Episode Four: The Million Dollar CEO Secret Nobody Talks About

This is the episode I almost did not make.

Not because I do not believe what I am about to share — I believe it more than almost anything else in this series. But because this is the layer that makes the logical, spreadsheet-loving, show-me-the-data part of your brain get a little itchy.

So I am going to name the itch. And then I am going there anyway.

In this episode I talk about the layer of intelligence that is bigger than your strategy — the intuition, the trust, the quiet signal that arrives before your brain has caught up. 

I share the story of the house that was supposed to be out of our price range, the vision board I forgot I had made, and the moment I realized that every single thing on my list had arrived without me forcing a single one of them. 

I talk about discovering I am a Human Design Projector and how ten years of exhaustion suddenly made complete sense.

Whether you call it God, the universe, intuition, or really good luck — it is real. It is a tool. And it is the most underused excavator in most women's businesses.

This episode is for the woman who has had moments she cannot explain and has been filing them under lucky ever since.

Transcript

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Okay, I need to start with a confession. This is the audio I almost did not make. Not because I don't believe what I'm about to tell you. I actually believe it more than anything else I'm going to share in this entire series, but because this is the layer that most people get uncomfortable about. This is the one where the logical spreadsheet loving, show me the data part of someone's brain starts to get a little itchy. And I have spent enough time in rooms full of ambitious women to know that the itchiness is real and it is worth naming before we go any further. So let me just say it. What I'm about to talk about is not strategy. It is not systems. It is not your nervous system or your cortisol levels or anything that can be measured in a lab. What I am about to talk about is the layer underneath all of that, the one that most business coaches skip entirely because they don't know how to put it in a slide deck. And I'm going to call it the 7D layer. Depending on who you are and what you believe, you might call it God or the universe or intuition or synchronicity or just really good luck. The word really does not matter. What matters is that it is real and it is a tool. And the women who learn to use it stop fighting their way to their next level and start being led there instead. I want to tell you a story. A few years ago, my family needed to move. We had three kids who were ages six and under. And I need you to understand it was a particularly beautiful kind of chaos. We had outgrown our house completely. We were bursting at the seams. My husband Jesse was working 80-hour weeks in construction. I was running my business and doing school drop-offs and answering customer emails at midnight and surviving on caffeine and the particular adrenaline of someone who has not had a full night of sleep since 2013. And in the middle of all of that, I sat down and I made a list. This was not a practical, let's see what we can afford list. This was a real list, the kind of list you make when nobody's watching and you let yourself want what you actually want without editing it down to something reasonable. I wanted a house with five bedrooms, one for each of our three kids, one for Jesse and me, and one that would finally be an office, a real one, so I could stop running my business out of a jumbled mess in my closet and actually put things on a shelf like a normal person who has her life together. I wanted new construction because I needed this to be easy and I could not handle inheriting someone else's problems on top of my own. I wanted at least half an acre so the kids could run. I wanted the same school district so my oldest could stay with his friends, and I wanted the feeling. I put the feeling on the list too. I wrote down that warm, modern feeling that is really hard to describe, but you know it the second you walk in, where the light is right and the space breathes and it just it feels like yours. Jesse looked at my list and said gently and lovingly, absolutely not. We cannot afford this. This is not a list. This is a fantasy. And I want to tell you that I didn't argue with him because logically he was right. The numbers did not work. The house on my list did not exist in our price range and probably did not exist in our school district. And we had a newborn, and this was not the time to be chasing a fantasy. And then one afternoon I was scrolling, just scrolling the way you do when you have a baby on your hip and four minutes of quiet. And I saw a listing for an open house. It was new construction in the same school district, and I clicked on it, and something happened in my chest that I didn't have language for yet. It wasn't exact it wasn't excitement exactly. It was more like recognition, like something in me knew before my brain had time to catch up. I went to the open house and I walked through the front door and I felt it immediately. That warm, modern feeling where the light was right and the space breathed, and something in me just said, This is yours. So I made a video on my phone walking through every single room like an HGTV narrator. I made this video like a woman who had already decided that this was hers. And I sent it to Jesse and I said, I remember this so clearly. I said, I know we can't afford it. I just need you to see it. Jesse watched the video as soon as I hit send and he said, Oh my gosh, that does look perfect, but we still can't afford it. And then two things happened that I could not have planned or strategized or worked harder to make occur. Jesse got a bonus, a really significant one, the kind that doesn't arrive on a regular schedule and can't be counted on and showed up at exactly the moment when you need it. And at the same time, the contractors who'd built that house, who had been sitting on it for six months without a single buyer, brought the price down. Everything lined up and we bought the house. And here's the part that made me sit down when I finally understood it. After we moved in, I found my vision board from earlier that year. It was the one that I'd made at my annual vision board party when I was sitting on the floor with my girlfriends with magazines and scissors and glasses of wine. And I looked at it. I really looked at it. And I realized that every single thing on my ridiculous, unimaginable, Jesse said absolutely not list was there. Every single one. And not in a vague way, in a specific, this is exactly what I asked for away. I had not achieved those things. I hadn't hustled for them or optimized my funnel for them or built a strategy around them. I'd simply asked for them, like ordering something on Amazon. And then I let them arrive. Now, I am a practical woman. I am a data-driven woman in a lot of ways. Obviously, I built a multi-million dollar company on real decisions and real systems and real work. And I'm not standing here telling you that you can just make a vision board and wait for the universe to deliver your dreams to your doorstep while you watch Netflix. But what I am telling you is this there's a layer of intelligence available to you that is bigger than your strategy. And most of us spend our entire careers trying to think our way to results that were just meant to flow to us because we were never taught that flow was an option. We were only ever taught to push. The 7D excavator is what happens when you stop pushing long enough to just receive. And I want to get specific about what that actually looks like in practice because I don't want this to feel like a random concept. I really want it to feel like something you can use tomorrow. A few years ago, I discovered something called human design. And I know that for some of you that's a familiar concept. And for others, it sounds like something your most spiritual friend keeps bringing up at dinner. Either way, I want you to stay with me for a second. Human design is essentially a map of how you are specifically wired based on where and when you were born, how you are designed to make decisions, to use your energy to move through the world in a way that is sustainable and aligned for you specifically. And when I looked at my map, I found out I am what is called a projector. And here's what that means in plain English: projectors are not designed to be the engine. They're not built to generate constant energy the way some people are. They are built to see, to read systems and people and situations with extraordinary clarity to guide the energy of others, to be the one in the room who sees what everyone else is missing. And when I read that, I sat very still for a very long time because I had spent years trying to be the engine. I'd spent my whole life trying to be the engine, running at full speed, generating the energy, doing all the things for all the people, being everything to everyone, and wondering why I was so relentlessly bone deep exhausted in a way that other people didn't seem to be. Wondering, I'd spent my lifetime wondering what was wrong with me and why I couldn't just keep up and why the hustle that seemed to work for everyone else was slowly breaking me. Here's what I discovered when I looked at my human design map. Nothing was wrong with me. There had never been anything wrong with me. I was just a projector trying to operate like a generator. I was an excavator operator who had been handed a shovel and told that was the only way to dig the hole. The moment I understood my design, something relaxed in me that had been clenched for a decade. Not because I suddenly had all the answers, but because I finally had permission to stop doing the thing that was never mine to do. And here's what I want you to take from that. Even if human design is not your thing, even if that framework doesn't resonate with you at all, there is a version of you that is specifically, uniquely designed to do this work in a specific way. And the odds are very high that you have been overriding that design for years. You've been pushing when you were meant to rest. You've been initiating when you were meant to wait. You've been forcing when you were meant to trust. The 7D excavator is the practice of coming back to your own design, of trusting the quiet signal that arrives before the logical argument catches up. It's the call to make the decision that your gut said yes to before your brain could talk you out of it. The 7D excavator is the house on the list that was out of your price range, the bonus that arrived when you needed it, and the price that came down after six months. It's every time you have said yes to something that didn't make logical sense and it turned out to be exactly the right thing. And it's every time you've said no to something that looked perfect on paper and something in you just knew quietly, clearly, and without explanation that it wasn't meant to be yours. That knowing is not luck. It is the most underused excavator in most women's businesses. So here's what I want to leave you with before Audio 5. I want you to think about one moment in your life, in your business, in a decision you made, in a door that opened when you were not forcing it, where something arrived that you could not have planned for, where the thing you needed showed up in a way that logic cannot fully account for. The truth is you probably have more than one. Most of us do. We just trained ourselves to call it coincidence or to file it under lucky and move on, because we were taught that the only things worth trusting are the things that we can actually explain and push and make happen ourselves. But what if that knowing that quiet, clear arrives before the logic signal? What if that was your most powerful excavator? What if you stopped dismissing it and started building with it? We've talked about the practical layer, the physical layer, and then now Audio 5 is the last one and it's the one that's going to tie everything together. We've talked about the practical layer, the physical layer, and the deeper layer. Now I want to show you how they all work together and how to figure out which one is your specific entry point, which one is the first excavator move that is going to break your particular plateau wide open. I will see you there.