Episode 256: The 3 Stages of Advice to Action
“We receive tons of advice on navigating our lives and our career but no guidance on how to go to the next step. How can we move from receiving advice to receiving help to coordinating the next steps.”
In this episode, I explore how we absorb advice and what we do with it. I break it down into three steps - Awareness, Enablement, and Integration - and then pose thought-provoking questions for an exercise in self-observation with non-judgment.
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“We receive tons of advice on navigating our lives and our career but no guidance on how to go to the next step. How can we move from receiving advice to receiving help to coordinating the next steps.”
Read the Transcript:
Hello there, my friend. Welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura, and I am so delighted to be with you for another episode.
In my full-time work, because this podcast and my coaching practice are my side hustles, I work for a very large tech company.
One of the many things I love about my organization is that they've become very employee-focused since the pandemic, provided unprecedented support, and demonstrated a commitment to the employees.
About a year ago, they started an employee training program where we have two days dedicated to personal development every quarter. It’s an entire conference where we have global sessions with speakers like Brene Brown and Michelle Obama, and then we have regional sessions where we have speakers from the area of the world that we live in come into smaller sessions.
These sessions are broadcasted, and we can participate in an online Q&A where a panel is on-hand to answer questions or simply take part in a chat – like a chat room of some sort.
During one of the latest sessions I attended, one of the comments that I saw posted to the chat feed really stuck out to me, and I wrote it down.
And it said, and I quote, “We receive tons of advice on navigating our lives and our career, but no actual guidance on how to go on to the next step. How can we move from receiving advice to receiving help to coordinating the next steps.”
Isn't this so true? We receive tons of information every day, right? We look at something, hear something, or smell something; all of it is information coming at us – all things that our bodies, minds, and brains have to process.
We receive information from books, magazines, and websites, and from scrolling through our social media feeds – there is no shortage of advice. But navigating it, now that’s a tricky thing.
Having a 3rd Profile Line in my Human Design, I do a lot of experimentation with what I share on Instagram and observe other accounts and what resonates with me and others.
At least on Instagram, I've noticed that some more popular accounts share educational information through shared graphics – single graphics and carousel graphics. Some of these accounts get a ridiculous amount of engagement, whereas others get more engagement from selfies and personal photos.
In my personal experimentation with sharing personal photos and videos versus graphics, I've noticed that the posts that graphic posts, videos, and reels don't get as many likes as photos, but they get an equal number, if not more engagement because they are the posts that are saved and shared the most.
It's made me think about how we take in information and what we do with it. This is a question posted by a colleague, who, by the way, I don't even know who this person is, resonated with me.
What compels us to take action and do something with all the information that we take in and advice that we’re given? How can we move from receiving advice to taking the next steps and doing something with it?
What takes us from “This is nice to know” and “I’m going to share this with my community” to “I want to learn more about this and put it into action?”
Maybe because I’m a 1/3 in my Profile Lines, but if something captures my interest, I will do more to learn about it – at the very least, google or Wikipedia it.
If you need a refresher, the One Line is about learning everything that interests you – finding safety in knowledge, and the Three Line is about trying things out and experimenting. Both have the energy of curiosity.
So, when something is even remotely interesting to me, I’m going all in to learn more and give it a try because, well, - what’s the point? Having an interest in something but not doing anything to me, as a 1/3, is wasted energy.
At my full-time job. I work in Market Readiness, meaning that my team works with Product Management to do everything needed to bring a product to market.
What do we need to do to have it ready for sale? Some think of it as marketing, but it's more than that. It’s the operations involved in processing a sale, how prepared the sales teams are, and how they’re compensated. There's a lot of things that have to happen; an important part of that is educating them to sell the products.
We call that sales enablement. Before being on the Market Readiness team, the other product teams I’ve worked on had a perception that sales enablement is having an hour-long meeting to let the sales team knows what’s coming. Once that webinar happened, we’d consider sales “enabled” because we told them all about it.
But telling someone about something without teaching them how to take action, how to go from “this is nice to know” to “what do I need to do to take action and be successful with it” is not setting them up for success.
We've since evolved our approach to enablement into three stages - Awareness, Enablement, and Integration.
And unconsciously, I’ve structured my service offerings in my coaching practice similarly, miming my progression with Human Design. So, let’s take a look at it:
Awareness:
I first learned about Human Design in 2018. I had a couple of friends who started getting into it and had readings, but at that time, the Enneagram was really popular. But me being me, I wanted to find out my Human Design too, so I looked it up – thankfully, I already knew my birth time – and popped this chart of a body with all these shapes, lines, and numbers.
I had no idea what any of it meant and didn’t have the capacity or interest to figure it out. I thought it was too much effort, so I filed it away.
Eventually, I started following a few Instagram accounts because, at the very least, I knew I was a Projector, but that’s as far as my awareness went. This is the Awareness stage – the “nice to know stage.”
Maybe this is where you’re at – you’re listening to my podcast, and perhaps you may follow a few Instagram accounts. Have even downloaded my free resource called “Your Human Design, Discovered” from my website, which is a workbook that directs you to a website to find your Human Design chart, and then the workbook walks you through your chart so you understand what all the shapes, lines, and numbers mean. From there, you’ve joined my email list. But that’s the extent of your journey with Human Design.
Enablement:
The next stage is enablement. This is where we start to take a deeper interest in our Human Design, beyond listening to podcasts and scrolling on Instagram, and customize our experience.
“I’m a Generator; what does this mean? How does it apply to me?”
“I’m a Projector with a Generator child. What’s the best way to parent them?
“I’m a Reflector, and my partner is a Manifestor. How can we best work together to support one another and get the most out of our relationship?
This is where we start to go beyond just knowing our Type to understand what it actually means and what other components of our Human Design are, and they complement each other to make each of us our unique selves.
In the Enablement stage, I offer Human Design readings, whether individual or partnership readings and self-paced programs that I've begun to offer.
My Deep Rest program is available at the time of this recording, with more in the queue to come.
Deep Rest is my inaugural program that focuses exclusively on our relationship with rest and how we rest and rejuvenate our minds and bodies.
This is important for everything, but it's especially critical for those of us who non-Sacral, those who have undefined Sacral centers - Projectors, Reflectors, and Manifestors, to be aware of how we welcome rest in our lives,
The program takes a different approach to thinking about how we rest. It introduces a Functional Nutrition approach to rest and brings in Human Design and how we can work with different parts of our design to understand how we uniquely approach rest.
It asks you to consider how you can go inward for a self-observation exercise with nonjudgement and ask, “What does this mean to me, and how does this fit into my life?
This is how we start to enable ourselves with our Human Designs.
Integration:
And then the third is integration. Integration is where you get deep into exploration, reflection, and transformation. It’s an entirely personal journey and is where I offer private sessions to guide and support you through your experience.
The private session clients I work with are deeply curious and committed, and they earnestly want to bring Human Design and other things that I teach about into their daily lives, aligning their lives with it.
They want it to be a part of their daily routines and habits, and they want to shift their thinking, perspectives, and mindset to get the transformation they want for themselves.
This was the natural progression of my Human Design experience, and I want to offer it to you too.
You may have heard me say that I’ve tried my best to structure my services flexibly to meet you wherever you are. And this is what I mean by that.
I have clients that I’ve worked with who have never had any experience with Human Design, I’ve had clients who have known about Human Design for much longer than I have but hadn’t yet taken any steps beyond awareness, and I have clients who I’ve worked with who are colleagues – fellow Human Design and health coaching professionals themselves. And I love the diversity of it all!
So, let's go back to the quote that I opened the show with:
“We receive tons of advice on navigating our life and career but no guidance on how to go on to the next step. How can we move from receiving advice to receiving help and coordinating the next steps? So how do you receive advice and help to put those into the next steps?”
The short answer is that it takes you wanting to take the next step.
The onus is on you to know your vision, end goal, transformation, and changes you are willing to make, and then be proactive and look for what kind of guidance and support you need.
Everyone’s goals are different, and the kinds of guidance and support we all want and need are different, so it's up to you to know what that looks like for you and be able to articulate it and advocate for yourself.
Hopefully, the personal development you’re taking in is giving you clues and tools on how to go about finding it for yourself. You have to find who or what is the right fit for you.
This is one of the reasons why I have a weekly podcast and try to be as real and transparent as possible so that if you choose to work with me, you know what you're getting, you know who I am, you know what to expect – there are no surprises here.
As a coach, I've had all kinds of clients.
I've worked with people who are so committed to their journey and are open to experimentation, who are detached from what their journey looks like because rarely does it ever turn out the way that we, both them and me, anticipated. Still, they get to where they want to be. It may be somewhere they never expected, but it's the right place for them.
I've also worked with people who say they want to take the next steps and want guidance and support.
But when it comes to taking action, they're not willing to make the time or the space or put forth the energy and the commitment the next steps require to get the change they say they want for themselves.
This is all about transformation here. So, if you’re searching for guidance and support to take the next step, this means that you want a transformation to come about. Well, transformation literally means change. So, nothing changes if you're not willing to put forth the energy to support that.
Your responsibility is to find the right resources to help you get there.
I want to ask a few open-ended questions, as I often do.
Where are you on your journey?
Are you in the Awareness stage?
Are you in the Enablement stage, where you're just starting to customize your experience and think about what this can look like for you?
Are you in the Integration stage and ready for the transformation you seek?
There's no right or wrong answer here. As I shared, I sat in my Awareness stage for three years before moving to Enablement and then very quickly to Integration. And guess what – I’m still in my Integration stage – it’s a lifelong journey, and I’m here for it!
Follow your Strategy and Authority and see where it takes you!
Always thank you for your time and energy, and I hope this conversation provokes some deep thinking and reflection.
With that, have a great week, and I'll see you back again next time!
Naomi Nakamura is a Health x Human Design coach who’s creating a healthier society through aligned energy.
She blends a bespoke mix of Functional Nutrition and Human Design to help others shift into alignment to leverage and correctly manage their energy to support their body, mind, and spirit.
She believes that when we embrace our authenticity and lean into our bio-individuality, we naturally live a life of freedom, empowerment, and optimal health.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
Connect with Naomi on: Instagram
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