Open Centres, Self-Protection & Becoming the Obvious Choice, episode #207

If you're feeling drowned out by lookalike messaging and cookie-cutter funnels you're not alone.

In this episode, Yvette  unpacks how “protection patterns” in your open Human Design centers secretly dull magnetism, blur positioning, and stall sales and how to shift into clean authority that converts. She walks through each of the nine centers and ties them directly to real marketing friction: the head’s niche-hopping loops, the ajna’s wait-for-certainty silence, the throat’s forced visibility, the G center’s identity shape-shifting, the ego’s proving energy, the solar plexus’ discomfort avoidance, the spleen’s clinging to familiar offers, the sacral’s productivity myths, and the root’s urgency spirals.

You’ll learn why visibility alone doesn’t sell, why repetition builds recognition and trust, and how to anchor your brand around a specific outcome your clients truly desire. She gets practical about regulating patterns without spiritual bypassing: commit to one clear idea long enough to be felt, speak at 70% comfort instead of chasing perfection, delay action when urgency is driving, and design offers and launch rhythms around energy you can sustain. 

She shares how dropping proving and urgency created daily demand in her own business, and why authority grows when your message is honest, timely, and consistent across channels.

As promised, if you're feeling called to better define what you're here to be known for...so you can become the obvious choice and succeed in 2026, make sure you jump on "Famous For by Design" while it's just $27.

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Transcript

Welcome & Audience Promise

From Niche Clarity To Daily Sales

Standing Out In An AI-Saturated Market

Protection Patterns And Self-Sabotage

Why Open Centers Trigger Safety Responses

Head Center: Overthinking And Niche Hopping

Ajna: Waiting For Certainty Silences You

Throat: Forcing Visibility Kills Magnetism

G Center: Shape-Shifting Dilutes Positioning

Ego/Will: Proving Energy Repels Authority

Solar Plexus: Avoiding Discomfort Weakens Message

Spleen: Clinging To Familiar Blocks Growth

Sacral: Productivity Myths And Burnout

Root: Urgency Patterns And Reactive Sales

Scaling, Visibility, And Clean Authority

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi hi! Welcome to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Yvette Mayer, and this show is for you if you're done with cookie-cutter marketing and ready to build your personal brand in alignment with who you really are. I'm a marketing expert, human design nerd, and intuitive business coach who's helped hundreds of women just like you to elevate their frequency and activate their most magnetic personal brand. Each week we'll dive into practical tips, interviews, conversations, and more to help you create an aligned business, a positive contribution, and of course, an abundant life. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. This week I'm jumping in to continue a conversation around how our open centers protect us. And in particular, I want to bring the conversation forward around selling and sales in 2026 and what's really necessary to stand out now and become the obvious choice for your clients. This is a hot topic for me. It's something that I've been really contemplating, and it's a part of my journey. It wasn't until I got really clear on my own natural, authentic, aligned expression and how that intersected with what my clients to be really wanted from me, that I became known for something specific and therefore had huge success and growth in my business. And this began with repositioning my business as human designed for marketing. And then as that turned into uh rethinking the transformation that I was able to offer through this body of work, I started to become known for the outcomes. So, for instance, in my signature programs, firstly, the Frequency Project, inside the Frequency Project, the outcome is that you become magnetically aligned across your marketing. And that can lead to magnetically aligned clients and client attraction. And it can lead to magnetically aligned sales. So that's my first program. My second program is the sold-out offers by design. Now, this one is all about, well, obviously, selling out your offers, but in a way that they align with your soul, they match your values, and they are strategically sound and built on marketing psychology and experience. Okay. So one program's about you and your brand expression and being magnetically aligned. And the other program is about sales. It's really focused on sales and all of the aspects that go with that, like building funnels and doing it in a way that feels amazing for you and that is effective. So in my business at this point, I am the obvious choice if you are looking to attract more clients that are aligned to you through being your most magnetic self, or and if you want to sell out your offers and build your ecosystem so that your business loves you back. Obvious. Okay. I have become obvious for these outcomes, and that is why I have consistent demand and I make sales every single day. Okay, there's been a couple of days over the last two months where I haven't, and that that was a little uncomfortable. But overall, 99% I make sales every single day. Now, this topic that has been sitting with me and something that I've been talking about a lot in my communities, as in how do you become the obvious choice in a market that is quite frankly saturated with coaches and healers and creators saying the same things because of AI? It's more important now, now than ever, that you step into this for yourself. But here's the thing our biggest blocks, our greatest challenge in doing this work is ourselves. Not going to sugarcoat it. We get in our own way. You know this to be true as much as I do. And I think human design is so powerful in being able to see how our energy is actually working to protect us, and that is leading us to having things like um issues or challenges with visibility or other aspects of marketing and sales that in turn become what I call it, barriers or friction in your uh attraction process around clients and around selling. So today's episode is going to explore how your open centers may be causing challenge around you becoming the obvious choice and selling with ease. Now, you probably think the reason that you're not the obvious choice or not selling as consistently as you'd like is because you don't have your messaging dialed in, or your branding isn't doing a great job of representing your work. Maybe you think it's just that you're not showing up enough, and that as soon as you step into more consistency, then you will have more sales success. Yes, all of these things are important, but what I see more is I'm not gonna lie, I call it self-sabotage. And if we look at our open centers, we can see exactly why this is happening, have some understanding of our own patterns and behaviors, and actually work with them to get out of any dysregulation into our grounded, confident expression and keep moving. And that's really the name of the game. It's for you to be able to see what's going on, identify where you're potentially blocking yourself, and to work with tools and understanding so that you keep moving through. And the reason this happens is protection. It's as simple as that. When we're looking at open centers, we're looking at the places in our chart where they're not colored in, not defined is another word you'll hear for your centers. And these are places in our body graph that we don't have consistent energy. So there are nine centers on your body graph, depending on how far along you are on your human design journey, you're gonna instantly know. For example, I have two defined centers, my sacral and my G center. That's where I'm consistent. Okay. I happen to have seven open centers. So in these places, I don't have consistent energy. And when we're not consistent, we go into protection mode. Because in our systems, not having consistency feels unsafe. It feels unsafe. So what do we naturally do? We go into protection. So this is absolutely what is causing, oh, I shouldn't say absolutely. This is a powerful way of understanding what may be causing the friction between where you are now and you becoming the obvious choice. So I'm gonna take you through this in a way that I think breaks this down and makes it easy to understand. So you can pull out your body graph chart, see where you're open, follow along with me. I'd encourage you to even pause the episode if you're not clear on this for yourself. Grab it, find out which centers you're open in. As I said, it's where there's no definition, so there's um no colouring. Even if it was a black and white chart, it would not be a black center filled in. It would be open, it would be white. Generally, it's white where you're open. Okay. So let's get into this because when protection is running your visibility, there's no way that you can become the obvious choice. What's that land? If protection is running your system, you're not going to become the obvious choice. And I know you want this. I know you want your clients to see you as the obvious choice, right? So let's work with this. Let's start to understand. So, yes, you can also celebrate where you're defined and you have consistency. That's wonderful. That tends to be your comfort zone and not something that you have to spend a whole lot of time exploring, exploring, brother. Congratulations. Now, open centers. These are variable. This energy is amplified from others. To be clear, inconsistency is not a failure in any sense of the word. It's how you're designed. And there are beautiful things about being open. It makes you very flexible and fluid, and it also gives you a sense of instinct and intuition around others who are open, whether they're open or defined, you feel into them a lot more in these open centers. But on the flip side, because it brings up protective uh mechanisms, it also can lead to some of this sabotaging type behavior, like overworking, overthinking, overpromising, or even hiding. And really, protection is going to dull your magnetism. Dull magnetism weakens your positioning in market. So this is really, really important. And therefore, I knew it would be valuable to bring this to the podcast. And go and listen to my last episode, and you'll you'll get a feel for how this all came into my sphere because it's not something that I've picked up on from another human design coach. It's actually my lived experience and working with my own open centers. So on the last episode, I talked about my open heart and how much I can see proving myself, dysregulating my system. Okay. And when you're dysregulated, you're also not as magnetic. And that is something that I've been doing a lot of work on because I am in such a beautiful place in my business that I can slow down, make sure that I'm clean energetically, because scaling is like that's what I've been setting up my business for over the last 12 months. And I can't scale effectively until my energy is clean, clear, and my systems and structure is set up effectively. And gosh, so much good stuff going on in the business in this space. All right, I know you're excited for this. So let's dive into the centers one by one. Starting with the head center. So if you have an open head center, this means that in terms of protection, you're going to have mental pressure to try and figure everything out. Yes, this is the overthinking engine. And there's a part of you that's constantly trying to find out the right answer. Like, but what is the right answer? So it's the loop that runs. How this can manifest and cause friction in your sales process is endlessly changing your niche or tweaking your niche, overthinking your positioning and reimagining it over and over again. Even if you're a manifesting generator, that is not going to help you become the obvious choice. And another part of this is changing your message continually and losing people along the way. So, what do we do when we see this pattern in ourselves? Now that I've called it out around your sales process, you need to regulate yourself through this. And I'm not going to go into the regulation side of your physical energy on every center. I'm actually going to talk to you about regulating yourself by the healthy expression of how to move through this block. Okay. But I will say this regulation also looks like seeing friction show up or seeing not self-behavior, which is human design speak for being in the low frequency of this center, and doing something to move your energy. That could be EST tapping. I'm somebody who really loves to tap. It could be meditation, it could be getting out and going for a walk in nature. There are so many different modalities. It's a personal choice, but actually, instead of hitting a wall and stopping, taking a next step to see that it's time to regulate and keep moving. As I said, I'm not going to do that, this step for every center, but I wanted to flag that physically moving your energy and regulating your energy is going to be extremely powerful. The other part is having some cues around how to regulate your thinking so that you don't get in your own way. So you just need to commit to one idea for long enough for it to work. Okay. So no spiraling. Yes, you're going to go over and over and over again. And then remind yourself, okay, I see what I'm doing here. I just need to make one idea felt and land for it to work. And that is going to help you become the obvious choice when you focus on one idea, you get results, and then you hone and optimize instead of spinning. Okay, next one, your ajna. So the protection pattern here is needing to feel certain before speaking and really having um or wanting to wait for a very strong or rigid opinion to feel safe. Okay. Not natural for someone who's inconsistent here, but you're you're going to identify with this that you're holding back because you're not certain and you don't feel safe because you don't have this really strong opinion. So what happens here is you will then have a negative sales impact as a result, because you will soften your message. You won't speak to it with certainty. You will avoid making bold claims where you know you can deliver bold outcomes and you'll sit in fear of publicly saying something that is wrong. All right. So how do we work with this? And as I said, seven of my centers are open. And so I have to work with a lot of these things regularly to regularly to regulate. Regularly regulate myself. Okay, so reminder leadership doesn't require certainty. It doesn't. And it doesn't require you to be right all the time. It does require you to evolve in real time out loud and to express yourself authentically. You don't need to get it right, you just need to get it authentic. Perfection is such a waste of energy. Yes, it's good to be 70% comfortable and that will give you confidence, but don't wait for perfection, or you're actually going to cause yourself to create that friction that I'm speaking to that leads to slowing down sales. All right. So we've done both of the head centers, or the head and the ajar. Now we're going to move to the open throat. So if you have an open throat center, you're going to force yourself to show up even when you don't want to. It's not great. It's not magnetic. You will actually get anxious if you don't think you're being consistent enough in your visibility. And that can cause you to post to reduce anxiety, but not to actually get the outcome that you want. So you're actually talking for the sake of talking, not because you have something to say. Whoosh, it's bad, right? And this can lead you to inconsistent content, not being cohesive or congruent in your uh positioning, in your messaging, in the way that you're building your presence online and otherwise. And that's confusing. It's really confusing for others. And of course, when you're not being consistent or congruent, then your voice isn't clean. You're not felt and heard. You are not the obvious choice. So, how do we overcome this? Regulate, regulate, regulate. Hold off speaking until it's clean. It's not urgent. Business is not urgent. It's about waiting for the moment when you do feel anchored, when you have something to say and you feel strongly about it. Honestly, selling isn't consistency. Visibility doesn't lead to sales. It is about honing your message. It is about understanding your audience and what they really want from you and speaking when these things are true and felt that is going to take you so much further. Okay. Next one. Your G center. G center, I love the G center because it's defined. Yay! Um, okay, protection pattern running in your G center. This really is the center of purpose and identity. When it's defined, that's wonderful. But when it is not defined, you may find that you're shape-shifting your identity continually, not clear on your purpose and therefore trying to try on different strategies continuously and reinventing the way that you show up. Even attaching to environments because you think that you're seeing somebody else's success and that you should go in that direction, trying that on and then switching. Again, you're diluting your presence, you're diluting your positioning and causing audience confusion when you're doing this. And that is a negative factor when it comes to selling. You don't have a stable reputation, and it's really hard to be known for something specific when you're in shape-shifting mode and not clear, not confident in what you're here to be known for. Regulation. I'm not saying this is easy, but appreciate that sales and marketing is a long game. You do need to choose who you came into this world to be in your business and for your clients and to stay there for long windows. Long windows. I'm not saying forever. I know I have a lot of manifesting generators in my audience, but persistently showing up in a lane or what I call in your fame frequency, because you're designed to be known in a specific way for specific people, because repetition builds recognition. Okay. You need to be recognized and trusted to sell more consistently. You will not be recognized and trusted if you're continually outsourcing what's what looks like a successful path for you and causing confusion for your audience. So regulation looks like accepting that you're going to slow down, gain clarity, choose who you're being in this chapter of your season of your business, and staying there long enough to gain traction. Repetition is so powerful in your business. That's a hard one, right? Okay, next up. Here we go. The open ego and will center. 65% of you lovely listeners are open here, and I am also open here. And I do think it is one of the trickier ones for visibility, for sales, for marketing. Because it's all about worthiness. And if you're not consistently designed to feel an inner inherent sense of worth, then you tend Fall into protective patterns like proving your worth. So constantly trying to prove value and worth in the way you communicate, overpromising because you want to prove your value, and even underpricing because you think that that's going to make someone buy from you. This is a bad cycle to be in. And if you don't see it for what it is, it can really burn you out. And that's a factor in you not succeeding in your business. You start to sell from pressure because you're burnt out, you're chasing success, you're trying to prove, and you're eroding the value, the inherent value of your work. So how do you regulate? You remember that you came in here to this incarnation on purpose, designed exactly in the way that you're supposed to be. You're meant to be here. You're meant to be known and making a positive impact. You're inherently worthy. And just knowing this and seeing it's part of your patterning is very, very helpful. So you don't need to prove, hello, I don't need to prove myself constantly. I can price in alignment with my value, and so can you you like remember the value that you offer. That's where you price from, right? Not what will other people think? How do I prove that this is good enough? And the other piece is getting into desire and knowing what your audience and your clients to be truly desire. Instead of you defending yourself all the time, you become the thing that they desire. Because proving energy absolutely repels authority. And authority is one of those important uh elements in marketing because authority leads to trust. So does recognition. Authority and recognition lead to trust. Trust is the gateway to sales. When people trust that you are an expert in helping them get the outcome that they want, they trust you, they recognize you for that, then you sell. But proving energy repels authority, it repels recognition. So we need to regulate through this uh reduction in the sense of trying to prove. All right. The next one we're going to explore is the solar plexus. And another one where there's uh half of the population that do not have a defined solar plexus. So it's it's a lot of you are going to identify with this. This is the emotional center. And those who are open here, hello, it's me as well, uh, tend to be avoiding emotions. They find them very uncomfortable. So anything that brings up your own emotions, anything that's uh feels like vulnerability, you're going to want to avoid that. You're also going to avoid anything that might upset somebody else. So that can affect your messaging as well. And actually uh calling out things that are disruptive. Disruption is such a powerful way to get your message across. But if you're in your open emotions and you don't want to say the thing out loud that's going to make others uncomfortable, guess what you're going to do? You're going to have weaker call to actions, you're going to have a diluted positioning, and you're actually not going to be reaching the edge you need to reach in your communication to sell effectively. So regulation. Remember, discomfort isn't danger. You can actually be polarizing. Polarizing? You can be polarizing. Polarizing. Wow, I'm not good at that word. You can be polarizing and feel discomfort, and it's okay. It's okay. In fact, polarization and discomfort are part of leadership. They're part of leadership. We do not follow others who speak just to be kind and nice and who avoid emotion. We want to be led and become the leader who says the truth, no matter how uncomfortable the truth is. That is leadership. That helps you become the obvious choice. Being the obvious choice is not neutral, it's not bland, and it's not vanilla. Okay. Spleen, splenic. This is the center of health and instinct. So the protection pattern here when you're open is holding on to the familiar even when it's clearly not right for you. This shows up in health in the way of holding on to bad behavior, even though it's not good for you. You know, anything to do with addiction is an example of this. It's also going to show up in your sales and marketing. You might hold on to offers that have worked in the past, they're very familiar, and fear letting go. And in doing so, you're staying in outdoubted, outdoubt, outdated strategies. You're avoiding the new, you're sitting in fear when what is on the other side of fear, maybe you fly. Well, you're much more likely to fly than staying in the fear. This is going to show up in the way that you are protecting yourself from the fear but clinging to what used to work and avoiding what is necessary for you to evolve. All right, so how do you regulate this? How? Like, what are the right words to be considering, contemplating, sitting in? Remember, familiarity does not equal alignment. Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's aligned for this version of you. Remember, what got you here will not get you to the next level. Release even when it's comfortable. Release, release, release, right? In fact, release before it gets uncomfortable because then you know that you're meeting your next level. Release before it's too comfortable, right? Remember that growth requires shedding. It requires shedding. You have to let go. It's like declutter what's not working now to make space for what is going to in the future. All right, sacral. Sacral. What is the protection pattern here if you're open in your sacral? Well, you're going to be trying to be productive all of the time and saying yes to everything. And this is learned behavior. It's not who you are. This is forcing energy. Okay. So you don't need to be consistently productive. You don't need to work hard and say yes to everything to become the obvious choice, to be somebody who sells every day. If you're doing this, you're going to see your protection showing up in overworking, burning out, creating when you've got no energy, launching or live launching, even when it doesn't feel aligned for you because you think that's the way things work. And then running out of steam and not having solid follow-through. And that can also lead to weakening your funnels. It's a lot. It's a huge area of confusion because, as you're aware, 70% of the population are defined here. 70%. So you're in a world where seven out of 10 people are defined in their sacral, and that is the center of life force energy. They have consistent life force energy. You do not trying to be like somebody who is designed with sacral energy is a recipe for you exhausting yourself. So you have to regulate through this and remember that sustainable, slow, and steady repetition is actually more powerful for you. That is what is going to build demand. That is how you're going to become the obvious choice, not by exhausting yourself. Right? Okay, open root. If you have an open root center, and this is the center of drive and hurry up and get things done. When you're open here, you tend to think everything is an emergency. There's an urgent feeling, and that is your protection mechanism. Hurry up and get this down done so we can relax. Sell more so we don't have to work as hard in the future, right? You're rushing to relieve pressure. You're jumping into things like uh reactive sales pushes because you want to release. This is not how you effectively build your business. In fact, the negative consequences for sales are making quick decisions that aren't meaningful, that's going to deliver revenue instability that brings on a whole lot of anxiety, which then feeds you into what can I do next? Maybe I need to add some more private coaching packages and do a 50% off sale because, oh my God. No, this is this is not magnetic. This is not your way forward. So remember, business is really an emergency. There's no sirens. Build your business robustly from the foundations up. Pressure is not your friend. Delay action when it's coming from this place of anxiety and build a rhythm and a confidence that breeds authority. We will not respond to reactive energy as clients, so we should not be putting that out as leaders as well. True authority, true recognition is never reactive. It's intentional. It's absolutely intentional. And let's talk about leadership. We've been through the whole nine centers now. Because as you scale, as you grow, this is gonna you're gonna bump up against these things more and more. As you become uh more successful, more like more success breeds more amplification and other people projecting onto you. With growth, you need to become more visible. You believe you need more money, more money, more visibility, more responsibility. What happens? Your open centers get louder, they get louder and louder. And if you're not aware of your protective patterns, you will pull back, you'll dilute your positioning, you'll soften your voice, you won't speak your truth. You might even avoid being known for something specific because it brings up all your fear. Protection really reduces your ability to be magnetic, to be known, to be recognized. And when that's not happening, I'm sorry to tell you, but sales are not going to flow. You are not going to become the obvious choice that has consistent demand from this place. So you can see why this has been on my mind, how it relates to the last episode. I really do trust and believe that there's been something in here for you to build um clarity around. Like for me, this drop-in that happened over the holidays for me in 2025-26, around how my open centers are leading to all these protective mechanisms inside of my energy has been an absolute game changer. And do you want to know the outcome? I've become clearer and more confident in who I am here to be and be known as in my business. I've slowed down, cleared blocks, set up my systems, my team, my products to scale more effectively than ever before because I took away the proving energy. I took away the open root uh pressure to hurry up and get to the next level, and allowed myself to drop in to recognition, to authority. And this is the gateway for the next level. And I know that if you're sitting on the precipite of the next level in your business, you're going to understand and appreciate this so much. If you don't feel like you even know what you're here to be known for, or what you're the obvious choice or who to, then check out my product, Famous for by Design. I'm going to leave the link to it in the show notes. You may already have this and know how powerful it is. It is mind-blowing, honestly. I have people inside my programs who do it repeatedly because it just expands and elevates their sense of uh free, well, their frequency actually in the way that they show up. It is going to open you up to so much more than a niche exercise could ever, because it is bringing you this power of the intersection of the way you're designed, or what I call your energetic framework. What are you here in terms of your human design pre-programmed to be known for? Then layered onto that, what have you actually built experience and lived through that is relevant to the people that you're here to work with? And what will people actually pay you for? Like what is the market demanding from you now? And it collapses this through Selena AI from Sold Out Offers into this essence of you, not needing you, like you as a differentiation. You're more powerful than any niche could ever be when you have clarity around what you're here to be known for. When you know what you're here to be known for, you can start to build this path, and it can happen quickly to becoming the obvious choice to your clients. And part of this process is clarity around the outcome that your dream clients are seeking and heroing that in the way you position your work. All of this and more is inside Famous 4 by Design. And right now, for a limited time, you can get your hands on it for just 27 US dollars. So if you haven't done this program, do yourself a favor. Go and dive in. You are going to have such an incredible experience, and it will set you up for more sales in 2026. Thanks for joining me in this episode. I can't wait to be back in your ears again soon. If you've got any comments or you want to drop in and ask me a question about this episode, please do that over on Instagram at ivetmea underscore. And I look forward to connecting with you soon. Bye for now. Thanks for tuning in to the Human Design for Marketing podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button, tell your friends, and extra brownie points, go leave me a review. I would so appreciate it. There are heaps more resources in the show notes. I can't wait to be back in your ears again soon. Bye for now.