From Doing All the Work to Her Highest-Paid Client: Kristen’s Expansion Circle Story
by Abigail Rebecca | Human Design Business & Leadership Mentor
What happens when you stop looking outside yourself for the formula and start trusting the experience, wisdom and intuition you already have?
For Kristen Lena, that has meant stepping into a completely different level of leadership.
Kristen has spent more than a decade in the online marketing and coaching space. She ran her own coaching business for seven years, empowering women through communication, before moving into marketing strategy and client architecture for other coaches and entrepreneurs. She has a huge amount of experience.
And yet, at the beginning of this year, she found herself doing all the work for a client without being paid anywhere near the level that reflected what she was bringing to the table.
A few months later, she’s working with the highest-paid client she has ever had in this role.
She’s consulting and advising rather than doing all the tactical work, being paid for her experience, perspective, wisdom and intuition, and perhaps most importantly, she trusts herself at a level she says she has never experienced before.
This is Kristen’s Expansion Circle story.
Why Kristen Said Yes to the Expansion Circle
Kristen and I had worked together for several years before she joined the Expansion Circle.
She had her Human Design book. She’d experienced multiple Human Design readings with me. She’d even invited me into her own community to work with her clients.
So when I told her about the Expansion Circle, her response was immediate.
It was a full-body yes.
Part of that was Human Design. Kristen describes herself as a complete Human Design geek, and the opportunity to spend a year exploring and experimenting with her individual design within her life and business was a huge part of the attraction.
The other part was something she knew she was ready for.
Sisterhood.
Kristen had experienced the power of an intentional women's circle before and knew what can happen when women come together with a shared desire to elevate themselves and each other.
As she explained:
“The Expansion Circle was just... it was time for me to be in sisterhood, in community with other like-minded women.”
For a woman who had spent much of the previous decade as a solopreneur, having a place where she didn't have to build alone was extremely important to her.
A Different Way to Expand
There’s a particular phrase Kristen used during the conversation that sums up so much of what I wanted to create with the Expansion Circle:
Expand without burnout.
Because her fellow Expansion Circle sisters have big visions.
They want successful businesses, make money, create impact. They want to become more visible and influential and use their gifts and expertise in ways that make other people's lives better.
They also want a way of creating that success that honours who they are.
Kristen described the Expansion Circle as a place to explore her uniqueness and experiment with it inside her business, alongside other women doing the same.
There’s no expectation that everybody should build the same business, follow the same strategy or achieve success in the same way.
Human Design gives us the framework to understand our individual energetic blueprint. The Circle gives us somewhere to actually live it.
For Kristen, that has been incredibly freeing.
“I'm Meant to Do It My Own Way”
One of the biggest changes Kristen describes is the freedom she now feels from comparison.
She had spent years experimenting with business formulas and paradigms. Many of them failed for her. Human Design helped her understand why.
Years ago, during our work together, I told Kristen something about her design that stayed with her: “You are designed to succeed where others fail and fail where others succeed.”
At the time, she didn't fully understand what I meant but now she does. Kristen realised she was never meant to build her business according to somebody else's formula. She was meant to find her way.
That understanding has helped her step away from looking at another woman's success and assuming she needs to replicate how she created it. In her own words:
“I'm meant to do it my own way.”
This is one of the reasons Human Design sits at the heart of the Expansion Circle. I don't want another room full of women following me, I want a room full of women becoming more of themselves.
Then Her Business Started Reflecting It
At the beginning of the year, Kristen was working with a client where she was doing an enormous amount of the work without receiving an equivalent financial return. Then came a wonderful client who paid her well and made the work feel like play. And then another opportunity arrived.
Three years earlier, Kristen had set an intention to work with exactly this kind of woman.
When she realised what had happened, she told her new client that she had imagined working with someone exactly like her three years before. Her client's response?
“Hi, here I am!”
Kristen describes the money from this engagement as phenomenal. It’s the most she’s ever earned in this particular role supporting another entrepreneur. Yet the calibre of the client and the nature of the work matter just as much to her.
She’s working with someone she loves working with, she’s being highly paid, she’s working in a way that serves both of them and she’s moved into the role she had wanted for herself: Consultant and Advisor.
She’s no longer responsible for doing all the tactical work and that’s given her freedom.
The Expansion Was Also Internal
When I asked Kristen what had expanded most since joining the Circle, her first answer wasn't her income.
It was: “My view of myself.”
And I think that's incredibly important because the external expansion has required Kristen to see herself differently. Working with the highest-paid client she’s ever had in this role required a new level of self-trust. She had to trust that she knew enough.
Trust the decade of experience she had accumulated.
Trust her intuition.
Trust what she could hear underneath what a client was actually saying.
Trust her wisdom and inner knowing.
Kristen told me:
“What I've seen and felt and experienced more than anything is a level of self-trust that I've never had before.”
She directly connects that self-trust with being inside the Expansion Circle and the wider community. And now, she says that her intuition and inner knowing account for around 90% of how she operates within this high-level client engagement.
She gets to combine years of knowledge and experience with intuition. And, in Kristen's words, she gets “paid ridiculously for it.”
That is expansion.
The Power of Being Seen by Other Women
There’s another part of Kristen's story that has very little to do with revenue and a great deal to do with why I created Expansion Circle.
Being witnessed.
Kristen describes the women inside her Circle as powerful, beautiful, brilliant, loving and fierce. They’re coaches, artists, entrepreneurs and women at different stages of business and life.
On an Expansion Circle call, one woman can begin sharing something and suddenly another woman sees herself in her story. Sometimes Kristen hears a younger woman talking about something she once struggled with and realises how far she’s come. At other times, she witnesses another woman's success and sees what else might be possible.
There are struggles, breakdowns and breakthroughs. There is celebration. And there’s a room of women who can see your greatness while you learn to see more of it yourself.
Kristen describes it beautifully:
“It's sisterhood. It's being seen and held. It's being able to contribute. It's being able to be contributed to.”
That is the Circle.
What Are You Ready to Expand Into?
The next Expansion Circle begins in November.
It’s for the woman who has already accumulated experience, wisdom and expertise and knows there is another level of her leadership, impact, visibility and business waiting to be expressed.
It's a space to understand yourself more deeply through Human Design, experiment with what works for your unique design, strengthen your self-trust and expand alongside an international and intentional community of women who are building purposeful businesses and lives. Because expansion can look like more money.
It can look like a higher-calibre client.
It can look like becoming an advisor instead of the person doing all the work.
It can look like trusting your intuition in a room where previously you might have doubted yourself.
It can look like finally recognising the value of the woman you've already become.
Kristen's advice to anyone considering joining the Circle was to listen to the highest version of herself.
She said:
“You will be amazed at what happens when you just step into the yes.”
Applications are now open for the November Expansion Circle.
If you can feel that you’re ready for your own season of expansion, I invite you to apply.
