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THE UNFOLDING INSIGHTS™
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Availability Is Not Consent
How systems misread participation at work An Unfolding Insight Created and owned by Itzel Yagual Many systems treat continued availability as agreement. If someone keeps showing up, responding quickly, absorbing more work, or remaining outwardly cooperative, that availability is often interpreted as consent. The assumption is simple: if there were a problem, it would be named. That assumption is wrong. In many organizations—especially those that rely heavily on women’s...

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Jan 264 min read


Responsibility Without Authority Produces Withdrawal
Created and owned by Itzel Yagual An Unfolding Insight Withdrawal is often interpreted as a personal or motivational failure. Someone stops volunteering, becomes less responsive, or quietly narrows their engagement, and the explanation offered is disengagement, burnout, or resistance. That explanation is incomplete. In many cases, what is being observed is not a lack of commitment, but a rational response to a structural imbalance that has gone unnamed. What’s Actually Happen

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Jan 123 min read


What Was Labeled Burnout Was Often a Reading Error
Created and owned by Itzel Yagual Organizations have become fluent in the language of burnout — and increasingly imprecise in how they use it. Over the past year, slowed output, withdrawal from discretionary labor, boundary enforcement, and refusal of informal responsibilities have frequently been interpreted as individual depletion. While exhaustion is real, this explanation collapses distinct structural phenomena into a single psychological category. From an industrial-orga

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Dec 29, 20255 min read


Part II — Holiday Survival Mode: The Psychology of Memory, Magic, and Misalignment
Unfolding Insights™ — Newest Edition Created and owned by Itzel Yagual There’s a certain honesty that only emerges after the holidays — the kind that arrives once the noise settles, the expectations fade, and your nervous system finally tells the truth about what this season required from you. If Part I explored the emotional architecture of December — the version we live in versus the version we’re sold — this chapter delves further into the psychology beneath it: how memory

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Dec 10, 20259 min read


Capacity Debt™: Why Women Leaders Keep Paying Invisible Bills
Created and owned by Itzel Yagual When Energy Feels Like It’s Missing We often talk about time management as if it were the golden solution. Get the right planner, block your hours, wake up at 5 AM, and you’ll finally be on top of it all. But what if the problem was never your time? For many women leaders, especially neurodivergent and culturally complex women, the real drain is capacity debt™ . This isn’t about forgetting tasks or failing to organize. It’s about running on a

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Nov 24, 20255 min read


Capacity Isn’t Infinite — Why ND Women Leaders Burn Out Faster
Created and owned by Itzel Yagual The Real Cost of Capacity Debt™ in Leadership Organizations lose talented women every day — not because we lack ambition, but because we’re drowning in capacity debt ™. What is capacity debt ™ ? It’s the invisible overload that builds up when roles stack too high. Caregiver. Professional. Culture keeper. Survival-mode strategist. For neurodivergent and culturally complex women, capacity debt™ looks like carrying five jobs in one body while t

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Nov 24, 20253 min read


Living In-Between: Identity, Belonging, and the Space No One Talks About (Part Two)
Capacity Debt™: Why Women Leaders Keep Paying Invisible Bills Opening Insight Living in-between is not confusion. It’s not dilution. It’s not brokenness.It ’s adaptive navigation — a way of moving that builds identity fluency where others only see misfit. For neurodivergent, culturally complex women, it’s the unseen labor of translating yourself across contexts while protecting your wholeness. Too often, that labor is dismissed as inconsistency or over-sensitivity. But in rea

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Nov 24, 20254 min read


When Projects Collapse: Strategic Tools for Capacity-Aware Leadership
Created and owned by Itzel Yagual Opening Insight Leadership doesn’t always collapse loudly. Sometimes it pauses quietly in the middle of a project, in a half-written email, or while staring blankly at a to-do list that once felt purposeful. For neurodivergent women, especially those carrying multiple roles and navigating workplace misfit, that pause is often mislabeled as inconsistency or a lack of motivation. But in industrial-organizational psychology, we understand diseng

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Nov 24, 20257 min read


The Unfolding Insights™ Weekly Newsletter
Created and owned by Itzel Yagual Founding Edition Unfolding Insights™ is the long-form publication where I examine identity, work, leadership, and neurodivergent life through an industrial–organizational psychology and feminist lens. This is not a newsletter in the casual sense. It’s a space for depth — where lived experience meets research, and where the patterns beneath women’s work, caregiving, and survival are named without simplification. Some editions will be personal

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Nov 24, 20253 min read
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