnephew, Anna, my niece's son, Atlas. And this is what I've noticed. Babies are amazing. They watch, they study, and then all of a sudden they're going to roll over for the first time, or they're going to say their first word, or they're going to stand up by themselves, or take their first step. And do you know what we do? We cheer them on. We get the phone out, we want to send the picture to somebody, we want to video it and put it out to the world and let everybody know this exciting thing that this child has done, right? Why don't we do that as women as we age in life? Why are we not celebrating these wins with everyone? A child stands and we don't say to them, Oh, hey, when you run a marathon, come back and I'll tell you how great that is, right? The little things that we do in life, and all of them are so important that us as women need to be celebrating these wins with each other. That's why the hive community was built. I wanted to be a place where we can celebrate these tiny wins, setting a boundary, taking a walk, drinking all your water that you were supposed to that day, right? Those are all of the things that I want to celebrate with you. That's why the hive exists. And we'll talk about bees on another podcast, and you can understand why the bee reference is so important to me and so important to what God has put on my heart to build. Because I think that we need to sit with ourselves, have an honest conversation with ourselves. Because sometimes the most important conversations are the ones where we can actually hear ourselves again. So I know there's a piece of you that's deep down in there waiting for you to come back, waiting for you to start asking those questions, waiting for you to start answering those hard questions too. And this is one thing I know for sure. The answer that you've been searching for, it's not missing, it's not lost. It's simply been buried deep inside of you, underneath everything that you have been going through. And sometimes it just takes us to make some room because life is full of infinite possibilities. Today I just want to tell you this. If something resonated with you today, I want to invite you to do something simple. Take a few minutes, write down those three questions. What am I carrying? What am I avoiding? What am I no longer listening to? And you don't have to have all the answers, but I want you to sit down and write. And then I want you to look back and I want you to notice the clues. And if you're ready to take this journey just a little bit deeper, I'd love you to join me inside the 31-day Unclog Your Life challenge. Where together we're gonna clear emotional, we're gonna clear mental, we're gonna clear physical, and we're gonna clear spiritual clutter. All of that stuff that keeps us stuck. So hop on over to my website and you can join me. So if something resonated with you, please share this with somebody else because another woman out there is gonna need this just as much as you needed it. And please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts at. Download Big Talk at the table so you never miss a beat when another episode is dropping. And remember this: you are loved, you are valued, you are worthy. Keep making your magic, keep remembering your worth. And what if? Start asking yourself that question. What if? And no, there is always a seat waiting at the table right here for you. Until next time, remember you got this.