What I Learned from Trusting Myself (and my career journey to Human Design)
PLANT YOURSELF WHERE YOU WANT TO BLOOM
If you told me when I was in high school that I would be spiritually advising people, I would have been like THAT IS RAD and also how is that a thing? I’m grateful for all the twists and turns my career path has taken because without the duality to life, I wouldn’t know the depths of life as I do now. If you’re reading this and you’re feeling stuck or unsuccessful right now, remember that we’re always changing and evolving.
My perceived “failures” (how I saw things at the time) led me directly to my successes. I definitely know that I would not have ended up here had my first career path been “successful” instead of deeply frustrating.
So, how did I end up here? My career path has been a weaving of retail, teaching, and wellness. Figuring out how those pieces fit together has been a journey. I’ve found my footing by taking agency over my life, my experiences, and most importantly, my body.
My 20s felt out of control and held some very high highs and low lows. I was living OUTSIDE-IN. Hoping that if I could get the external circumstances right, my internal life would calm down.
I know now that the only way to get out internal life calm is to go INSIDE OUT. We must begin within.
Now, I live an incredibly low-key lifestyle. Every day is a wonderful day because I’m right within (and if it’s not a good day, I have the tools to realign). I see clients, I work at an indie retail shop here in Austin, and an exciting night for me is making art in my own home. I love it. Super slow living.
HOW DID I MAKE THIS SHIFT HAPPEN?
Let’s start at the beginning. I used to like to learn my lessons the hard way. Why do I believe in body wisdom so deeply? Because I’ve lost my health multiple times from not listening to myself.
After graduating college (undergrad) with a degree in fashion (and another one in communication, because hello, I was your typical perfectionist overachiever) I began my professional career bright-eyed and oh-so-naive in NYC.
My first year of city living caught up with me by blowing out my immune system. I think it only took about 6 months. I had to do all the things. Be amazing at my job, go to all the happy hours, make friends outside of my office, be the perfect girlfriend to my boyfriend at the time. I’d been so out of place in college, that I was determined to make up for “lost time.”
In reality I was a people-pleaser trying to be everything to everyone, seeking approval and validation, and desperately trying to fit in. I was living for the checklist. I figured I could find salvation through achievement. If I have a brag-worthy job and am in a relationship with someone who also has a brag-worthy job and we look good and do cool things, then I’ll be happy, then I’ll feel successful and not this empty void. I was totally caught up in my perception instead of how I was feeling, cultivating externals and completely ignoring my internals.
All of this trying-to burned me out. I hated my job, I didn’t know if I liked my boyfriend, and I barely had friends. I didn’t know how to cope. That first winter, I got sick with a fever that nearly wiped out all my white blood cells and bone marrow. I was grateful to have to go to the doctor’s office at least once a week as an escape from the office. My doctor tried to figure out why I barely had an immune system left as a 22-year-old who seemingly had just had the flu. They tested and tested me for months and finally settled on the solution being gain some weight, but really, no one had answers.
The “great recession” hit and I got switched into a position that was a terrible fit for me, but I was grateful to be employed. My Projector vision showed me that commerce was rapidly changing and that millennials were not mini-boomers. HOW WOULD WE CHANGE AND ADAPT? I had ideas to reach out to marginalized communities and to younger people. No one would listen to me because it wasn’t “worth it” financially. It was unproven. I continued to give unsolicited advice and provided endless ideas to my team to no avail (ahem, not-self Projector) and I became increasingly depressed as I kept hoping for someone to see my value and put me in a position that was a better fit or give me more power (haha, I would have had to have been much better at doing my ASSIGNED work).
Why wasn’t anyone listening to me? During those 5 years that I spent in corporate merchandising and buying, I learned many invaluable lessons.
1) How we run businesses is absolutely insane. If you are a good individual contributor, you are rewarded with a completely untested skill set of managing people. Not all individual contributors should be managers and people who would make good managers may not be good individual contributors. We promote to the level of incompetence and that’s why there is so much ineptitude in business.
2) Just because a lot of people believe something, doesn’t make it true or the best. I call this the myth of the best-seller. General wisdom is that something that sells the most is BEST. No. It just means a lot of people bought it. Validation isn’t the same as quality. When we would go to market, it was so depressing to see all these incredible products that would never make it to mass market because they were new ideas or not broadly enough focused. This is illustrated best by watching Shark Tank. Good ideas aren’t always marketable ideas. Things that are good for society don’t typically square with the principles of capitalism which is solely focused on growth and profits.
3) Betraying yourself to belong comes with a hefty price tag. If you give up on being yourself, your insides go to shit.
4) RESISTANCE IS A CALL FROM THE UNIVERSE TO LET GO. Learn to cut your losses. Admitting defeat is a good thing. When we keep trying to make something happen and it’s not happening - it’s time to look at your ego. Resistance is a sacred call from the universe to take another path.
SILVER LINING! Being in a job that wasn’t the right fit gave me an amazing opportunity to get clear on my values. If it wasn’t for the rampant waste I was exposed to and the insanity of our capitalistic society that centers on growth at any cost, I wouldn’t know that I am all about sustainability and minimalism. It was only through experiencing corporate values firsthand and seeing how mainstream companies are run that I found out that I was personally driven by the values of minimalism, sustainability, and understanding entire the life-cycle of a product.
When I finally accepted that the only person who could fix my life was me, I went back to my roots. When I finally realized the mainstream retail industry wasn’t going to bend to my value system, I quit my job and started again. I had loved being a camp counselor in high school and college, so I went back to school to become a teacher. I was still tethered to old paradigm programming, so I didn’t fully go for my dreams which at the time were a recurring fantasy of working on an organic farm or becoming a body-image and confidence counselor for young women. I let other people’s opinions and my own practicality get the best of me and I landed in a master’s program for special education.
My first teaching job was hectic and an extremely unsupportive environment. I was scared, out of control, and I headed straight back to burnout town. My health problems came back even worse and I ended up needing a lot of medical care. However, the lessons came through strong:
1) We live in an extremely racist society. During grad school I faced my white privilege more than I ever had to before. It was extremely eye-opening as I realized how many internalized biases I had to dismantle (this work continues to this day).
2) Resources pool at the top. Rich schools have rich PTAs and access to resources well beyond what the school system provides. Schools on the other end of the spectrum are underfunded and overwhelmed with a lack of resources and adequate help.
3) Our educational system is backwards and broken. Testing students is the focus of schools because of educational policy at every level of government. It is ineffective and goes against how students learn best. Every single student has different needs, strengths, and weaknesses, but traditional schooling elevates a very small skill set and ignores many skill sets that are deeply needed in life. Students who excel in school may be very ill-equipped for “real life” many students who have incredible skill sets that would serve them well in “real life” aren’t celebrated or acknowledged in a traditional school setting.
4) A warm, safe environment is the root for learning and collaboration. If our emotional and physical needs aren’t being met, we cannot learn or grow. If you are actively facing trauma or are feeling unsafe, you cannot learn (and may not even be physically growing). Environment is critical for our wellbeing. Until we are safe, we cannot thrive.
I was so lost and confused, but along my way I found kundalini yoga and an entirely new world of thinking. I read Conscious Loving by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks and I was hit with lightning. I understood my health issues in an entirely new light. I also understood that I was quite far from operating in my zone of Genius.
A new chapter: discovering body wisdom + the power of being present
If students can’t learn when they are actively in a traumatic environment, what does that say for those of us who inflict trauma onto ourselves?
My health was out of control. Since I was so out of alignment personally, my body was screaming at me to change course. In Conscious Loving, the Hendricks identify that tamping down our emotions manifest as illness later on and if we fight our natural rhythms, our bodies will fight our battles for us.
When I didn’t know how to communicate for myself that my boundaries had been crossed or I was in the wrong place, my body would generate illness so I could escape my circumstances. Since I wasn’t listening to my body or allowing myself rest (and my internal environment was a wreck with perfectionism) I would manifest sickness as an escape or an out from life. I didn’t know another way to stop the train.
Lessons:
1) We are most effective where our passions and skills lie - if we are happy we create positive environments for others and ourselves. If we’re unhappy and not using our talents, we’re not being effective for anyone.
2) Our bodies hold so much intelligence. Honoring our energy and feelings is the key to finding our correct path.
Now that I know my body communicates what is right and what isn’t, I listen to my body and let it lead me. In the years since reading Conscious Loving, I’ve only had one major relapse with my health (and it was very much stress-related).
Armed with a new way of thinking, I completely stayed in the present moment and let go of the future entirely. We make leaps and bounds in our life when we can be here now (thank you Ram Dass). By feeling my feelings, honoring my body, and acknowledging what I was going through internally instead of burying it deeper and deeper within (and pretending everything was fine), I changed my life.
My job (actually my whole life at the time wasn’t the right fit for me) but I focused on taking it one minute at a time. Slowly, my circumstances began to shift. I was grateful for all the good things. I realized my external circumstances didn’t dictate how I felt.
Lessons:
1) WE ARE NOT MEANT TO DO IT ALL. Teachers, especially special education teachers, have an impossible job. My colleagues that felt that they had to do everything and save the day were drowning. Since I had so much on my plate and had gotten so behind in my school work from my health problems, I had to let go of doing it all. I just couldn’t.
2) You can let go of your baggage at any time. Since I was so overloaded, I became free. When everything is a crisis, nothing becomes a crisis. I was able to stop thinking about what could happen, or what would happen, and was radically present in my life.
Serendipitously, I found another teaching job much more suited to my skill set in a much more supportive setting. Some might call this manifesting. I’ve found in my life that the next step comes the more that I detach from the outcome. Many teachers talk about how being present is the secret to co-creating with the universe and when I look back over my life, that’s certainly been the case for me.
The new school I worked at was wonderful, and the quality of my life improved. I love being around people and especially kids, but even in this better suited job, I was present enough to see how our education system is so terribly broken. At first I wanted to work against the system, but I realized that it absolutely drove me mad that my students were so aware of their “shortcomings” and not given more time to work on their incredible gifts and talents. Why did we work in a system that focuses on where a student doesn’t thrive instead of supporting them in their interests and talents?
lessons:
1) keep clarifying your values. As a special education teacher I realized so deeply that everyone deserves to be celebrated and acknowledged for who they are. Celebrating our differences became so much more important to me than test scores.
2) Not every fight is your fight. I feel so strongly about education, but just because something is important to you doesn’t mean you have to make it your life work. My mother and grandmother were both teachers and it is a very noble profession. Allowing myself to leave was critical to my evolution. Just because you care or you tried it, doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.
I didn’t want to do my job, I wanted to work with students on their self-worth and self-esteem.
The way I see it is like this: if we erode your self-esteem how will you even have energy left to do what you love? If you aren’t doing what you love then the world misses out on your talents and joy. It would keep me up at night that I wasn’t able to help these students in their area of interest but had to sit with them while they did the subjects they hated the most. I just didn’t agree with the school system at all, even though I loved my students and my school, teaching just wasn’t the right fit for me.
So after teaching in public schools for 5 years, I had a revealing moment of clarity. Who was I living for? What was the point of everything I was doing? I could stay and teach forever at the incredible school I was so blessed to work at and feel like I was compromising, or I could follow that nagging in my heart that said I hadn’t really let myself chase my dreams.
I was done denying who I was. I was done hoping I could wrangle myself into submission, hoping I could fit myself into the mold I felt I needed to succeed, so in the summer of 2017, I traveled to Texas, following my intuition that I was meant to live here and I quit my stable life.
I FINALLY SAID TO THE UNIVERSE, WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN IF I BET ON MYSELF?
And it turns out, the doors just keep opening the more that I listen and am honest with what I am feeling. Living my values and staying true to my heart are the things I believe in most.
It was here that I serendipitously found out about Human Design.
Finding Human Design (and finding out I was a Projector) was one of the biggest aha moments for me. All of a sudden my life made sense. As a Projector I operate differently than most - I work in intense bursts, I work best one-on-one (no wonder teaching was so draining!) and I am meant to share my unique perspective with the world.
I realized we don’t have to fight our nature, we must embrace it.
When we make a commitment to ourselves to be authentically us, we are able to cultivate a sense of stability and inner peace that grounds us in who we are.
We can become unshakeable.
The amazing thing is it’s never too late to find your truth and find yourself.
I’ve rebuilt my life completely by learning to trust myself and living my design. You can too
I used to feel so frustrated that I hadn’t just followed my heart right after college, the heart that would routinely keep me up until 2 in the morning googling life-coaching and freelance writing wondering if a 22-year old could be qualified to tell anyone anything about life. No, I would think, I can’t do that - it doesn’t have health insurance.
Now, I am thankful for all my experiences. I don’t hold a grudge against my younger self for not knowing what to do or feel confident to follow my heart (I have an undefined G-center and ego after all) and everything has had a lesson and has enriched my life. Showing me what I want and what I don’t. The duality of life and our experiences is what brings richness and meaning to our experiences. If I hadn’t experienced such low-lows and found myself in so many doctors offices, I would never appreciate and treasure my time and health like I do now.
Things that felt like wrong turns have taught me so much about my boundaries and my self-worth. Living my values and allowing my values to evolve have brought me to this moment in time where I can now help facilitate this experience of clarity for others.
Finding our way is a winding road and there’s no destination. It’s just one long journey of self-exploration. We lead with our hearts when we’re ready to tune into what our heart has to say to us.
I had a memory recently about a talk I attended at my old corporate job where our CEO urged us to bloom where we are planted. I would say it to myself all the time to try to find the good even thought I knew the situation I was in wasn’t right for me. Now I know I it’s actually the reverse that true for me- plant yourself where you can bloom.
If you’re ready to live more embodied - reach out. I’d love to talk to you - drop me a line at hello@jenigage.com, I’d love to hear your story.
