That's when everything shifted — but I hadn't fully understood it yet.
Not long after, I ran a webinar on Human Design and parenting. Advertised it for two weeks. Nobody came. I could have called it a failure. Instead I got curious, and realised I wasn't even doing what I actually wanted to be doing. I changed niche and got clear on who I actually wanted to serve.
I thought that was the lesson learned. It wasn't.
Eight months later, the pattern showed up again in a completely different outfit. It was my son's 3rd birthday, halfway through a Brand Accelerator, and I decided not to touch the business for the first two days of our family staycation. Before that, my days had no gap built for feeling anything at all up at 5am, working my day job by 7:30, home by 5pm, bath and bed for my son by quarter to eight, then the laptop back open until 10pm most nights.
Two days of spaciousness and it all landed at once a wall of exhaustion I'd been carrying since the start of that year. That's when I saw it properly: it wasn't just burnout. It was a pattern of overriding what I was actually experiencing and carrying on anyway, because I thought I should.
Two months later, the same pattern found a third shape. I burnt out again twice in two months, something I'd never experienced in 39 years. This time I'd been forcing Instagram to grow my business through sheer effort, creating from obligation instead of joy, drifting further from the thing that actually lit me up: Human Design itself.
Once I had the spaciousness to actually look at what was happening, I stopped forcing it and went back to my podcast publishing on Substack for the first time in eight months, and gaining four new subscribers from one episode. I went back into Facebook groups, showed up as myself, and had one of the warmest responses I'd ever had to a post leading to an invitation to run a Human Design workshop locally.
None of it came from trying harder. It came from finally reading what my experience had been showing me.
That's when I understood the pattern properly. Different circumstances. Different symptoms. Same pattern underneath. None of it was separate failures. All of it was information.
Human Design perspective
When I looked at my own design, I saw the through-line I'd been ignoring. My incarnation cross is the Left Angle Cross of Obstruction. My Gate 60 sits in my conscious Mercury, on a three line. I'm a 6/2 profile. My design points toward learning through friction recognising what I'm experiencing and turning it into wisdom.
I'd been trying to build a business around self-trust and decision-making, while overlooking the very thing my design was asking me to communicate: pattern recognition.