In this episode of the One Small Change Podcast, Yvonne McCoy welcomes Nancy O'Keefe, who shares her transformative journey from traditional business coaching to empowering women entrepreneurs through human design. Discover how embracing individual differences allows for authentic leadership, greater visibility, and business alignment. The conversation dives into challenges faced by women, overcoming societal conditioning, the science behind human design, and practical steps for self-discovery. Listeners will walk away inspired to tap into their unique strengths and lead with purpose.

Guest Bio:

Nancy O'Keefe is an experienced business coach and consultant with a passion for helping entrepreneurs align with their authentic selves. After over 30 years in business consulting, she pivoted to focus on human design, using this innovative approach to guide women entrepreneurs toward impactful, service-driven businesses. Nancy believes in the power of differentiation and is committed to helping her clients find and own their unique voice.

Chapters:

00:00 "Authenticity-Driven Business Transformation"

04:52 Empowering Women to Find Authenticity

07:43 "Embracing Differences for Connection"

12:12 "Start Your Human Design Journey"

14:00 "Decisions Beyond Logic"

18:09 "Entrepreneurship Through Shared Experiences"

20:18 "Grow, Share, and Connect"

Quote from the Guest:

"You're not broken. You're perfect, just as you were designed. And stop looking outwardly for validation about who you are and what's right and what's wrong for you, because all the answers are inside you."

Link:

Create Your Free Human Design Chart and Download Your Personalized Free Report: https://nancyokeefecoaching.com/resources/

Welcome to the One Small Change. I am thrilled as always, that

you're spending time with me this week and, you know, are joining for this

journey of exploration and transformation. And I'm your host,

Yvonne McCoy. I bring almost 30 years of entrepreneurial

experience and I have a passion for discovering growth through the power of

seemingly small change. And every week, I bring you someone

who has an amazing story and they will share how a

small or unexpected or insignificant decisions sparked a

remarkable transformation and growth in both their life

and their professional, you know, their personal and professional life.

And this week we have with us the amazing Nancy O'Keefe.

Nancy, thank you so much for sharing your time with us. Oh, thank

you for having me. So I'm just going to let you rip.

Tell us what, what you do and tell us what, what happened that

made you do what you do. It makes you better at it than anybody

else. Well, Imana, I'm a business coach, and

I have been a business consultant and a business coach for over 30 years.

But in the last seven years or so, I have

discovered human design. It actually came across my

radar and I dismissed it because it looked very complicated

and I was busy. Like all entrepreneurs, I had no time and no

extra time to look into something new. But it kept showing up. So

I started looking at it. And I've always used assessments in

my work. I did a lot of work with talent development and

helping people really key in on their strengths and improve

themselves in terms of their careers as an

entrepreneur as they're in their businesses. And human

design, frankly, just blew me away. First, I recognized

some characteristics of my own that I

had kind of been hiding. You know, I've

always been outspoken. I'm different. I'm a rebel. I think differently.

And that wasn't always welcomed. And sometimes I just,

you know, kept my thoughts to myself and, you know, just kind of hid in

the background and didn't want to rock any boats or

create any kind of a stir until I looked at my human design

chart and I realized, well, that's what you're here to do. You're a visionary

disruptor, and you're here to create a stir. You're here to help people

see their true selves and help them really

understand how to step into the authentic self.

So I pivoted my whole business. I was doing systems, process,

talent, blah, blah, blah. And that just all of a sudden became

extremely uninteresting to me. And now all I do is work with

people to align themselves with their authentic selves and, and

to translate that into a business that feels easy,

flows, has natural abundance, allows them to

magnetize themselves to their clients by being visible

and being valued because of what they do and what they bring to the

table. And it's just been an incredible shift for me

personally and for my business. Well, I have to tell you

that first of all, we both agree, I think that

we have unique abilities, and it's kind of like a recipe. We

could all have the same ingredients, but in different amounts. Absolutely.

And so you end up with something different. And I had an

experience with someone else who is a podcast guest,

and we were talking about something after the show, and she said, you know,

you aren't compromising, you're surrendering.

And it was like, oh my God. And I kind of went

back and looked at everything and it was from the human design, you

know, perspective. And it was like, she's

right. She's absolutely right. So the first

thing I'm going to say is, you know, one of the things that

you said in your bio is that, you know, you guide women

entrepreneurs into impactful service

businesses that make a bigger difference. And so I

want to talk about challenges that women have or that you're

seeing, because I think we are so underrated

sometimes and we, we do it to ourselves as well as let other

people do it to us. Well, all

conditioning is a learned experience. And

from the time we were very young, our well meaning parents gave

us rules. You know, don't stick your finger in the light socket, don't do these

things. It's harmful, it's not safe. And we learn through what

we're taught about safety. And one of the things women

have always been taught is to be basically subservient,

nurture others, be in a position to put yourself kind of

last. The children, the family comes first. And

we've all grown up accustomed to just

serving everyone else to the point of our own detriment.

Sometimes many, many women never

feel comfortable stepping out and being who they came here to be.

Because of that, I'll call it training. And

I love watching women really start to

peel back those layers and get at who they are

and be willing to be bold enough to stand in it. And

one of the things that I do with my clients is that we work

on creating a point of view, creating a, a belief and

standing in that, being willing to really, you know, die on the

hill for it, because that's what makes you different and stand

out from everybody else. We are suffering in this

marketplace from, you know, sameness. We all sound

the same. We Spent a decade learning how to do funnels and

scripts, and all it's done is mute our voices so that we

all sound like robots. You know, people say, well, what about

AI? We're kind of already there in the messenger messaging

department. We're already sounding like everybody else. And we all

have something unique. One of the great things about human

design is, is it shows us that each and every one of us is different.

It is the science of differentiation. And in our society,

what do we do about differences? We hide them. We don't value

them. Matter of fact, we have even gotten to the point where, where we

hate because of them. It's just gone so far

afield of what differences are meant to serve us with.

Differences are meant to be juicy. They're the good stuff.

When we look at somebody and see how they're different from us,

there's lessons to be learned, things to be shared,

wisdom, experience in that juiciness. And we're letting

all that slip and fall through the cracks.

So, you know, I love helping women get a voice and

because I feel like they haven't felt comfortable having one.

And those that have been able to get a voice and

stand out have been ridiculed or

shut down in some way. Not taken

seriously, not seen, not heard. So

we're shifting. The energy is shifting on the planet. We've been

in a certain energy for the last 400 years. And in

2027, that's the hard date for the shift. We're

moving to a more individually empowered energy, an

energy that is far more collaborative and feminine and

way less masculine. And what we've been under

this, I feel, is women's time to shine.

Well, I'm on a mission. I want to help women find their voice

because their voice matters. And let's get ready because

when the prevailing winds shift, when we want to be able to step

up and share our wisdom with the world. Okay, so

I'm going to, I'm kind of going to play kind of like devil's advocate

a little bit. And so, you know, I'm, I'm a

very analytical, show me the data kind of gal,

which does not mean that I'm not starting to step more into my

intuitive, you know, and my gut feeling and stuff. But

for people who say this sounds like hogwash,

you know, this sounds like a lot of woo woo stuff.

Let's see if we can, let's see if we can, you know, make it a

little bit more. Help people be a little bit more open. From my

perspective, I believe, you know, if you can believe that every

snowflake is different. Why can't you believe each person is different?

And the thing that I say is your

differentness is what brings the right client to you

because they feel that they are heard, that they

are valued, that somebody has shared some of the experiences

that they have. And what that means is

that people will be willing to pay you more because you

more on, they trust you faster. Right, like you more.

So can you talk about some of the things that you see happen in people's

business when they tap into their uniqueness? Well,

over the last seven or so years I have given hundreds

of human design readings and I am

blown away at the accuracy. People have said to me, wow, how

did you know that much about me? All I gave you was my birth information.

It is very real and it is based in a number of ancient

systems as well as quantum physics.

There, you know, there is a lot of evidence that this is not woo

woo, this is real. We came into the world as

a ball of energy. We all understood in seventh grade science class

that everything is energy. It's either a solid, a liquid

or a gas. And we're the same way. And

human design talks about our energetic DNA. Now we know

anybody that's ever watched a crime drama on TV knows that we have physical

DNA. If you've done ancestry.com or anything like

that, we know we have certain characteristics that are

our physical DNA. Well, the energetic DNA in

your human design, those 64 gates that have that

energy follow the codons in the DNA.

There's a lot of scientific evidence around this. Now it

is reasonably new and the scientific evidence is

emerging, but it is real

and it's, you know, amazing. It's an amazing body of work

that was introduced in 1987 and it's growing

by leaps and bounds every year. So as more and

more people get involved with it, do readings,

explore the depths of it, we're going to just learn some

amazing things from it for the really the good

of humankind. Really. Well, you know, the thing that I want

to say to people is just because, you know, there

are things that have been around for centuries and just because

it's old doesn't mean it's not true. Do you know? I

mean, so I think that, that you know, there was, I forgot

who the person was, a very famous.

Health. Person once he goes that said, you

know, if you break your arm, I'm not going to tell you to

meditate, I'm going to tell you to go, you know, to the emergency room.

But if you're dealing with some other things, maybe meditation is the thing

that need. And so I think just like everything else

that, you know, the more assessments, you know, the more

things you do to get to know who you are, the better off you're going

to be. And whether that is therapy, whether that is

disc, whether that is, you know. Myers Briggs,

Myers Briggs. But, you know, I find a piece of truth in all of them

every time I do it, you know, and you put you, you know, somebody

said, you know, when you go in a grocery store, you don't feel like you

have to buy every box of cereal. You go, you're looking for a particular thing,

you take an assessment, you walk away with a particular thing that, that

resonates with you and add it to your. You add it to your

toolbox. So I want to ask you, what are three things

that we can do that can help us with this, that can, you know,

help us to discover who we are and, you know, if

you've got a gift, how's that going to help? Well, the first thing I would

recommend is that you start your human design journey. And if

you go out to my website, nancyoke coaching.com

you can actually put your birth information in and pull

your personalized human design chart, which is a

picture of your energy and a report that explains it. And

that's a good sort of primer. As a matter of fact, I call that report

the primer that gives you a sense of what's in it. And

if you want to continue your journey and learn more about it, I

have other resources on my website under the resources

tab, ebooks and some other things that will help you deepen your

knowledge a little bit about human design. Start there.

And if after you look at your chart and your report,

some of that resonates with you, then you want to take

the next step. Maybe that's a reading, maybe that's going out to

Amazon and buying a book and diving deeper.

But helping yourself understand where you have been

conditioned, where you're settling, where you're

not feeling comfortable being yourself

in the world, is the first step. Awareness is always the

first step in change and transformation. And then you

just look at it. Once you become aware, you can start to, you know,

to look back. It's a process. You didn't become conditioned in five minutes.

You're not going to decondition in five minutes, but you can start looking at

some of the tenets that you were raised with as a child, some of

the societal norms that we live under. And you can

ask yourself, do I really believe this? Is

this really true for me? You'll also learn about a

very important aspect of your decision making authority

that is in your human design. We've all been taught to make

decisions in our head to, with logic, weigh the pros and cons,

and that's a good thing to do. But where we really make decisions

in is in other parts of our body. And that depends on

your energy type, which will be actually told to

you in this report. And if you feel into those areas of your

body, you'll get signs from your body about whether this is an

aligned choice or not. You know, you'll feel a pang in your stomach or

you'll feel, you know, a pounding of your heart or

some other physical feeling that'll let you know whether you're on

the right track. There are a lot of people running around in the

world today who've made decisions based purely on logic and

purely on the pros and cons. And they're not happy because they

didn't weigh in from a feelings perspective. And

that's kind of the missing way we make decisions in our

society today. So if you just get that out of it, that'll help you a

lot in your life. And I think you're talking about something really important.

I mean, I think that, I think that

so many times, especially for women with the

preconceived ideas and the limiting beliefs, you know, our

decisions are not truly our own. You know, they're kind of,

you know, we're kind of pushed or nudged in a certain direction or

whatever. And you know what? I find that so

exciting for me is I say what? Part of my, you know,

I probably should stop saying it's my secret goal. But my secret

goal for every woman that I work with is that she become, you know, that

she comes into her own CEO mindset, right, to make the

decisions that, you know, she wants to make based

on what she is important to her. Right. And it

just, you know, you know, I just remember going to a

graduation once. I was doing adult education, and the person

on the stage said I had a choice of two jobs.

One was, you know, kind of my dream

job in terms of money, but the other one was the one that I really

wanted to do, and so I picked that one. And

I remember so clearly the voice in my head saying,

that's a choice. You can do that.

Because every job I'd always ever taken had been

based on money. And it was like, it was,

yeah, it was like a thunderclap, you can do that.

Yeah. Do you know? And so the thing is, you

know, knowing what your values are, knowing what you're

good at, knowing what fires you up,

right. In terms of making your decision is, you know,

sure, you want to know the logical stuff. You want, you know, you don't want

to make the same mistakes as other people, but knowing that you're different from

other people, that maybe that won't become a mistake for you. For you.

Exactly. And so, you know, you just can be so much

more exciting and. And your life can be so much

more fulfilling. And I, like I said, one of the things I think that we

have so much in common and we probably could keep talking about this. I think

we could. How women are.

Are not shining the way that they are capable of.

And, you know, and a lot of it is just educated into us.

And there are lots of, you know, not just, not just being a woman. I

mean, there's a thing called the Woman's Journey to Fulfillment. I don't know

if you've ever read I forgot. I. I should write this woman's name on

a sticky note because I quote her all the time. But, you

know, after childhood, in her model, there's motherhood,

which I call the nurturer. Right. And someplace along the

line, if something, you know,

incredible doesn't happen, you know, like an accident or something like that, around

the time that you get to the end of your 40s or your 50s, I

think almost everybody goes, is this all there is? I

want more. And so, you know, that's when we're kind

of going on that spiritual quest to say, who am I,

what do I want to do, what do I want to leave? And. And then

those that become entrepreneurs take it one step further and say,

I'm going to help other people either get through this or not go,

not have to go through it. Right. And that becomes our

passion. And so it is because of the different

experiences in our different, you know, DNA and stuff like that that we

can help the same people who have the same situation

get to trust us much faster. And it is

an amazing, amazing thing. So. All right,

obviously, that's my high horse as well. I

agree, though. You're right. I agree. So let me ask you

this. So I. We've got your website so people can co.

Take that assessment. I would say to people, you should definitely do that

because no matter what the results are, you're going to walk away with a piece

of information that's going to help you grow. Absolutely. So

the other thing is, the trick Question before the commercial, and that is, when

was the last time you did something new for the first time? Oh,

probably yesterday. Great. What did

you do? Well, I'm. I'm an experimenter.

That's how I learn. So I'm always trying things.

What did I do yesterday that was new? I tried

to create something on my website that I had never done before.

It was an integration with another program,

and frankly, it didn't go very well. I have to go back and see what

I did wrong. But. But yes. So, I mean, I'm always

experimenting. I love technology, and if I find a new

piece of software, I'm all over learning about that. I

probably do something new almost every day. And you know

what? That's a good thing. You know, one of the things that. That

I've learned in terms of being more positive is,

is I. When. When I come up against something, I go, am I being

judgmental or am I being curious? You know, how do I face

this? And for so much of my life, I was highly judgmental

because that's kind of how we protect ourselves. It's like, this is not good.

I'm not doing this. I'm. You know, and as opposed to saying,

tell me more, you know, you know how. Tell

me what you're thinking about. Tell me, you know, how I can learn from this.

And it's. It makes life so much nicer. Okay,

before we run out of time, which we are fast doing, I

gotta be sure to make sure you guys subscribe and share and engage on social

media. About the podcast, and the reason I started it was because

I wanted to expose you to as many different people as possible

so that you could grow your business and, you know, have a, you know,

also build a vibrant community. And so I hope you'll continue to,

you know, to join me on the one small change. And, you know, the

idea is that we want you to have a bold vision and for

innovative possibilities. And so, Nancy, I'm going to ask you,

what are your last words of wisdom? What do you. What do you want people

to remember? You're not broken.

You're not broken. You're perfect, just as you were designed.

And stop looking outwardly for

validation about who you are and what's right and what's wrong

for you, because all the answers are inside you.

Here, here. I say you're you. You don't need to be fixed. You just need

to be found. So we are in total agreement about that.

Okay, People, remember, the change is simple, but it's not

always easy. So it requires courage, resilience, and a

willingness to step outside your comfort zone. And, and what I'm going to say to

you is if you're comfortable or if you're afraid of being

uncomfortable, you are not growing, you are stagnating.

So be curious, get out of your comfort zone and see what

amazing things await you out there. And so I hope

that you will continue to join me on the one small change. Until the

next time, stay very, very curious. Nancy,

thank you so much. Thank you, Yvonne. This was wonderful. This was

great.