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 transitions, the spaces between things? And what would it mean to use those not to task-switch, but to land?Follow Stefanie and her work on modern leadershipBeing Is the New Doing is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/08gxk9ctThe 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 Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe