How Human Design Helps You Build a Business and a Family That Fit You, With Stefanie Carlstedt

I've had people come to me and say, "I tried the Dream Client Code, and it didn't work. I did everything you said."

Then I look at their stuff, and they're using the same colors I use and the same copy I wrote.

Of course it didn't work. None of it was them.

That's a big reason I wanted Stefanie Carlstedt on the podcast. We've known each other for almost two years, and we worked together. Every time her business shifted, she got clearer on who she's supposed to be. I wanted to know her secret sauce.

Stefanie is a human design guide in Omaha, a mom of four, and an entrepreneur for 14 years. She helps people come home to who they were before the world told them who to be.

When the business crumbles

Stefanie knew almost right away that a regular job wasn't for her. Six months into the job she went to school for, her dad was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and she knew she needed to get out.

She built a health and fitness business, and along the way it stopped feeling good. It wasn't how she had pictured it. Right after she lost her dad, that business crumbled, and that's when she came to me. She knew entrepreneurship was where she belonged and she wasn't going back to corporate. She needed help getting going again.

While she worked on figuring out what she wanted, she found human design. She says it was guided to her by her dad. Reading her chart was the first time she saw that the parts of herself she'd been hiding were how she was made.

What her design says

Stefanie is a 3/5 manifesting generator. In her words, she's here to trial and error and fail forward more than anybody else. She pivots, skips steps, multitasks, and has a lot of ideas going at once, and somehow it all works.

She used to think something was wrong with her for quitting things and pivoting. Then she read that it's what she's designed to do, and it became her favorite part. It's also why she shares the hard parts of life and business in her content.

She says about 90% of the people she works with cry when they read their chart. It feels like coming home and finding out nothing was wrong with them.

The closest thing to a manual for your kids

Stefanie's work started with business owners, but every client wanted to know their spouse's and kids' designs. That's the part that lit her up. When her daughter was heading to college, it was important to her that her daughter understood her design before she left, and that sparked her shift toward families.

Parents always say they wish their kids came with a manual. Stefanie says this is the closest thing you'll get.

Her five-year-old started acting out in a classroom he'd been in for two years. His design shows he needs to be around different people in different environments to feel like himself, so the same room with the same teachers every day wasn't working for him. Stefanie is the only one in her family who's fine doing things on her own, so that one was hard for her to see.

Another daughter used to feel like something was wrong with her because she'd make plans and then cancel. Her design says she needs more alone time than most people. When she read that, she realized it's how she's supposed to be.

This one hit home for me. My brother and I were talking about how different my kids are, even though they're raised in the same house. Maddox is friendly and sweet, Gracie is serious, and Violet needs to be around people. They're not supposed to be the same.

Know your authority

If you only learn one thing about your design, Stefanie says to learn your authority, which is how you're designed to make decisions.

She has sacral authority, so her gut tells her yes or no right away. She used to get in her head, overthink, and ask other people's opinions. When she started trusting her gut, the right people and opportunities showed up. When she ignored it, she regretted it.

Someone with emotional authority needs to sleep on a decision, because they can be excited about something one day and low about it the next. Someone with mental projector authority needs to talk things out to hear their own voice say it. One of Stefanie's clients said his wife wanted to talk through everything as soon as he got home. Stefanie told him she didn't need him to say anything. She needed a sounding board.

It shows up in marriages, too. Stefanie's husband researches a vacuum for a month before he buys it. She goes and buys the vacuum, and if it doesn't work, she gets a new one.

All you need to run your chart is your birth date, birth time, and birth place. No questions to answer. I had to pay to get a record sent to me to find my birth time, and Stefanie had to call three people to get her daughter's, because North Dakota doesn't put it on the birth certificate. It's worth tracking down.

What this means for your business

Here's where it comes back to you as a coach.

Stefanie says you're designed to show up in a different way than the people you're watching. Some people do well posting every day. Some need to post once a month and do the work behind the scenes. Some people are meant to be visible, and some aren't. Your design even shows the traits of the people you're here to help, so you know how to market to them.

It shapes how you sell, too. Projectors are designed to wait for the invitation. They still put themselves out there, but people come to them. A cold DM from a projector almost always gets ignored or deleted. Stefanie says the projectors she knew in her network marketing days now look back and say, "No wonder that never worked for me."

She said that if she'd known her design 14 years ago, she never would have gone through her burnout and crash.

She also uses things I taught her that work, and she tweaks them to fit her design. That's the difference. The strategy can work. Copying every single step, down to the colors, is where people lose themselves.

Coming back to yourself

Stefanie says that up until about age seven, we remember who we are, and then we slowly forget. The more she learned about her design, the more fun she had in her day. She wrote on her Substack that she feels like she's 16 again, but loving herself this time.

She also doesn't buy the idea of a midlife crisis. She sees it as women in their 40s and 50s remembering who they are.

I agree. We recorded this on my little brother's 40th birthday, and I told him that morning that the 40s are pretty cool. You finally feel like you can be who you are.

Find Stefanie

You can run your human design for free, for your whole family, through Stefanie's Instagram. She also has a private podcast to help you make sense of your chart, and her new app, the Family Decoder, helps parents understand what's happening in hard moments with their kids.

Lindsay Maloney