What if your Intuition became the CEO of your business? // HD in Biz series: pt 2 of 4
In this episode, I'm going to discuss a really fun thought experiment about what would happen if your intuition became the CEO of your business. This is the second episode out of a four-episode series all about human design and business. So I recommend that you go back and start with the first episode in the series, which aired last week, titled The True Purpose of Human Design and Gene Keys in Business, before you listen to the rest of this one. Let's dive in.
I remember vividly my first real observation of and experience with a corporate CEO and their element. I was 23 years old and working at this cutting-edge biotech company doing entry-level marketing as an event coordinator for this company. At the time I thought it was the best job in the entire world because I got paid to travel for events. I may have been traveling to some stuffy conferences in the dental industry, but I didn't even care.
I got to travel all over the US and to different places throughout the world for this job and it was absolutely amazing. At that particular moment, we were planning and promoting the biggest conference of the year for the company. It was the biggest sales event of the year for them and they made a majority of their annual revenue from this event.
At the same time, this was mid-2008 when the economy was starting to destabilize pre-crash and into the Great Recession. And there I was, invited to a meeting about that big conference that included my boss, my boss’s boss (the VP), and then his boss, the CEO of the company. Normally, I wasn’t invited to those types of meetings because, well, I was an entry-level associate. But that day, it was different. It was all hands on deck — all the departments were there together: marketing, sales, operations, finance, customer service, and more.
The company had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the event up to that point, but registrations were gut-wrenchingly low with the rumors and mumblings of the recession getting louder. We weren't even close to anything near what would be a break-even point for this event in terms of registrations because our clients and potential customers were hesitant to travel.
We were having this meeting, and the meeting intention was to determine what the right move forward was. In a way, it was a no-win situation: either cancel the event and lose all the deposits made, or run the event but still lose hundreds of thousands of dollars on low turnout and subsequently low sales. It was an uncomfortable meeting, but I will never forget the leadership lessons I absorbed just by observing what was happening.
Each department was invited to share its perspective and opinions on the outcomes of these options. The different departments debated and pushed each other while the CEO just observed and prodded further at times. You could tell that while the debate was ongoing, he was running through all the different options in his mind, playing out all the different scenarios to find the option that not only mitigated the risk the most but provided the best possible outcome for everyone involved. That is the job of a CEO.
As the chief executive officer of a company, it’s a CEO’s job to understand the field of all possible scenarios and make decisions (many decisions) that are in the best interest of the company. It doesn’t matter if there are infinite possibilities or if it’s a no-win situation, they have to make countless decisions and follow through on them. It pays, literally, to be able to see the future and waterfall effect of all the possibilities and make important, high-impact decisions quickly and confidently.
At the level of a CEO of a publicly-traded company, the pressure of each decision becomes extra intense and it may require gathering some information to make an educated decision, as my CEO did in that meeting. Or it might even require a pause to contemplate and think about all the potential outcomes like he did to come to a decision (for those of you curious, we ended up canceling the event) a few days after that particular meeting. The one thing you don’t want to do is to become wishy-washy or flip-flop in the decisions you are making because not only is your company at stake, but potentially the livelihoods of the people involved with your company too.
You might not be running a multimillion-dollar business yet, or you might not even be at the point where you have a team that can help you navigate the decisions that you have to make every single day in your business. But as a leader, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, by default, you are the CEO. You are the chief decision-maker of your business and this can be very scary.
Especially if you are at the point where you are just getting started and especially at the point where you don't have the business experience or online marketing experience. You might need to have all the information at your fingertips to make the best-educated decision for your business. Many decisions come with the thought, “I have no idea what I'm doing, so hopefully, this works!”
There's always going to be a level of unknown, so you have to take what you have and make a decision and run with it. On the other hand, you could make a decision and then constantly second-guess yourself, but that is exhausting. For the people you're working with, for the people that you're serving, and your audience if you continually go back and forth and flip-flop. It's going to be confusing for the people you serve as well, and so this is a lot of pressure on people like you who just want to be of service and share their gifts. It might even feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders in this CEO role.
It could be enough pressure to steer you away from this adventure of starting your own business altogether. I know many people who have gone down this path of pressure to find and make the right decisions, which has kept them away from pursuing this vision, dream, and creating this reality of their own.
Most of us on this journey are stuck in this loop of mental pressure, feeling the weight of the world and the pressure of success or failure with each step forward we take in our business.
If you're like me, and have a very logical-minded or over-thinker, it might feel like you're constantly running calculations about all of the possible outcomes and lost opportunities for each of the decisions that you make. It's like constant pressure to make the right decision at the right time. It’s exhausting.
I’ll venture to guess that this is the reason why so much of the mental burnout that newer business owners face is trying to make the right decision at the right time or trying to figure out what the right decision is in the first place.
So here’s where my thought experiment comes in…
- What would happen if you delegated the CEO role of your business to your intuition?
- What would happen if you surrendered all of the decision-making from your head to your heart instead?
If you trusted that your intuition always knew the best decision for you and your business, the best way. The best path forward for you at this moment, even though maybe some of those decisions might not make sense or seem illogical.
But what if you trusted those decisions anyway because you chose to delegate that responsibility to your intuition and trusted that your intuition always knew the best answer for you?
- Does that begin to take all the pressure off of you and your mind?
- Does it take the weight of your business and your future off your shoulders?
- Does it help you feel more confident in your path forward?
I know what it does for me and how I feel when I choose to delegate big decisions to my intuition. I feel a lot more creative and fun. I want you to take a moment to ponder that.
You can even pause or journal on it and ponder what it would feel like if you promoted your intuition to the CEO of your business. I want you to think about:
- What would it mean to you?
- What would you do?
- How would it free you from the heaviness of all the decisions and distractions at hand?
- How would it open you up to being more creative?
You can’t go wrong when your intuition is making decisions on your behalf. Because no matter what decision is made, it is the best and only decision for you. There's no question about it.
So, allow your intuition to become the confident decision-maker in your business and allow it to step into this role now. Because the larger and more successful your business becomes, the more daunting the decisions you make on behalf of your business will be. The bigger your business becomes, the more consequential some of those big decisions become, affecting more people.
If you continue to keep that pressure on your mind and your shoulders, it's only going to get more and more stressful as your business grows. But if you're able to delegate that pressure and that decision and that analysis to your intuition, you can work with it and train it and grow with it as your business grows, so that the weight doesn't get heavier and heavier on your shoulders as your business continues to expand.
And maybe at this point, you might be thinking, “Well, this all sounds great, but how do I even know if it's my ego or my intuition that I'm hearing if I delegate my business? Like, how do I know if what I'm hearing is even my intuition, or is it just my mind playing tricks on me?”
I also get this question a lot from clients and prospective clients that I work with. They said that they are not sure if they can fully trust their intuition right now because they are still developing a relationship with it. So, what does that mean for me? I'll be honest, this is something that I can help you with and this is where human design and gene keys come in and show their full beautiful colors and help with this specifically.
Last week on the podcast-the first episode of this 4-episode podcast series called "Human Design in Business"-we talked about the true purpose of human design and gene keys in business, which is to strengthen your connection to your intuition. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, I HIGHLY recommend you go back and listen to it first.
Human design and gene keys act like coaches to your intuition—helping it do the exercises and reps necessary to become clearer, stronger, and faster; establishing a clear channel between your head and your heart; and training it to become the best CEO your business could ever have leading it. Yes, your intuition can have multiple coaches, of course, but I believe that gene keys and human design are two of the best and why you need them both.
When I think about how these systems strengthen your intuition, it makes me think of the show Cobra Kai on Netflix, which is one of the few shows that my husband and I can agree on watching together. Human Design and Gene Keys are advisors, guides, and spiritual mentors to your intuition.
Human design is more like the style of Johnny Lawrence style of coaching (the reformed Johnny Lawrence, that is)—very to the point and prescriptive.
This lesson directly applies to karate, and you gain experience by sparring with each other constantly. The human design gives you very direct clues as to how to build your business in alignment and how to thrive within your energetic blueprint.
Gene Keys, on the other hand, is more the style of Miyagi Do coaching - where you learn these things that seem so unrelated to karate (aka your business), like wax on, wax off, and paint the fence. These are the lessons that you keep practicing and practicing, wondering when you are going to get into the meat of it. Then one day, it all comes full circle, and wax on/wax off is a blocking move.
Gene Keys takes you on a journey that unfolds as you progress through it. This might not fully make sense right away, and you may not see the direct benefits right away, but it leads to the epiphanies and breakthroughs that unlock your deepest, truest gifts on your path to purpose.
This is why human design and gene keys work so well together. And why are they so effective at developing your intuition and increasing your confidence in the decisions they're making on your behalf.
So, before I wrap up today, I want you to take a moment to think about what it would mean for you and your business if you were to surrender that CEO role to your intuition.
How does it feel? What would you do differently? And how you can use these coaches to your intuition, of human design and gene keys, to strengthen it and sharpen it so that decisions can be made quicker, more confidently, and with more certainty on this wild journey we are on.
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