Why Manifestor Coaches Go Quiet Instead of Asking for Help

I’d rather be admired than helped.

That is a hard sentence for a coach to write down, and asking for help is the very thing I invite other women to do, my Manifestor clients most of all.

Ugh, do you cringe? I just cringed. I shuttered slightly, closing my eyes every so slightly and felt my shoulders drop a little because it is 100% true. My ego dances with joy at my acceptance that this statement is being written down for everyone to see. I don’t know if it’s because I am binge listening to all of The Vera Wong’s murder mystery books by Jesse Q. Sutanto or because my own Korean ajumma persona is coming out strong but it feels quite liberating to say it for you to read.

At the same time I am horrified that my ego is rising up and wanting to rebel and be this honest since as a spiritual mentor, you aren’t “supposed” to say you don’t want to be helped. But let’s be real, especially being a 6/2 Projector and an Aries Sun sign, it can’t come as a surprise that I often walk around as if I know the solution and that people should really just listen to me. Lol. (Asian Auntie vibe all the way here, friend.)

So here is what I mean by this. I would rather be known, and respected, and seen as a woman with wisdom to share, someone you look at with a sense of authority built out of forty eight years of living, than to be a woman who needs help.

At the same time, I also yearn and open to receiving help, especially from someone I respect, who understands how to hold space for me, and knows how to call me out on my bullshit. I often wonder if this is why I have had great mentors that always scared the shit out of me and made me feel as if they saw the inner workings of my brain every time they coached me. The last one of these mentors was definitely Grandmother Ma.

When I pull my clients’ Human Design charts, I have quite an even split between Manifestors, Generators, Mani-Gens and Projectors. The ones whom I wish would share with me all the little tidbits from dreams to plans, to pivots, to results are the Manifestors. My Manis like to go real quiet and figure everything out on their own. They show up to share what they have been working on and where they are going and that is that. Full stop.

Here may be ways a divine Manifestor may initially show up on a call but don’t you worry because everything begins to soften and change after feeling the love of her community members.

A Manifestor shows up to a call delighted. She tells me everything she has done, all of it, and I can feel her reaching for an A plus. Her deepest desire is the celebration, this note that she has done a good job, that she is incredibly successful and smart and has her shit together.

Or she shows up looking guilty because she has not “done any work,” in a room where nobody is grading anything.

Her questions arrive methodical. They are already on a piece of paper before we begin, and there is an outcome she is aiming at. Here are the five things I would love support around. Thank you. I will get it done. And that is that.

What I rarely hear is the messiness. She does not tell me she has no idea what the question is yet, or that she cannot see how any of it would actually happen, or that something in the plan has stopped feeling aligned to her.

She is an incredible shiny balloon, and she is watching the room for the pin. Someone might bash the idea. Someone might make her small, or tell her she is wrong, or tell her it will not work, and she would deflate.

So when she tries the thing and it does not come out the way she was dreaming, she goes away for a while. She comes back with a specific plan and a specific action, and never with the mess. She says nothing, though she would love to have her fellow colleagues love her up.

This may be the initial experience but based on who is holding the space, coaching her, and who are the community members walking with her, she blossoms into a person who can hold her balloon up high and skip around the messy middle with such delight that it becomes contagious. Why, because she is magnetic AF.

I love the medicine she walks with because she is so often the very woman who speaks about vulnerability, about being bold and audacious and putting yourself out there, and she means every syllable of it. The medicine that is hardest for her to take is to be bold and vulnerable and out there inside a group where she would actually be receiving the support.

I am a Projector, and I believe I know best. I know best in my marriage, and I know best about how to mother my two dogs, and I know best about a great many things, and some of that is even true, because seeing the whole of a thing from the outside is my actual medicine. It is a humbling business to sit with the fact that not everyone is reaching for it. Not everyone wants to hear my views nor my solutions and I am not yet quite that Auntie that just blurts it out and tells people what to do.

I get it. I totally get it. I might not get it from the space of the Manifestor in Human Design but I for sure get it in the fact that often in spaces I feel invisible until I claim that I am visible, that I am open, that I am fully present for that communal experience.

• So I wonder what does it mean to be admired?

• How does that feel?

• What parts of admiration is sweet medicine for our soul and for our clients?

• What parts of admiration is a shadow that feeds on a wounded version of ourselves?

• Where are we hiding?

• Where are our values and our mission that has us hold space for others not being met within ourselves?

• Why is help valuable?

• How can help be unhelpful?

• What specific frequency of help comes from a sovereign place and what frequency comes from a desiring to be rescued space?

Not long ago I wrote an essay about spilling the tea. I spent four weeks of Mercury retrograde building a training that never once felt aligned with who I am, and when it was over, nobody said yes to LUSH Business Academy. The women who did not say yes are women I know love me and respect me and are encouraging me. That one stung the most. I have been sitting with the possibility that it did not resonate because I was not aligned with how I showed up, for them and for myself. The whole soggy story lives right here.

I almost did not send that one. It felt so tender to have failed, and I could feel myself putting my own quotation marks around that word even while I was feeling it.

Then one woman wrote and told me about herself, about how she reminds herself to stay the course on her own path even when the bank account is empty. She kept me company.

May I try my hardest never to burst your bubble. May I be a passenger on your epic ride. I get to come along and enjoy it and notice it how beautiful it is. I am not coming to approve it, and I am not coming to tell you whether it will work, and I would never push.

I invite you to share the unfinished thing, tell your sacred council of people what you are dreaming. Allow them to witness the magic of your vision.

May you be witnessed in your messy middle. May you be loved up long before the thing is finished. May you receive both, the admiration and the help.

LUSH Business Academy is a room where you get to bring the unfinished thing and be met in it long before it is finished. It lives here.

xoxo,