Nicole Laino (00:30)
Hello and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design. I’m your host, Nicole Laino And if you’ve listened to this show for a while, you probably know that I used to be an actor, that that was what I did before I became an entrepreneur. And in acting, I studied something called Meisner technique. Sanford Meisner had created this technique and craft that was built around truly being present or in response to what’s happening in.

in the moment. And there’s an exercise in it that we all had to go through. I did a two-year conservatory with this. And for the first like six months, we just do this exercise called repetition. And I remember the first time that we did it, we all sat in the theater in the in the studio room that we worked in. And you know, very much like an acting studio that you think of everything’s black. The the chairs, the walls, the

floor, everything is black. And when we’re in there, we’re sitting in these chairs facing each other. And what we have to do is say the same word back and forth. So you just sit there staring into your partner’s eyes and you say watermelon. And they say watermelon. And you do this for what feels like forever.

Now you get used to this, because like I said, you do this at the start of every class. We did it for the whole class at the start for a long time. And then eventually you graduate to doing it at the start of class and then you start doing other things. But for a long time we did this and we just went back and forth. And then you change partners and you would do it again and you would do it again. And I hated it, and most of us did. And I don’t hate it now. I once you see the value in it and you start to understand how it works.

It actually creates so much presence. But almost everybody hated it in the beginning because if you didn’t do it right, if you weren’t really in it, it made you so totally self-conscious. It showed you how uncomfortable you were just being and allowing the moment to be the moment. You notice how much your attention is on yourself.

And that’s honestly the point of the exercise is to get you to take your attention off of yourself and to really be present because if you’re present with somebody else, you can’t be self-conscious because all of your attention is on them. But it’s an exercise and a skill you have to build to truly be in the moment. And you just have to be of service to the moment, is the whole point. Character work and acting was much easier for me.

and more enjoyable, but it was much easier because I didn’t have to bring me on stage. Kind of the whole reason I got into acting. Well, not the whole reason. I had lots of things that I loved about the craft of acting, but I really loved the character work because I wanted to disappear and be somebody else that felt really attractive. And I have lots of issues

With being on stage as myself. Not so much anymore. But we all have issues with showing up as ourselves, especially at different levels. Because why it was easier for me to show up on stage as a character is because if they judge the character, they’re judging her. Maybe they’re judging my work, but maybe it’s like the way I thought about the character that it didn’t capture her.

And trust me, you can definitely take you did a crummy job personally, but online when I’m being me, they’re judging me. On stage, when I’m being me, they’re judging me, or it feels that way. When I show up as something different and they have an opinion or a thought about that, that’s very vulnerable because that’s actually who I am. So when we’re looking at leveling up.

In our businesses, in our lives, the conventional way to look at it, is what actions do I need to take to get something that I want? I want more money, I want more success, I want more visibility, I want to be chosen. So what actions do I need to take in order to make that happen?

But actions are only part of it. It’s the identity that makes the action possible or sustainable or not. And this is a really key point that most people will miss. And it’s why they stay in a loop of taking action but not being able to sustain that action. Or taking action, but it’s not really working.

Especially around visibility. You’re not really showing up and being visible. You are showing up and you’re still hiding.

You know, we’ve all done the work where we’ve shown up for a challenge or something like that for a few days, only to snap back into the old patterns we had before. It’s because we changed the behavior, maybe muscled our way through or hustled our way through. We never changed the identity that created the behavior. So if you’ve ever had a moment where you have stepped up, maybe you’ve had a big launch, maybe you started to post some reels.

Maybe you have gotten more productive for a time, or maybe you’ve raised your income level

But then you snapped right back to where you were before.

If you’ve ever had that happen then this episode was made for you. So, in this episode, what I’m gonna break down is why the next level of you feels like a threat, even when you really want it badly. We’re gonna talk about what your human design G Center has to do with it. And then I’m gonna give you at the end three steps to move beyond the identity that’s keeping you small. Okay? And if you’re interested in this topic, we actually have a

guide on this, a free guide. Just DM me the word shift on Instagram. I’m at NicoleLaino Official or go to NicoleLaino.com forward slash shift and you can get the free leading from identity with human design guide that we have. Okay? So let’s get into it. Why does a new identity feel scary? Well we’re often not thinking about it that way. But there is a version of us that we feel safest as.

Or we’ve been made to believe we have to be. Sometimes our results are tied to that identity. We become known for something, and it’s hard to believe anything else could be as successful as that. So something like, i I’m known for human design. Sometimes it’s hard for me to talk about anything that’s not human design, because it works.

Right? I’m the human design person. That’s wonderful to get known for something. But then when you want to expand what you’re known for, that is a growth edge. You have to shift that identity. Corporate dropouts go through this all the time. They lose confidence after they leave because they no longer have that title. They don’t realize how much of their identity until they leave and they have trouble was wrapped up in.

That job and that title and the success that it brought them, that feeling of I am somebody. And now suddenly they don’t feel like they are somebody anymore. But they were always somebody. We know that. When we’re on the outside, we know that. But when you’re in it, that’s very much a different a different task, the different level. Because

It’s easy from the outside to look at it and be like, you are somebody now. We don’t look at you any differently. But they have to overcome that. They have to change it because they are the ones who attached the identity to the job. And now they have to unattach it. I see this all the time. And again, I’ve done this, so I understand it deeply. I was a corporate dropout. Well, I’m still a corporate dropout, but I was a corporate worker. I worked on Wall Street for seven years. I absolutely

had an identity attached to being successful and being a multi-six-figure earner and all the things that came with that. And then when you shift, and I see this with clients all the time, they shift to being a coach or a healer and they have trouble coming out of that closet because they’re afraid, people will look at them differently, that it’ll threaten the relationships that they have.

So our industry, and by industry I mean marketing, social media, the coaching industry, the industry of being seen, says just show up and be seen. Just do it. What it skips is the fear of judgment underneath all of it. You can show up everywhere and still not let anyone see you.

And that’s why we do the thing and we don’t get the results. There’s so much more to this than just doing it. And sometimes we have to do something because we can fall into the healing trap. And we’re waiting for some magical moment when we feel ready. Sometimes action is needed, but sometimes the action is not the whole thing.

And if you’re finding that, it’s the identity piece usually that will snap this into place and start to get you actually moving forward and moving up with ease and with sustainability, where you’re able to get to the level and hold it. Okay? So let’s talk about the G Center. The G Center is the center of love, purpose, identity, and direction. So it’s at the center of the human design chart, it’s the little diamond.

in the middle of the human design chart, excuse me. And i if you think about this, I want you to think about how it’s at the center of you, it’s your heart, basically, that it’s this energetic center of you where your self is held. How you relate to yourself. Do you do that in a defined way or an undefined way?

By defined it would be do you do that in a consistent way, or do you do that in an inconsistent way? Does it feel like you’ve always been kind of the same person, maybe on different journeys? That would be defined. Do you feel like you have been changed and and shaped more by the environments that you’re in? And the I I think about undefined G people like the feather floating on a breeze.

They have to be so open to themselves and things changing like water, right? So at the center of you, do you have something that feels very fixed, or do you have something that feels so open? Both come with their gifts, both come with their challenges. Now, the gift of having a defined G is that it is kind of a inside job.

So might feel like you have a little bit more control to change it, right? You know your path. Your path feels like you have been on your path, that you are becoming who you need to become. And a lot of times, defined G-center people will often feel like they know who they are, right? The work for them is trusting that they are on.

their path of their purpose and just trusting that and allowing it to happen, right? That’s a lot of times not terribly difficult to them when I ask people who have a defined G center, a lot of times they will say to me, Yes, I’ve always felt like I had a sense of self. I’ve always felt that even if I didn’t know where I was going, the path was unfolding for me. Like I I know I’m on it. And I know when I’m off it. Like I can feel

The clicking into place and clicking out of place, like on a train track. I can feel when my wheels are on the track and when they’re not, right? So that’s the define G. The challenge for the define G is that this is always going to be something that when you want to level up and you want to change your identity, you’re going to have to change the tracks. And if you think about if we were changing the tracks of a train, of an actual train, you know, it doesn’t seem so easy.

I’m thinking I’m getting a vision of like the railway yard. You know, you’ve got to pull them all into this place where it’s neutral. they have all the different train tracks where you can shift which path they’re going down. What if you had to lift the train? That’d be hard, right? You know, to get those wheels back on the track. If it fell off, if you wanted to change the track, you might have to go all the way down to the station, to the railway yard.

And pull into some area where you could shift to be on a different track. There’s a process to it, right? So you have to break the identity is sort of the the the way that I think about it. And now the undefined G, they absorb the identity of the rooms that they’re in. So the changing can be easier. The trust that who they are is okay, that it’s enough, that

They have a sense of self, that they have a sense of direction, that they know where they’re going, that’s the hard part for them. The shifting part can be usually a lot easier once they get the trust in what is right for them, that their path won’t be linear, that it will feel much more fluid if they can get comfortable with that and they get into the right rooms around the right people, they can often absorb that next level identity very, very easily.

Now staying there is the ongoing trust. So the G Center plays a huge role in how you approach the identity work. And I’m often thinking about that and looking at that when I’m shifting people’s identity in programs like BBD, where we are doing this all the time. You know, the process of leveling up is always leveling up our identity.

And there’s a multiple-step process that we’re gonna go through right now. There’s a framework for moving beyond the identity that’s keeping you small. So let me walk you through this. There’s four steps. So first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna name the old identity. You’re gonna kind of try to see what you’re holding on to. And if you think about that, like I think about my corporate job, you know.

If I could see that I was holding on to the version of me who handled everything, who took orders from a lot of people, you know, I waited for a boss to tell me what to do. I had a lot of parameters set around like the job and showing up. And I wasn’t a manager there.

I managed some people, but my job, I had bosses and managers who gave me the work to do. And I did a lot of visioning work and worked on those, greater paths and roadmaps that we were implementing, but I was much more of an implementer there. So then put me in entrepreneurship, I kinda need a whole new level of skill. I need different things. And I needed to look at that from a

identity perspective of well now I’m somebody who decides what should be done and what doesn’t need to be done. I have to make those choices. I have to get up in the morning and motivate myself. I have to have those roadmaps and I have to be the one who does that. So that is the the way that we could start looking at that. Now

I was leaving a role where I it was very, very linear. And I had to think about all of my friends who might think that I was crazy. Starting a podcast in a business around human design. You know, it didn’t start there. My business started out as business coaching, as marketing coaching, as, you know, helping people with their personal brands and all of that. That was less of a

Of a leap, but once I came out with human design, there was a whole bunch of identity stuff that I had to let go of, you know, that I was the sensible one. And not that I was always the most buttoned up in my corporate job by any means, but those people were. Would they still like me? Would they still get me? Would I still be welcome? You know?

Am I afraid of what other people will say, not just the people who knew me then? But like I’m gonna talk about, you know, cosmic shifts like of 2027 and these things that are happening. I’m gonna talk about energy and attracting with your energy, you know, wasn’t the easiest thing. So I had to recognize where I was attached to an old identity, being the person who taught business versus the person who teaches human design. so identify the old identity.

What are you holding on to? Now the second step is you’re gonna catch the habits that belong to that old identity. You’re gonna see what habits or things am I doing that are associated with that old identity. So for example, for for a lot of people, it’ll be you launch a podcast, you do five episodes, and then you let it drop.

you put a post up and then you don’t do another one for one to two weeks or sometimes longer. there is this: I step out and then I hide. I step out and then I go back. I step out and then I go back. It’s not sustainable. You haven’t shifted anything. So those are the habits that you are identifying. You’re noticing where am I not able to keep moving in a direction of my choosing, and how is that somehow associated with my old identity? Step three.

Is now you have to act as the new identity. So you need to identify what would the new identity do? What would be different? If I were this person, then how would I behave? And if you have a defined G center or an undefined G center, that’s gonna shift a bit of how you approach this work. as an undefined G, you might have to get around those people in order to really know what that is, rather than it being a list of your tasks.

you have to feel what the new identity would feel like as opposed to the define G center, where you might just have to be able to explain it to yourself. Okay. you probably won’t be able to fully overcome all of these things without some healing. But it’s these first three steps. So you might say, like, well, I’ve tried that, none of this sounds very different.

what’s different about this, Nicole? sometimes I want to do the things that are associated with my new identity, with my next level identity, but I can’t do them sustainably. That’s where the healing comes in. And the difference between the way I look at healing and the way a lot of other people and coaches look at healing is I don’t think that you need to go on this grand healing journey necessarily, where you aren’t taking any action. It’s the action that shows you where healing needs to occur.

And that’s why we work on this stuff. I’ve talked about this in n pretty recent episodes, where healing is not a one and done thing. It is a constant thing. It is hygiene. It is a habit that you build. It’s something that’s part of your routine so that you are constantly expanding and creating space for the new version of you. It’s what I use EFT and breathwork for.

This is how when we meet resistance, you have to ask yourself what part of me does not feel safe, and then meet that part in you and expand it. That’s what these tools help you do. They help you release the hold that these old fears and patterns have on you. So that’s how we break it down. So I hope that this episode opened that up for you, where you’re getting to see.

How your old identity, is what’s keeping you small. That it’s an identity shift combined with very intentional action and then resistance work on what’s keeping you from taking that action that actually helps you create a new identity and live in it. Okay? And if you’re interested in the free guide, all you have to do to get it is DM me the word shift.

On Instagram, I’m at Nicole Laino Official or go to Nicole Laino.com forward slash shift and you can get it there on our website. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you. And remember, in order to have an unshakable business, you must first become an unshakable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakable with human design. We’ll see you next time.