Welcome to Unshakeable with Human Design, the show dedicated to helping entrepreneurs use human design to shift from hustle to flow without sacrificing results. Come here to become an unshakeable human and build an unshakeable business according to your human design. I’m your host, Nicole Laino.

 Hello and welcome to Unshakeable with Human Design, everybody. I am your host, Nicole Laino. And as always, I am thrilled to be here with you today talking about thought leadership. That’s what this episode is going to be about. We are diving into what it takes to be a thought leader. And we’re going to talk about how that ties in with human design.

That’s the high level of what we’re going to be talking about. So most entrepreneurs have that on their vision board, have that as a high goal that they want to be seen as a thought leader. And I’m no different. I really believe that helps to certainly boost our business. But it’s also something that typically when you get into this work, you have a perspective.

It’s because you have a way of looking at things and you have a way that you want to shape things and guide people and do all that. And thought leadership is very inherent in all of those things. So in this episode, I want to dive into that. And I want to dive into how human design can help you on that journey of becoming a thought leader.

So before we start, let’s define what it means to be a thought leader. I’m going to read a definition, okay? I’m going to read it right off the page because I want to get it down to the letter. A thought leader is an individual recognized as an authority in a specific field or industry who distinguishes themselves through their expertise, innovative ideas, and the ability to guide and influence others. There you go, thought leader. So, probably when you hear thought leader, there are some people who pop into your head, right? And who are they? Who are you thinking of when you hear the term thought leader? Who Immediately comes to mind?

For me, I automatically think of Brene Brown. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think that’s a really common one for people to have come up is to think of Brene Brown. Deepak Chopra, Mel Robbins, Steve Jobs was a thought leader. Now, I’m adding him in here and I’m speaking about him because it’s not just entrepreneurs who do this.

Remember what the definition was. It’s about innovative ideas. And I don’t know if there was anyone who was really more innovative inherently than Steve Jobs. He definitely was an innovator and a visionary. The expertise that Brené Brown, being a researcher and all the work that she has done on vulnerability, shame, and being able to make that mainstream. Really, really, difficult thing to do. Takes a certain type of person who can usher in a conversation like that. To really start that and to get it to be something that everybody is talking about.

Mel Robbins is another thought leader. Malala Yousafzai, Gabby Bernstein, Greta Thunberg. These are the people that I had down on my list of people that I was thinking of because they changed the way that we think. And what they all have in common though, regardless of what field they were in, what industry or what area they were seen as a thought leader in, or still are, regardless of that, these people all command attention.

They all have authority. And when you want to be a thought leader, it’s really about being an authority in your space. It’s you being respected enough that you command authority, that you command attention. This is what sells books. This is what gets people to tune in when you do something on TV, a podcast or something.

And honestly, authority is currency. Attention is currency in this world. We see this with influencers, just the fact that they have the attention of people means that they can command money. It’s something that works. So authority has a monetary value to it as well.

Influence has a monetary value to it as well. You can’t put a specific dollar amount on it, but it’s worth something. It is something you can monetize. And people all over the world do. Every single one of those people has monetized it in some way. They’ve written a book, they’ve made TV appearances, and it’s not all for free.

This is how they make their living, this is who they are. They are thought leaders. And if you’ve ever said something like I wish I could just talk about what I know, and people would want to work with me. That’s a really common thing I hear entrepreneurs say, and I don’t blame you because it it often is how you feel like you would get out of the marketing piece. But they go hand in hand.

So if this is something that has been on your vision board, I want to take a pause here and just say I am teaching a masterclass. If you’re listening to this on the day that it drops, which is January 29th on a Monday, then today is the day where we are starting my Authority Accelerator Masterclass.

Because if you want to be seen as an authority, which is the first step in being able to become a true thought leader, then becoming an authority comes first. This masterclass is built exactly for that, where we craft your million dollar message in three days using human design.

So that’s what this episode is about. We’re giving you a little taste of it, but if you want to dive in deep, if this is something that you have on your list of 2024 wishes on your vision board, then you want to tune into this masterclass. You want to go, you want to show up live. It is a three day masterclass, but we also have some bonus sessions on specifically how you can deliver your thought leadership, how you can repurpose thought leadership content, how you can make that more effective.

We have all sorts of things planned for this workshop and it’s going to be really, really fun. And if you’ve ever taken any of my workshops, if you haven’t, just know that my masterclasses are not like a lot of others. They are not a big, long sales pitch. I really do teach you something. I really do try to change your perception and give you information and help you understand things on a much deeper level. They are truly a masterclass. So on Instagram I’m @NicoleLainoOfficial. If you’d like to attend, DM me the word masterclass and I will send you the link right away or the bot will.

And if you want to go to the website, you could just go to nicolelaino.com/masterclass. Of course, this is all linked up in the show notes for you. So you do not have to remember that stuff, but please go register so you can join us. I promise you it will be worth your time and your energy.

So let’s continue. So, being an authority, stepping into that thought leadership position and saying, I am an authority. Taking that first step into thought leadership by commanding the attention. By becoming an authority in your space. And here’s the thing that trips a lot of people up, because they want to skip all of the audience building and all that stuff.

And what it can feel like is that you’re not getting attention. So it can feel like it’s not possible for you to be an authority until people listen. And the truth is that when you start to become an authority, they start to listen. But become an authority to yourself first.

You cannot be an authority to others until you are an authority to yourself. It is not just what people say. Every single one of those thought leaders that I mentioned before, Brené Brown, Steve Jobs, Mel Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Gabby Bernstein, all of these people. It’s not just about what they say, although that’s important.

It’s not just what they do, although that matters, especially if they’re generators or manifesting generators. It’s gonna have something to do with what they do. It’s their energy. Their energy commands attention. Their energy puts out a vibration of pay attention to me. And that comes first.

Now of course they have to have the expertise. Of course they have to have the body of work that matters. Of course. But I’m assuming if you want to be a thought leader that you have something to say, that you have an expertise, that you have something that you have been putting out there already, maybe to a smaller group, but you haven’t been able to get it to catch fire out in the world.

You haven’t really gotten the message to carry. That’s where the energy comes in. That’s where if you feel small right now, it’s very hard to have a big message with a small sense of self. It’s difficult to get that message to carry because the messenger is just as important as the message when it comes to this.

Even if you have great things to say, even if they are so innovative and different, you have to say them with authority in order to get people to pay attention and take them seriously. So, how does human design tie into this and help with this? There are so many elements of building authority with human design.

Becoming that authority to yourself first with human design. There are eight exactly that I work with and there are so many of them that I actually gave it a name and I call it the Authority Matrix. Which is a sort of cocktail of different elements of your human design, that when you put them together and get them to work where you are understanding them, and bringing them to life, and bringing them into full expression, you naturally become an authority.

You naturally just sing with your gifts, lead with them, lead with this big boldness that is authentic to you, not the boldness that somebody else has and that you’re copying, but something that’s truly authentic to you, coming from your strength, coming from your power. And that ends up commanding the authority that you need.

Now, I’m not going to go through all eight of those. I’m going to focus on one of them now. But I will be sharing all of them in the Masterclass. The replays, I believe, come down February 5th. So, if you are listening to this before February 5th, then you still have time to register, sign up, watch the replays with us, or jump in live if it’s even earlier than that.

So, let’s talk about the one element of the authority matrix that I’m going to highlight here. This one piece is honestly the most crucial. It’s the most important, which is why I’m giving it to you so you do walk away from this episode not feeling like I gave you only some of the formula. I’m going to give you the one that’s the most important, which is your human design authority.

Your human design authority, everybody gets one, is the wisest voice in your chart. It’s the wisest piece of you. It is the piece of you that tells you how you make decisions. And part of being disempowered, part of us not feeling like an authority, part of us not feeling empowered in ourselves is that we are too moved by what other people think, what they think we should do, who they think we should be.

We are trying to be things that we are not, and we’re led by things that are not our true intuitive wisdom, but rather the outside world. When we are in that space, basically what I’m describing is operating out of alignment. When we operate based on what the world expects from us, what we were taught would get us more love, more attention, more money.

When we do the thing that we think will get us what we want, but doesn’t really feel like it’s right for us. And we ignore that intuitive knowing and we do what we think we have to do, even though it feels wrong, even though it feels bad, even though it feels out of alignment for us, we are out of alignment.

And when you’re out of alignment, then you don’t feel grounded. You don’t feel powerful when you’re out of your body. And there are so many other elements of this, but at the core is, am I making decisions that are in alignment with who I am as an authentic being, and what I am here to do, and the purpose I have here on this earth?

Am I making decisions from my power or am I making my decisions from my conditioning and my feelings of not being enough? If you are doing the latter, then you will find that you are not grounded in a sense of yourself. You’re not trusting yourself. When you don’t trust yourself, others will not trust you.

There is an energetic feel of, I don’t know, there’s something off with this. There’s something I just don’t trust. There’s something I just don’t believe about what they’re saying. I think I shared on an episode recently, there’s a person that shares things in her social media. I’m like, there’s something energetically that I feel is off with this.

And I can pick it up when people are out of alignment with what they are saying. And I can pick it up when people have true conviction for what they are saying. When they are really embodied in who they are. And people can’t ignore that. And it looks different for everybody. My authority, my being in my power and the way I deliver things, I’m a 5/1 emotional manifesting generator.

It’s going to be very different than a 2/4 splenic projector. We’re going to very different ways of presenting our authority in an authentic way, but it all comes down to me following my emotional authority. So what does that look like for me? I’ll give you the example of me, and being an emotional authority, and how that helped ground me and was the start of my journey of really becoming embodied in my own authority.

And that was the start of me being seen as an authority in this space. And as an emotional authority, our biggest thing is that we are taught that we have to be decisive. We have to make decisions quickly. We have to move fast. And that never felt right to me. That never felt comfortable.

And I thought I was just scared all the time. So the world told me that I was supposed to do something a certain way. I had a really hard time doing that. I would do it and I would be uncertain the whole time. I would make a quick decision. I would move fast and I’d be scared the whole time. And what did that result in?

That uncertainty, that’s what we manifest with. We manifest with our certainty. That uncertainty always made me feel like I was on shaky ground. So I never felt completely empowered to say what I was saying. There was that energetic thing that was off. And then I got the permission to wait.

Cause that is how emotional authorities make our decisions is we wait. We feel into them. Once I gave myself permission to wait. At first that felt awful. Oh my God, I’m waiting. I’m going to die. Everybody says I have to move fast. I’m not moving fast. Nothing’s going to work for me. I’ll never be successful.

All that went through my head. Trust me. I have a very, very loud inner critic that I’ve had to deal with throughout my entire life. But being able to wait, once I got over the fact that it was scary, once I was just like, I’m going to commit to this.

I’m going to commit to experimenting with it and seeing what happens. And then I did. And I waited. And waiting felt really comfortable. And it was almost like my spirit, my soul was like, oh, finally, we can root ourselves in this body of yours. Finally, we can really be home here because you’re not pushing us away and you’re not working without us.

That’s how it felt. Like it was a dropping in. Like my soul clicked into place. And I haven’t looked back since. Now I love waiting. And I have a very, very different relationship to waiting. So now when I make decisions, I make them from full and complete power. And that’s the first step in authority.

It’s building the authority in yourself, trusting yourself so implicitly that it doesn’t matter what other people say. Because again, if we go back to what it takes to be a thought leader, remember innovation was in there? Remember being able to influence the way that people think? You can’t do that if every time someone says something you second guess yourself.

You can’t be an innovator if you’re going to subscribe to other people’s way of thinking. But also, if you are going to cut and run every time someone says you’re crazy for doing what you’re doing because that’s what innovation is.

Innovators are the crazy ones. They’re the ones that nobody really gets. And they’ve got to be okay with that. You’ve got to be so grounded in yourself that you’re like, I don’t care if this doesn’t sound like anything anyone else has done before. Maybe I’m the first. Maybe I’m the trendsetter. You’ve got to be able to believe that.

And it’s got to come from a place of power, not just fake it till you make it. It has to come from something where you feel led. That’s where real conviction comes from. So this is the first piece. Like I said, there are eight. I’m going to give you the rest of them if you come to the Authority Accelerator Masterclass, which we start on January 29th.

It’s a three day of the main content. Then we give you the day off on Thursday to catch up with the replays because I know a lot of people can’t always make it to the live sessions. Friday, we have a beautiful bonus session for you there. We have another one for you on Monday, and then we have a Q& A.

We have all sorts of things going on. You want to register for this because you do need to be registered in order to go. So, please DM me the word masterclass on Instagram. I am @NicoleLainoOfficial or go to nicolelaino.com/masterclass and sign up yourself right there. We will link all of it up in the show notes for you.

So thank you guys for being here. Thank you for making it all the way to the end of the episode with me. I appreciate you and remember, in order to have an unshakeable business, you must first become an unshakeable human. So thank you for letting us help you on your journey of becoming unshakeable with human design, everybody.

We will see you next time.

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Go to nicolelaino. me forward slash podcast links to join the group, book a human design reading with me or access our free human design resources. We’ll see you there.