I recently had the pleasure of welcoming back one of my favorite guests, Nancy O'Keefe, for her second conversation on She Coaches Coaches. Nancy is a certified human design business and leadership coach, certified executive coach, and the author of the brand new bestselling book Lead with Your Light. Our conversation picked up where we left off and went places I did not expect. I came away with a renewed sense of what leadership actually is, and what it is not.
The thing that struck me most was how simply Nancy defines leadership. Not as a title, not as something you earn or are appointed to. She defines it as influence. And by that definition, every single one of us is already leading, whether we know it or not.
Leadership Is Not Developed. It Is Awakened.
Nancy has done hundreds of human design readings. And she told me that she sees leadership capacity in every single chart, without exception. It is not something some people have and others do not. It is something that is present in everyone, waiting to be recognized and chosen.
What I find so freeing about this perspective is that it takes the pressure off the idea that you have to become someone different in order to lead. You do not. You have to wake up to who you already are. Nancy talks about a concept she calls the leadership threshold: that doorway where capable women stand and hesitate. They know they could step through. They know they have something to offer. But fear stops them. Fear of judgment, fear of being wrong, fear of being too visible. Her mission is to help women through that doorway.
She also made a distinction I thought was important: there is a difference between not being ready and simply choosing not to step up right now. Both are valid. Leadership is a choice. Not everyone will make it at the same moment. And that is completely fine.
What Human Design Tells You About How You Make Decisions
One of the most practically useful things Nancy shared was about decision-making authority in human design. This is the idea that each of us has a specific internal mechanism that is most reliable for making aligned choices. And almost none of them involve the logical pros-and-cons analysis we were all taught to use.
Nancy is an emotional generator, which means she needs to wait through her emotional wave before a yes or no settles into clarity for her. I am a pure generator, which means my sacral response, that immediate gut yes or no, is my most reliable signal. Nancy described an experiment for Generators who are new to working with their sacral: make a list of yes-or-no questions, have a trusted friend ask them, and notice what happens in your body before your mind has a chance to analyze. The body knows before the mind catches up. The practice is learning to trust that.
I shared something I have been experimenting with in my own business: instead of a traditional to-do list, I write a "could-do" list. As the day unfolds, I check in with each item and ask which one feels like a yes right now. It sounds almost too simple. But it has changed how I work, and Nancy confirmed that for Generators this kind of approach is genuinely aligned with how we are designed.
It Is Never Too Late
Nancy was in her 60s when human design came across her radar. She admitted that she initially passed it by because it looked too complicated. But it kept showing up. She kept seeing it referenced, kept hearing about it, until she finally recognized that it was showing up because she was meant to work with it. She committed, studied, and built her entire practice around it.
She started writing the book that became Lead with Your Light eleven years before it was published. She wrote the first half, then set it aside because she could not see how it connected to her business. Seven months ago, she received a message in the night: read your book and finish it. She got up and did. The second half flowed from everything she had learned in the years in between.
I love this story because it is a reminder that nothing is wasted. The experiences we gather, the timing that feels off, the things we start and set down: they are all part of the preparation. The book needed eleven years of lived experience to be complete. And Nancy needed those years too.
She will be 73 this year. She is more visible, more certain of her convictions, and more committed to her mission than she has ever been. That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when you finally stop waiting for permission and choose to lead.
🎁 Free gift from Nancy, get your personalized Human Design Leadership Report. You will need your date, time, and place of birth: nancyokeefecoaching.com
📖 Get Nancy's new book, Lead with Your Light: Individual Empowerment, Influence and Impact with Human Design:
Grab my free course, Stop Guessing and Start Signing Clients, and take your next step today: https://candymotzek.lpages.co/vfo/
Want to see what's actually working for coaches right now? Download the free Coaching Business Insights Report 2026: https://candymotzek.lpages.co/business-growth-survey/
Ready to keep building? Watch this next: How to Start a Coaching Business playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Ja1CypZHinAnJBRM6ENbRtYs--2hSwY
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