The Human Design for Marketing podcast™, with Yvette Mayer

How An Open Heart Center Can Hijack Your Marketing

• Yvette Mayer • Season 3 • Episode 206

Share episode

If you’ve ever tried to take a real break and found your body wouldn’t let you, this story will feel uncomfortably familiar. I planned a long van trip from Sydney to Tasmania, tied up loose ends, and promised myself lighter work days. Then the ground shifted: my senior VA stepped away, $30k vanished in a crypto hit, and my once-reliable ads softened. What followed wasn’t just logistical chaos; it was a front-row seat to my open heart center’s favorite role The Prover driving me to validate my worth through output, numbers, and grit.

I walk you through the messy middle: guilt for stepping back when business was strong, the awkward blend of bad weather and spotty reception, and the tension of onboarding new help from a campground. When loneliness spiked, I chose regulation over endurance and flew home early. Within 48 hours, hugs and real conversation did what dashboards couldn’t. Returning to Tasmania with a friend, we went fully offline-hiking, kayaking, no signal and I watched the proving impulse surface on mountain trails instead of sales pages. It was humbling, clarifying, and oddly freeing.

We dig into Human Design as a practical lens, not a label. An open heart (will) center often seeks safety by proving value, and awareness alone doesn’t resolve it. I share simple ways to build a marketing rhythm that respects your nervous system: pre-scheduling core content, setting guardrails for ad tinkering, standardizing team onboarding, and using prompts that separate service from validation. The goal isn’t constant alignment; it’s enough regulation to choose visibility without self-betrayal.

If sales feel scary or showing up feels like a threat response, you’re not broken...you’re protective. Press play to hear how I’m redesigning support, reframing worth, and laying the groundwork for a new series on the “safety roles” of each open center and how they block sales. If this resonates, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick revie, tell me where you feel the urge to prove and what helps you soften.


----------------------------------

Please come say hi!
Join the Human Design for Marketing FB group, here where I go behind the episode scenes and answer your questions
Follow me on IG
Checkout our YouTube channel
Download your Human Design chart
Download your custom
Human Design for Marketing Reading (report) + Frieda 🤖
Book a Human Design for Marketing reading with Yvette
Get the Cosmic Creator Kit
Join the Frequency Project
Join Souled Out Offers by Design

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, hi! Welcome to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Yvette Mayer, and this show is for you if you're done with cookie cutter marketing and ready to build your personal brand in alignment with who you really are. I'm a marketing expert, human design nerd, and intuitive business coach who's helped hundreds of women just like you to elevate their frequency and activate their most magnetic personal brand. Each week we'll dive into practical tips, interviews, conversations, and more to help you create an aligned business, a positive contribution, and of course, an abundant life. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. I'm Yvette, who brings you this wonderful podcast less regularly than I could have been of late, although I am feeling excited to be back in the podcasting seat and to return with more regular episodes. I will say last year was quite crazy with the amount of travel that I did and just different major life events that um unfolded for me. And I do find that the podcast uh in relation to other types of content feels like something I need to be more organized for and have a plan, and therefore it can feel like it is a lot more to carry. That is partly on me because I don't regularly bring guests on, and maybe that's something I will look at implementing this year so that you get to see more incredible humans doing spiritually um aligned marketing type of work and business uh this year. But for today, I thought I'd start it off, I'd start us off for the year with a somewhat personal reflection of my last couple of months. It's gonna come back to my design and something of a breakthrough that I've experienced, which I know is gonna be relevant to the majority of you, uh, around things like what stops you showing up and where parts of your energy can create systems, shall we say? Your body creates systems to continually uh help you be safe. And some of those safety systems are actually sabotaging you, uh, not because your body is evil, but because it is driven for survival. And that is not always going to serve you when it comes to growth. So we're gonna talk about that, but we're mainly gonna talk about it, to be honest, as I reflect on how uncomfortable I felt at times in my business over the last couple of months, and how that has played out around what I'm doing in 2026, how I see uh not just my results, but the future of my business and why taking a lot of time out of the business has been a great mirror for me and really illuminated some areas of opportunity, some spaces and places that I needed to feel into and I needed to be distraction-free to do that. So I'm gonna wind back a little bit to the end of last year. Uh, as I got towards December, I had booked in a couple of months of van life. Very exciting. My first real long trip in my van. Now, when I first bought the van, I kind of thought maybe I'll do a lap around Australia at some point. You know, I can work from anywhere. I love to be a nomad. And after that, it's been two and a half years, I didn't go on any really long trips. In fact, I have been something of a weekend warrior. You know, I've been away for for more than a week, but honestly, on longer trips, I have spent more time staying in Airbnbs than in my van itself, because whilst I'm nomading, I don't feel super professional or actually it's not even that. I don't feel like working as much when I'm in my van. I want to like explore. I want to park up by the ocean and stare at the waves, not be in productivity mode. So there's something in that, and you know, all of this can be um looked at through our energy. But it's a truth for me. That said, I always wanted to take a longer trip to see uh is this just noise? Is this mental storytelling that's keeping me uh in my routines? Routines of not staying in my van when I'm working, basically. And also I had a story running that I don't sleep so well in the van. I made the decision, I made the decision that I would go on the longest and furthest trip that I've ever taken, which was from where I live near Sydney in New South Wales, all the way down to Tasmania. And I would spend six, seven, eight weeks. I actually didn't really know when I first booked the return trip. I had to book it and lock it in because there's a boat that crosses between the mainland and Tasmania and Australia and it sells out, especially if you're taking a van. So I booked it mid-year. I booked it to travel at the end, no, early December and then return in the middle of January. And then I had a friend say, look, I'd really love to do some of this trip with you. She works in corporate, she doesn't can't take as long off or away from her working life uh as I can. And so we uh locked in a trip where she came in to Tassie after Christmas and we spent two weeks together. She also rented a van, and so we had two weeks in a a group of two in a couple of vans, uh, and that was that was spectacular. But that's not what I'm here to do to tell you about my my holiday. I'm actually here to talk about what happened with my business, my nervous system, and how I felt during this trip because it wasn't comfortable. Honestly, it was not comfortable. So when I left, I had been in hyper focus mode, like get lots of things done, get all of the selling or get out in front of all of the sales pushes before December, so that I have the luxury of only working a couple of days through December and then into at least some of January, definitely the first half of January. And so, number one, I needed a transition. I couldn't go from all in on my business to zero without my nervous system going, hey, why? I was I was too in the rhythm of working and working hard. But I tried. So I really tried immediately to go from working, I don't know, eight hours a day, at least three days a week and more, um, you know, a few hours at least on Mondays and Fridays, because I I generally do three full days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and less hours on Monday and Friday. So that I'd been, I don't know, I'd been in the in the high productivity mode. When I got into the van and I was moving around a lot, I had a couple of things happen in the first week. Uh, the first one was some guilt. Like it's just the beginning of December. My business has been firing. What am I even doing, leaving and being in my van right now? Like it just did not feel comfortable. I then got hit with some pretty average weather. Uh, and so you would think that I'd be like, that's fine, I'll go and sit in a coffee shop and I'll work and I'll be really on. But there's a there's a truth that also existed with this, and that is that a lot of me once I got into my van, checked out. So I had the energy rushing through me and the guilt showing up, but I also wasn't available for working a lot of hours. Like I I was like, no, I have done all of the work so that I don't need to be in any form of high productivity, and I can really enjoy this exploration because I I took the long way down to Tasmania. I had I spent the first week travelling through uh southern New South Wales and the coast of the east coast of Victoria, and I was stopping in places that I have never been before, having experiences that were brand new for me. And so even though I had the like guilt and the what am I even doing, I also had a real resistance to doing long hours. Uh I also had gosh, I had so many things going on right around this time. But the big one that happened business-wise is that my long-term senior VA support decided to uh take time out, potentially indefinitely, uh without notice. And this is somebody that I treasure and have worked really closely with for a couple of years, and I did feel like, you know, the wall was pulled out from under me because I was just about to go on this trip. And part of the reason I'm able to do this kind of travel is because I have a really strong support system in place. And so for my like second in charge, let's call it, go-to person to not be in the equation right at this time, that did put a lot of extra pressure on me. Also, as I left, I had uh I had I had money stolen. Let's just put it like that. I'm not gonna go into all the details, but I had$30,000 disappear from my life. Uh it was through crypto, is the is the short story. And that all of these things happened just as I left. And so I'm like, I don't, I don't even know how to how to cope with all of these conflicting things going on, like this scarcity that's showing up because I've just had this money stolen, my right-hand human disappearing, that keeps all the lights turned on and oversees my junior support. And then I uh you know very quickly took on a new senior VA. Uh, but that was difficult as well because that meant having to do work to onboard. And you cannot bring someone new into your business and expect them to figure it out without help. And I probably didn't do a great job of that because I didn't have time in my schedule, time that I made, uh, to do that as effectively that as I would have at another time. Like if I was doing it now, it'd be entirely different. So all of that was going on. And then as I got to Tasmania, the weather just was very mixed. And for me to even see the best of what this incredible state of Australia has to offer, I really had to pick days when I could see that the weather was going to be my friend to do some of the major experiences and plan my work around that. So for the first couple of weeks in Tasmania, all of this was swirling. And then add into this, I have had a lot of softness with my ads in the last few months. So, beginning of last year, if you've been in my world, you you may have even found me through my ads. And I had six months of consistent high profit and quality humans coming into my world through my ads, and it changed the scale of my impact significantly. And also my ability to be less on when the ads themselves were growing my visibility and attracting the right people into my world that would ultimately not just buy maybe a low-ticket product, but stay. Now, this was probably the hardest thing to deal with, is that whilst I'm traveling and I'm used to holding a certain level of mount uh sorry, a level of cash coming through every month, this was going backwards. And I did not have the energy or the desire to breathe life into my ads in December. It wasn't that I did nothing, but I had given myself this space to properly enjoy my travels and to focus my energy into this area whilst I did it. It just wasn't optimal. And it wasn't like I was gonna do something new or go in a different direction. It was more like what can I do as simply as possible to keep the lights on, kind of thing. And that that was true through the entirety of December. Now I am being very, very open with you because I always am, let's be honest. And I I share my chaos. And yes, this is another example of difficulty at the beginning. I definitely had difficulty at the beginning of my van life travels. And what really started to uh land with me during this time is that I have a strong relationship with how would I put it? Proving that I can do anything, and that means uh if things uh soften, so uh in the middle of last year, I can be traveling Europe and working an hour or two a day and having abundant months, and life is amazing. That gives me life, it gives me value, it gives me meaning, feeds my open heart center. And when I take the same set of uh of um not the same set of variables, but you know, six months later, when I'm giving myself this break and time out and reducing load, doing it sensibly by building cash flow in advance, it doesn't matter how successful I've been. Like last year was over a$450,000 year in the business and you know, giant leaps forward from where we've been in years gone by. But rather than hold that success, a lot of the time I felt flat. Flat is the right word, like frustrated, flat, uncomfortable, annoyed with myself because I wasn't having a good enough time. Now I ended up uh diagnosing the problem as loneliness, and it was definitely a factor. I mean, spending this amount of time on your own, it's not for the faint-hearted. I was literally on my own in the van for three full weeks without connecting with anybody that I know personally one-on-one in in real life. I mean, yes, I was talking to people on the phone and I was having Zoom calls and I was working with private clients, all of that good stuff. But I wasn't like hanging out and being friendly and feeling somebody's energy in person. And add all of the other thing that things that were going on with me, it got to the point where I just didn't want to be there anymore. And it wasn't Tasmania, Tasmania is beautiful, and I I was very aware, like I don't hide my challenges, my blocks from myself or from you. I don't hide them. I look at them, I work with them, I grow through them, and yet in this instance, the growth move for me was to stop trying so hard to be the person who can work two hours a day and not care if things are wobbly financially, or more wobbly, I shouldn't say wobbly, and be on their own all the time and be responsible and take care of myself. Uh like just trying for all of that to be okay and you know, bring on a new staff member. Let's just throw all the rest of it in there and and navigate the the um the crypto scenario. In the end, I gave up and said, you know what, I just want to be with my family and friends. I don't want to be here anymore. So I ended up flying home to Sydney, which I was always going to do, but I ended up flying home to Sydney a few days early. And it was the best decision ever. Within 48 hours, I felt my self-re-regulated, like my nervous system started to settle. You know, the hugs, the love, I love you, the quality conversations. You just can't beat that. And I'm I'm really actually proud of myself that I didn't tough it out because that is something that I tend to do. Like I just want to prove that I can do anything. So that's all true. And then went home, had Christmas, had a fabulous time, spent a week in Sydney, caught up with friends, caught up with family, like amazing, amazing. And then I flew back to Tasmania to have two weeks with uh another friend who was coming in from Queensland. And I knew this was going to be very different because I wouldn't be on my own. I was in company all day, every day. And I also wasn't working at all. This was like turn the computer off. Half the time we didn't even have cell reception. So I couldn't check, I couldn't be hyper-vigilant, I couldn't do all the things that I normally do to like give myself some sense of security. Uh, and we were hiking. So it was a very physical, out in nature, lots of time to thinking. Uh, but no, what would I call it? None of my normal stimulation and probably cortisol injections that I get through my business were happening at this time. Like I am offline, I am doing things like a 19 kilometer walk on News Eve. We did that. Oh my god, walk. I should I should say hike. Like it was steep. We we went up to a very um quite significant. It wasn't a summit, we did that later in the trip, but it was it was a It was a it was a big mountain. It was high. Uh and that was that was also challenging. Oh my god, I have to tell you, I'm a very competitive person. I don't know if you've picked up on this, but I am. And the friend I was traveling with is extremely fit and very fast on land. I would say I'm more of a water baby. I wasn't expecting that she would be running rings around me when we were hiking to the point where I was often losing, like I was just running out of breath. I was running out of breath and feeling like, oh my god, like I need to catch up and like really trying to pick my feet up, but then not enjoying it. And you know, I'm in my mid-50s, my body was hurting. That was fascinating to just witness myself in this environment. Like, I'm not working, I'm not there's like there should be no comparison itis, no, nothing like that going on. And yet here I am trying to get myself up the mountain faster so that I keep up. Uh that that was very present. We also went kayaking, my goodness, we went kayaking in the in an area called the Tarkine, which was just stunning. And I had high hopes that in the boat that maybe I would be quicker. I was not. Another example of her just taking off and and me scrambling behind, trying to keep up and not look like I'm not fit enough or I'm not strong enough, because clearly I am. So that all happened. And as time wore on, I really started to look at myself more deeply. And I do a lot of personal development work, but I was really looking at wow, this is so interesting. That on the one hand, I am having the best time. Like that this these couple of weeks were incredible, like seeing incredible landscapes and you know, watching penguins coming out of the water at night and wombats like in the middle of Cradle Mountain and jumping in little streams in tiny free camping spots. That's all happening at the same time. I'm offline, so I'm not seeing messages come in. I know that they're coming, like occasionally, like we'd be at a summit and I'd get all these notifications, but once we were down again, I'd be out of reception. So I couldn't check back in with people. And I also was telling myself, like, you've told everybody you're not contactable, it's okay. Or most people. But over the course of all of this, the biggest thing that I started to do was think, gosh, my open heart has a lot to answer for. This pattern, now I know that them like a lot of us have an open will center, an open heart center. Over 50% of the population do. So I know that if you're listening to this, a lot of you are going to share this with me. And this is actually why I decided to talk about this, because I wanted to talk to you about the open centers and how much we can learn from them and see what's going on when we're aware and present and actually looking at it and doing the work to move through and set up support systems so that we don't allow things like open centers or our not self to run the show. Now, for me, my open heart center is something that I I look at my mum's chart, I I've shared this on the podcast before, and my own. We had we both have the same thing, not a single gate defined. So completely open. And when I share with you everything that unfolded over the last six weeks or so, the biggest theme was me trying to prove myself over and over and over again. I am still worthy. I am still worthy. I am still worthy when I'm not earning as much. I am worthy of having this time away from my business. I am proving that I'm as fit as you by trying to keep up with you. I am proving how successful my business is by sharing my income results with you. Like all of this stuff is going on, on and on and on. And it really got me thinking about how, as leaders in the human design space, I think we need to get beyond diagnosing the problem. I'm not saying it's a problem to have a lot of open space because I have and I have a lot. It's getting beyond the understanding and into living in a way where it helps us. This is where I think there's more work to be done. And this is my humble opinion. What I can see is that where we're not consistent in a particular like so just to lay it out, if you're newer to human design, especially, where you're defined, you have consistent energy. Where you're open, this is energy that comes, turns it on and off, depending on your environment and other things, like the people you're around. But essentially, what I observe is that our open centers it's an instability in the center, like it's not safe, it's uncertainty. Okay, so it's uncertain. So we'll use the wheel center as an example. I don't have a sense, a consistent sense of worthiness. Will that change? Unlikely. This is how I'm designed. I don't have consistency. It's not something that will heal, that I'll move on from, that I'll say, I deconditioned that. Come on, no. Uh and yes, it is conditioning, it is mirror, we do grow. However, we do not have consistency here. So the more powerful move is to not just understand it, but to be aware when it shows up and to meet ourselves there with tools that support us, particularly around our nervous system. Because I think the the biggest challenge is we get dysregulated when we're being protected, shall we say, by a center. It's like trying to do its job to keep you safe. So for me, and for a lot of you, with an open will center, that center is trying to become more certain by protecting me. And the strategy is I will prove my worth. And that shows up unconsciously. So over and over and over again, at the unconscious level, I am running this center in its uh in its inconsistency. And it's not my body, my body like trying to destabilize me. It is instead my body trying to make it safe. Make it safe. Prove yourself, prove yourself, prove yourself. That's how we get safe. But it's a false economy. It's a false economy. This safety mechanism is robbing me of my peace. And I can imagine that it's doing the same for you. Now, the anecdote to that is not, I will say a million affirmations and it's just going to go away, or I'll see it and I'll release it in an instant. It's actually meeting it there and doing the work to release that somatically. Now, I'm not a somatic teacher, but I I can say this that what I've learned through being in this kind of pressure cooker type scenario of analysis of, yes, I have an open head, I like to think a lot too, um, of what is really going on here, I realized that the longer that I was off work and off all of the stimulus that I usually have feeding me and helping me prove my worth, the less I cared. But what was also happening was I was processing this and I was moving. I was moving my body a lot. I was slowly but surely letting go. And I was regulating myself. Like that amount of uh journaling, hiking, swimming in like ice cold water and going into saunas and red, like I've done, I did all of those things. And by the end of it, I felt so much calmer, but not healed. I felt that there's a part of my work that I think is coming through me, which is how do we work with these aspects of ourselves that do show up and block us from sales and marketing? They are very present. And I I have a, you know, I have a huge community of incredible humans who oftentimes tell me that they're showing up is their biggest block. Like it's becoming visible is the hardest thing. And I know that part of that is the awareness of what's driving that, and it's a safety mechanism. Where does it live? How can they work with that in their design and see it? And also, what is it going to take for them to regulate through that and help them feel or connect into the healthy expression and not just healthy, but regulated expression in any given moment, not consistently, but in any given moment. And so I wanted to share this with you very vulnerably and truthfully, because it's been so real for me, but also as a setup to the next episode, which I'm going to record, which will be about the roles that we unconsciously play in our open centers, or the roles that centers themselves play to try and keep us safe. And a little bit of a clue for you: the role of the open heart center when it comes to safety is the prover. Okay, so that's just the first one, but we're going to talk about all of them on the next episode and how these centers and this behaviour is actually blocking you from sales and marketing, but sales in particular. So I can't wait for that. Uh, thank you for being with me for this one. I trust there's been something in here of an eye-opening or a reality check. Maybe you could relate. And I look forward to being back with you again soon. Bye for now. Thanks for tuning in to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button, tell your friends, and extra brownie points, go leave me a review. I would so appreciate it. There are heaps more resources in the show notes. I can't wait to be back in your ears again soon. Bye for now.