Taking Human Design Into the Conversation: My Guest Expert Sessions

One of the things I’ve been enjoying about building my business is having the opportunity to step into other people’s communities and share what I do.

Recently, I’ve been invited to speak as a guest expert, sharing my perspective on Human Design, business and decision-making.

And I want to do more of it.

Sharing My Expertise With Debra Banks at Biz Growth Academy

I recently had the pleasure of joining Debra Banks as a guest expert in her Biz Growth Academy community.

It was an opportunity to share my knowledge, introduce people to my approach and have conversations about how Human Design can be used in a practical way.

Because, for me, Human Design has never been about simply knowing your type, memorising your gates or collecting information about yourself.

I’m interested in what you actually do with that information.

Especially when you’re running a business, making difficult decisions and trying to figure out which direction to take.

Next Up: She’s The Consultant

I’ll be joining Lesley Elder-Aznar as a guest expert in her She’s The Consultant community.

Lesley supports professional women who want to use their existing expertise to build independent consulting businesses, with greater freedom and control over their working lives.

My session is called:

When You’ve Got Too Many Sensible Options

It’s a subject I think a lot of business owners will recognise.

Sometimes you’re faced with several perfectly reasonable choices.

You could launch a new offer, change direction, invest in something, continue with what you’ve already built or walk away from something that no longer makes sense.

None of the options is necessarily wrong.

But that doesn’t make choosing between them any easier.

During the session, I’ll be exploring how Human Design can offer another perspective on the decision-making process, alongside the practical realities of running a business.

Why I’m Saying Yes to More Conversations

I’ve spent years building experience across different industries, roles and businesses.

These days, I bring that experience together with Human Design to help business owners examine their decisions with greater discernment.

And while I love writing and sharing my thoughts through articles and social media, there’s something valuable about being able to have these conversations with people directly.

It gives me the opportunity to explain my work, challenge assumptions and introduce Human Design to people who might never have considered using it in their business.

I don’t believe there’s one universal formula for running a successful business.

Different people have different strengths, circumstances, priorities and ways of making decisions.

That’s a conversation worth having.

Would You Like Me to Speak to Your Community?

I’m open to further guest expert opportunities, interviews, podcasts and conversations centred on Human Design, business strategy and decision-making.

If you run a community, membership, event or podcast and think my perspective would be useful to your audience, I’d love to hear from you.

You can get in touch through my website at elenaatkinson.com/contact.

Business Done Differently Is Officially Here!

20 Chapters. Different Perspectives. One Powerful Message.

Today, 6 November 2026, marks the official launch of Business Done Differently, a collaborative book that challenges the idea that there’s only one right way to build and run a successful business.

And I’m delighted to be one of the contributing authors!

What Is Business Done Differently About?

Entrepreneurship is often presented as though there’s a universal formula for success.

Follow the strategy. Build the systems. Stick to the rules. Do what everyone else is doing.

But what happens when those conventional approaches don’t align with who you are, how you think or how you want to work?

That’s where Business Done Differently comes in.

Across 20 chapters, an incredible collection of contributors shares personal experiences, professional insights and unconventional approaches to entrepreneurship.

From business strategy, branding and structure to intuition, spirituality, mindset, identity and transformation, this book explores what becomes possible when we challenge traditional expectations.

It’s for anyone who’s ever questioned whether there’s another way.

My Contribution: The Real Cost of Working Against Yourself

My chapter, The Real Cost of Working Against Yourself, explores something I believe deserves far more attention in business: what happens when we continually override our own instincts, strengths and natural ways of operating to meet someone else’s expectations.

As a Human Design Strategist specialising in business and decision-making, I see the importance of understanding how we operate as individuals rather than blindly following strategies that might work brilliantly for somebody else.

Because a strategy can look perfectly sensible on paper and still be completely wrong for the person trying to implement it.

Building a business differently isn’t about rejecting every conventional approach.

It’s about having the discernment to recognise what genuinely works for you, what doesn’t and why.

Different Perspectives. One Powerful Message.

What makes this book particularly interesting is the diversity of perspectives.

Twenty chapters exploring different aspects of business, personal development and entrepreneurship, brought together by one underlying message:

You don’t have to build your business according to somebody else’s rulebook.

Whether you’re starting out, reconsidering your direction or questioning the way you’ve been taught to do business, this collection offers different perspectives worth exploring.

Get Your Copy of Business Done Differently

Business Done Differently is officially available now!

I’m proud to have contributed to a book that encourages people to question expectations, embrace their individuality and explore alternative approaches to business.

If you’ve ever felt that the traditional rules of entrepreneurship don’t quite fit, this book is for you.

Get your copy of Business Done Differently on Amazon

Business doesn’t have to be done the way it’s always been done.

Elena Atkinson Featured in MarketSpy

I recently had the slightly surreal experience of seeing my work featured in MarketSpy.

The piece looks at the way I use Human Design in business, particularly around decision-making, strategy and the gap between knowing what you “should” do and actually being able to trust yourself enough to do it.

That distinction matters to me.

There is already an enormous amount of business advice out there. More content strategies. More launch plans. More formulas for what somebody else says should work.

My work sits somewhere underneath all of that.

I’m interested in how people make decisions, where they start overriding themselves, why they keep circling the same issue and what happens when the strategy looks perfectly sensible on paper but doesn’t actually work for the person trying to execute it.

Human Design gives me a framework for looking at those patterns in a way that is practical rather than theatrical.

The MarketSpy feature explores that approach, along with my work as a Human Design Strategist and the way I bring Human Design into real business decisions without requiring anyone to turn into a different person first.

If you’re curious about how I apply Human Design to real business challenges, you can explore the different ways to work with me.

It’s always strange seeing your own work reflected back through somebody else’s lens, but I’m really pleased that this was the part they chose to focus on.

You can read the full MarketSpy feature here:

Human Design Strategist Elena Atkinson is carving out a distinct niche⁠

And yes, I’m absolutely counting this as one of those little moments where I stop for five minutes and acknowledge that I’ve actually built something worth writing about 😏

Who I Work Best With

You probably do not need another person telling you how to run your business.

You are capable.

You have experience.

You know how to make decisions.

You have already read the books, taken the courses, followed the advice, tested different strategies and changed things more than once.

The problem is, somewhere along the way, you may have become very good at listening to everyone except yourself.

You can make a logical case for almost anything.

You can understand why a strategy should work.

You can see why someone else recommends a certain way of doing things.

And yet, when you try to apply it to your own business, something still feels off.

You may second-guess decisions you were originally quite sure about.

You may change things too quickly.

You may assume you need another tactic, another framework or another opinion.

You may even know quite a bit about Human Design already.

But knowing your type, authority or profile is only useful if it helps you make better decisions in real life.

That is the part I care about.

How do you make decisions without endlessly revisiting them?

How should your business be structured so it actually suits the way you work?

What pace can you realistically sustain?

Which offers make sense for you?

How visible do you want to be?

Where are your boundaries too loose?

Where are you forcing yourself into a way of working that was never a good fit in the first place?

You do not need to hand your judgement over to me.

In fact, I do not want you to.

My role is to help you see what is happening more clearly.

I look for patterns.

I question things.

I care whether something works in practice, not whether it sounds clever in theory.

I use Human Design as a practical tool for understanding decisions, structure, pace, offers and working patterns.

And I am not interested in making you dependent on me.

I want you to leave with a better understanding of yourself, stronger trust in your own judgement and a business that makes more sense to run.

You are probably a good fit for my work if you are already capable but tired of second-guessing yourself.

If you are done collecting advice and want to understand what actually works for you.

If you want direct support without being talked down to.

If you want Human Design applied to your real business, not taught to you as another subject.

And if you are ready to stop asking everyone else first.

If this sounds familiar and there’s one business decision you keep going round in circles over, my Human Design Decision Audit is a practical place to start.

Is Your Business Model Wrong or Are You Just Working in the Wrong Way?

It is very easy to assume that if your business feels difficult to maintain, there must be something wrong with the business itself.

Maybe you need a new offer.

Maybe you chose the wrong niche.

Maybe you should change your business model.

Maybe you need to start again with a completely different strategy.

Sometimes you do.

But before dismantling the whole thing, I think it is worth asking a less dramatic question:

Is the business actually wrong for you or have you built it in a way that is difficult for you to operate?

Those are not the same problem.

I see a lot of perfectly capable business owners trying to solve structural problems by changing direction. They keep replacing offers, strategies and positioning when the work itself was never really the issue.

The difficulty was how they were trying to deliver it.

A good business can still be badly structured for you

A business model can make complete sense commercially and still be a terrible fit for the person running it.

You might have an offer people want, clients you enjoy working with and work you are genuinely good at.

But perhaps the business also requires you to:

  • be available far more often than you want to be
  • deliver too many calls
  • produce content constantly
  • switch between too many different kinds of work
  • maintain a pace you can manage temporarily but not indefinitely
  • keep selling in a way you dislike
  • carry more clients at once than you work well with
  • spend most of your week doing the least enjoyable part of your own business

At that point it is tempting to conclude, “This business isn’t working.”

But parts of it may be working extremely well.

The useful question becomes: which part is actually causing the problem?

That distinction can save you from throwing away something valuable.

Look at what happens after the sale

When business owners think about whether an offer works, they often look at whether it sells.

That matters, obviously.

But selling an offer and successfully operating the offer are two different things.

Imagine you sell a service easily enough, but every new client adds three meetings a week, constant messaging and several hours of preparation.

The sales problem may be solved.

The delivery problem is getting worse every time you succeed.

Or perhaps you have built a low-cost offer because it seems easier to sell, but the numbers mean you need a volume of customers you have no interest in supporting.

Again, the offer itself may not be bad.

The structure around it may be asking too much of you.

This is one reason I am interested in what happens after somebody buys.

What does fulfilling the promise actually require from you?

How much time?

How much access?

How much switching between tasks?

How much interaction?

How much recovery afterwards?

Those questions tell you a great deal about whether a business can realistically support you as it grows.

Capacity is not the same as capability

Being able to do something can cause all sorts of trouble in business.

Capable people often build around the maximum amount they can handle rather than the amount they actually want to handle repeatedly.

You can run six calls in a day.

You can answer messages at 10pm.

You can produce content on five platforms.

You can create a new workshop every month.

You can take another client.

The fact that you can survive something does not automatically make it a sensible operating model.

And because you are capable, the consequences may not appear immediately.

You keep delivering.

Clients remain happy.

Nothing visibly collapses.

Meanwhile, you become increasingly reluctant to promote the business because every new sale creates more of a workload you already resent.

That is an interesting problem because from the outside it can look like a marketing issue.

You are not selling enough.

But underneath it, there may be a perfectly rational reluctance to create more demand for something you do not want to deliver at greater volume.

Changing your marketing strategy will not fix that.

Human Design can help examine the operating model

This is one of the areas where I find Human Design particularly useful in business.

Not because your chart contains a pre-written business model waiting to be discovered.

It doesn’t.

What it can give us is useful information about the way you operate, make decisions, use energy, respond to pressure and interact with your environment.

Then we compare that with the business you have actually built.

For example, your business may require constant output even though your best work happens in shorter, more concentrated periods.

You may have created a service with heavy ongoing access when you work better with clearly defined periods of focused involvement.

You may have copied somebody else’s weekly schedule because it looked organised, then spent months wondering why you cannot maintain it.

You may be trying to create consistency by making every week identical when your energy simply does not behave that way.

None of this means the chart gets the final vote.

We are still dealing with a real business. Clients have expectations. Work has deadlines. Revenue matters.

But Human Design can help identify where you may have built unnecessary friction into the way the business operates.

Be careful when borrowing other people’s business models

There is no shortage of people willing to show you the business model that worked for them.

One signature offer.

A membership.

A group programme.

High-ticket consulting.

Low-ticket products.

Evergreen funnels.

Launches.

Retainers.

Courses.

VIP days.

Subscriptions.

Any one of these can work beautifully.

Any one of them can also become miserable if the day-to-day reality does not suit the person running it.

This is why I am reluctant to talk about business models as though one is inherently better than another.

The interesting part is what the model requires.

A membership may provide recurring revenue, but it may also require ongoing community management.

A high-ticket service may mean fewer clients, but those clients may expect greater access.

A course may reduce live delivery, but it requires a different sales system.

A group programme may be efficient, but you still have to enjoy working with groups.

The attractive part of a business model is usually what it promises.

The useful part to examine is what it demands.

You might not need to scrap the offer

Suppose you have an offer you are beginning to resent.

Before deleting the sales page, I would want to know what exactly you resent about it.

Is it the work?

The price?

The length of the engagement?

The number of calls?

The communication between sessions?

The type of client it attracts?

The preparation?

The turnaround time?

The way you sell it?

The amount of customisation?

The frequency with which you deliver it?

Those answers lead to very different decisions.

If you love the actual work but hate weekly calls, perhaps the delivery needs changing.

If you enjoy the clients but the price no longer reflects the amount of work involved, perhaps the commercial structure needs changing.

If the offer is profitable and enjoyable but nobody understands what it is for, that is a positioning problem.

If you dread every part of delivering it regardless of how you structure it, then yes, perhaps the offer itself has run its course.

But now you are making that decision with useful information rather than reacting to a general feeling that the business is difficult.

Structure should support the work you want more of

I think business structure is most useful when it helps you do more of the work you actually want to be known and paid for.

That sounds obvious, but businesses accumulate things.

A service gets added because somebody asks for it.

A platform gets added because everyone seems to be there.

A weekly call becomes part of an offer because that is what similar programmes include.

A process continues because nobody has ever stopped to question it.

Eventually, you can end up maintaining a business that contains surprisingly little of the work you originally wanted to do.

So I like asking:

If this business became significantly busier, what would I be doing more of?

That question can be revealing.

If the answer makes you want to hide under the nearest table, I would not increase the marketing budget yet.

I would look at the operating model first.

When the business probably does need a bigger change

Not every problem can be solved by rearranging delivery.

Sometimes the business itself genuinely needs changing.

Perhaps demand has disappeared.

Perhaps the numbers no longer work.

Perhaps your circumstances have changed so much that the original model is no longer realistic.

Perhaps you have become more interested in different work.

Perhaps an offer has been tested properly and simply is not wanted.

Perhaps the business has evolved and you are maintaining an old version of it out of habit.

Those are legitimate reasons to make bigger changes.

The point is not to preserve everything indefinitely.

It is to identify the right level of change.

You do not need to rebuild the entire business because Tuesday afternoons are unbearable.

Examine the business before replacing it

If you are currently wondering whether your business model is wrong, start by breaking the problem into pieces.

Look at what you sell.

Look at how you sell it.

Look at how you deliver it.

Look at how much access clients have to you.

Look at your workload when business is busy rather than when business is slow.

Look at where your time actually goes.

Look at the parts of the week you repeatedly avoid.

Look at what would increase if sales doubled.

Then ask whether the problem belongs to the business model itself or to the way you are currently operating it.

You may discover that something genuinely needs to go.

You may also discover that you do not need a new business at all.

You need a version of the existing one that makes more sense to run.

If several parts of your business feel connected

My Human Design Business Blueprint is designed for this kind of wider business question.

Rather than looking at one isolated decision, we look across the way you work, make decisions, use your capacity, structure your offers and operate the business as a whole.

The aim is to identify what is working, where unnecessary friction has built up and what may need to change, stop or be structured differently.

The Human Design Business Blueprint is £497 and includes a private 90-minute session, a written summary and 14 days of Telegram support.

Read more about the Human Design Business Blueprint