Why Your Design Matters More Than Your To Do List

Hello, heroines! This is Alex. Happy Friday! I am so happy to be back with you again today with yet another interview and with Susan, who has a different approach, and I have not brought anybody in yet that does what she does. So, Sue, why don't you just tell us who you are, where you're from, and what you do?

So my name is Sue Goodrich. I call myself the Dragon Whisperer, aka the Good Witch. Gotta bring my magic in here. I'm a transformational life coach. I also coach on business, but I think of myself as a designer, as I was just sharing with Alex. I mean, the truth is I've, you know, designed home, my home. I've designed courseware because I was an instructional designer for many years inside a, you know, training environment, inside an engineering environment. Um, and, you know, now I often coach over business, but I also coach a lot in the business. I know that we are the foundations of our business, so it's really about knowing who we are, like taking care of ourselves, which is the self-love piece. You know, it's knowing how to have those relationships because they're affecting all of us. I mean, I know that all of your— the people that we're speaking to here have come through that relationship piece. And, you know, from being in the drama of relationship, learning how to step into the empowerment place of relationship, and You know, and, but I feel like one of the most powerful things that I know and that I've learned is about no, having several times through my life tapping into knowing who I am, how I'm designed, what I'm made of. And I've really been fortunate to have done this a few times in my life, but it wasn't until I discovered Human Design that I really began to understand how I was designed, and I see the pattern. So I see how other people are designed.

So tell us, for those who are not familiar with what Human Design is, tell us more about that.

Well, it's a little bit— it's based on a lot of different things. It's, it's about 100 years old. Somebody by the name of Ra, I can't even tell you his whole name. He did— he downloaded this, divinely downloaded this information. It's based on astrology, the Gene Keys. I've heard it's also got the Kabbalah in it. Um, recently somebody— I heard somebody said it had also had some of the Hindu, uh, religious pieces in it. And so it's really the patterns. And I know you and I were just looking at your chart, so it comes with a physical chart, you know, that has all these numbers and codes, it looks like, and all these channels and these centers, as we call them. And when you first look at it, it's kind of like, oh my goodness, what is that? But when you begin to understand it and decipher it, I mean, we can pull out your energy type, and we can pull out, you know, what your gifts or gates— they sometimes call them gates, but I like to think of them as gifts. And what I know is that when we have, we have these lines, I don't know, it'll almost be kind of fun to even pull up a chart. But just to, we have all these lines, which we call channels, and there's 32 of those, right? 32 channels. And most of us only have like 2 to 4 complete channels, which means we have the gifts. There's a gift at either end of those. And so those are the pieces that we're meant to do. Those are the things that make us unique. They're the ones that— those are our, those are our really special gifts. Those are the things that we're meant to do in this life and to honor. And I know a lot of times when we're in relationships, we bend and twist and try to fit inside. Yeah, I can remember being in relationships and trying to think that, how do I fit into this, right? Thinking that that's who I was supposed to be. I was supposed to fit into this role model. Right? That, that, you know, that especially that old— I mean, I was born in the '50s, yeah, so I'm 69, and I've never really done anything by the book ever. I mean, I'm someone who had kids at 50. I, I say kids because I decided to have children at when I was 52, and I implanted embryos, and I didn't just have one, but I ended up with 2. So I gave birth to twin boys at the age of 53 who are now 15. So it's, you know, life has its, you know, has a different wave. And we're all designed differently. So we're all meant to do things in a different, you know, path. I mean, even with Human Design. So just maybe even backtrack a little bit based on my design, so you can understand how sometimes your design really has you do things differently. So one of the lines in my profile is a 6, and a 6— somebody who has a 6 in their profile actually has 3 different phases of their life. Now, I happen to have— not only do I have a 6, but my children have a 6, and I can have seen, met a lot of other people with 6s in their profile. And what that means is we have 3 different phases, and our first phase, up to about the age of 30, is just experiment. It's experiment, you know. I mean, sometimes we meet people who know right out of the gate what they're going to be. Like, they know at the age of 3 they're going to be a fireman, and they're going to— they're a fireman for the rest of their lives. I thought that's how one of my kids was going to be because, you know, they wear their little yellow raincoats and their hot fireman hats. Um, but what I know is that it, it can, it can be confusing for people who have 6s in their profile because they're like, oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing. And then in the second phase, we're really meant to kind of be watching, right? But it's only in the third phase as a 6, like myself, that we get to step into becoming the role model. And my role, me as a role model, is very different than, than the average role model, right? There were the roles, as you were talking, as you were mentioning, right? The roles that we all thought that we could fit into. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons why I never actually married. I tried, I tried being in relationships, you know, to have a couple of 4-year relationships, one in my 20s, one in my 30s. And I kept trying to figure this out. And I thought, is there something wrong? Do I just not know? Now, I didn't have a good— I, my parents had 5 conflicting channels when I did their profile. We used to call them the War of the Roses. So you'll know the role model that I I had was not good. So, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me, and I was like, well, what am I missing? What am I doing? What is— and I would— so I just kind of abandoned the idea, which is why I ended up doing IVF at the age of 52, because I had already buried the idea that I was even going to be a mom, because I just didn't think anybody was ever going to love me enough. You know, those places that we go, we think that we're just unlovable, right? Unworthy. Because I thought, well, you know, am I unworthy to be a mom? Like, am I just not lovable enough? Am I not capable enough that somebody would want to make me a mother? I mean, that really is part of my story. And I was in a relationship not too long ago, about 3 years ago, and I was after having not been in a relationship for, I don't know, 50— well, probably close to 30 years, really, the truth. And, but I had done this transformational work, and I was clearing out a lot, doing a lot of my own personal work. And then I worked with a shadow coach because I started dating, and oh my God, I would just like, what is that? My body was like, I was in trauma, right? And so I did some shadow work with, with another coach. You may even know her. She was in, in the same program that you and I were in. And I, so I started to clear out some stuff and I found somebody and we had this great connection. I thought, oh, this is really lovely. But I could feel myself contorting. I was giving more, literally giving more, because I obviously didn't know how to receive. But the other thing that I saw And it wasn't until after he decided, no, he couldn't do this because I have kids and not everybody's into having twin teenage boys. It's a bit of a challenging time of life. Um, and when I learned Human Design, I became really— because it was after that that I learned Human Design. I also learned about, um, a process. I don't know if Um, there's another, another coach that I was following who, uh, he wrote a book called Safe to Love Again, and it's a really incredible book. Really, really an incredible book. And I've actually done some work with him, and he uses, um, family cons— family something—

family constellation.

Yeah, family constellation. And I had never experienced that before, but it was really profound. And he talks about the we in a relationship, and it was like so powerful because it was like, for me as a coach, I can see based on his four pillars of a we of a relationship, I was like, I can bring that to anybody and anything because it's so powerful. And I could see almost immediately where somebody's pain points are, and I can take them through their story really quickly. So, so powerful. But the Human Design piece for me, when I had somebody doing my reading and she was telling me, oh, I've got this channel 1333, which is really the channel of the Storyteller. It's the deep listener, but it's also the storyteller. But to do the deep listening, we need a lot of solitude. So if you have that channel, you may recognize if you don't know you have that channel, you probably don't know that you need the solitude, and you don't know how to take the space for it. Because part of us— at least I was raised this way, I don't know about you, Alex— but raised about, you know, that we're supposed to always be there for, you know, when we're in relationship, we're supposed to always be there and always on and helping and serving and, you know, being all— and I was like, I, I knew that, you know, cleaning house was not my thing. I also have the Sovereign channel. Anyways, go ahead.

No, no, but I was going to say, in terms of always being on, I think it's— for me, that's it. That's okay, and that's a good thing, as long as you also have those opportunities to do your own thing and to have those moments where you can do the things that make you come, come alive, right?

And, and yes, and yes, and because you are a manifesting generator like I am, that we are meant to like be on and go and go, but we are also meant to stop and, and rest and only do what lights us up. Because when we do what lights us up and we take the time to restore, is that we fill from our overflow. We don't feel weak. We just, we don't even have to do anything. As a manifesting generator, you just have to show up. That's the truth. You just have to show up when you're overflowing, right? When you've filled your bucket, right? And we're not taught that, right? We're just not taught that, right? We like keep working and doing, and especially when we're caring for others, or sometimes in relationships, we think, oh, we're supposed to be doing this, we're supposed to be doing this, like the roles as we talked about. Oh, my My role is I'm supposed to be cooking, right? My role is I'm supposed to be cleaning. Well, I don't, for the most part, do either one of those very well. We'd always had a cleaning lady, you know, when I grew up. I remember one day cleaning the house. My mother said, I said, oh, do you like how I clean the house? She goes, we have a cleaning lady for that, Susan. Why aren't you going out and finding yourself a job? So I learned really quickly I wasn't supposed to be doing that. I also have the Sovereign channel. So really, do queens really clean. So, but I do right now, I have to do that. I digress, but that's okay.

Um, I want to go back to what something you said before, which was that you did not know how to receive. And I think that's something that a lot of us experience, myself included. So how does somebody who does not know how to receive, how can they change that and slowly learn that giving is one part, but the receiving part is also important.

Absolutely. I mean, we are meant to give first and then receive. And I've done work with somebody who actually does meditation, and I actually use her format in that, you know, the, the giving and the receiving. So sometimes we really need to drop into our bodies to be able to do that because We need to be open and receptive, right? That's the thing. We need to energetically be open to receive. But I think the one thing— and one, I just, I want to tap into this because I think it's aligned. Is that right? I feel like it's aligned. It's this, it's this, um, it's part of the we that Gary talks about. And I mean, the first one is to be welcomed with joy, right? Like, we always want to be welcomed with joy. But the second one is, is getting your needs met. And I'm going to reframe that word because I— there are— there's power in words, right? We often think— and I've had people that I've coached on that— the word need, we often interpret it as needy as opposed to need. So I'm going to reframe it as requirements, right? We require certain things like We require rest. We require food, like nourishment. We require connection, right? Hugs. We require, you know, that, those kinds of things. But women often don't know how to identify what they require, or they turn it off. I was coaching somebody the other day and we were in deep meditation around this piece and I said, so what do you need? I said, what do you require? She— well, first I said, what do you need? We were dropping in and she was like in this deep space and she said, I'm not human, I don't need rest. And I'm like, you have a body, your body requires rest. And it was so interesting that those were the— like, when we're deep enough, we hear that. And so one of the things— let me just see, let's go back to your question. Yeah, about receiving. So part of that is because we don't typically take the time to identify what we require. Right? And there's a process to learn. Like, this is one of the things I learned in my coaching training was learning how to identify what you do require, because it's easy to receive when you know that, you know, you require that. You've given yourself permission. Like this woman I was coaching, she wasn't giving herself permission to rest, right? So we need to give ourselves permission to get our needs met, get our requirements met. We don't need the other stuff. Really, we just, right, we just need to fill up on what we, what we require. And that might be affection, it might be appreciation. I mean, you've, you've probably tapped into the Five Love Languages. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, like, I mean, so some of us really, like, I really love to have some acts of service, but it makes me crazy when my children won't do anything because I don't have a partner and I don't have anybody doing anything for me. So I get that. And so how do we get into identifying what our requirements are? And we, as adults, we need— we now are responsible for getting most of those met, right? And the way we do that is literally through our emotions. And most of us don't even allow ourselves to feel when those emotions come up. We often just sweep them under the carpet. And so what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to start Identifying what those are, because those, those pieces are gonna tell us what we need. Like I used to wake up, so I had this process that I used called emotional alchemy. And every morning I would wake up, I would do this emotional alchemy piece and I'd be sitting on the couch and doing my morning practice. And it was part of, it's part of my morning practice. And I'd go, okay, what am I feeling? And I was like, and I noticed a pattern. I'm like, every morning I feel really sad. And I'm like, why am I feeling really sad? I mean, it's, you know, and it's be also part of becoming aware, right? Why am I really sad? Well, what am I— what am I needing? And I was like, oh, I wasn't getting enough sleep. I was requiring rest. I was like, why wouldn't I have just thought that I, you know, that I was feeling tired? Well, the truth is I'm a manifesting generator, and when I don't have enough energy I'm gonna feel sad because I can't do all the things that I want to do, right? Yeah.

So it's—

so sometimes that emotion shows up differently, and what we need, what we require— sorry, I keep slipping into the need— but what we require, right, is what we, what we need, need or require to operate at our optimal. Yeah.

And I think the thing too is when there's that uncertainty, when we don't know what I think, like you said, what we require, but also what we want, because I think there's a slight distinction there. But when we don't know those things, the universe doesn't know to deliver that to us. It doesn't bring the right people in. It doesn't create the right circumstances so that we can get that bucket filled.

Yep. And it's our job to get the bucket filled for the most part. I mean, it doesn't mean that, you know, if I want a hug or I want some connection. Yes, I need another person. I mean, there's obviously those things, but I also want a presence that the first time I did this process and I came— they give you, they give you two lists of feelings and a list of, and they call it, still call it needs, but I think I need to go and just cross that out and put requirements. Um, is the first time I saw the needs list, I I was shocked. I was like, I have the right to connection? Because I somehow was— I learned, you know, some crazy story that I made up that it wasn't safe to connect, or it wasn't—

but the truth is you didn't deserve it, or I didn't deserve it.

But I know that I like to go deep.. And not everybody can do that. And I know we just had a conversation about our parents, our mothers, and I know that that's not who my mom is, you know. And so she was not able to meet that requirement or that need of mine because that isn't part of her design. And so sometimes, like, I have this saying, I said, uh, you know, you can ask a question, and sometimes we don't even ask, and we need to learn how to ask as well, which is confidence comes from clarity. So we need to get clear on what it is. And really, Emotional Alchemy is a really awesome way to do this, right? Getting really clear on what, what we're asking for and have the, the humility to be humble enough to be able to ask, to know that it's okay to not have everything. And I think that when you look at the Human Design chart, you can see that there's 30, 32 channels, right? And I said there's only about 4 that we have completed, we need other people to help us complete those other pieces. And we don't need them to necessarily show up and do all that stuff for us. Sometimes just by being in their energy, being in their space. And it's funny how it even happens even in Zoom, I've noticed, right? Like, because you and I are in another group, and it's like when we're gathered together, there's this energy that shows up, and it's because we're supporting it. Our energy sort of fills in some of those channels. But like I said, sometimes you can find the conflict as well.

So I could— I think I could talk to you for hours about this stuff, but, um, I also want to release you into the wild so you can go do your magic. But what is something that you think is important for our heroines to know that we haven't really talked about yet?

Well, really, truly, that not everyone is for us, right? Really, that whole piece. And, you know, I think that, you know, we— I coach on something called the Love Rings, which, you know, about our inner relationships, and that there are people that are our power partners you know, and it could be your relationship, like it could be your romantic great life partner, but it could also be a business partner, maybe a best friend who supports you. And that— I don't think that a soulmate— I know we're often looking for a soulmate, but it's really hard to find a soulmate because I don't think one person can really fulfill all your needs because we really only come with part of those channels, right? Like even when we're looking after our own needs, right? We have another partner who has these other parts that can support us, but there's still all these other empty channels and we need other people. And so sometimes we need a partner who is, you know, helps us in this part of our, our life, and someone else who helps us in another part of our life. And then there's all these other people that sometimes they're our followers, sometimes they're just social, and then sometimes there's just everyone else. But we have the capacity to love everyone else when we understand that we're all wired differently.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Susan, I want to say thank you so much for sharing what you do. I think it's absolutely fascinating. So thank you very much.

You're welcome. It's my pleasure.