A&A Ep. 93
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Karrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to Awakened and Alive After 40.
Dominique: If you're searching for inspiring and easy to apply Enneagram and Human Design content, then you've come to the right place. We're your hosts, Dominique
Karrie: and Karrie. Two friends and coaches who are passionate about sharing our knowledge and insights on these two powerful self awareness systems to help you step outside the box and into a life that is true to who you really are.
Dominique: We're so grateful to have you here. Let's jump into today's episode.
Karrie: Welcome back to the Awakened and Alive After 40 podcast. We are so happy to have you here listening to this episode today because we think this is a pretty important topic for anyone listening out there because this is something we have all experienced at some point in our life, maybe especially [00:01:00] more when we were younger and a little more susceptible to outside opinions about how we should be living our lives. But today we want to talk about what it means to outsource our power to someone else and some ways we can start recognizing that in ourselves and to break that habit in order to build some more self trust. Dominique, I'm curious, especially thinking back to your younger years, did you have some moments in your life when you maybe relied on other people's opinions of what you should do rather than your own inner wisdom?
Dominique: I did that quite often, to be completely honest. I know I've shared on the podcast a few times that I was greatly disconnected from myself, besides dissociation, disconnected from my body. I had very little trust in my abilities, in my knowingness, and for me, that's [00:02:00] what handing over your power or my power is all about, is a lack of trust within the self. And so that's been a big part of my journey throughout the years as I've been working on getting to know who I really am outside of societal and familial conditioning. And like you said, it's something that I think every one of us has been impacted by. I get excited about this because I'm even noticing more people in my direct environment and world starting to become more aware of how they might be handing over their own power and starting to make changes towards that. It just gets me excited to see that within my friendships and people I care about. How about you?
Karrie: Definitely. I have a very specific one in mind, actually, because I revisit this in my own reflection a lot. And this is back when I was in college. So I was [00:03:00] around 18, 19, 20 years old, trying to figure out the direction I wanted to go and what I wanted to study. I wouldn't admit this to myself at the time, but I really felt pulled toward more the liberal arts. I was taking Latin, and I really loved my Latin classes and I thought, oh man it'd be so fun to major in this. But I had in my head I just knew everyone would say when I said I'm majoring in Humanities or whatever the major would have been called, I just imagine everyone saying, what are you going to do with that? And I didn't want to have to deal with that question. So I ended up majoring in business because I knew no one would ask me what I was going to do with a business degree because in our society that is a quote unquote valid degree, and everyone is like, you'll definitely just find a great job out of college with that degree. I remember even choosing my specialization within the business degree based on what one of my friends, now he's my friend, but at that time he was my friend's [00:04:00] boyfriend, said to me just about, oh yeah, you should major in finance, like choose finance as your specialty. I didn't even want to be in finance, but he was just like, you'll make good money if you major in finance. I think, how would my life be different now if I had majored in what I wanted to or just blocked out all of those voices and opinions during that time of my life?
Dominique: Yeah. And I think it's so easy too, if we see people in our lives that are successful in whatever way you term successful as, and like your friend through a very loving way recommended that area for you. But at the same time, it's just like really all about checking in with ourselves and learning how to do that. It's so easy to see what is working well for somebody else and think that, Oh, it should be the exact same for me. It'll work out fine, and I just need to push through it and then maybe eventually I'll start to like it [00:05:00] or be happy in that area. You know, the whole grass is greener on the other side thing. When it comes though to outsourcing power, I want to just kind of share a little bit what we've, talked about before recording here, Karrie is what that might look like, and so our listeners can maybe have a little bit of an idea of within their own lives. And so there's three areas that we really view as major areas and that's health, success and happiness. It's a great thing to start looking at these areas of your life and asking yourself, what ways might I be outsourcing my power? So if it's in health, are you expecting your doctors, the practitioners, to have all the answers for you? Or are you recognizing they're human beings as well. They are limited with what they can do because of the system, because of insurance, and they're just doing the best they can. For myself, that was a big one, where I was [00:06:00] diagnosed at a very young age with anxiety attacks, when I had never really experienced what you would consider anxiety, and my body told me that's not what it was. And doctor after doctor was like, oh, you're young. You're healthy. You're a woman. You're probably having panic and anxiety attacks. But I wouldn't take that as an answer because I knew my body well enough at that point. And turns out through my own research, through pushing for more answers, it was a very deeper diagnosis that came about through the diagnosis of POTS. Now because I didn't take that as my final answer of just anxiety, I have been able to do a lot of healing and better understand my own body and health. Success is another area for all of us. Are we, like you were mentioning Karrie, outside of ourselves when we hear people talk about what is successful in society within their families. [00:07:00] Even looking at big corporations and mentors was a big one that came up for me because over the years, and this is recent years, I have had to catch myself whenever I meet a new potential mentor that just glows with all of the thought and knowledge and education that I am desiring, I am tempted to automatically want to seek their support through mentorship. I have really had to pause and ask myself, what is it that I believe they have that I don't? And I think that's a really big one, especially for those of us who are seeking new careers or seeking greater spiritual alignment or connection to the self. Of course, we're here talking about how we're coaches and it's a beautiful thing, but how are you viewing that? Are you viewing it with these corporations or society or mentorship because you don't have enough or [00:08:00] know enough? So success can be a tricky one. And then happiness. That's, I think, a huge one. Are we really focusing on other people's opinions? Are we blaming others for our discomfort or current place of being unhappy or struggling in some way. That was a big one for me over my years. And then also another one I recognized was my choosing to remain a victim throughout the years instead of taking my power back and being the one to choose what direction I wanted to go in my life. So I think with these three major areas, pausing, sitting, journaling, or just simply reflecting and asking yourself, okay, in my health, success, and happiness, how or where might I be handing over my power? When in reality, it's something that we already have the answers to. But it's about building that trust as well. What are [00:09:00] your thoughts on those areas, Karrie, and do you have any ways that you've worked through or you've noticed how that has played out for you?
Karrie: One thing I wanted to mention on top of the happiness piece that I think a lot of us do because I think it's just our human nature is allowing other people's opinions to shape how we see ourselves, which directly impacts our own happiness. When we don't cultivate a relationship with ourselves and a love for ourself and compassion for ourselves, then those outside opinions can impact us on a deeper level. And that's when we really let our power go to other people when we aren't able to allow other people's opinions to slide off us because we are so secure in our own sense of self.
Dominique: That's a beautiful point to make there, and again, one that I absolutely [00:10:00] resonate. I feel like that has been and will always be a lifelong journey for myself, for sure. And a lot of that, like we've been talking about the building of trust in knowing that you know what is right for you, and only you know that. And so I'm curious, Karrie, through the lens of the Enneagram, are there particular types that might be more susceptible to handing over their power or looking outside of themselves for answers?
Karrie: There are. I've talked about these types before in other episodes because this theme comes up a lot in what we talk about on here, but I'm going to give a little bit of a more complete picture today because I think it can be very nuanced, right? Obviously, we all have the ability to outsource our power in one way or another. But through the lens of the Hornevian Triads in the Enneagram system, these are also a lot of times referred to as the [00:11:00] Stances. This is one of those groupings where we take the nine types and we put them in groups of three based on similarities. To me, there's like a hierarchical outsourcing of power, if you will. Or where there are types that depend a little bit more on outside resources, people, institutions, rules, or whatever it may be, to guide their decision making. So, those three types in my opinion, the most likely to outsource their power group is called the Dependent Stance, and those are Types 1, 2, and 6. These three types tend to look outside of themselves whenever they're trying to get their needs met. The direction of movement, so this is a bit of a metaphor or an abstract idea, of these types is toward. So they go toward other people, or they go toward safety, or they go toward other people's opinions, or maybe a set of rules or boundaries that help them feel secure or like they're [00:12:00] doing the right thing. On the other end of this, so the least likely to outsource their power is what we call the Assertive Stance. These are Types 3, 7, and 8. They tend to just push through, actively pursue whatever they are going after without caring or worrying about anyone else's or any outside opinion. So their metaphoric direction of movement is against. Anything that gets in their way, they just plow through it. They force through, they go against this. And then in between these two groups is the Withdrawn Stance. These are Types 4, 5, and 9, and they tend to withdraw. They look within themselves to get their own needs met. So they're not really looking outside of themselves, but they're also not pushing away anything else, so it's more in the middle. Their direction of movement is away. So they move away from people just so they can go within themselves. It's not that they're actively [00:13:00] pushing those people, like there's no forceful against-ness, like with the Assertive Stance, but they also aren't going toward people, seeking other people's opinions and thoughts on their life or decision making process.
Dominique: That's really interesting to me because as you're talking about the 1 and the 9, of course, because me being 9, and I'm like wondering when I was younger, how that might have looked because I was very withdrawn, because that was like a whole safety thing, keeping the peace withinside of me, I knew that I could only, I didn't know, I believed that I could only trust myself for certain things, and that was probably for the bigger decisions and things, but for those smaller ones that pertain to like friendships, what kind of music or clothes or things like that, it was very much looking outside of me to see what everyone else around me was [00:14:00] liking or not liking. I'm kind of just sitting here trying to put that together in terms of the small things and the big things for decisions.
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Karrie: Well, and I think, you know, when we're teenagers, mm-Hmm , most of us are very influenced by our friend group and the trends more than our own self knowledge of what we want to be interested in. I think it's just a developmental normal thing to have happen where we very much rely on our friends opinions to help inform [00:15:00] our own opinions and who we are. So yeah, the teenage years might not be the best time to reflect on this because I think we all tend to look outside of ourselves during that time. For me, this has been really eye opening about myself when I learned this because I would have never thought I was like a dependent person on other people. But I can definitely see how I, as a Type 1, have really looked toward a set of very specific guidelines and rules to inform myself. So when I look outside of myself to make an opinion or to outsource my power, it's like, what is the right way to do this based on whatever set of arbitrary rules I created in my head or that I acknowledged in my head as being valid. Breaking out of that has been a big part of my work is just understanding that just because these rules exist doesn't mean I have to follow them.
Dominique: Absolutely. It's interesting when I look from the Human Design lens on ways we [00:16:00] can start to reclaim our power or even cultivate greater trust within ourselves, authority stands out for me and strategy as well. Strategy and authority kind of work together. But authority is your inner compass, and strategy is how we would take action. We've talked about many times how as Projectors, our strategy is to wait to be recognized and then invited to share whatever it is that we have to share. But the authority is knowing if it is right for you, this experience coming into your life. And so the types of authorities that I want to speak of, there's five types. There's sacral, which is an in the moment gut response. And every Generator type is with a defined sacral. So they will naturally have this like deep knowing that something is a yes [00:17:00] or a no. And we call that sacral response a nonverbal communication, so it's like this, uh-huh, or uh-uh, sound that they will actually get internally. But if you have pure sacral authority, you can go ahead and take action if that thing that you are responding to feels right for you. If you have emotional authority as a Generator even or as any of the other types, emotional authority is not making decision in the moment. It's taking your time. It's waiting for clarity and the whole process of waiting, which ultimately every single type has a period of waiting, whether it's waiting for internal alignment or external, the waiting helps to avoid possible regret later on. If you're too quick to make a decision, and later on, you're just like, Oh, why did I say that? I wasn't even in the right space [00:18:00] when I said yes. So that's the beauty of waiting, and with the emotional authority, again, whether you have a defined sacral center, or if you're another type, it's all about waiting for deeper clarity. We've talked about you having an emotional authority, Karrie, and the emotional authority has waves that they work through where the waves of varying levels of emotions day to day, feeling high, feeling low, wherever you're at, it should always feel like a yes to you. There's ego authority, which is a type of authority that needs to have the energy available or resources in place in order to take action. And the reason for that is because the ego, the Will Center, that's our center for self value, self worth. If you have low sense of value or worth and you're pushing through energy that you don't have because you're trying to [00:19:00] prove your worthiness, to prove your goodness and value, then that's when you could be making decisions out of alignment. So ego is all about making the decision that feels good, but having the energy to actually take action. Then there's splenic authority, which is in the moment. It can be spontaneous in decision making. It is like a ping. It is so quick and then it's gone. So with the splenic authority, that is something that really takes time to learn because we can often question like, huh, was that real or not real? Was that my intuition or was I just imagining things, because it doesn't necessarily speak again in the same way. So splenic authority is in the moment. Lastly, there is self authority and this lumps a few other things under it as an umbrella. So mental authority, which that's what I am. There's self-projected authority, which is for individuals who have a [00:20:00] G-center that is defined, they're speaking from the self. And then all Reflectors or in Quantum language, Calibrators, are also considered a self-authority because they follow through a lunar cycle and through that lunar cycle, they are just feeling into how their energy shifts and changes within themselves. If we can really connect to the authority that we have and our strategy for taking action, this is when we are making decisions in alignment for ourselves, not for anyone else but for ourselves, that are going to lead us on the path that we are meant to be on.
Karrie: Another piece about authority that I forget who I heard say this. It might have been Jenna Zoë on her podcast at one point. For some people I think the word authority can be a little bit triggering, but I heard someone say that this isn't at all and like you just [00:21:00] said, Dominique, outside of yourself. This is learning to trust your authority, which is you, which is your higher self. It's not anything else. It's not an authority outside of yourself, which I think so many of us are conditioned to hear the word authority, and we imagine something outside of ourselves controlling us. But this is about learning how to read your own inner Intuition and has nothing to do with anything outside of you. It's really getting to know your own intuition and higher self at this trusting level that you can completely trust it, so you don't need to seek anything outside of yourself.
Dominique: Yeah. And that's what I love so much about Human Design is that it is designed to teach you how to be within your own knowingness, your own energy, coming back into the body, not getting stuck within the mind and overthinking and seeking outside of yourself. Human Design is all about bringing you back into yourself, your body, your [00:22:00] own knowingness, like you mentioned, your own authority to make decisions that are aligned for you, because only you know what is right for you. What are some steps on how we can stop outsourcing our power and gain greater trust in what we already have within ourselves? What do you have, Karrie, that you really enjoy to do?
Karrie: Well, the first one is what we just finished talking about. I think if you're interested and if you feel pulled toward learning more about your own Human Design, deeply learning about your own authority is step number one because it gives you sort of a blueprint or a plan on what to do in order to start cultivating your own sense of power. Learning to trust yourself can take time. And one of the ways that you can start to do that is to make a promise to yourself and have it be something small, something you know you can follow through on, whether it's a small habit you want to [00:23:00] start cultivating or something you just want to bring back into your life and actually do it, because if you tell yourself I want to run five miles every day. Okay, that is not very realistic if you're not running any miles right now, and it's going to be easy to break that, thus you don't trust yourself. But if you make a promise to yourself to not pick up your phone for the first 10 minutes of your day, when normally you pick it up immediately when you wake up, this is something you can do. This is a very achievable goal. And when you start doing that, and you see, I can set something for myself and I can do it, this is the first step towards building self trust.
Dominique: Yeah, huge. It's absolutely huge. I love that you brought up the thought of running because right away, I think it might've been from Atomic Habits when I was reading that book. I really recommend it. When we talk about running and trying to develop a routine or a [00:24:00] habit out of it, starting with just putting on your running shoes. Every morning put your running shoes on and then take them off, and that's where it's then like, okay put the running shoes on, walk out the door, walk back in, take off the shoes. So like even those baby steps, like you mentioned, Karrie, if you're not running at all and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, yeah five miles every day or even if it's three days a week, yeah that for me that would set me up for a failure right away. But those tiny little baby steps are huge. Another thing from The Holistic Psychologist, she even talks about just make a promise that you will drink a glass of water every morning after you climb out of bed. These tiny little things are gonna really end up being massive life changers when it comes to creating new habits. On that topic of learning to trust yourself and creating a new habit, one thing that I love to do is to think about interrupting a pattern that is happening that is not serving me [00:25:00] any longer. If the pattern is quickly or instantly going to someone else for guidance on, say, a question, and it can be even basic, like, should I cut my bangs? Instead of just automatically going outside of yourself to ask somebody else's opinion, pause, put a scratch in the record. If your mode of operation is instantly going outside of yourself, put that scratch and first check in with yourself just a second, just like, huh, I wonder if I really would like to cut my bangs? And just sit with that for a moment. And then if you really want somebody else's opinion, go ahead and ask them. But you're interrupting the pattern of the thought instantly going to somebody else, whereas now it's a thought, check in with yourself first, and then if need be, go ahead and seek some other person for some input. But it's putting a scratch in that record because it's habitual. Start [00:26:00] it off as a habit, and it can be reprogrammed with consistency and just in three weeks you can make huge strides towards reprogramming a habit that no longer serves you, because ultimately, again, only we know what is correct and aligned for ourselves and the life that we are desiring to create.
Karrie: Thank you for listening to this episode. Your support is so appreciated.
Dominique: If you'd like to have a question answered about your Human Design or Enneagram type in a future episode, you can submit it through the link in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.