Being Is the New Doing Podcast

Valerie Demont

You didn't start your business to become a prisoner of it. For established entrepreneurs who have built something real — and lost themselves in the process. Hosted by Valérie Demont, strategist, mentor, and author of Being Is the New Doing. demontvalerie.substack.com

  1. May 31

    C'est quoi un employé IA ? (Et pourquoi je refuse de dire « agent »)

    I'm so sorry! I made a mistake and uploaded this podcast to the wrong publication. Anyway, I am grateful to everyone who has listened to this french episode so far, so I am going to leave it here. My apologies to all my English-speaking audience! Un agent IA, c’est un outil. Un employé IA, c’est une présence. Cet épisode, je le voulais court. 11 minutes. Le temps d’un café. Pour te raconter pourquoi je refuse de dire « agent » et pourquoi je dis « employé ». Un outil, on l’utilise. Une présence, on l’entraîne. Tu lui donnes du contexte. Tu lui donnes ta voix. Tu lui donnes tes décisions passées, tes lignes rouges, ta méthode, tes clients. Tu le briefes comme tu briefes une humaine qui débute chez toi. Et au bout de quelques semaines, on ne voit plus que ce n’est pas toi. Dans mon entreprise, j’ai cinq catégories d’employés IA. Les agents de flux. Les créateurs de contenu. Les passeurs. Les sentinelles. Les gardiens de mission. Tu vas découvrir ce que chacun fait dans mon entreprise. Et surtout, dans quel ordre les recruter quand toi tu commences. Chacune de ces recrues, elle peut être à 4 niveaux d’autonomie. Du freelance ponctuel au directeur qui tourne tout seul, en passant par l’employée interne et l’employée avec les clés. La règle : le but n’est jamais de monter jusqu’au 4. Le but est de choisir le bon niveau pour la bonne tâche. Et la chose que personne ne te raconte quand on te vend « automatise ta vie en 30 jours » : Pour entraîner un employé qui te ressemble, il faut savoir à quoi toi tu ressembles. C’est précisément pour ça que le 19 juin existe. Deux heures en Zoom. Une démo live d’un employé IA. Et surtout, on regarde par où toi tu commences. 🎯 Momentum du 19 juin · valeriedemont.ch/momentum Et après ça, on pourra creuser ensemble cet été. Pour aujourd’hui, écoute l’épisode. 11 minutes pour comprendre ce qui change quand on passe d’agent à employé. Prends bien soin de tes good vibes, Valérie Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe

    C'est quoi un employé IA ? (Et pourquoi je refuse de dire « agent »)
  2. May 10

    The Most Underrated Skill in the AI Age

    You know the kind. A migraine that arrives at four in the afternoon and feels like someone strapped a bag of sand to your forehead. Shoulders that creep up to your ears between two meetings and refuse to come back down. A knot in the stomach the morning of the launch. A jaw locked at three a.m. for no reason your brain can name. We have all had one. Probably this week. And what most of us do, with that signal, is reach for an ibuprofen. Or a coffee. Or a deeper breath we forget two minutes later. Last Friday, my client had a migraine. Not one of her usual ones. This one had weight on it. A lead helmet on her head. A bar across her eyes. Fog in her brain. Brief due. Three calls. Inbox that would not quit. She closed the laptop at four thirty. Saturday morning at seven, she called me. Clear. Light. Recalibrated. And she said something I have not stopped thinking about: I think my body did the work I was refusing to do, I’ve been recalibrated. I know that sentence. I have lived it. I still live it, occasionally, on the weeks where I miss the whisper. The shoulders climb. The jaw locks. The stomach turns at a meal I love. And every single time, when I trace it back, the same thing is true. Something I said yes to was not aligned. A collaboration that did not smell right. A direction I took because the logic was clean, even though the body was already saying no. Here is why this matters more than ever right now. In 2026, most of us are no longer working only with humans. We are collaborating with AI employees. With agents. With LLMs that produce a draft, a structure, a strategy in thirty seconds. And the question we have to ask, every single time, is not just is this good? The brain can answer that one. Pros and cons, sharp and fast. The real question is the one only the body can answer: Does this sound like me? Is this actually mine? Is this aligned for my company, for my voice, for the work I am here to do? You will feel it as a small expansion in the chest, or a small contraction in the gut. You will feel it before you can put words on it. And learning to hear that, early, before the migraine, before the contract you will regret, before the launch that drains you, that is the most underrated business skill of 2026. Not prompt engineering. Not productivity stacks. The body, in conversation with the work. It is a skill, in the real sense. Something to tame, to hear, to respect. Something that gets sharper with practice and dulls when ignored. In this episode, I share what my client said on Saturday morning, why this listening matters more than ever in the AI age, and one small invitation for your week ahead. 📚 Order Being Is the New Doing on Amazon → https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct 🌿 Save the date: Tuesday June 23, 2026. I am opening Momentum, the English version. My first ever group offering in English. Two hours, once a month, for conscious entrepreneurs who want to keep training that listening in real time. DM me, or subscribe to be on the list when registration opens. Take care of your good vibes, Valérie Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe

    The Most Underrated Skill in the AI Age
  3. Apr 26

    Your rituals stopped working? That's your upgrade talking.

    She had a ritual. Every time she had to present in a room, on a big Zoom, she’d arrive early, always. Walk in. Breathe the space to feel it and align herself. Take a few long exhales before the noise. It worked for years, beautifully, reliably. Then last year, everything started fighting her. The train delayed or found no parking. Arriving on foot, sweaty, exactly on time, zero margin. The next meeting: a technical failure. Zoom wouldn’t load. She joined late. The important decisions had already been made. And so on. She told me: I’ve lost access to my inner guidance. I don’t know how to decide anymore. I looked at her and said: No my dear, you haven’t lost anything: your old system just doesn’t fit where you’re going. In this episode, we talk about what no one names: What happens when you outgrow your own operating system and what it feels like to live through that. Here’s what I see again and again with the entrepreneurs I work with closely. They’ve done the work, retreats, therapy, years of inner exploration. They have a very precise way of accessing their intuition: a specific time, a specific state, a specific sequence of things that opens the channel. It works… until it doesn’t. * Until the day the train is late. * Until the Zoom breaks. * Until life refuses to cooperate with their system. And the story they tell themselves is: I’ve lost it. I’ve regressed. I’ve disconnected. Or a more evolved version — because the people I work with are sophisticated — is: maybe I’m just not ready. Maybe I need more inner work before I can step into what’s next. Both versions say the same thing: the problem is me and I want to offer a completely different lens. You have enough fixings. You are perfect, as is life. Now it's time to step into your complete version of yourself! When I looked at what was actually happening with my client — I call her Clara — I saw something she couldn’t see from inside it. She didn’t lose access to her inner guidance, she was being supported 👉 The decisions got made in her favor, without her needing to fight for them. Life was showing her, repeatedly and insistently, that she didn’t need to control the conditions anymore. Her old system was built on a belief: I need to prepare. I need to arrive first. I need to set the scene. I need to perform rituals to access my intuition and channel it.That belief served her well. For a long time, it got her here. But she’s being called into a C-level role now — something significantly larger. The old system, which was based on controlling conditions, is absolutely not accurate for the new posture. I’ve been there too. In autumn 2022… I found myself sitting on the floor of my friend’s kitchen, crying, saying I couldn’t take it anymore. Nothing was moving. And she said, receiving it from her own guides: Valérie, you have to stop using your Excel spreadsheet. (I mean that literally. I had a spreadsheet for everything. A beautifully organized container for the illusion of control.) What she was pointing at: my system of mental planning had become a wall between me and my own intuition. I had to dismantle it — to get back to what I actually knew from the inside. And then rebuild from there. Inner governance first. Structure second. Tools third. Not the other way around. Especially these days, with AI reshaping the middle layer of every industry and the rules rewriting themselves in real time. The entrepreneurs who will move through this period well are the ones who don’t need the conditions to be ideal. Who are connected to their inner compass not as a Tuesday morning ritual, but as a way of operating — a permanent frequency. That’s a different thing from having practices. And getting there often requires an upgrade, or in some cases, a complete reinstall of the internal system. If you’ve been feeling cut off from your own guidance, if your rituals feel flat, if your decisions don’t feel like yours, before you conclude something is wrong with you, please change your point of view and ask a different question: What if my system is simply too small for where I’m going? Sometimes losing access to your old guidance means you’re at a threshold and the way through is to start learning the new one, not to fix the old system. And honestly? I’m so glad for you if you’re living that. Because we need you to upgrade for the new paradigm. Ready to learn your new operating system? My book Being Is the New Doing walks through the six-stage FLUIDE framework — each stage a layer of the operating system. It’s the same process I use with the entrepreneurs I mentor closely. 📖 Order on Amazon → https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct Want to work through this directly, together? → valeriedemont.ch/en/product/powerweek/ Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe

    Your rituals stopped working? That's your upgrade talking.
  4. Apr 17

    Your Business Won't Grow Beyond What You Can Hold Inside

    Welcome to the After-Launch Party 🎉 The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about. So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations. This is the last one — and it’s the most personal. Being Is the New Doing is structured around the acronym FLUIDE — six dimensions of an aligned life and business: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. This conversation lives in the “E” — Evolution — as a lived experience of allowing what wants to emerge, rather than forcing what you think should happen. I invited Renee Spears Abundology because she was there from the beginning. She heard me say “I think I’m going to write a book” before I’d written a word. She was there during the editing, the proofreading, the translation into English. She was the first person to have me on her podcast to talk about it and she knows the backstage in a way almost nobody else does. (I also visited her in Montana last summer for one of her amazing 1-1 spiritual business retreat, and that alone tells you everything about the quality of this friendship.) Renee is a spirit guide channeler, spiritual mentor, and the host of the Abundology podcast — 450 episodes, six years, two missed Sundays. She channels messages from people’s guides. She describes herself as a translator from the spirit world to English. And in this conversation, she channeled her own guides live, on air, in front of an audience. Which is not something I planned. It just happened. (As things tend to do when the energy is right.) The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle [00:05:47 — 00:07:16] The name Abundology came to Renee during an acupuncture session. The needle went into her third eye, and she received a complete download: the name of her company, the work she’d be doing, the direction of her life. She’d just sold the mortgage company she’d built over 20 years — started in her living room, grown into something real — and she had no idea what came next. Six months of puzzles, chocolate, pedicures, and waiting. The word wasn’t one she’d heard before. She went home and Googled it. It existed, vaguely, in some other context. She followed the guidance anyway. And the name, she says, really does fit — because abundance for her was never primarily about money. It was about joy, presence, beauty, the richness of a life fully inhabited. That’s why I invited her for the last conversation of this series. She doesn’t just talk about this. She lives inside it. The year income doubled by shifting to joy [00:11:32 — 00:12:18] About ten years into running her mortgage company, Renee was deeply unhappy. She had been focused on the numbers, the bottom line, the revenue targets. And she made a decision that, by conventional business logic, sounds almost irresponsible: she stopped looking at the numbers and shifted her entire focus to joy, to appreciation, to the quality of her relationships with her employees and clients, to the journey itself. The first year she did that, income doubled. She said this without drama, almost as a footnote, as if it confirms something so obvious it barely needs stating. Which, if you’ve read the book, it does. But I want to sit with it for a moment because it’s the kind of thing that sounds like a motivational poster until you actually live it and then it sounds like physics. The live channeling: what the guides said about AI [00:24:33 — 00:30:07] Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I asked Renee to channel her guides live. She doesn’t usually do this for herself she normally works with other people’s guides. So she was curious too. The question I gave them: What do they have to say about AI, and how do we use this time well as entrepreneurs? What came through: “AI is an integral part of this collective consciousness shift. It’s going to free up energy and attention from the things that don’t need us as much — so we can redirect toward connection, authenticity, and knowing ourselves. Because that’s the work of this era, not the eight-hour business plan. Getting to know who we actually are, right now, in this new version of ourselves.” And then the part I want you to read twice: “We are not who we were six months ago, let alone five years ago. And so even if you did know who you were, this is a new version of you.” So the question isn’t just “who am I.” It’s: who am I becoming? And am I awake enough to meet that person? Pfiou! OMG! AI sucking our authenticity [00:29:52 — 00:30:13] Renee also said something she and I had talked about before (see the video below), and I want it here because it’s precise: AI risks sucking our authenticity. Not because it’s malicious, but because if you don’t know yourself well enough to evaluate what it gives you, you’ll use it to define you rather than serve you. This is the same point Stefanie made about the inner compass. The same point Iva made about design. The same thread running through all five conversations: the external world — AI, algorithms, other people’s opinions, financial forecasters telling you a company that doesn’t grow will die — can only disorient you if you don’t have a strong enough signal on the inside. The work isn’t resisting AI. The work is knowing yourself well enough to use it as a tool rather than let it become your voice. Peace starts within (not out there). [00:30:46 — 00:32:35] I pushed the guides on the practical question 🤷‍♀️ the one my entrepreneur mind needed to ask: How do you keep inner peace when you have a company to run, invoices to pay, salaries, taxes? If I spend time on myself, who’s paying the bills? The answer through Renee was clean: “That’s scarcity thinking dressed up as pragmatism. The shift isn’t about spending three hours a day in meditation instead of running your business. It’s about the quality of presence you bring to the marketing plan, to the client session, to the proposal. Are you doing it from “I got to get this done” or from peace and joy and abundance? Because those are two completely different energies. And they produce different results.” And then: “If you aren’t open to this shift, you’re going to get smacked upside the head with something not working to get you to shift.” She said it with a smile, the guides said it with precision. We’ve all seen this: * The sore knee that forced Renee to sit still and receive ideas she wouldn’t have had otherwise. * The meeting I’ve missed that turned into an afternoon in the sun. Everything happening for you, not to you, if you’re awake enough to read it that way. A company that doesn’t grow will die. But what is growth? 💥 Spoiler alert: that's not how it works in the new paradigm. [00:52:41 — 00:55:51] One of my clients sent me a voice note earlier that day. She’d been in a meeting with her financial forecaster, who told her: a company that doesn’t grow will die. I asked Renee — and the guides — what they thought. The answer: “That’s our old-fashioned idea of growth. Revenue up, headcount up, complexity up, overhead up. And when revenue went up in that model, for most of Renée’s friends who ran companies, happiness went down. Because more revenue often meant more everything — more work, more people to manage, more costs, more pressure. The number grew. What was left didn’t.” She asked the question I want to ask every entrepreneur I work with: What does success actually mean to you? Is it a company that doubles revenue every four years? Or is it: I make great income. I work with people I genuinely like. I have time for my life and my family. I leave work feeling like myself. If it’s the first one : how can you have a healthy business if the people inside it aren’t healthy? If the owner isn’t healthy? That’s not a company that’s thriving. That’s a number that’s growing while everything underneath it deteriorates. For the first time in history, we get to choose how we evolve [00:51:15 — 00:52:08] Renee quoted Barbara Marx Hubbard — something she’d heard in a talk years ago that has stayed with her. The idea: this is the first time in human history that we get to consciously choose how we evolve. Before, evolution was driven by necessity. We needed lungs. We needed to walk upright. We needed whatever the environment demanded. Now, it’s consciousness. We get to choose how we want our businesses to evolve. Our souls. Our societies. That’s a completely different position to be in. And the invitation, from the guides and from this conversation, is to approach what’s happening with wonder rather than fear. Not “what is this going to destroy” but “what wonderful thing is going to come from this.” Not reactive in the sense of scrambling. Reactive in the sense of open, receiving, present. So here’s what I’m leaving you with: If your business stopped growing tomorrow — in revenue, in headcount, in scope — but everything inside it became healthier, lighter, more joyful: would that be a failure? And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, what does that tell you about what you’re actually optimizing for? You can find Renée Spears and the Abundology podcast on all major platforms, and her work at abundology.com. A And please do me a favour: start next week with Renee's Energy of the Week here on Substack or on Youtube (or your favorite podcast platform). Being Is the New Doing is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct Val The Awakened Entrepreneur is a r

  5. Apr 16

    The Inner Compass Nobody Teaches You to Use

    Welcome to the After-Launch Party 🎉 The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about. So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations. Being Is the New Doing is built around the acronym FLUIDE — six dimensions of an aligned life and business: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. This conversation touches the F - Foundations and L — Liberation — the process of freeing yourself from the conditioning, the autopilot, the inherited definitions of success that were never really yours to begin with. And what leadership looks like once that work is done. I invited Stefanie because she operates at the intersection that I find most interesting and most rare: woo, neuroscience, and practical everyday leadership. Not one or two of those. All three. She works with executives and entrepreneurs, and what she keeps finding is that the skills that actually matter for modern leadership — groundedness, boundaries, the ability to make a decision from the inside rather than from external pressure — are exactly the ones nobody teaches. Not in business school. Not in grad school. Not anywhere. And so here we are. The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle [00:01:00 — 00:05:08] Stefanie calls herself a modern leadership coach — reluctantly, because like me, she doesn’t love the word coach. (If you find a better one, she says, please let her know.) What she means by modern leadership is this: the lines between work, parenthood, and every other dimension of life have blurred irreversibly. And in that context, performing well, feeling at peace, and feeling fulfilled require a set of skills that simply aren’t on any curriculum. The most fundamental of those skills: knowing where you are in your own body at any given moment. For her, the signals are visceral and specific — a contraction in the solar plexus when something is off, a felt sense of wrongness when she’s about to say yes to something that doesn’t fit her actual priorities. She’s a self-described people pleaser. Her default under pressure is yes. And so the work, for her, has been building enough body awareness to catch that default before it lands — and choose differently. Energy is the currency. And boundaries, she says, are inseparable from it. Not as rules, but as information about what actually fits. The doing factory [00:11:21 — 00:12:39] Stefanie said something in passing that I want to give more space to: we are so in the habit of doing that being is something people don’t understand, let alone know how to practice. And while people think they’ve forgotten how, the truth is they haven’t. They’ve just had it trained out of them. From early childhood onward, the system rewards output. Good marks, university admission, job performance, KPIs. The entire architecture of modern professional life is designed to keep people at the average — predictable, measurable, comparable. What I call the Gaussian curve problem: everything pulls toward the middle, toward conformity, toward fitting. The individuals who sit at the edges of that curve — the ones with something genuinely different to offer — are precisely the ones the system is least equipped to hold. Stefanie’s son comes home from school and says he’s bored. She tells him: you’re not bored. For the first time today, you have autonomy. You get to direct yourself. And that’s actually a skill nobody teaches — children or adults. How to be with yourself, unstructured, without immediately filling the space. Multitasking puts fog on the inner compass [00:33:48 — 00:35:44] The image that stayed with me from this conversation: multitasking as fog on the inner compass. When you’re switching between tasks constantly, you don’t just lose focus — you lose access to your own signal. The body is still sending information, but you can’t hear it through the noise. Stefanie describes the inner compass as something that gets clouded from multiple directions at once: other people’s priorities, subconscious programming, an overfull calendar with no gaps. Even with awareness, even with intention, if you look at your day and there is no space — no being time, no time that belongs to you without an agenda — the compass gets obscured. Not broken. Obscured. The antidote isn’t two hours of meditation. It’s a 10-minute walk. Three minutes of breathing. The ability to sit somewhere without stimulation and let yourself land. That’s enough to restore access, she says, to the information that was already there. The career coach who fired her client [00:29:00 — 00:30:36] Around 40, Stefanie lost her job unexpectedly. She’d left a stable position to join a startup and was let go after eight weeks. In the aftermath, she hired a career coach who asked her all the foundational questions — what do you want, who are you, what matters to you — and Stefanie realized she didn’t have clear answers. The coach, gently, told her: I don’t think I can help you. I think you need a life coach. That moment — being effectively fired by your own coach for not knowing yourself — was the beginning. She found Michael Singer. She found Deepak Chopra. She spent time with herself for what felt like the first time. And in not having anything to do, she discovered being. Not as a concept. As the only option available. Now she tries to take people there without requiring the crash, she says. Before the illness, the divorce, the layoff. Can we do some of this work while you’re still standing, still functional, before the system forces the question on you? I recognized myself in this completely. My own tipping points were burnout and the loss of my father. Strange, we said to each other, that it takes something enormous to make us stop and look at the life we’re actually living. AI as the new autopilot [00:24:28 — 00:27:14] We went somewhere unexpected in this conversation: AI as a mirror for the inner compass problem. Stefanie made the point precisely — if you don’t tell AI what you’re after, it will tell you. It will generate, propose, structure, and if you don’t have enough inner groundedness to evaluate what comes back, you’ll take it for granted and act on it. I mentioned the Anthropic study published a few weeks ago showing that some users were delegating decisions to Claude and then using the AI as an excuse — “AI told me to do that.” She made the analogy immediately: it’s like a Tesla in full self-drive mode. When the car has an accident, you say it wasn’t me. But Tesla isn’t liable. And neither is the AI. The human is still the one responsible for the outcome. Her framing: lay all the tools on the table — AI, money, relationships, all of it. But there is only one person who can assemble them, prioritize them, deploy them, and oversee them. That person is you. And if you’ve outsourced your inner compass to an algorithm, you’ve given away the one thing no tool can replace. The test for your own clients [00:55:44 — 00:56:09] Stefanie shared her own version of client alignment as a qualifying filter. She tells potential clients: if you want to work with me, you need to be able to close your eyes and take a long, deep breath. If you can’t do that — or can’t imagine doing that with your team — I’m not the right person for you. I use something similar. Former corporate clients sometimes come back expecting the same relationship we had before. And I have to tell them honestly: I’m the same person, same energy, but today the work is different. If they want to work with me now, they have to be willing to go inside. If that feels too far, I’m genuinely not their person. And there’s nothing wrong with that. What Stefanie added is the nuance I find most interesting in corporate work: even when the leader wants to do this work, the team often doesn’t. Someone suggests a breathing exercise or an intuition workshop and immediately it’s “a bit woo-woo.” And so the work, often, is not just with the individual but with the permission structure around them. Getting an organization to take seriously the things that don’t fit on a KPI spreadsheet. Being sure enough to let people go [00:54:34 — 00:55:31] One of the last things Stefanie said that I want to leave here: when you’re sure of yourself and in alignment, you can say something that puts someone off — and not immediately backtrack to soften it. The old version of her would have rushed to explain, to qualify, to find the version of what she meant that wouldn’t upset anyone. Now: if it felt right to say, and it doesn’t vibe with you, that’s a filter. Not a failure. She’s rebuilding her website right now with this in mind. She doesn’t want to fake-sell herself. She doesn’t want to optimize for maximum inoffensiveness. She wants to be true to what she actually does, and trust that the people meant for her will recognize themselves in it. That’s it, really. That’s what this whole series has been about. Daniel rebuilt his land and his body by creating conditions rather than forcing outcomes. Kim listens for the voice that comes from the belly, not the throat. Iva stopped driving herself toward things and started following the pull. And Stefanie gets off autopilot — late, as most of us do, after something breaks — and begins, for the first time, to use the compass she already had. So here’s what I’m leaving you with: If you look at your day today — not as an ideal, as it actually is — where are the gaps? The unscheduled minutes, the tra

    The Inner Compass Nobody Teaches You to Use
  6. Apr 16

    When You Stop Forcing, Things Actually Move

    Welcome to the After-Launch Party 🎉 The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about. So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations. Being Is the New Doing is built around the acronym FLUIDE — six dimensions of an aligned life and business: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. This conversation touches all six, but it lands most deeply in the “U” — Unicity — Your energy, your nervous system, your design, your relationship to your own true rhythm. I invited Iva G. Biz + Human Design because I worked with me last year, and because what she does is rare: she uses Human Design, psychosomatic work, and story selling as one integrated system. A business that feels good isn’t a luxury in her world. It’s the point. And she lives that. From the outside, people look at her and say: you’re doing so much. She says: I don’t feel like it. Because when it’s your passion, it isn’t effort. That’s exactly what Being Is the New Doing is about. The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle [00:03:21 — 00:06:25] Iva discovered Human Design eight years ago. Like most of us, she read her chart, found it interesting, and dropped it. A year later she came back, this time with the intention to actually live it — starting with her authority, then her centers, then the gates inside the centers. Eight years of that, she says, is exactly the seven-year deconditioning cycle Human Design talks about. Your cells regenerate. Your body resets. You get, literally, a new system. But the real turning point was a December she decided to use as an experiment. No motivation, no inspiration, nothing she wanted to do. So instead of pushing, she gave herself an entire month to act only from her design — from her sacral yes and no, from her emotional authority. Wake up: do I want to get out of bed or stay in? Do I want to read or scroll? No overriding. No “I should.” Just following the pull. That month, Clubhouse launched. She felt a strong pull toward it, unusual for her. She started hosting live conversations. Clients came in. Opportunities followed. A collaboration with one of the biggest Human Design creators on YouTube. Offers launched from pure enthusiasm, no plan, no course built in advance. $9,000 in a week. Not because she forced anything. Because she finally stopped. The difference between using Human Design and living it [00:10:06 — 00:10:45] There’s a version of Human Design that’s mental — you know your type, your profile, your “it factor,” and you use it to inform your content strategy. Iva used it that way for years. It works on that level, she says. But it’s not the same as feeling it from inside your body. The shift is from doing Human Design to being it. From “this is my it factor, I’ll show it through my content” to “there is a pull in my body right now, something that wants to move, and I’m going to follow it without needing to understand why.” That second version is what changed everything for her. Not the knowledge. The embodiment. And that, she says, is exactly what the title of your book means. Being is not passive. It’s not the absence of doing. It’s the condition from which the right doing becomes possible — and feels completely different from the inside. The fear gate, goal trauma, and EFT tapping [00:15:50 — 00:22:25] Human Design gave Iva a map, but the map also showed her the blocks. Gate 44 in her spleen center — the fear of the past repeating itself. In business, this translates directly: every time you’ve set a goal and missed it, every time something went badly, you carry that unprocessed experience forward. It becomes a weight on every future attempt. She calls it goal trauma. She survived two wars. Lost her father at 12. There was, she says simply, a lot of stuff there. And Human Design helped her see exactly where those experiences were living in her energetic structure and why they were creating specific patterns in her business behavior. The tool she used to clear it: EFT tapping. Not as a concept, as a daily practice. In EFT, you go through a round of venting first — all the swear words, all the “this is not fair,” all of it — and only after the emotion is fully expressed does the neutralization become possible. This is precisely what Human Design prescribes for emotional authority: act from neutrality. But you can’t get to neutrality by thinking your way there. You have to move through the emotion somatically, not manage it mentally. The plane above the hurricane [00:25:34 — 00:27:10] Iva described a moment that I found precise enough to keep exactly as she said it. She’d received bad news. She was spiraling. She started pacing around her kitchen doing circular breathwork — the conscious connected breath she’d learned from a coach. Within 90 seconds — the time it takes an emotion to leave the body if you don’t cling to it — something shifted. Before: a plane in the hurricane. After: a plane above it. The clouds are still there. The difficult situation hasn’t changed. But her emotional state is completely neutral. Detached. Able to observe. And from that place, she can actually think. This is not a metaphor for bypassing. It’s the opposite. You go through the emotion with the breath, not around it. The nervous system regulation opens the parts of the brain that dysregulation shuts down. Creativity, discernment, decision-making — all of it comes back online. And this, she says, is the only state from which you can make good decisions. Because all of your resources are available. Why breath is the tool nobody teaches us [00:23:59 — 00:27:27] Both of us said the same thing in different words: the breath is a superpower and nobody teaches us this. It should be in schools. It takes three minutes, works on the vagus nerve, regulates the nervous system, and costs nothing. I added my own version: I wake up sometimes with a contraction right here, between the solar plexus and the heart, in the sternum. Three minutes of alternate nostril breathing and it’s gone. Not suppressed — gone. And from there I can start my emails, my sessions, my day, from somewhere that actually feels like me. Iva’s version is sharper: procrastination, bad decisions, fear and doubt — all of these come from a dysregulated nervous system. Regulate it, and everything else gets easier. Not because the problems disappear, but because you’re meeting them with all of your capacity rather than a fraction of it. Mirror work, radical self-acceptance, and the face that doesn’t lie [00:32:54 — 00:34:14] Iva’s other practice is mirror work. She started it practically by necessity — living alone in Toronto, sometimes weeks without seeing anyone in person, she started talking to herself in the mirror. Dancing with herself. And from that came something she hadn’t expected: radical self-honesty. Your eyes don’t lie. Your face doesn’t lie. You can tell yourself whatever story you want, but when you look at yourself — really look — your face tells you what’s actually true. I shared my own version of this. Last week, after the book launch, I looked at myself in the mirror. I expected to feel thrilled. I wasn’t sure what I felt. And in the mirror I saw it: deeply satisfied. Proud. And a little ashamed to admit it, because there’s something in us that hesitates to claim satisfaction outright, like we’re not supposed to be pleased with ourselves. The mirror caught it before I could qualify it. That recognition, Iva says, changes something in the cells. I believe her. Human Design as a certification to be yourself [00:31:01 — 00:32:00] One of the lines from this conversation that I keep turning over: Human Design gives you permission — a certification, she called it — to be yourself. To stop comparing your energy, your rhythm, your pace to someone else’s and wondering why you can’t keep up. She has an undefined root center. Not consistently driven. A homebody by nature. She loves what she calls soft business — no hustle, no burning through energy in ways that deplete. Someone else, with a defined root center, thrives on exactly that intensity. Neither is wrong. But knowing which one you are, and stopping the shame about it, is the beginning of everything. Comparison, she says, can be the thief of joy. But it can also be a source of it — when you use it as information rather than judgment. When you watch someone else’s system and recognize: she has this and I don’t. This path is hers, not mine. And from that recognition, you stop borrowing blueprints and start building from your own design. What being actually produces [00:53:22 — 00:55:51] Iva closed the conversation with something I want to keep as a kind of compass. She said: when you start from being — when you start with your nervous system, with honoring yourself, with that foundation — everything else comes from that. The launch becomes easier. The content ideas keep coming because you’re in a creative state. The offers take shape because you know what you actually want. And on top of that, all the tools and tactics and strategies fit — because there’s a real foundation under them. The version that doesn’t work: you start with the strategy, the launch plan, the marketing calendar, and try to find the energy to execute it from a system that’s already dysregulated. The doing is all there. The being is absent. And it feels like exactly what it is: pushing. She said something else at the end that stayed with me: with AI

    When You Stop Forcing, Things Actually Move
  7. Apr 16

    Finding the Expression That Actually Sounds Like You | BIND After Launch Party

    Welcome to Being Is the New Doing After-Launch Party 🎉 The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about. So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations. Being Is the New Doing is structured around the acronym FLUIDE — six dimensions of an aligned life and business: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. This conversation lives right in the heart of the “I” — Intuition — and specifically what it means to let that intelligence come through your voice, your words, and the way you show up when you speak. I invited Kim Parkinson because she is doing something I find quietly radical: she helps spiritually aligned women entrepreneurs find and use their voice — not as a performance, not as a brand exercise, but as an actual channel for what they know. I met her on PodMatch, and from the very first conversation I had that feeling of “I’ve known this woman my whole life.” When someone can help you arrive at your own truth, that’s a gift. And she embodies what Being Is the New Doing is about: leading from inside out, trusting what you already carry, and having the courage to let it actually be heard. [00:03:04] The first thing Kim told me is that when women come to her with a podcast idea, they almost always arrive with the same plan: They’re going to interview other people. Their clients. Their friends. Experts. Anyone, really, except themselves. And she has to stop them and say: no. We need you. Your story. Your voice. Your words. It sounds simple. It isn’t. Because the block isn’t a lack of content — it’s a throat chakra constriction, as she puts it. A deep, almost physical hesitation to take up space with your own truth. And what she’s learned, over years of working with priestesses, astrologers, ministers, and corporate women, is that the moment someone stops performing and starts actually speaking — you can hear it. Immediately. In the voice itself. That’s what this conversation is about, voice as a doorway to yourself, rather than podcasting as a tactic. You can hear the smile [00:07:19 — 00:08:12] Kim said something that stayed with me: “I can hear their smiles.” Not see them. Hear them. When a client sends her a recorded audio, she knows within seconds whether they’ve arrived. Not from the content, not from the structure — from the quality of what’s coming through the voice. When someone reads from a script, the voice flattens. When they move to an outline — just sticky notes, just a few anchors — something shifts. The inflection returns. The breath changes. She can feel the calmness come over them through the recording. And that, she says, is when the intuitive guide starts coming through. When the transmission actually begins. It made me think of my first student job, answering phones as a telephonist before the internet existed (yes, we are that generation). My boss used to say: I want to hear your smile in your voice. I was 20 and shy and had no idea what that meant. Today, running a podcast, I realize I’ve been training for this my whole life. (The universe is like that, sometimes annoyingly so.) The throat chakra and what’s actually blocking you [00:04:23 — 00:06:57] Kim works with women across very different spiritual traditions — from Oracle readers and tarot practitioners to ministers and pastors, and corporate women who would never call themselves spiritual but already are, in their own way. What they all share is a version of the same blockage: the felt sense that their story is not quite worthy of being shared. That someone else’s story would be more interesting, more helpful, more legitimate. What she does is simple and not simple at all: She sits with them. She asks the right questions. What do clients ask you all the time? What do you know that you don’t even realize you know? And then she waits for intuition to take over, because it always does. The voice that emerges from that process sounds completely different from the voice that was performing before. It’s stiller and it comes from further inside. She describes it like an elastic band. You have to pull it back just a little, and then you go forward. The resistance isn’t the problem — it’s the launch. What I felt in my belly [00:16:53 — 00:18:25] There was a moment in our conversation where Kim was describing the feeling of speaking from a place of true alignment, and I noticed something: my belly went completely calm and settled. Not the electricity I sometimes get when something is right. Not goosebumps. Something quieter, more anchored. Like being grounded from the inside. I said it out loud, a little uncertain: I feel like my voice is more from the inside than from my throat. And she said: yes. That’s it. That’s an inner wash. That’s what we aim for — that what you speak comes from within and you’re delivering it to the world. That distinction between a voice that originates in the throat and a voice that originates in the body, the belly, the deeper self — it’s subtle and it’s everything. You’ve heard both. You know the difference immediately. One leaves you feeling slightly empty after speaking. The other leaves you feeling more like yourself. Intuition doesn’t push [00:45:13 — 00:49:28] One of the most useful things we said is that intuition is sure of itself, so it can wait. It doesn’t need to push. It doesn’t arrive with urgency or anxiety. It arrives calm, complete, often at the most inconvenient moments: the middle of the night, in the shower, while driving. These are all moments when your logical mind is occupied elsewhere, and the space opens. She described a friend who, rather than wake up and write in her journal at 3am, would toss the journal on the floor next to her bed. If it was on the floor in the morning, she knew she had something to retrieve. A small, funny, deeply practical system for working with the timing of the inner voice rather than against it. I shared my own version of this: I’ve learned to receive what comes in the middle of the night without rushing to act on it. I tell it: “I know you’re here. Come back at a better time.” And it does — usually richer, with more precision, more information. Because when you stop forcing, there’s space for the full picture to arrive. The client who thought she’d lost her intuition [00:40:25 — 00:42:35] Earlier that same afternoon, I’d been with a client who was crying. She said she’d lost her faith and her intuition over the past year. No more goosebumps. No more visions. No sense of channeling. She felt like something essential had gone quiet. And then, in the middle of our conversation, something shifted. She was talking and I noticed: she was completely grounded in her own sovereignty. Still. Clear. I asked where it was coming from. She said: I don’t know. I just feel so good when I’m sharing this. That’s your soul talking, I told her. Your inner truth. You haven’t lost anything — the silence you’ve been experiencing is your upgrade. Because to arrive where you’re meant to go, you had to stop accessing the old way. You can’t run new software on the old operating system. She stopped crying. She felt it: still here. Just different. Kim’s response when I shared this: sometimes there’s just a lot of noise, and we allow it in. When we don’t step back, the noise takes over. What that client needed wasn’t more intuition. She needed someone to guide her back to the stillness she’d already earned. Acting from scarcity, or: why your clients can feel it [00:57:46 — 00:59:44] We ended the conversation somewhere unexpected: talking about what happens when you try to attract clients from a place of need. Not want, not intention — raw, anxious need. Kim said it directly: if your bank account is at zero and you’re in panic mode, it’s not going to work. They can feel it. Scarcity repels. I added what I’ve learned over 15 years of running my own business — through the long downs, the dry spells, the moments where the fear is real: even then, right now, at this second, I am safe. Roof over my head. Invoices paid. Healthy. That shift — from the anxiety of what might happen to the present fact of what is — is not a performance of abundance. It’s inner security. And it’s the only ground from which aligned clients can actually find you. Kim put it with the simplicity that I’ve come to recognize as her signature: “If you are truly in alignment with the people you want as clients, they will find you. Whether that’s your podcast, your newsletter, your Instagram, wherever. They’ll find you when it’s ready for them too.” So here’s what I’m leaving you with: When you speak — in your podcast, in a live, in a client conversation, or just to yourself in your journal — where does the voice actually come from? The throat, or somewhere deeper? And if it’s been a while since you felt that deeper place: what would it take to create enough stillness for it to come back? You can find Kim Parkinson and her podcast Podcasting for Your Spiritual Business at kpcreativemedia.com/podcast, and on all major podcast platforms. And below our very first conversation 😉 Being Is the New Doing is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/08gxk9ct Thank you Margaret Williams, MS, ACC, Paul k, and many others for tuning into my live video with Kim Parkinson! See U all soon!Val. Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Apr 14

    Lucky is a choice

    Welcome to Being Is the New Doing After-Launch Party 🎉 The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about. So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations. Being Is the New Doing is built around an acronym — FLUIDE — six dimensions that together describe what an aligned life and business actually look and feel like: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. The “U” — Unicity — is the one that carries the question of personal ecology: how you live in your body, how you organize your energy, how you find and protect your own rhythm so that who you are doesn’t get consumed by what you do. I invited Daniel P. Hirschi because it was obvious because he is, in his entire life, what Being Is the New Doing is about. A man who stopped doing in order to finally be — and rebuilt everything from that place, with his hands in the soil of Transylvania and his feet on a piece of land that was dead before he arrived, 20 years ago. If you’ve read the book, you’ll recognize the embodiement of doing from your Complete Self, If you haven’t, this conversation is a good reason to start. [00:04:07] It was two o’clock in the morning in Transylvania when Daniel’s wife broke every traffic rule to drive him to the hospital. His main coronary artery was completely blocked. The cardiologist told him later that in cases like his, people have roughly 40 minutes to survive. His wife made it in 20. He was lucky, he was lucky in his misfortune. That night in August 2018 was the culmination of something that had been building for years: a successful landscaping company with 12 employees, a heavily overweight body, chronic stress, and a life built entirely around output. A life, as Daniel puts it, that violated every principle of nature he had spent decades studying. Even if this may sounds dramatic (and it is), I invited Daniel for the After-Launch Party of Being Is the New Doing because of what he did with it. He is very conscious of his second chance in life. At one point, he said something that stuck with me all afternoon until I wrote this article: I’m very, very lucky because I can afford meditation and I am a very lucky guy to be here still. Yes, it seems it wasn’t his time yet. And also… …that luck is a choice he made. Every single day, for the seven years since his heart attack, he has committed to living differently. Period. This is what that looks like. These are the main points we discussed during our conversation. The thing about holistic management [00:09:04 — 00:13:47] Daniel is a permaculture designer and professional gardener. So when he had weeks of enforced stillness after his heart attack, he reached for the books he knew, including Alan Savory’s Holistic Management*, and did something most of us don’t do when our lives fall apart: he applied his professional framework to his own existence. He made a list of every natural principle he’d spent his career working with, then he looked at his life and realized he was violating most of them. What followed was the FARMISH Blueprint — seven life segments he identified as non-negotiable: Freedom, Authenticity, Relationships, Money, Inspiration, Sustainability, and Health. The insight is in what he noticed underneath it: when any one segment dominates for too long, everything starts to break down. The founding of a company might justify two years of imbalance, but five years of it? That’s a whole part of life and not only a phase. The homestead as a mirror [00:18:22 — 00:21:00] Before we can understand what Daniel did with his body and his business, we need to understand where he lives. Twenty years ago, he and his wife bought a piece of land in Transylvania that was, in his words, completely degraded — thirty years of monoculture corn had stripped it of almost everything. They introduced tons of compost, rotational gardening, a food forest. Today that same land holds more than 350 species. Birds and insects that don’t exist on neighboring plots have found their way there, drawn by flowers and trees that simply aren’t available anywhere else nearby. Daniel tells this story as the conceptual spine of everything else he does. A compost pile, he says, contains thousands of species of microbes, worms, insects, all working together and the heat it generates comes entirely from their combined, invisible activity. 20 years ago, the land was dead. He created the conditions to get it back to life and the rest happened. That is precisely the logic he applied to himself after 2018. His body was the degraded land: his main focus was how to create the conditions for it to recover. On depleted soil, performance isn’t the main issue. He made decisions that supported his new way of life. …. and he says it himself: he had to be selfish; it was a matter of survival, because after the first attack, the second one is just around the corner if you don’t change anything. And that was obviously not an option. [00:16:14 — 00:17:33] The first structural decision Daniel made was to reduce his company from 12 employees to one. He rethought the business model entirely — cut costs, redirected what was freed up into digital and online marketing, and rebuilt the whole operation around a simpler, leaner architecture. He used the word “selfish.” And then he defined it precisely: When we are talking about our health, we have to be selfish. The damage is in your body, not in everybody else’s. This is the part that tends to get glossed over in wellness culture, which is often more comfortable with the concept of self-care than with the actual disruption it requires. Real change is inconvenient for the people around you, at least initially. Reducing your team, changing your revenue model, restructuring your entire way of generating income — these are not small decisions. They were the preconditions for everything else. He couldn’t hear himself clearly while carrying 12 people’s livelihoods on a heart that had just stopped working. So he changed the weight he was carrying. The result was space. And space, as he discovered, is where your body finally gets to tell you what it needs. Food as the first conversation with your body [00:23:58 — 00:28:05] When I asked Daniel how he rebuilt his capacity to feel — to actually listen to his body — he didn’t start with meditation or journaling or breathwork. He started with food 🎉 His argument follows the same logic he applies to his land: No wild animal in nature is overweight, because every species eats according to its DNA. The ant, the lion, the elephant — they don’t need a nutritionist. They eat what they’re wired for. He shifted to mostly animal protein, eliminated snacking entirely, moved his first meal to early afternoon. The morning brain fog he’d lived with for years disappeared almost immediately. His heart scars healed at the rate of someone 30 years younger than he was. The parallel with the homestead is exact. A degraded soil can’t support biodiversity because it’s been stripped of what it needs. A body perpetually occupied with processing inputs it wasn’t designed for has no bandwidth left to signal. Sensitivity requires space. You can’t hear yourself if the noise never stops and processed food, he says, is one of the loudest forms of noise there is. The radical act of boredom [00:28:44 — 00:32:16] Daniel told me something that stopped me mid-conversation: I can handle boredom. People can’t handle boredom anymore. He can stand in his garden for half an hour, doing nothing visible, just observing. A new bird that wasn’t there last week. A bug he’s never seen before. His wife, he says with affection, finds this mildly incomprehensible. But this capacity for stillness is not a personality trait he was born with — it’s something he built, deliberately, by removing the inputs that made it impossible. He doesn’t call what he does meditation, because he finds the word too structured. It’s closer to what permaculture calls “observe and interact” — make a halt, step back, notice what you’re actually seeing before you do anything about it. Sometimes it becomes an idea for an article. Sometimes it’s nothing. Both are fine. His phone has designated windows of availability, not rigid ones, he adjusts based on the flow of his work. When he’s writing and it’s going well, his phone is completely off (not on silent - OFF) and in seven years of this practice, he says, he has never missed anything that mattered. The second half of life as a design project [00:33:09 — 00:37:32] Daniel and I both circled around something during our conversation that I think is worth naming directly: there’s a particular kind of freedom that comes in the second half of life, and it’s only available to people who stop performing. He put it plainly as relief: I am not playing around anymore. I’m not acting for absolutely nobody. I don’t care what people think about me. The energy that used to go toward managing others’ perceptions now goes toward actually living. What made this possible, he’s clear, was not the heart attack itself but the years of accumulated experience that preceded it. The mental breakdown at 25, the medication, the company with 12 employees that was slowly dismantling him — those weren’t detours. They were the soil (that’s what I call our Inner Capital, in my F-Foundations chapter). Without them, he wouldn’t have had the roots to know, with certainty, what he was choosing when he finally chose differently. You can’t return to yourself without first knowing what it cost you to leave. His program is called “The Return” —

About

You didn't start your business to become a prisoner of it. For established entrepreneurs who have built something real — and lost themselves in the process. Hosted by Valérie Demont, strategist, mentor, and author of Being Is the New Doing. demontvalerie.substack.com