242: Finding your joy, ft. Ali Mortimer

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Cani Crystals the podcast. I hope that you're all doing well. So today on the podcast I'm joined by another guest. Sushi is a coach, a mentor, and a speaker who helps high-performing women create more joy, alignment, and fulfillment in their lives without sacrificing themselves in the process. This is what we all need in our lives. After navigating her own experiences of grief, burnout, perfectionism, and major life challenges, her work now focuses on helping people reconnect with who they truly are beneath the pressure, expectations, and the stories that they've been carrying for years. So in this episode, we're going to be diving deep into everything from joy and success to burnout, identity, and Human Design. We're going to be looking at what happens when life doesn't go to plan, how we stop forcing our way through life, and why the very things that we think that are holding us back can sometimes become the things that actually transform us. So expect some real honest and powerful moments in this conversation, and please give a very warm welcome to the lovely Ali Mortimer. Welcome to the show, Ali. How are you?

I'm really good. Thank you so much for having me, Mart. I'm so excited to talk about this. And you know what, when you were speaking there, I was like, oh, I think I need to listen to this podcast episode.

I think it's an episode that's going to resonate with a lot of people, isn't it? Because it's a lot of— there's a lot of raw story and raw emotion here. But I'd like for you to share your story and your background. Like, how did this all come about for you? For anyone listening that doesn't know of your work and then we'll get into the deeper stuff.

Yeah, of course. So I think if we wind back, I mean, we're what, 2026? Wind back 10 years, maybe let's even go back 12 years, back to 2014. And I was, I had a really beautiful corporate career. I loved what I was doing. It was super exciting. I was an IT consultant in the retail industry in the time that I was like there. So through the noughties and all the way up into kind of like those the, like, 2010, 2012, 2011, 2012, 2013. It was all of the times where we were shaping the way we live today. Like, in lockdown, when we were thinking about all of the home deliveries that we were having, that's what we were building back in, like, the '90s and the early 2000s. So it was super, super exciting what we were building, and I loved it. And suddenly I didn't. It was the pressure, I think, of high performance, my own kind of feeling of perfectionism, the, the pressure to perform. It was in my own sense of professional pride that I couldn't let drop. But yet so many things were being added into my life, like two incredible, wonderful children that I have, multiple miscarriages, my mum with Alzheimer's, my husband— he was working really, really hard as well at the pinnacle of his career, and it suddenly just imploded. Like, in about 2014, it was my, my wonderful boss was diagnosed with cancer, and she had a teenage daughter, and I just I looked at myself and said, do I want to get to the point where my boys are teenagers and I haven't spent nearly enough time with them because I've been working every minute because of a sense of professional pride? I was just like, actually, no, I don't. And it was at that point where I decided that I wanted to walk away from my career and do something else. And it was a really, really hard decision to make that choice, especially as I think, you know, I've been grown up to say, you can have it all, you can have the kids, you can have the job, you can have the titles, you know, you can have all of this. And it suddenly felt like I was this enormous failure because I couldn't do it, that expectation of my parents to do it. And I started writing as I left my corporate job, um, a daily blog called The Ali Sandwiches. My mom had just been— oh, it was an awful day. She'd come at, um, some policemen with some knives because she had Alzheimer's, and she was taken and she was sectioned by the Mental Health Act and put into you know, a mental hospital. And these days they don't have the old-fashioned, you know, white jackets that we probably imagine. It's very much a drug-induced one. And they literally just put her away, put her on drugs, and she just shrank, shrank into nothing. And this was after a 10-year battle with Alzheimer's. So she'd been declining for a really, really long time. It's called The Long Goodbye. But that was almost like the pinnacle piece for me, just starting of the writing very openly, how I was coping. With, with those sandwich years, you know, looking after little children who need a lot of your time, like, you know, you know, with Jake, they need your love and your attention, and that's what makes them beautiful, rounded, whole, you know, human beings later in life. And also this very great grief of losing my mum and wanting to be there to support my dad, who'd had, you know, a really tough decade, being trapped in that middle and having a husband who wanted me and to continue kind of like our youth. We've been together since we were 18. You know, all of these things, that incredible pressure to perform in all of these different areas, and a body that felt like it was failing me because I never had any time for me. And I was going through this whole journey of trying to decide, well, what do I do now? You know, there are so many women who hit that midlife period, wherever it is, or a point where you just go, what next? I don't know. What are the questions? Where do I go? What do I follow? And there was tension in my marriage. And as we were, you know, continuing to understand how me not working full-time in a corporate profession and my husband continuing his career— and he moved to London because he took a job down there— one morning when I was taking the boys back from, from tennis camp in half term, I got a whole load of messages that really just showed me that my marriage wasn't exactly what it was. And that was in 2016. So I'd lost my identity as a professional corporate working woman. I'd lost my mum because she just died in that period of time, which in some sense was a relief, but then that, that brings up a whole load of guilt at the same time. And then, you know, finding that my marriage had completely fallen apart, it felt like the universe had answered a prayer in some ways, as me going, is it— is this it? And it had gone, no, it's not. Let's get rid of everything and let's start again. And where do you start other than from rock bottom? The only way is up. That's the only way I can think about it from that point. It was— I remember just being at this lowest point of my life, not really quite sure where to turn. And I only had my two sons, and I was like, I had to get up every day for them, even if it was just to get them to school and to go back to bed. And I say I went back to bed, but that's really where I started to learn the power of meditation. It was where I felt my spiritual self It was where I started to understand the laws of, you know, the universe. I read the books like Gabby Bernstein's, you know, um, The Universe Has Your Back. I read Marianne Williamson's Return to Love. It was where I— it was almost like I was gifted a very, very beautiful different path, and I just allowed myself to follow that curiosity, which ultimately ended up healing me. And one day I just wrote and I said to myself, you know, I've just been diagnosed with PTSD clinical depression, an eating disorder because I couldn't eat. I didn't know what was going on in my life, and I felt like it was so utterly dark and no hope because I didn't know what the future held. I couldn't understand the past, so I was just focusing on the moment. And I said to myself, if I can find one moment of joy every single day, I will be okay. I'll be able to cope with the darkness. So I wrote down what I call now the joy list, and I still have it in my drawer. And I just wrote simple things like, I love to cook, I love to hug my children, I love to walk the dog, I love having conversations with my friends, I love eating dark chocolate, I love writing my blog, I love reading my books. It was so basic and so simple, but I thought, if I actually do one of those things every day, I have a glimmer of joy, and that's enough. Yeah, that's enough. I think the fascinating thing was then, as I did that over the course of the year, I healed myself happy by just doing that, because I now understand the science of what was happening. Yeah, so what I was doing in that period of time was giving myself a daily dose of joy, but I was also giving myself a massive hit of hormones. And the 4 hormones I was giving myself were dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. The dose, easy for me to remember. I remember I was doing my, um, health coaching qualification and they were talking about it. I was like, how can I remember these? And I love alliteration, so it was dose, right? Fine. Dopamine, ticking something off a list every single day. I gave myself a dopamine hit. Oxytocin, you know, that's the bonding, you know, the love hormone. Cuddling my sons, touching the dog, flooding my body with oxytocin. Serotonin, getting out in nature, walking the dogs. Serotonin, which was kind of like the feel-good mood hormone. The endorphins, the pain, the thing that eases your pain, dark chocolate, meditation. I was healing myself from the inside out, which was my first record, kind of like realization that, what I was doing intuitively with joy was actually science, because that's ultimately chemistry, because chemistry is how, how things change. And I changed myself from the inside out. So that's really where joy started without me really knowing it. That's a very long introduction.

No, no, it's not. And it's all relevant because I didn't know any of this as well. So this is very interesting for me to find out. And obviously, like I was saying to you just before we started recording, a lot of people will resonate with this episode because I knew you'd been through like grief and loss and burnout, but I didn't know to what extent. So I think it's all relative because a lot of people— well, pretty much everyone in the world is going to go through grief, loss, and burnout at some point in their lives, aren't they? So do you think that there were kind of many moments in those early days, around about 2016, where you were learning about your spiritual side, where maybe gratitude and manifestation felt almost impossible?

I remember saying so very clearly, it's going to take a miracle for me to be happy again. I remember writing in my diary because I journaled all the time, and I just— it will take a miracle for me to be happy again. And that's when I found Gabby Bernstein, Marianne Williamson, and, you know, two of the greatest manifestors. And how do we manifest? We manifest through love, we manifest through joy, and it's about how can we get ourselves into that emotional state without actually any of our circumstances changing. So every day when I was lying in my bed in between pickups and school pickups, I was meditating, but it wasn't necessarily visualizing. I actually struggle. And actually, side note, when we were at Manifest last year, the wonderful Victoria Jackson— do you remember the meditation and the visualization she did?

I do it all the time. I still watch the recording back and do it all the time. I love it.

It was just incredible. For the first time, really forever, I saw— there was only two times I've seen, and I'll go back to the first time, but that was— and I was sat next to a really good friend of mine, and I had tears running down my face. I had ugly cries, you know, when you sob and snot comes down your nose. And I just couldn't stop crying because I felt the emotion of what I was seeing through that. And it just— everything about manifestation, whenever I felt it, is never about the thing, it's about how can you feel what it is that you want in advance. It's rather than visualization, it's almost emotionalization, where you use the visual to help you understand how you're going to feel.

Yeah.

So if we go back to 2016, I was like, is it going to take me a miracle to feel happy? And I was like, well, things aren't going to change quickly, but I can still feel happiness and joy. So if I close my, my eyes, can I tap into times when I have felt happiness, when I have felt joy? Can I create and cultivate that feeling and that energy within me, even though my husband has moved out, even though I don't know what I'm doing for a career? Even though my mum has died, even though... all of these things, I would spend time almost in transcendental meditation of just allowing myself to feel happiness. And in those moments of feeling the happiness, my spirit guide, I suppose, or my soul, one of the— actually, I think it was my soul. My soul showed me a vision of my life where I was happy, and I was literally just sat in this beautiful garden that was all green, and I sat there and I felt happy. And sometimes I was there on my own, just enjoying the beautiful trees and the garden and the peace and the birds. Sometimes my boys were there, sometimes friends were there, or I could feel them. And I, I asked my spirit guides, okay, well, how do we go? This is where I started, you know. I started to have crystals, I started my cards. It was like a real tapping into my intuition because I'd lost my mind. I had PTSD. I had clinical depression. I could not rely on my mind to find solutions. And I was working with an amazing therapist and coach at the time. And it's like, this isn't the time for logic. This is the time for heart. This is the time for soul. This is the time for your gut. And so it was about following that vision of writing the joy list, following the joy every day, trusting that my path was going to unfold by just following the feelings of happiness every day. And I was about to sign on the dotted line to move into a home separately from my husband to start divorce proceedings, and he rang me and he said, I found a really beautiful old home and I think we should put all of our savings and all of our money into buying it. And he said, I will do this house up so that we can sell it and make some money for the children, but what I would really love is for you to let me look after you and come and live in it with me and raise our children together. I'll spend the rest of my life making it up to you. And I said, well, I'll come and see the house. And I walked into the house, it was old, falling apart, needed a lot of work. And I said to the old man who was selling it, I said, can I see the garden? And we walked through this beautiful yew arch and we walked down some steps and that was my garden. And I got goosebumps. I get goosebumps every time I tell that story. And I just turned around and I said, okay, let's do this.. So I allowed myself to change the path. I allowed myself to follow the feelings. And that was 10 years ago now, 9 years ago coming up this month. And oh, I've got all tingles. It just is the power of can you follow your feelings and trust that they're okay? We're brought up in a world where we're meant to follow logic rather than trusting in feelings. And I think that's where my life and my work started. I wrote in my diary, I do not know why all this is happening to me, but one day I will look back and I will know how, and hopefully I'll be able to help others do it. And I became self-fulfilling prophecy. So after we moved into this house, I did retraining in health and holistic coaching. I trained in mindfulness, in how to teach people how to meditate, and I went on to learn the powers of Human Design and understand much more about energetics and how we can use that to shape our lives, to inform ourselves of the decisions, and actually just let our brains make the strategy rather than make the decision. I think that's really what I've understood.

That's incredible. And I know when I first met you, because I think I first met you at Manifest last year, and I remember I was stood next to you because I think I was still in my shorts and t-shirt because I've been there since like 5:00 in the morning setting up and I hadn't been changed yet. And there's a photo of me speaking to you, and I remember afterwards saying, who is that lady? Because she was really interesting. And someone said, she's the joy lady. And we didn't know your name, so we just referred to you as the joy lady. And I was like, look how joyful she is, because on the photo you're really beaming from ear to ear, just like you are now. And I know obviously joy is a great big part of your business and your, you know, your life story. So I think you talk about joy as being the strategy rather than the destination, which I think is a very interesting way of looking at it all. So what made you realize that we've all been doing it backwards?

From the story that I've just shared, joy was never about, you know, I said to myself, it will take a miracle for me to feel happiness and joy. And then it was just saying, okay, well, if I know that that's what I want my destination to be, then— and I'm— I love words and I love descriptions and I love definitions. It's like, okay, well, what's my definition of happiness and joy then? Because if I know what it is, then I can start today by feeling it rather than it being just a destination. I can use it as the energy to create the path. I don't have to wait to feel that. I can feel it today. I can close my eyes and I can do it. So it was then looking back and saying, well, this is my gift. This is what I've been told. This is how I know. And I think one of the hardest things that when I said that I was going to start a business using happiness and joy, when I told my husband, who is an accountant, by the way, he's very factual, you know, he's in touch with his feelings, but, you know, it's all about facts and figures. My sister, who is a scientist, who doesn't believe in anything to do with energetics and spirituality, you know, she's just all about the science. When I said I was going to start a business, you know, helping people be happy using happiness and joy, they were just like, they didn't get it. So I had to try and find a way to explain to them what I knew intuitively was actually the most powerful path and was actually the strategy in creating not only a business, if you want to create a business, it's the strategy if you want to do well in your career and your promotion, it's the strategy for your health, it's the strategy for your relationships. And one of the most powerful tools, or two tools I suppose I've come across, was the first one was I learned about the Hawkins Scale of Consciousness. I don't know whether you've ever heard of that. Yeah, I have that. Um, I have a beautiful diagram. I like it. For anybody who doesn't know it, I'll give you the kind of like spread the link if they want it so they can find it, download the guide on how to use it. But it's just this understanding that all of our emotions— firstly, is information, information for us, but it is our emotions and how we feel that is our vibration, that is our frequency. And ultimately, and everything that you talk about, Mark, is that manifestation is the direct relationship that you have with the frequency that you are feeling. And the Hawkins scale shows us how and why that works. Because joy, peace, love, and enlightenment are our highest frequencies if you look at the Hawkins scale. And those are the ones that give us that doorway into the quantum field. So for anyone who is looking for this manifestation of a quantum leap, of a quantum creation, it is our job every day to say, where am I now using the Hawkins scale? Let me bring some awareness. We'll use some mindfulness here. We'll sit in our meditation, just check in and say How am I feeling today? Where am I? Okay, I might be sad. You know, I might be feeling really guilty for something. I might be fearful of something. I might be just, you know, a bit like, bleh. That's okay. It's just, it's a human emotion. There's no right or wrong, good or bad. It's just an emotion for us to say, right, on the scale, how am I going to move from here and move myself up that scale to, to hope, to willingness, to gratitude? Gratitude is always a good mover of the needle along the Hawkins scale, right? And how do we shift ourselves up into that love, joy, peace, and enlightenment? Because that's where we can access the quantum field. That's what I was doing when I was meditating. I was feeding into the joy and just thinking of this garden where everything was wonderful. I didn't need to see what was going on, I just knew, I felt it. So everything would have slotted into place. So it's how can we use that Hawkins scale with absolute intention to move ourselves up into that joy space? So that is why joy is a strategy.

Yeah.

Not the reward. It's not something you get when the dream happens or when your desires have been fulfilled. It's how you create them. And I also think that an— another wonderful way to understand your energy— yes, it's emotions, yes, it's energy, but that energy is power. And one of my favorite ways to explain to people who don't understand power or energetics is thinking of a toaster. You'll have a toaster, right? And it's just a hunk of metal. Until you plug it in to the electricity and then it starts to, you know, cook your toast. It's the same with us. We have to plug into our power source in order for us to generate the heat to create what we want. And that's what we do. We plug into ourselves, we plug into our sources of emotion. If we want to dial up the heat, then that's what we do.

I know you mentioned earlier about being a recovering perfectionist as well. Do you think that perfectionism is secretly blocking our flow of abundance then? Because this is something that I deal with in my day-to-day lives. Like, I am a perfectionist. I like everything doing to a certain standard, and this is the reason that I fail to delegate, because if I delegate something and it's done at 90%, I'm like, nah, I can do this better myself, give it back, I'll do it myself. But then it burns me out.

Yeah. So my, my reply to that is, I don't— it may be a different question. Is, is perfectionism blocking our flow of abundance, or is it blocking our flow of potential? I think if you try— what I have learned through my own kind of like personal battle with perfectionism is that if you're trying to be perfect, if you're trying to control everything, it's all kind of like one-dimensional, it's one channel, it's this way or no way, it has to be perfect. Whereas actually, if you open up, you're giving yourself so many other opportunities for the universe to gift you in different ways.

Yeah.

So I suppose in that sense, yes, you can open up. I also think that one of my favorite lines when it came to perfectionism is that I was told that Turkish carpets like the really, really beautiful ones, like the ones that go for so much money, they're all done by hand, which means they are all totally flawed. If you had one that was done by a machine, it's perfect and therefore not as expensive. So it's about saying, actually, the imperfection is what creates the beauty, is what creates the difference. We're all unique, we're all completely flawed, and that's okay. So I could start to release my perfectionism from that way forward. I also learned in my Human Design, I'm a 3/6. So for anybody who doesn't know or knows about Human Design, the 3/6 is the double martyr. I'm here for the failures, I'm here for the mistakes, I'm here for the plot twists, I'm here for the diversions. And that's what creates the beautiful kind of diamond life that I've had, because it's in the, in the redirections, in the things that have gone wrong, I have found incredible beauty in my life. So through my own experience, I've started to be able to release the control, to let go And as a generator, I'm not meant to know the full path. It's not meant to be picture perfect. It's meant to be just say, you know what, what's my next step? Yeah, I'm open to responding to what the universe is giving me today. And if I was so hell-bent on going one way, then I would miss everything that was happening over here.

Yeah.

So it's about that opening up.

Well, let's talk about Human Design, because I think you've explored Human Design quite deeply by the sounds of it. But what exactly is it? Because I've got this app and it pulled my chart for me, and it's got all these numbers all over the picture of this body, and I don't have the foggiest as to what to even do with that information. So what is Human Design?

Okay, I'll explain it in really simple terms. So, you know, when we're young and we're told like the human body has all of these bones, and we see the skeleton of how all of our bones connect, and then we're given the one with the muscles, and you can see how all the muscles go. You know, when you go for a massage, they're on the wall.

Yeah.

Human Design is almost like the layer beneath that. It's how we can see how our energy moves through our body. We know Kung Fu Panda is one of my favorite movies. We're talking about the chi. The chi is how our unique energy flows through our bodies. So from my— if I go back to my corporate world, we always did things like the Myers-Briggs. Yeah, we did so many of those personality tools.

But what Myers-Briggs type are you, by the way?

I think I was mainly blue with A with a hint of red. Oh, so I was quite Type A.

I was sunshine yellow with a hint of red.

Yeah, but yeah, of course you were. And do you know what, if you're a clever person, if you're going for a promotion— this was me back in the day— it was like, well, I can freak my answers to cater for what I know they're looking for. In this role, they don't necessarily need me as my green version because that's very analytical, but actually they need me more Type A, very leadership, very strong. So you can determine it based on how you want to be conceived. The wonderful thing I love about Human Design is that you have no control over it because it's based on your date, your time, and your location of your birth. And it's the, the imprint of as you come out of the birth canal, or out, you know, if you come out through the sunshine roof like I did, it's the minute that energy and the imprint of kind of all these tiny little neutrinos, which are the tiny particles of the death of a supernova, imprint onto your body. And that's how your flow of energy creates. So every single person is unique, and it's how you can use that chart that you've given, literally as a chart, to navigate your life using your energy. So you can use it to help you understand how you make decisions, how you lead your life. But one of the most important and powerful things I've ever used it for is how my energy impacts those around me. So it was a beautiful healing tool for my husband and I because we recognized how different we were.

Yeah.

And rather than each one of us trying to make the other one be like us, it was like, oh, now I know that you're a projector and I'm a generator. We, we run completely differently. My numbers and charts are very different to him, but there's also similarities. We can also see where we connect. It's knowing that we're both Line 3s, so we're not here for a perfectly beautiful ride. We're here for the trial and the error and the adventure and understanding life through our mistakes. He's a Line 1. So he loves everything detailed and planned, like our youngest son. So we always have to have a plan, whereas I'm a bit more like, let's go with the flow. So it's just so interesting. So how you can start to understand, and for our children who— we've got two sons wildly different, could never understand why one son was so radically different to the other. I pulled their charts, I was like, oh, now I've got a guidebook to understand how to parent my children and where they clash and why they clash. And how we can deal with them. So it's really just— I would say it's the simplest map and guide to helping you understand you, understanding how you can be conditioned, how you can actually remove those conditions and understand that again, it's just all information. Like our emotions, Human Design is just information to help us understand ourselves and how we can move through our life. And if we blend it with the Hawkins scale, it's how we can access joy, love, and peace in our own way rather than trying to do it in everybody else's way. So it's your own blueprint to your energy.

And do you think, looking back now, do you think that Human Design's helped explain parts of yourself that you've maybe spent years fighting against?

Oh my God, I looked at it and I cried, Mark. So I was gifted it to coach— I was— it was gifted to me in 2021, and I read it. The line 3-6, the, the double martyr. Life isn't meant to be clean you know, beautiful plain sailing for you. Yeah, it was answering the questions of like everyone saying to me, and you're doing what now? And where are you going? And why is this going wrong? It was just like, oh my God, I was never meant to be perfect. I was always meant to be this kind of like flitting here, flitting there, doing something else until the point where I am now at 50 saying actually everything that I have been through in my life, all of these failures and excuse my French, all of these fuck-ups in my health, in my life, in my marriage, in my career were never failures. They were all lessons that have turned into wisdom, which is the enlightenment piece that we can get from the Hawkins scale, which is for me to share how I've gone through and navigated all of this and continue to use joy and see beauty and wonder, not waiting till the end.

I think so many of us are forcing or pushing and hustling because we think that's what success requires, and I'm no exception to this. Like I was saying earlier, like I recently hit burnout myself and it was absolutely horrible. So how has Human Design changed the way that you now approach work or ambition or creating results?

Well, if I look at my unique chart, I can see where my chakras are open and where they're defined.

Okay.

So I know where I'm taking on a lot of everybody else's energy, especially as a mentor and a coach. You know, I can take on everybody else's energy. And if I'm feeling that, or as a parent and as a partner, you can feel it. It's saying, I need some downtime. And I need to, you know, just spend some time with myself. And I love that episode that you shared earlier. I think it was in April. I can't remember. It was a while ago when you were talking about your own experience of burnout. And it's so true. We can be so highly functioning. And I've just had a couple of, you know, really, really tricky weeks, and I was still highly functioning. I was still showing up. I was still supporting my clients, still doing everything right. But I knew something was off.

Yeah.

And I think this is where this your work, our work in the spiritual space is so important because we recognize that it's not just the actions that we take or the skills that we have, but it's the power with which we're fueling them. And that power comes back from our energy, like the toaster, using the Hawkins scale, using your Human Design, because it's your Human Design that helps you, that says, oh my God, I'm so open, I'm taking everybody else's stress on, that's what's bringing me down to feeling heavy. And everything is hard and I'm fighting it. So Human Design can help you stop the fight and move into flow. It's recognizing where there are blocks and how I can stop that block or release it. It's like a pressure valve. It's almost like, oh, the recognition of it. Oh, I just need to— I need to go and do that meditation, or I need to sit, you know, with a, a beautiful crystal like an amethyst, and I need to hold it, you know, maybe on my third eye and just sit with it there 'Or I need to sit with, you know, rose quartz on my heart, and I need to really pull the power into there so that I can clear the energy of my heart chakra.' It's, it's just a really, really beautiful and simple way for you to access what do I need to clear and cleanse right now based on what's going on in my life. And yours is going to be different to mine, and mine is different to my husband's, and it's different to everybody else's. So it's just almost like a revealing and seeing yourself in incredible high definition to say, well, I know this about me, and if I know this about me, then I can find the right remedy, whether that's a meditation, a journal, or a crystal.

I think when I got access to the app that I use to basically find my chart, I got it and I almost didn't do anything with it because I think subconsciously I was scared that I would then start and use it as an excuse rather than actual self-awareness. Like, oh, that's why I do that, I'll just continue to do it. Do you think that that's like a common misconception that some people have about Human Design?

They do. And every time I share a report or I do somebody's reading, I always stop them first and say, this is not to define you. Yeah, your Human Design doesn't define you. Just like whether we know whether I'm a Capricorn, it's like a Capricorn doesn't define me. Yeah, but I understand that, you know, perhaps my hard-working ethic comes from the fact that I'm born under that star sign. The same with Human Design is all of this is information that we get. We're human beings with brilliant brains that can practice discernment. Do I want this to be true about me? Is this true about me? I remember looking at and saying, do I want that to be true about me or not? Or what do I want to do with that? Yeah, it's discernment. It's, you know, give yourself credit to know what you are and who you are, but use that as just another tool to help you navigate what you're going through in life. Yeah, you know, help yourself navigate through a really difficult time. Or if you're just like, actually, I'm in a really good place, but I want a little bit more. Okay, let me go and turn up the heat in some of these areas and let me use that to power myself forward.

So if someone got their reading and they discovered that they've been maybe building their entire life in a way that goes against their natural energy, where would you tell them to start?

Always start with your energy type. So you're— whether you're a generator, a manifesting generator, projector, reflector, or a manifestor, you always start there with your energy type before you look anywhere else in your chakras, in your lines, anywhere. This is almost like the purification of yourself. Can I actually act in alignment with my governing energies? I would start there. I would also say, do not beat yourself up. You know, I wish that I'd had my Human Design chart in 2016. When I was navigating so much hardship, but I didn't. But now I did. So I kind of like see like anything with the universe, it's a gift to receive it when you're ready to receive it. If I'd received it in 2016, I've just gone, what's all this nonsense? I'd just come out of IT where I was a cynic about all of this. But receiving in 2021 when I'd already done several years of personal development work and followed my curiosity in like the spiritual realm, I was like, well, I'm so open for this now.

I know that you were talking earlier about, um, experiencing like deep lows in your life and things. Do you think that when we experience pain as human beings, it changes what success means to us?

Oh, hugely. One of, one of the first things I wrote down when I left my corporate job, you know, success to me from the age of 18 till the age of nearly 40 was always about how high I could climb that corporate ladder how much money I could make. I don't shame myself from that. That was just how I've been brought up. It was like, that's what we do. You're on this treadmill, you keep going. That was what success meant, like the big house, the cars, the, the jewels, the handbags, whatever you want to do. It was like that was a symbol of success. But I had all of those symbols, but I wasn't happy, and everything fell apart anyway. So one of the first things I did in those dark times, I was like, well, happiness— I knew what happiness was. What does— what does success then? When I was starting to feel like I wanted to move back into kind of more of a into my career space after I'd healed my heart. I was like, well, what is success then? If I'm going to start a business, what does success mean? And I wrote down, success to me is loving what I do, loving who I do it with, and loving myself in the process. And that was literally every single day. Am I loving having this conversation? Am I loving this client? Am I loving, you know, where I'm going? And that was my, almost like my boundary of, you know, or my, my discernment of, am I loving it or not loving it? Am I loving being with this person or I'm not loving it? Am I honouring myself? Am I loving myself while I'm doing this? So that was huge for me. I've recently relooked at that again, as, you know, life shifts. I've got two boys that are about to leave home. You know, my career is growing. I'm loving what I'm doing. Everything feels like it's just landing perfectly, having followed that. And I suddenly got the call to say, okay, well, what does success feel like in this era? Because I also believe that we're allowed to change.

Oh yeah.

5-3-6. And my new definition is having a lot of fun, helping a lot of people, and making a lot of money so that I can help more people and have more fun. And so this is a beautiful cycle, and I remind myself every day that that's what I'm here to do, to share my message in a way that's fun, because that's what we're here to do, right? We're here to have enjoyment of life, to receive all the abundance that life can give us, but to also share it with our friends, share it with our families, share it with our communities, and I think you've created such a beautiful community where you share this, where people just want to hear more of this. And, you know, all of us coming to Manifesting, I think by the time recording this, we're what, here, 2 weeks? Yeah, 2 weeks away. I'm so excited. The energy in the room when I was there was nothing like I've ever felt in any kind of conference or event. It was beautiful. So I'm so excited to see what you're going to do this year.

Thank you. I mean, it's bigger and better this year, so I mean, prepare to have your socks knocked clean off. If someone felt successful on paper but maybe a bit empty inside, what do you think is usually missing from their lives?

Joy.

Joy.

And I would say joy not in just the sense of the feeling, because yes, that's important, but joy in terms of the strategy. Yeah, where joy stands for just on you. J-O-Y. They're not in their life. And that's the strategy that I help so many women and all of my clients with is time for themselves.

Yeah.

Because I know that I used joy in times when I had nothing.

Mhm.

But there's also times, and like you saying, you know, last month you had so much going on with launches and life and your family and your son, and it's like, oh my God, it's like when the chips are down you can use joy, but when the chips are up you can still not have joy.

Yeah.

So it's saying, what does joy mean when you have everything, when everything looks good on paper? You've forgotten to put yourself in. And that's why it's so important every day to start with your energy. Every day, you know this, it's like every morning start with a joy moment. How am I today? How am I feeling? How can I get back to peak joy? Because when I'm in my peak joy, when I'm in peak joy, love, peace, and enlightenment, and then I go and do my live stream, or then I go and do my podcast, or then I, you know, write a post on social media, or then I go into a meeting I'm in my peak place. That means that my results are going to be exponential and the person that I'm with is going to feel that joy from me rather than one of apathy and burnout and depression. So it's joy every day. You start with joy and if you're feeling like it's good on paper but not in yourself, you've got to put joy back in. But not just the feeling, the time for yourself to recognize and remember. It's not about reconnect. It's about a reconnection and remembering rather than a discovery. Yeah, it's just remember who you are before you had all of this.

I just think there's so much pressure added on us, isn't there? Like, I know exactly what you're saying because, you know, we all teach the same kind of message, don't we? That you've got to put yourself first and it's all about what you want and take an inspired action towards that. But there is just so much going on in our individual lives that there's so much pressure to, you know, put out 2 or 3 Instagram posts a day or, you know, to perform in a specific kind of way. That we almost forget to take on board our own advice, don't we? Like, have you ever had to unlearn anything that completely changed the way that you think about that?

Always, always and always. And something you just said then, it's— I like to say brain surgeons can't do brain surgery on themselves. Yeah, you know, we can teach this stuff, but sometimes we can't see it because we can't see behind, we can't see what's happening in the back, which is why it's always so good to have an accountability partner a friend, a coach, a mentor, or a therapist to help you understand that. You know, my mind— I think the biggest unlearning I had to do was recognizing that I am not my thoughts.

Yeah.

My mind was a complete bitch. You know, before I started to understand mindfulness, it was just like my whole subconscious ruled me, and it was saying, okay, well, I need to start to listen to those voices of fear. Yeah. Listen to those voices of criticism. And actually not call it an imposter because I hate that word. Because why would you invite an imposter in? Yeah, because imposters are meant to be kept out. So I like to call them my fear friends or my voices that are my friends. And I open up the door and I— and it's— that's the joy moment. It's the, okay, let me sit down first time in the day and just say, come on, everybody, come and tell me what you've got. Let my brain just go. And rather than worry about what's being said, just witness it and say, oh, isn't that interesting? The power of now, you know, the Eckhart Tolle. It's just witness your thoughts and see what's going on. Which ones do I want to take, which ones do I want to action, which ones do I want to release? It's this filtering. It's about how you can become a master of your mind rather than your mind mastering you. And that was the biggest thing that I had to learn.

And when life doesn't go to plan, how do we then keep trust in ourselves and life itself?

Well, that's when you just have to say, well, this is for me. And the lesson is, how do I find that it is for me? What is the lesson here? You know, again, just last week something really hard had happened and it floored me. And I was at Grantley Hall and I could have gone on and I could have performed and I could have done Joy and I could have done Confidence. But I was just like, okay, universe, tell me, what am I meant to do here? Because you've given me this for a certain reason and I feel really uncomfortable going on to perform. And the little voice in my head said, so don't. So go on and be, you know, live your value of transparency and truth and go and tell them that you don't have any joy and that you don't have any confidence and that it's okay, but you can still find it again. And this is how I'm going to find it again. So I think that the vulnerability piece of being true to ourselves is always going to be the path to help ourselves lead us forward.

Maybe Grantley Hall's a bit of a hexed place then, because that's exactly where I had my breakdown the other week.

You were crying in the hot tub. I know, I've shed tears there too. Like, it is, and it made me chuckle when I heard you saying that. It's, it, we have to allow ourselves to break. And I think, you know, that perfectionism means that we don't allow ourselves to break. And I do remember in that time where I did feel like everything had broken apart, I remember reading a beautiful quote, and forgive me, I can't remember who said it, but it is, when we break, we allow the light in.

Yeah. Love that.

And to me, that was the most beautiful thing. It was— I had to crack wide open. I had to let my heart break so that the light could come in to heal me. And that light was, you know, understanding, you know, spirituality. It was letting these books in. It was letting my friends come in and support me.

Yeah.

And I think we can try and hold on, we can grip too hard to trying to make everything perfect, but in that, we miss the beauty of everything opening up for us.

If people listening could start maybe just one tiny daily practice tomorrow that creates more joy in their lives, what would you suggest? Would it be the joy list like you were talking about earlier, or would it be something else?

I would say the joy list is always a beautiful place to start. Always write your joy list, just 8 little things, and commit to saying, if I can do one thing every single day on this list, no matter how, how hard life can be, I will do that. The second thing I think is, if you're in an okay place, if you're in a good place, so if you're not in a dark place, I would say the daily dose is a really good thing if you're in a really dark place. If you're in a space where life is good, life is busy, but you're still not feeling quite that joyful, I would just say have a joy moment, which is a just-on-you moment. Just check in and just say, how am I feeling today? And what do I need to do in order to feel joy? How can I access peace, joy? Almost just have that moment with yourself to connect with you before you do anything else. Because you'll give yourself your own answers, you know, but you've just got to sit and listen to yourself.

And finally, Ali, how can people find you online?

Come and find me on, on Instagram. I love Instagram. It's my, my place to create, to play, to talk joy, to find joy. I'm @allymortimer_thejoycoach. Come and find me there. I'd love to say hi to everybody.

Thank you so much for being here today. I've absolutely loved the chat, and I'm excited to see you next week at Manifest as well. Um, believe it or not, I've already got you down on the speaker list for 2027 as well, so yay!

I manifested that. Yeah, you did.

Amazing. So please go and drop Ali a follow. I will pop all of her social links in the notes for today's episode. Just drop down underneath the podcast artwork and you'll see it right there. Don't forget as well, you can share this episode with someone who needs to hear the message. You can like, review, follow the podcast, and I will see you all next Friday for another episode. Speak soon, guys. Bye!