The most important roles in your intuition-led business // HD in Biz series: pt 3 of 4

In this episode, I'm going to discuss the most important leadership roles that you need to fill in your intuition-led business. This is the third episode of a four-part series all about human design in business. So I recommend that you go back and start with the first episode of the series that aired two weeks ago, titled "The True Purpose of Human Design and Gene Keys in Business," plus last week's episode, “What if your Intuition became the CEO of your business?”. Let's dive in.

In August 2020, I was at a major crossroads. On one hand, my business was successful by all external factors—I was working for myself and my revenue was well above what I was making in the cushy 6-figure job I had left.

But what people couldn’t see is that, behind the scenes, I was working 14–16 hours a day and barely left my desk. My poor projector self was exhausted to the core. I had clients who didn’t respect me. I was doing a lot of work that I didn’t want to be doing. The truth was that even though my business was what people would call a success, I resented every piece of it.

I've talked about this story quite a few times because it's extremely pivotal to me and my journey, but here I just want to bring this back up because I felt so helpless at that moment. I couldn’t keep going the way it was going, but I also had no idea what to do next.

I had done everything right, from taking every logical step to following every piece of advice that I was giving my clients. I had exhausted ALL the options to improve my situation, and nothing made a significant difference. All the options I could imagine except the nuclear option, the decision to blow it all up, which I also didn’t want to do. I wasn’t ready to admit defeat yet, and that option was inconceivable.

In the midst of all of the other possible options that I could have taken to move forward at that crossroads, as the CEO of my business, my human quote-unquote self had reached its limit and I had no idea what to do next.

It's funny how we sometimes wait until we have what we perceive to be zero options before surrendering to something bigger to show us the options we couldn't see before. This has happened to me at many pivotal moments.

Those “rock bottoms” in my life where I’ve felt like I'm stuck and don't know how to move forward. Where my mind has exhausted every single option and I think there's nowhere to go. And it's only at that moment that I say, "There's nothing left and I've exhausted all of the possibilities."

And in that particular moment, I finally surrendered to the Universe and my higher self. I journaled, prayed, and took an extended break from the business, and the funny part is that once that happened, the next steps became so much clearer. I knew (splenic authority) that I had to essentially blow up my business to create something that was better aligned for me.

That’s right; the path that I’d called the nuclear option was the right choice for me at the time. When I finally surrendered my human self and ego to my intuition and higher self, that inconceivable option was the only way forward. Without it, there is no way I would be here today, talking to you. There was a lot I had to surrender, release, and redo to get to where I am today, confident in using my voice and confident in walking you through.

In last week’s podcast, episode #2 of our 4-episode series, we played around with a fun thought experiment: what would it look like if you promoted your intuition to CEO, chief decision-maker of your business?

I hope you had as much fun as I did thinking about what aspects of your business might evolve and shift, and maybe even what might remain the same. Maybe it was so much fun that I invite you to experiment with this in your own business, as I have been doing more and more.

But with it, comes a new question: if your intuition is now running your business, what is the actual role of your "Human Self" and what are the other critical pieces of your business’s organizational structure?

If you delegate that chief decision-maker role to your intuition, what do your human and your mind do? What role do they play in your business and what other roles need to be filled in your business? And so that's what this episode is about. Here we go. 

Let's start at the top of a traditional corporation.

So in a traditional corporation, especially a publicly held corporation, there's a board of directors and a chairman of that board of directors, and so the board of directors of a corporation is usually comprised of very experienced visionaries, people who have years of experience. Their goal is to focus on the long term growth of the company. 

They see where the industry is heading and the world is heading. And they see how the company fits in that. They're making sure that strategically, at the highest level, the company is making its way in the way that they see the world heading and that it will continue to grow even with all of these big environmental and economic factors happening.

The CEO, who might also be on the board of directors, is in charge of understanding this vision being set and creating the plan, taking all the steps, and mobilizing the company and employees as required to make it happen. 

Everything happens in business to make sure that the company you know matches, meets, or steps into that vision that the board of directors has for the company. The CEO is the chief decision-maker for the company.

In addition to the board, the board of directors, and the chairman of the board, CEOs typically have formal and informal advisors outside of the board that helps them become better leaders and operate more efficiently.

So underneath the board of directors, there is a chairman, and then comes a CEO who is the leader of each of the functions that are necessary to make these goals and visions become a reality (Chief Marketing Officer or VP of Marketing, COO or Chief Operating Officer, etc.), and they must work together to achieve these goals with their teams and with the CEO overseeing it all.

Each of these functions is primarily acting on behalf of the decisions and the direction that the CEO is given. Yes, there may be some strategy involved at the higher levels. But ultimately, the CEO is saying that your goals are my expectations. Here's where we are heading now, so how are you and your team going to make this happen? 

All of these different functions under the CEO have to work together to meet the goals and objectives that the CEO gives them, and the resources that the CEO gives them, to make it happen so that the business corporation can fulfill the vision that the board of directors sets. Hopefully, that was a little bit of a mouthful, but hopefully, you're tracking with me here.

What does this have to do with you, a soulpreneur who is either a solopreneur or a business owner with a very small team?

Even though you might not be a bigger corporation yet, this structure is still the same in your business. Even if you are a solopreneur, you still have a board of directors. 

The chairman of your board of directors is your highest self, and the rest of the board is made up of your universal support team—your spirit guides, angels, ancestors, etc.—with your intuition as CEO. 

Your intuition is responsible for regularly meeting with your board of directors and passing that information, wisdom, and direction through to you. In a way, it’s a middleman, but it also translates the bigger vision and purpose into more tangible steps that your human can implement in this 3D world.

When you place your intuition in the CEO role of your business, your human self, aka your ego, your over thinking, and the over-logic mind can take a step back and fill in the roles of the CMO and COO. 

What this means is that your mind doesn’t have to figure it all out because it’s just taking direction from your intuition. Your mind doesn’t have to see how all the pieces move around and think 20 steps ahead. Your intuition and your business’s board of directors have that taken care of those decisions and you can trust that.

All your human self and mind have to do is be able to hear what your intuition is telling you to do so you can take aligned actions to market, sell, and operate your business. 

The biggest priority of your “human” in business is to nurture that partnership, that dance, that relationship between your human and your mind with your intuition. Trust what your intuition is saying and follow its directions as quickly and efficiently as possible or at the right time. This is where human design and gene keys come into play and are so impactful.

Human design and gene keys are the advisors and mentors to the CEO. 

As I said, these formal and informal advisors make the CEO better, and their role is to strengthen the voice and presence of your intuition and make it more effective and efficient in its decisions and plans of action.

When you put your intuition in the CEO role, all that pressure and all that responsibility to make the right decision gets lifted off your human shoulders, and all you need to do is to follow the direction of your intuition and have the most fun and enjoyment while doing it. It’s not all about you. 

You have an entire team and support structure guiding you, including tools such as human design and gene keys, which make the entire system more efficient and effective.

How do I honor this organizational structure in my business for a recent decision or set of decisions that I've made for my marketing strategy?

So, as you may have heard me say before, I'm in the process of actively reevaluating the role social media plays in my business and specifically on Instagram. Many of the other experts in this space have used Instagram successfully to build their business and to build their audience, which then builds their business, and in my mind, I have also put mental pressure on myself to feel like I had to do this. 

I have gone through so many iterations of the purpose of Instagram in my marketing strategy. I've prioritized it to the point where I focused all of my energy on it and used it to post in-depth educational posts that get a lot of engagement. But the prioritization of Instagram posts exhausted and depleted me, making me very bitter. My projector's bitterness came through very strongly. 

In my mind, I had exhausted every option for Instagram and still didn’t know what to do with it. That's when I realized that my mind was tired from the entire decision-making process. 

That’s when I realized that my mind and my ego were fighting to be CEO and I wasn’t consulting the better decision-maker, my intuition. So I shifted my focus from figuring out the next step to connecting with my intuition so I could be guided through the next step.

My intuition told me to deprioritize Instagram, to let go of the structure I was forcing on it, and be open to different ways of growing my audience. Since then, I’ve also received some very interesting opportunities around SEO and my podcast, away from Instagram. 

These opportunities not only feel correct & exciting for me when I check in with my intuition but are also super aligned with aspects of my human design-as a projector waiting for an invitation, a 5/1 with a defined throat ready to share solutions & unique points of view, and my undefined emotional solar plexus heart & sacral center that calls me to use my energy as efficiently as possible.

But I’ve also felt more room for creativity when I do feel like posting. I loosened up my content plan and have posted more spontaneous, inspired posts, and a lot of the posts I’ve shared in the past couple of weeks have gotten 3-4x the engagement I’ve been getting in the last 6 or so months.

I’ll be honest, this is still an area of my business I’m playing with, so I don’t have all the answers. I’m sure you’ll hear more about this as time goes on. Still, exciting things started happening when my human mind finally surrendered to my intuition as CEO of my business and let each leadership role in my business be filled in a more aligned and pressure-free way.