Nicole Laino: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unshakeable with Human Design. I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and I’m here with a guest today. I’m so excited. I love having company on the show, and it’s been a long time. So I’m really excited to have this guest on with me. I have Marisa Hohaia. She is the anti hustle coach. So you know that I love this.

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, her vibe totally fits with what we do here. She is the anti hustle coach. She’s a mom of two. She’s the founder and CEO of Breakup with Busy, and she works with driven yet unfulfilled females. Hello.

Exactly same. Same, same. Showing them how to use their thoughts and energy to attract and manifest what they really want. More joy, money, purpose, and time with less stress. Hustle and self sacrifice, but it doesn’t stop there. She was also before answering her calling as a coach, she spent a decade as a top executive in global recruiting with Fortune 500 companies and high growth startups like West Elm, Nestle, DHL, and Heinz.

So I am so happy to have you here, Marisa. Welcome to the show because you’re a [00:01:00] woman after my own heart. Ex corporate, found that was not the way, really said let’s let go of the hustle, and then turning that into what you do now.

So, a woman after my own heart. Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Marisa Hohaia: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to chat today.

Nicole Laino: Yeah, I’m really excited to chat with you too. We’re going to be talking about self doubt, which I know is a topic and a theme that comes up for a lot of people who listen to this show. No matter what level you’re at, I think you’re dealing with some form of self doubt.

Can I do it? Can I do it again? Can I get to the next level? Is this okay for me? Is this safe for me? We’re always dealing with that self doubt. So before we dive into the topic, I do want to say that you are a 3/5 emotional generator. I like to let people know what the guests are so you can see it play out and how it’s playing out in their life, their business.

And while you’re listening, you might even hear little elements of their design. And I’ll of course be calling those out as I see them.

What didn’t I cover in [00:02:00] that bio? What else is there? How else would you like to introduce yourself to everybody? What would you like them to know?

Marisa Hohaia: I think one of the things I would add to that and I would elaborate on is, I’m really on a forever journey. And I think we all are, right? So, all of the things that I’ve done, the transformations, the different positions I’ve had, the different careers that I’ve explored, they’ve all been part of a bigger journey and it’s a forever process. And I think sometimes we look at people who have made these big shifts and we’re like, oh, I want that same shift and we really want it to happen overnight, or we think that we should be able to do it overnight or it’s not meant for us.

And it certainly didn’t happen for me overnight. And every day, there is some element at every phase of doubt that is present, connecting back to our topic today. And I really just want to [00:03:00] normalize that experience and also help people understand how they can change the way that they think about themselves and about the world, and then act differently in order to create whatever life it is that they want for themselves.

So for me, one of the biggest game changing lessons that I learned was that I was the creator of my own life. Once I accepted that, then everything opened up and shifted for me.

That’s all that I would add. I have a whole long history and story. I’ve lived overseas. I’ve done a lot of different things. I’ve had a lot of experiences, but that’s where I’m at now, and I can share that at a later point in time with anyone who’s really curious in diving into my whole background.

Nicole Laino: Okay, yeah, well let’s talk about who you help and what is it that you notice? Do you work mostly with people who work in corporate? Are you working with entrepreneurs? I know you reference it as unfulfilled women. Are they unfulfilled in work? [00:04:00] Are they unfulfilled in life?

What is it that you’re seeing the common thread, and how does self doubt show up with the people that you’ve been working with?

Marisa Hohaia: So, I work with a really wide range of women, and whether you’re in a corporate career, or you’re a stay at home mom, or you’re an entrepreneur. We all have these moments, right, where we look at our lives and we’re like, I’m not sure that this is what I wanted for myself.

This isn’t really what I pictured, or what I had imagined, or it is what I imagined for myself, and I worked really hard to get it, but it’s not really what I want deep down. So the women that I work with, from whatever background are all experiencing a common thread, which is this questioning of life.

This questioning of how did I get here? I’m not sure that this is really how I want to continue. And there’s something within me [00:05:00] that is calling. There’s a void, or there’s a sense within me that there’s more. And that’s not necessarily always tangible things like money, or sometimes it is, sometimes it’s really a true strong desire to do a certain career.

Maybe it’s to go into PR and to help people with messaging. But whatever it is, it all ties back to this common thread. These women that have found themselves in a life that doesn’t feel like their own in some way shape or form, and they don’t know how to change it.

So sometimes they’ll come to me saying, I think I need a new job, or I want a divorce. And they’re pinpointing some of these surface level changes that they could make that maybe right now seems like the best, most viable solution to “fix” the problem [00:06:00] that they’re experiencing.

But what they haven’t yet discovered is that it’s much deeper. And it’s really not about any of those surface things. It’s about purpose, and connection, worth, and a lot of times trauma.

Nicole Laino: Right, and the outside world is the thing that they’re pointing at. They’re like, I don’t feel good so let me look out here and see what I don’t think is working. I think it’s my husband, I think it’s my job, I think it’s this. And sometimes it is.

Sometimes we’re being moved. I remember when I left corporate, I went into like clinical depression and when I dug into myself it was like I don’t belong here anymore. I know that this is part of it. This job is no longer right for me. But it was an inner journey that illuminated that.

Sometimes there are things that need to move, but it’s almost like they move themselves when you do the inner work. When you start doing the inner work, they really start to come at you and focus in a very different way. And are [00:07:00] illuminated in a very different way. I had a call with a client today who was talking about these relationships that they’re starting to see are not really correct for them.

But from this very neutral place of, as I’m doing the inner work, it’s showing me what in my outside world no longer fits this new version of myself that I’m creating.

Marisa Hohaia: Absolutely. And that’s when you can learn how to break out of this hustle mentality, which is, I don’t like the way my life is, so I’m going to take my energy and I’m going to spend it outward. I’m going to project it outward to doing and I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to change this.

I’m going to fix this. I’m going to apply for all these jobs. I’m going to do, do, do, do, do. And what you’re talking about, I love, is turning that energy inward.

Nicole Laino: Hmm.

Marisa Hohaia: And looking within yourself to really get curious and understand, what more is [00:08:00] there? Really understanding that experience, those feelings, that knowing. Tapping back in. There’s a message in there that is trying to reach you.

And when you turn that energy inward, and you start healing, and you start reconnecting with your truth, and you start repairing your negative self talk and your limited beliefs, then to your point, it just starts opening up.

And that’s what I’m trying to teach is, don’t spin your wheels, you can, but you don’t have to spin your wheels on the outside all the time to find inner peace. And most of the time you won’t because those two things don’t coexist. Burnout and peace don’t coexist. They can’t, logically.

So, try turning your energy inward and see what you can manifest, or create, or attract using that method. But a lot of [00:09:00] people, most people, and younger generations are learning to do this much better than we are. But nobody’s ever taught us how to do that.

So figuring out how to go from that nice pretty idea and concept to actually implementing that in our lives is a completely different animal, right? And that’s where a lot of people need tools and frameworks.

Nicole Laino: Absolutely. And we do see this real trend, just in life right now, there’s a personal development craze that’s going on where people are getting more in tune with themselves and saying no to a lot of the things that they thought were so important before or they put up on a pedestal before, like the big career, or the titles and things like that and put other things in front. And corporations and organizations don’t know what to do with these self aware people now that aren’t so happy being enslaved to them anymore.

And you brought up a good point. We weren’t raised to look inward. My husband and I were talking about this the other night, we were raised to look at [00:10:00] the corporation and the company as everything. The hierarchy as everything, and we’re seeing these shifts now.

So, it shouldn’t be any surprise that the 30 somethings, 40 somethings, 50 somethings, these are the wounds that are being healed, and we’re changing. And kids are being raised differently now, thank goodness. But can you share some of your experience with this? I’m guessing you had some sort of damn the hustle moment where you had to make a change.

Can you share some of that journey with us?

Marisa Hohaia: Yeah. Absolutely. I wish I could pinpoint it to one moment. I think for me, and for most of my clients, sadly, it was a culmination of years of just the same thing before I actually decided I was going to do something about it. The pain that we experience sadly most of the time needs to be extreme.

Nicole Laino: Ha, ha. I had to have like a breakdown.

Marisa Hohaia: Before we actually confront it.[00:11:00]

Yeah.

Nicole Laino: I had to be diagnosed clinically depressed before I was really ready to make a shift, and then the universe steps in and is like, if you won’t do it willingly, we’ll just make you. So, sorry to interrupt there,

Marisa Hohaia: Just you the cliff.

Nicole Laino: But I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying.

Marisa Hohaia: I love that. It’s true. Yeah. And so for me, for majority of my young adult life, I really avoided feeling. I just was not raised in a home where we really felt our feelings or communicated well. And then I hit a couple of road bumps early on in my young adulthood, that thrust me into this hyperactivity mode. I had a friend that committed suicide and I had thyroid cancer.

And I didn’t have the coping skills to deal with those heavy things emotionally. So I thrust myself into a lot of different outlets that were not healthy. And became very codependent on food and alcohol, [00:12:00] and also on producing. Because this is where I lost my self worth.

We often times lose our self worth in these moments of trauma. And so, that set the wheels into motion for me for many years where I was just constantly trying to chase different achievements, my master’s degree, first my undergrad, then my master’s, jobs, relationship, I was just all outside of myself looking for the things to create the life that I thought would make me happy.

Always just thinking, once I have this, once I have this, once I have this, I’ll be happy, I won’t need to go out drinking to feel good.

Nicole Laino: Mm

Marisa Hohaia: And was just suppressing, suppressing, suppressing. And then, I married a professional athlete, and he was very famous and revered in another country, and I lived overseas, and I thought, gosh, how amazing is my life?

We had stories in [00:13:00] magazines, and I came to find out pretty quickly, this isn’t fulfilling me at all. And I had this crazy cognitive dissonance within me. This is what everybody wants. I wanted this. I created this. And I thought that this was supposed to make me happy.

I had the kids, I got married, I did all the things, right? And I was working. But I reached a place when my kids were young, and my son has autism, he has special needs. I reached this place where I was bathing one child and on a phone call for negotiating a candidate’s contract as a recruiter at 8 o’clock at night.

I’ve got another kid screaming in the background. I’ve got my phone on mute. I’m going on and off mute. I’m covered in bubbles. And my now ex husband, at the time, he’s off working, doing all these things. And I’m just looking at my son in the bath and I’m like, oh my gosh, how is this my life?

I created all these beautiful things and I [00:14:00] have no enjoyment. I’m broke. I’m working crazy hours. I have terrible habits. I’m overweight. I’m unhealthy. I have no friends. I felt empty. It felt empty, but it took me a few years even after that to get to the point where I was ready to really rebuild.

And to think that I even could really, that was the piece that held me back more than anything else was a fear of what would happen if I stopped. And I think that’s something that keeps a lot of people stuck in this burnout hustle culture is if I stop, then what? Then I might have to feel the things that I have been avoiding and what does that say about my worth and my value in the world? What will my life look like?

Nicole Laino: Were those thoughts as specific as that? Because I know I’ve faced a lot of those same things, but It took me a long time to get to the point where that question got answered in a good way, in such a real way. It started out with, I can’t afford it.

[00:15:00] I can’t afford to leave. I can’t afford to change anything. Or, I’m too far gone. The golden handcuffs sort of thing, where it’s just like, look at all I have that I have to keep up. Those are the immediate lies that you tell yourself because you’re so busy looking at them that you don’t see the other options.

You don’t even see that there are opportunities outside of that. And, so, I was just curious, did you start there with the profound answers? Or you arrived at them eventually? Because I was like, that’s some deep stuff if you got to that right away. Because

Marisa Hohaia: No, I didn’t

Nicole Laino: hell know I didn’t start there.

I started out with here are all the reasons I cannot do this. I didn’t get to, oh my god, it will shatter my image and identity that I hold for myself.

Marisa Hohaia: I did not get there right away. Absolutely not. Those are the limited beliefs that were underneath the fear, that were underneath the dialogue. And those I uncovered through my trauma work and through my inner healing. Actually, when I [00:16:00] did my trauma informed coaching certification. Because obviously I had to do my own trauma work to be certified in that. And I did that for a year, and that was where I was able to start connecting the dots between the excuse or the thought and the limited belief underneath.

Because a belief is just a thought that we continue to think. So, we use it quite interchangeably and they aren’t actually the same thing. So the belief is the command underneath, which typically sounds like the ones I listed off before. I’m not good enough, I’m unworthy, I’m incapable, I can’t use my voice, all of those phrases, but they don’t often surface as that, they surface as something else that sounds a little bit more like an excuse.

And so it takes a lot of work to get down to those limited beliefs. And we all have three to five of them that are really common within us that rear their ugly head in different ways.[00:17:00]

Nicole Laino: And this is how they end up becoming some form of your own self doubt. They’re your own form of, this is why I can’t do this. It starts out with those very shallow, surface level things like I have these bills to pay, this one’s in private school, and so that keeps us in the safe zone of thinking that it’s the outside world that’s dictating the way that I live my life.

But then when you go deeper, you see it’s actually, I don’t believe in myself. Or I know one core belief that I had to work through was a feeling of being unlovable. When I got really down far to it, when you chip away at that wall and you chip away at all of the things that you’re like, why am I not doing this?

What is holding me back? And you really do the scary work to go into your trauma, into your pain and you come out with, I’m unlovable. I am fundamentally broken in some way, which obviously is not the truth. There’s something about looking at it, at least for me, [00:18:00] where when I got to that point of realizing that it was there, it was such a relief to me, where it was just like, now that I’ve turned the light on in the room, the monster is not that scary. It’s a little kid that feels unlovable.

That is not easy to deal with, but it changes your relationship to it rather than it being this invisible thing that’s pulling the strings and causing you to act in ways that aren’t in alignment with what you want.

Marisa Hohaia: Absolutely. And the saying goes, knowledge is power. And I actually think knowledge and processes are power. Knowledge and tools is power. And I think when you can illuminate that, and then have a process to then combat that, is when you really take back your power. And that was the journey for me.

The first step is always knowing. You have to know. And so you have to do that deep [00:19:00] work.

Nicole Laino: What tools do you use?

Marisa Hohaia: So there’s a couple different processes that I will work through clients with. For me, I have a model that I developed called the rise up model.

It’s a process that people can go through from a high level to create the life that they want, but then also a daily practice. So it’s daily release, connecting with intuition, surrendering, energizing the things that you want, asking the universe for support, and then play, having some fun.

You gotta have all of those components each day in order to overcome and reprogram, right? So the reprogramming happens in what we practice and what we energize. So you could simply start, which a lot of people do, is really just starting with a simple affirmation, right? Affirmations every morning to start to get yourself into a place where you’re willing to believe something different.

Because in the [00:20:00] beginning it feels false, right? When you’re like, I am lovable, I am capable, I can do anything. You’re like, gosh, I sound so cheesy. Um…

Nicole Laino: I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it people like me. Yeah, but I do think that they do set the tone for your day. They do set a tone, to be on the higher side of things than on the lower side. Gratitude.

Marisa Hohaia: Yeah. I am also a certified emotional intelligence coach and I just think emotions are such a gift because they show us what’s going on within us. And so I have a free guide, a five step guide to self confidence, self belief. And it’s the same process that I practice in my own life and that I talk about here.

It’s just recognizing the thought. So when we’ve got an [00:21:00] emotion, what’s going on? That’s the biggest lesson I think when it comes to shifting is just first and foremost, recognizing when you’re having an emotional experience, not shutting it out. Recognizing it because it’s a flag.

So once we see that we’re having an emotional experience, we can go, what is this about? And we can meet it with curiosity instead of avoidance. And when we can meet it with curiosity and go, what is going on within me that’s creating this emotion, that’s creating this emotional experience? Then we can start to pick it apart a little bit.

And then we can challenge it. So if we say, I’m afraid of rejection. Then we can flip the script on ourselves and start to get curious again about what might happen, what positive outcomes could come out of this? And then we can start to talk ourselves into a different narrative. And we can start to practice that over and over again. I can do this. And then I always say take one action. Just take [00:22:00] one action to challenge the fear, to challenge the doubt, to challenge the negative story. Even just one thing each day. Okay, I’m afraid of rejection here. I recognize that’s going on.

I am good at what I do. I have knowledge. I have skills. I have something to share with people that they want. So I’m gonna show up one time today on social media and I’m just gonna share this piece of knowledge that I have with no attachment.

Nicole Laino: Yeah.

Marisa Hohaia: And you do that every single day. You do that over and over again.

That is how you build self confidence. And that’s how you build self trust. And that’s how you overcome the doubt. Is you just continue to keep showing up for yourself, despite it.

Nicole Laino: Right, and I will say you have four motor centers defined in your human design chart, which there are only four, so you have all of them, so there’s a lot of action taking in your chart to begin with. And then you also have what we call a quad left, I think because we had a few minutes movement potentially in your birth time.

So this may not be completely true. One of these might change if [00:23:00] we changed the time, but I believe you’re a quad left. It’s a lot of action taking in it. So I hear it in your method and in the way that you approach things. I always hear people speaking their design and entrusting yourself, you are the cross of the Sphinx with your G center defined.

And the cross of the Sphinx has all four gates in the G Center. There is a sense of self direction and self trust when you are in alignment that just comes. Or there’s always this voice that’s saying you’re gonna be okay. Go in this direction. Just trust me. Just do this and that’s just innate in you. And then with the defined ego, the defined ego is like just do it.

Just commit. Once a day, little by little, we’re gonna get this. And then you’re also emotionally defined, that’s the wisdom and the wrench in the plan at the same time. That’s the one that’s like, today’s just a bad day.

And there’s no real reason for it. We’re just feeling the feels today. And I see this with people all the time, where they incorporate the design into the way that they operate, into the way that they work, into [00:24:00] the messaging that they put together. And I’m hearing how your design is coming through in your business, which I just love seeing. Because even when people aren’t aware of human design, or haven’t been using it, if you’ve done any personal development work, you’ll start to bring things of your design out into the light and some of your strengths just start to appear and float to the surface a little bit faster.

So I love seeing that and I love pointing it out here just so people can hear some of the things that are tied to the chart and how they live out in a person. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this, for sharing your story so openly.

I appreciate you. And tell everybody, where can they stay in touch with you? I know you have a free guide. Tell them where they can download that. And of course, we’ll link everything up in the show notes, so you don’t have to write it down, but let them know where they can find you.

Marisa Hohaia: Yeah, so best place is Instagram. I have that guide, and other freebies, and live masterclasses, things happening all the time on my bio in my Instagram.

Nicole Laino: And what’s your Instagram handle?[00:25:00]

Marisa Hohaia: It’s @marisa.hohaia. It’s tricky. It’s a tricky one.

Nicole Laino: We got you. Don’t worry. We will link that up.

Marisa Hohaia: I know, I know. Yeah.

And my website is breakupwithbusy.com. Going through a bit of a rebrand on that right now, which is exciting and fun. And so that is where they can find me. Yeah, they can find those free resources, and I love it when people DM me with questions. I always enjoy diving deeper.

Nicole Laino: Perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this episode. Remember, if you need to find out your human design chart, go to nicolelaino.com/chart, and you can run an advanced chart that will give you more information than most of the other sites will.

So go there and run your advanced chart and then send me an Instagram and let me know what it is. But thank you for making it all the way to the end of this episode, everybody. We appreciate you being here with us. We appreciate you being here on all of the episodes with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And remember, in order to have an unshakeable business, you must [00:26:00] first become an unshakeable human. So thank you for letting us help you on your journey of becoming Unshakeable with Human Design. We will see you next time.