Human Design With Charlie Garnham Blossom Your Awesome Podcast

Human Design With Charlie Garnham Blossom Your Awesome Podcast

Charlie Garnham is a marketing maverick, business and life coach and human design guru.

She helps people journey inward through human design to discover their inner truth and live a life of passion and purpose.

On This Episode

In this conversation, Sue interviews Charlie Garnham, a human design expert, about the power of human design in understanding and cultivating self-worth. Charlie shares her personal journey of burnout in the corporate world and how she discovered human design as a tool for self-discovery and empowerment. Human design is described as a combination of science and spirituality, similar to a personality test that incorporates astrology and other spiritual modalities. Charlie explains how human design can help individuals understand their true selves, differentiate themselves from others, and cultivate unconditional self-worth. She also discusses the importance of slowing down to tap into creativity and the various applications of human design in areas such as parenting and recruitment.

Takeaways

• Human design is a powerful tool for understanding and cultivating self-worth.
• Slowing down and tapping into creativity is essential for personal growth and self-discovery.
• Human design can be used in various areas, including parenting and recruitment.
• Understanding and embracing one's uniqueness is key to cultivating self-worth.

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Transcript

Sue (00:01.014)
Hi there, today on the show, we have got Charlie Garnam here with us all the way from England. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the show.

Charlie Garnham (00:12.491)
Thank you, thanks Sue, I'm really pleased to be here and I hope we're gonna have a great conversation.

Sue (00:18.742)
Oh, I know we're gonna have an amazing conversation, Charlie, because I just, the work you do is so remarkable. I just love this, the Self-Worth Activator. I love that title, I think that's so cool. And you help people unearth their natural power, claim their self-worth. You're the transformative sidekick. I just love, love that. Human Design.

part science, part spiritual modality, that's what you specialize in. So I wanna get into that, but first of all, give us your backstory, how and why you got into this line of work, and then we'll get into the specifics.

Charlie Garnham (01:01.979)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's quite a typical story actually, I feel, with people who go into their own business. They have something that happens to themselves, usually some sort of burnout somewhere along the way, and then they go into business for themselves to fix things, right? So my story starts in corporate.

Sue (01:04.858)
Let's go.

Charlie Garnham (01:26.231)
I was a marketing executive in the corporate world. And I thought that to prove my worth, I had to work 10 hours a day. I had to just keep going and keep going and keep going. If anybody's listening has ever been in marketing, it's basically never ending. It doesn't ever stop. There's always more that you can do. There's always more posts that you can put out, emails that you can do, strategies to write.

there's always more to do. And I just pushed and pushed and pushed. And eventually I completely burnt out. And I remember there was one colleague that I was having conversation with about a particular campaign and she just wasn't listening to me. She wasn't having it at all. And I remember on my commute home, which at that time was a 90 minute commute, I cried all the way home.

And as soon as I stepped over the threshold of my door when I got home, I stopped crying instantly. And I said, that is it. I am not doing this anymore. I'm gonna do what I wanna do when I wanna do it. And I'm not gonna be burnt out with this anymore. So this is how I then started to look more into spiritual modalities. I, you know, went on a journey of self-discovery.

I just, you know, tried to find myself essentially. And I came across human design in 2020 and the rest is history, as they say.

Sue (03:00.914)
Mm, I love that. And so, you know, when you came across, so you go on this journey of self-discovery, when you came across human design, if there was one thing or what, and we'll get into what it is and all of that and you breaking that down for us, but what was it that really kind of drew you to it? Was there one particular thing? Why did that resonate for you more than other things?

Charlie Garnham (03:30.571)
So the first thing really was it was intuitive. And I kind of knew I was intuitive at the time, but I wasn't really tapping into it. And when I heard about human design and I was invited to run my chart by a friend of mine, I just knew intuitively that this system was something that I just had to explore. And I can't tell you why or how, I just knew in my body that

this was it and this was what was gonna help me. And when I started learning and going deeper and deeper and deeper, I knew that not only it was gonna help me, but I was gonna use it to help other people as well. So I think that's my one thing with human design is why did I go down that route? It was just intuition.

Sue (04:23.562)
I love that and that embodies so much of what it's about, right, and what it does and how it just pulled you in. So now Human Design, I think it was founded by Ra Uru Hu. And so give us the backstory, tell us what it is.

Charlie Garnham (04:42.255)
Absolutely. So if you've never heard of human design before, or maybe you've heard of it because it's a little bit trendy at the moment, people are really starting to talk about it. If you don't know what it is, essentially, I want you to think of human design as if a personality test like the Myers-Briggs test kind of came into contact with astrology or any other spiritual modality. And then when they came together, they had a love child.

And that love child is basically science meeting spirituality and human design was born. So as you said, it was founded by a chap called Ra'aruhu. He was in Ibiza at the time. He was living in absolute poverty and he actually came across the system by having an encounter with a completely, um, uh, unhuman being.

It was an encounter with something called The Voice, and he sat for eight days, you know, just downloading the system, and then he spread it out there into the world.

Sue (05:51.646)
Wow. So now getting a little more intricate with the details. So astrology, so it's based on your date of birth, your birth particulars, and then there's like some calculations that go in and spit out some characteristics and traits and does it, you know, like many times astrology will, is very specific and can pinpoint certain

Charlie Garnham (06:04.799)
That's correct.

Sue (06:19.766)
like time periods in life, and oh, this will be a difficult time, and this is a good time to go into business. So is it similar in that way?

Charlie Garnham (06:28.787)
A little bit, yes. So yes, it's based on your time and place of birth. So the way I describe this is that with a personality test, you as a human being, you're going to be answering questions as to who you think you are. So, you know, all the questions, they have A, B and C, D, A, B, C, D answers to give and you tick the answer that's nearest to you.

And this might be your ego mind overtaking the real truth, the real you. And with human design, you don't get those questions. You're literally just putting in your time and place of birth and then out pops your, what we call your human design body graph. And what you can tell from this is who you are at the core of your truth. So I call it like a personality test for your soul.

And although astrology does have an element of the transit and the certain times of your life, et cetera, human design, whilst it can do this, it's more about understanding who you are and also who you're not. Because in our lives, we often have imposter syndrome. Even if we don't call it that, we will often say to ourselves, why can't I be like that person?

why can't I do it like that? Why can't I get that promotion? Why can't I get those clients in my business? And we just look at other people doing things all the time, but human design helps us to understand that we are our own unique people, person. They are their unique person. They're doing it in their way. I need to find it and do it my way. So it really helps you to differentiate yourself in the world with other people.

Sue (08:21.586)
I love that. That sounds so amazing. And it's also so needed because so often everyone is looking externally, right? We're not looking inward enough. We're so focused on, okay, what is he doing? What is she doing? Oh, it's working. That's working for him. So let me emulate that. Let me copy that versus how can I bring a unique level of uniqueness, authenticity to this? That's amazing.

So now let me ask you, Charlie, self-worth, because you know how these two come together, right? How they correlate, because so often it seems that people struggle with self-worth. They have all this potential, all of this creativity in things that they don't access.

Charlie Garnham (09:17.287)
Yeah, I think there's a lot to say around the concept of self-worth. I think that in the human design system, you can see very clearly whether someone has what we call maybe like a roller coaster understanding of their own self-worth. And when you kind of look at someone's chart and you can see that actually, yeah, they don't have consistent understanding of self-worth, that helps you.

Sue (09:18.53)
Mm.

Charlie Garnham (09:46.995)
to really accept and understand yourself. And it helps you to go out there into the world and think, okay, so I may be, you know, not feeling very worthy right now, but that's okay, that's gonna change. And then you can start to put tools together and, you know, start to, you know, recognize your thinking and start changing those thoughts that you have so that you can then start to cultivate unconditional self-worth.

And I think it's really important to have this conversation because really our self-worth comes from a couple of different things that are a little bit deeper than just what a human design chart spits out or what an astrology chart spits out. Because our self-worth can come from our childhood, like our childhood traumas.

It can come from conditioning, from teachers, parents, the government, society, et cetera. We're expected as human beings to be a certain way and to act a certain way and to do certain things. But actually, if that's not our inner truth, then we're gonna really struggle to see our own worth in this world. So the human design system can really help you to decondition away from that.

you know, the conditioning that we have in society and help people to understand their true selves. And when you understand the reason why your soul has been put on this earth and what your life's purpose is, you're unstoppable. Like nothing can get in the way. So your self-worth becomes self-love.

Sue (11:29.134)
Oh, that is so powerful and so beautiful. Now, you know, when you say it's a rollercoaster, because it seems, and just based on that, I don't know enough about it, but what I envision, because it seems like people know innately that they're worthy, but they don't know, like you say, how to hold on to that. So you kind of have these moments of where, okay, I'm worthy and I'm going to do this, or I'm going to try this, I'm going to start this.

but then you kind of come down the roller coaster and it's like, I can't do it, it's so hard, I'm not worthy, maybe I'm not supposed to be doing this, right?

Charlie Garnham (12:04.375)
Yeah, yeah, completely, yeah. And I think it's just, it's human nature, right? So even if I was to say to you, yeah, okay, so you're probably one of these people that have, you know, the rollercoaster self-worth, it's really just up to you to decide, like, well, so what am I gonna do about that? I don't need to be up and happy and worthy 100% of the time, but...

you know, what am I going to do in those moments of low self-worth? How am I going to be resilient? How am I going to, um, you know, put myself in a situation where I start to feel better? So it's like, who do you surround yourself with? Do you surround yourself with people who lift you up? Um, or do you have people that, you know, don't, don't do that? Um, do you have a preferred environment, which is something we look at in the human design system as well?

So, you know, could you be, I don't know, feeling completely amazing if you are on top of a mountain? And do you take yourself away? Do you give yourself self-care? And do you do what you need to do to bring yourself back to that place of worthiness? And with the human design system, you can, it's literally on paper for you to see like who you are and what you need to do. And it's there for you to experiment with.

Sue (13:26.23)
This is so remarkable. I saw on your site, there's a place where it says, you know, who you are and then your greatest strength. So it's a culmination of those two things and that's kind of your personal blueprint.

Charlie Garnham (13:44.455)
Yeah, exactly. So I have found through my own personal sort of use of the human design system, I have a chart that actually says that I am actually very good at marketing, which is great, right? I had a career in corporate marketing, but that sort of part of me is more about marketing my true self. So this is where I've got an ability to really understand who I am.

and I can verbalize that and express that to other people. So that might be a really strong part of me. However, that's not my greatest area of wisdom for other people. And my chart also shows me where my greatest area of wisdom is for others. And you can probably take what a guess of what it is. It's actually, my greatest area of wisdom is self-worth. So I myself,

may not have a great understanding of self-worth. I certainly didn't before I found the human design system. I was pushing to try and prove my self-worth constantly all the time. I was trying to make people see who I was and how amazing I was, right? And now what I do is I help people to understand their actions, what they're doing, bring conscious awareness to whatever they're doing.

to help them to start to cultivate that unconditional self-worth that can really help to boost you, can help you to accept yourself for who you are and to give you confidence as well.

Sue (15:23.026)
And you know what I think is so cool about this, Charlie, is that it's very specific to each person because a lot of times you have people who talk about self-worth. There's kind of like this blanket, you know, advice or guidance, but this sounds like every person really has their own underlying reasons that they lack self-worth.

that they need to be tapping into to activate, heighten that self.

Charlie Garnham (15:55.815)
Yeah, yeah, completely. You've hit the nail on the head there. So even though, you know, I might be looking at one particular center on your body graph that helps me to understand your personal self-worth, actually I can look at the body graph as a whole to help you to see, you know, where your shadows are, which is called the not self in the human design system. I can help you to see how you have been designed to make decisions. And decision-making is the key, is the...

cornerstone to self-worth because if you are indecisive, you won't have any confidence. And yet if you are decisive, if you know how you are designed to make decisions and to stick with them and know wholeheartedly in your body that this is the right decision for you, whether it's buying a cup of coffee from a cafe or whether it's moving in with a partner.

When you know that this is wholeheartedly like what you're supposed to be doing right now, you just have the confidence. So, you know, the decision-making process comes into it. The other parts of the chart will come into it as well. Like knowing your life's purpose. All of those things can really help you to cultivate that self-worth.

Sue (17:08.507)
Thanks for watching!

Sue (17:13.898)
And so because, and the reason this works or can be so helpful and transformative is because of the different aspects like asking who you are. And so you're really kind of getting this personal feedback and then you're using these calculations to kind of come up with that personal blueprint.

Charlie Garnham (17:40.167)
Yeah, yeah, that's correct. And the thing is with the human design system as well is that it's not a Bible, but it is just a guidebook. So, you know, I can sit there in a human design reading, which is, you know, what I'm qualified to do. And I can tell you all about yourself. If some of it doesn't resonate to you, or if some of it feels not quite right for you, especially at this time in your life.

not a problem. You can take whatever you want from it, you can leave whatever you want, you can experiment with some things and you know it's you don't have to take it as you know the bible basically and human design is great to sort of you know if you're spiritual you can use it with many other different modalities as well so many people use astrology or gene keys or even just you know meditation, emotional freedom technique.

All of this together can really help you to understand who you are and just be confident in this world.

Sue (18:48.67)
And now, you know, you said something about a body graph. Can you talk to us about that? I mean, what is that? How does that correlate?

Charlie Garnham (18:58.575)
Okay, so when you want to find out about your human design, you can go to, just go to Google and type in free human design body graph, and you'll come up with a number of websites that will give you the opportunity to put your details in completely free and generate your human design body graph, okay? So what you have when you do that is a chart.

that shows you all the different centers on a body graph which correlate to different Hindu chakra systems. So the solar plexus for example, the sacral center, all of these chakras are related to the human design body graph. The only thing is of course is that being someone who doesn't know anything about human design, let's say, if your listeners don't know about human design yet,

you'll probably take one look at that body graph and go, well, what does that mean? Right? And the reason why human design is so accurate is because every single body graph is completely different. Like even identical twins will have slightly different human design body graphs. So it's really up to professionals like myself to interpret that body graph for you and to really start to help you to understand who you are and who you're not.

Does that help with your question?

Sue (20:27.194)
It does help. And I love this idea. I think one of the quotes was something about really understanding or something on your website, figuring out, like you just said, who you are to better understand who you are not.

right? Because I think there's so much confusion there or the waters get muddied there between trying to be something we're not versus focusing on what we really are and what we should be focusing.

Charlie Garnham (21:03.623)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's literally just my whole thing. And, you know, like part of like who I am is that I really helped people to come out with their weirdness, their quirkiness, their unusualness, because all of these things are really dampened in our society. We're told how to act, we're told how to talk. And, you know,

we just need to live in a society where everybody can express their own uniqueness and everybody can express their own true selves and in the human design system we actually can start to understand now that the evolution of humanity is moving into a very individual era. We're moving out of tribal.

You know, everybody has the same resources, everybody has food, everybody has water, everybody has this, that and the other. But we're now moving into individuality. And it's so important now more than ever that we express our true selves and we don't act like sheep and follow everybody else and think that we're everybody else as well.

Sue (22:14.838)
This is truly so powerful, Charlie. Now, something here I wanna ask you. So using human design to help you slow down to speed up. I'd love to talk to us about this.

Charlie Garnham (22:29.471)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, okay, so there's a, basically in the human design system, we have right at the top, because it's very complicated, so we have this almost hierarchical system where we start at the top with what we call our human design type. Now, there are some types in this world who are people who have consistent life force energy. They can buzz around, they can do all the things, they can get stuff done.

And then there are other people who aren't quite like that, but then they get pulled in sometimes by that energy and they think that they can buzz around and do all the things, right? So when I say slow down to speed up, I'm talking to everybody, because even if you're one of these people who are multi-passionate and you're doing all the things, you still need to slow down to really start responding to the world.

because responding to the world is gonna help you to know what's right for you and what's not right for you. And it's gonna help you to stop using your ego mind to make decisions and to let your ego mind run the show. So when we slow down, when we give ourselves space, when we use any kind of self care that we think is right for us, whether that's resting in bed or going for a walk or.

going to a spa day or walking a mountain, it doesn't matter whatever self care means for you, creating that space to be creative, to call in creativity for new ideas, this is where humanity and the individual person is gonna start thriving. And every single one of us has creativity inside of us. We just...

Charlie Garnham (24:27.519)
find that our society just dampens that creativity and we now live in a world of mental health issues, of physical health issues, of everything else that, you know, has completely been dampened by our society. And we don't have any creativity left. I mean, obviously some people are very creative and they know that, but a lot of us have been conditioned.

to say that we're not creative and we need to just let that out there.

Sue (25:02.218)
And now, you know, this sounds like this is kind of where the spiritual aspect of it almost comes in, right? This idea of like slowing down, maybe being sitting in silence or getting in the nature and doing things to evoke more out of you where I think so many times we're just going, going and pulling and trying to do so much. But it's really that slowing down where that stuff is heightened.

Charlie Garnham (25:29.767)
Yeah, yeah, because we can start listening to ourselves if we slow down. And you know, like there will be some people listening to this that will say, well, I don't really like sitting still. And that's okay because it might be in your chart that you don't want to sit still and you always want to be in and out of different groups of people doing different things, but you finding your own version of self care of slowing down is going to be absolutely instrumental. So it doesn't mean.

you know, sitting in bed or, you know, watching Netflix or anything like that. But once we do start to slow down and we do start to, you know, call in this, um, this like amazing energy, we will find that our problems will be fixed because we have the answers inside of us. We do not need to look outside for answers of how to fix our problems. We don't need to, you know, find, you know,

the answer to why am I not getting clients? We don't need to find the answer to why am I not being promoted? We can find that all inside ourselves once we slow down.

Sue (26:39.926)
And now, I know one of the things you do is help people get businesses and have kind of these transformative career stuff, but what else can people use human design?

Charlie Garnham (26:56.171)
So human design, in my opinion, can be used for so much. One of the other really popular things that you can use human design for actually is parenting. So with me myself, I have used it to reparent myself because I've been brought up in a certain way and it turns out I'm not that way. So I've reparented myself into who I am to understand my own inner truth. If you are a parent, you can use the human design system to understand your children.

in a really, really deep way. And if I, if human design was around and if my parents knew what human design was when I was growing up, it would have been absolutely amazing for me. But that's okay because where I am at the moment, where I am in my life right now is exactly where I'm supposed to be. So parenting is really, really important to understand each child, their uniqueness, et cetera.

You can also use human design in recruitment in corporate. So a lot of corporates are using personality tests right now to kind of determine like, you know where somebody might fit in. But like I said, at the beginning, human design is great because it doesn't, you know have the ego mind. So I remember when I was in corporate and I took the colors test.

And the color that I turned out to be, which was red, which was a leader and extrovert and all this sort of stuff, I was like, no, that's not me. And when I look back at the answers that I put in, I had absolutely filled out that questionnaire as to what I thought my employer would want from me in my role. So...

I feel like, especially if you are going to an interview and you're asked to do a personality test, I feel as though you're probably going to be drawn into answering the personality test as to what the employer is looking for, not the actual truth of the actual person. So human design kind of negates that. You can look at human design chart and start putting certain traits together, and you can build a team where each different person is so unique.

Charlie Garnham (29:13.895)
that when you bring them together in a group, they have exactly the right traits they need to be a successful team and to be a successful business as well. So those are just two of the potential uses of human design other than what I do with it.

Sue (29:30.578)
Wow. And now, Charlie, you know, self-worth, I want to touch on this really quick again. So you, I know you're using human design to help people really tap into their self-worth in a sustained way, but what have you personally seen? Is there something kind of a commonality that you find that keeps people from really just

living into their total potential.

Charlie Garnham (30:02.895)
Yeah, I think the common thing is that we often have a fear of being judged. And especially if you are looking to create your own business and get clients or even going for a promotion, we have a fear that other people will say, well, you're not good enough for that. If you won't make it, you won't be able to do it. I don't think you're strong enough. All of these like thoughts and feelings are running through our heads.

Sue (30:03.83)
Thank you.

Charlie Garnham (30:31.095)
And either we are incorrect because we are actually surrounding ourselves with amazing people who will always lift us up and say yes, you go for it because it's you know, it's going to be amazing or we're surrounding ourselves by people who Don't lift us up and actually it is the truth. They will probably say to you No, I don't think you can do that. I you know, it's not right. I don't think that this is going to happen so that fear of being judged is

Probably one of the most important things, one of the most prevalent things that I see in our society It's the reason why we don't move forward Because we have a fear that if we put ourselves out there on social media, on podcasts, on you know wherever it may be, that other people are gonna look at us and just go What on earth is she doing? So yeah

Sue (31:26.238)
Wow, that's a great insight there. And so let me ask you, the human design process, working with you, what does that entail? What does that look like? Give us those details.

Charlie Garnham (31:40.555)
Yeah, absolutely. So the main thing really with human design is that you can come and work with me for an hour and all I do is I just go through your body graph and I tell you who you are. I give you an understanding of where your shadows might be, so this is something you know to look at and I help you to understand your greatest area of wisdom and how you can bring that out into the world and I help you to understand your life's purpose.

There's lots of practical things that go into it as well. So a reading isn't like a psychic experience. It's a very practical, this is who you are. And then I get to ask you questions as well to just hear what we call your lived experience. So that's a reading. But what I also do, if you do want to take it further as well, is I do what I call living your design coaching.

And all this is, is using my coaching qualification to help you to uncover your limiting beliefs, to set you some amazing goals and to help you to work towards those goals, to help you cultivate unconditional self-worth. And I use your human design chart, your body graph, to guide you with that as well. So you're kind of given a little bit of answers from me using your human design chart.

but a lot of it, the answer's already inside yourself. And I just empower you to be the leader that you know that you are.

Sue (33:13.462)
Oh, that sounds amazing. And so tell us, I'm going to have links to all of your stuff for people. And then so I think once they sign up with you, then you send a questionnaire or something for them to fill out. So you do the chart. Is that how it works? OK. And then what else is coming up for you this year? Any books, anything else? What are the big projects that you're working on?

Charlie Garnham (33:26.675)
That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Charlie Garnham (33:39.015)
Well, it's funny you mentioned a book because I'm definitely gonna be starting my book this year. So I'm gonna be doing something, I reckon it will be called something like how to reparent yourself using human design. That's kind of like the working title that I have in my head, although maybe that's not so inspirational, we'll have to see. So I'll be working on my book for sure.

And then really I'm kind of working on launching something that's a little bit more sort of inclusive, but a little bit more empowering using the human design system I don't know what it looks like yet but if you follow me then I would definitely be launching that this year and I'm very excited about it for sure. I know it's inside of me. It's just gonna It's got to come out at some point

Sue (34:29.682)
Oh, I love that. Okay, so a couple of things first and foremost. I just wanna say thank you so much for your time today and your insights. This is all so fascinating and I feel like I need to get my own human design reading. So that and hopefully other people are gonna sign up for it. I'll have links to your stuff. So just wanting to thank you for your insights. It was so delightful.

Charlie Garnham (34:57.983)
Thank you. It's been wonderful chatting to you today and thank you so much for giving me the space to share my wisdom about human design.

Sue (34:59.441)
Thank you.

Sue (35:06.882)
how you're very welcome. And now in closing, Charlie, if there were just one message, your hope for everybody, what is that closing message you wanna leave people?

Charlie Garnham (35:18.303)
Just be you. If you know who you are, just be you. That's all it is.

Sue (35:26.408)
That is such a powerful closing message. I love that. You've been so wonderful. Thank you so much.

Charlie Garnham (35:32.075)
Thank you, Sue.

Sue (35:33.602)
Thank you.