how I found my missing pieces
on mid-burnout discoveries and learning to trust
👋 If you’re new here, hello! I’m Sarah, midlife creative, northerner and 4/6 sacral Generator, here to challenge the old rules and to create safe spaces for change. I support women to discover who they really are at the deepest level, and nurture the confidence they need to take their next bold steps in the world. Today’s letter gives you an idea of why I do this work… do reply or say hi in the comments to let me know if it resonates with you 🧡
Hello you,
I think we can all agree that figuring out what’s missing when it’s actually missing isn’t particularly easy. In fact it’s damn near impossible.
Because we can easily bring to mind what we already know… but when it comes to the unknown, well, where do we start?
I’m thinking back to the early days in my coaching business, 2019, and to the two decades before that spent in a ‘proper job’…
There was definitely Something Missing.
I felt like I was fighting against myself all the time. I was very reactive. Nothing was my fault. The world owed me a living, and a great one at that, so why wasn’t I earning big bucks and skipping around with a grin on my face? How was it that everyone else was climbing the ladder and I was left behind?
Honestly, I was grumpy and resentful and I actually don’t know if I’d have liked myself very much back then.
Missing piece #1 - coaching
It’s too long a story to tell here but the short version; after the years of self doubt and bitterness I realised coaching would have made a huge difference to my self belief and took my career in that direction so I could share this medicine with others…
Now, I don’t know if you are a coach, or you’ve trained as a coach, but one thing that (good) coaching training does is put you through your paces in terms of sorting out your own shit. There is literally no way you are getting through that process without raising (and hopefully taming) a few demons along the way. I can highly recommend it.
I uncovered a lot. I healed a lot.
At the same time I was project managing our new home build and spending many happy hours planting trees, meadows and hedges on our land. I was living the dream. I even caught myself saying “I feel like me!”
This was it, surely, I was done!
Phew…
Only, I really wasn’t. I’d lost so much of myself in my work over the last 20 years that it would take more than the side-effects of learning how to coach to fix this. I continued searching*…
Missing piece #2 - NLP
NLP, or neuro linguistic programming, has the most inaccessible name for what is a bunch of very simple and powerful tools. At its heart it’s about how we behave in the world.
I discovered it through my coaching peers** and I was hooked from day one.
You might wonder what it was that really drew me in… well, NLP tells us this: you are responsible for everything that happens around you, even the ‘bad’ stuff. Which was the exact opposite of how I’d been living all those years. It messed with my head. I sulked a bit lot. And then I got it. I could continue to live at the effect of the world around me, subject to the mercy of everything and everyone… or I could choose to take responsibility for me. To not cast blame and hope someone would apologise and make it better.
Not only that, NLP tells us that “everyone is doing the best with the resources they have at the time”… now, I was pretty good at being judgemental, for assuming the worst in people, and blaming them for my lack, I might have mentioned, and so this brought me up short. It meant I had to dig deep, to see their side, and find some long-buried depths of patience and understanding inside of me.
There was more… so much more.
Slowly but surely I found a version of me I quite liked.
But there was still something that wasn’t working…
Missing piece #3 - Human design
By this point the house was built, the Airbnb was open and doing ok and my work was ‘ok’ too. Thriving if anyone asked, but pretty quiet really. I’d just escaped from a horrendous project that should, on paper, have been wonderful. And I got covid, two years after the lockdown began.
I say covid, and technically it was, but honestly it was burnout. I was exhausted. I felt empty. I cancelled everything and went to ground. Human design flooded into the void I created.
It wasn’t the first time I’d come across HD. It had been tapping me on the shoulder for years. A close friend had mentioned it, I took a peek and it looked ridiculous. My crania-sacral therapist asked me ‘what my design was’… she guessed I was a Projector*** (most people do) but when I re-checked my chart and discovered I was the ‘common’ worker-bee type (Generator***), I put it aside again, no thanks. During a day retreat in the Peaks I sat next to a human design expert and, as you do, I got to showing her my chart. She said some interestingly accurate things and I was intrigued how she knew just from looking at the wildly complicated robot picture… that was what landed just before my covid/burnout/retreat.
I read and read and read. I looked up family charts and started to understand my husband and son better (both Projectors, of course…), I had my chart read properly and started to notice where using my design made my life better.
I made a decision to trust this chart. To use it. To actually live it.
That was where I found the magic.
I rediscovered my energy. I could see why that project had been so awful.
I found I had a whole new language to make sense of the inevitable clashes at home. Like how I see what’s missing or needed in the world and he sees how wonderful everything already is; this difference left me feeling like I only saw negatives and he only saw the rose-tinted (though often impractical) positives. Now I see how we fit together and he needs my viewpoint just as much as I need his****.
I set better boundaries. I stopped trying to be someone I’m not.
And best of all, I realised that I kind of know this already, I know HD deeply, it feels like a natural part of me. Studying it to share through my work was the easiest decision I’ve made. Adding HD’s “how we’re designed” to NLP’s “how we behave” has brought a special dimension to my work in a way I never imagined.
Honestly, all this, my friend, is just a tiny part of why HD is the most magical missing piece.
And it’s not just me… what inspired me to write today was some feedback from a client, she told me:
“Something always felt like it was missing. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it - until I heard you talk about Human Design. That’s when I knew: this was the missing piece.”
And I thought, yes… yes, I see that, and actually, me too.
I thought, I can’t believe how different I am now, and yet I feel 100% like me. I can’t think of any other way I could have got here. I’m intensely grateful for all the nudges I got to come in this direction.
And I’ll continue to share the journey with you!
With love
Sarah xx
PS. The human design geekery bit… (get your free chart here to play along)
*with a line 6 in my profile (I’m a 4/6) I’m designed to spend the years from c30 to c50 in retreat from the world, healing, learning and integrating all my pre30 life lessons, before coming back into full circulation at c50 to be a role model for those around me. I’m 49 this year… and I can’t wait!
**the line 4 in my profile means that I’ll naturally build a solid network around me and that the good things in life will come to me through those connections.
***Projectors are around 20% of the population, here to see how the rest of us use energy and guide us to do things better… they’re hailed as the leaders of the future and, of course, I really wanted to be that. Generators make up 70% of us and we’re here to work (boooooring!) but actually discovering properly what this means has made it joyful to lean into my real self. And why lots people think I’m a Projector is something I’m still figuring out!
****the Perspective arrow is what gave me this brilliant nugget and has saved us from at least 4,000 arguments already…!
If you’d like to discover if human design is your missing piece...
Do join me for an Unpack where I read your chart and give you some real-world, down to earth guidance in living your most aligned life 💫
Or if you’d prefer to properly embed this beautiful work, we can hang out for three months and explore the depths, gifts and nuance of who you really are - but you probably want to book a call and make sure we’re a good fit first - you can book our free chat here.
S xx