Stepping up into the leadership role — my relationship with my 5/1 profile. (2025)

When I first discovered human design and I learnt that I was a heretical investigator, I guess I could identify with the investigator especially as I really went down the rabbit hole with investigating human design.

I could identify other areas in my life that I may have researched a lot, and felt slightly less inadequate about my knowledge in that area.

But the heretic?

I didn’t identify with this at all.

It was only when I started to listen to other people talk about their lived experience of the 5 line, and hear how my human design teacher, Laveena, explains it (she’s a 3/5), that I began to understand, embrace, embody and love the heretic in me.

Let’s start with the largest breakthrough I had: being projected onto.

The Saviour

Throughout my life, I have found that people have approached me to save them from the depths of their despair. I would give them advice, which was almost always what they didn’t want to hear, so they would just carry on like they always have been, never changing and resenting me for saying what I said to them.

I had a big lesson in being the heretic when I just started my coaching business, and I had had a sales call with someone that my spleen said no to. I hadn’t heard of human design at the time, so wasn’t aware of my splenic authority, but I do remember feeling like I didn’t want to work with this person.

However, the generator coach that I was working with at the time pushed me into taking money from her just so that I would be keeping up with the other clients in his group coaching programme who were reaching out and making clients on a daily basis.

This new client tore down the boundaries that I had set AND by the end of our time together, she was asking questions that made me feel she was projecting on to me that she hadn’t got very far in her business because she only had 2 hours every 2 weeks to work on it.

She blamed me for not making much progress in her business.

As a result, I learnt two lessons: to listen to my splenic authority (by the time I had finished working with her I had learnt what this was).

Second was to never PROMISE anything tangible to anyone. Your outcome is your own.

The Seductress

I’ve always known about energetics between people all my life, even if I wasn’t able to put it into words. Some people would be absolutely magnetised to me, and my logical mind would try and work out why and whether there’s any pattern to it.

I would ask men why they were attracted to me. And they wouldn’t be able to tell me. I just had an aura of seduction to me that was only seen by a small number of people.

A few months ago I participated in a clubhouse room that entailed 4 of us having a conversation around what it was like to be a 5th line and at the end, those who weren’t 5th lines in the room were stunned into silence. They were enthralled by us, seduced by our wisdom and unique tales of our heretic experience. It was beautiful to feel that in the room!

The Stranger

I often felt that the 3rd line was applicable to me: bonds made and broken. The friends I made in my teenage years and at university left my life quickly. Either because they weren’t interested in keeping up a friendship when I was in a different city (I moved around a lot in my 20s), or because I had consciously decided to remove them from my life.

In the end, this party girl who surrounded herself with friends and who used to go out clubbing ALONE because I’d always bump into someone I knew, became a loner.

Why? Because I got fed up of being used. I was used for money, for friendship, for sex.

So I started a life where I had a few friends, and the rest of my acquaintances were just that: people I held at arms length that couldn’t use me but when recognised and invited, I was happy to be there.

Now, with my coaching business, I thrive on meeting new people every day. Being their coach, teacher or adviser, diving deep, but never becoming friends. It’s a hard concept to explain, that you can go deep with someone but not be their friend but that’s what it is!

The Practical Person

When I first started my marketing and business coaching online, I couldn’t understand why all the other marketing coaches around me weren’t teaching the practical side of how to run an Instagram account or how to do your marketing online effectively. Everything I could see others doing was all mindset, what buzzwords to say and how to make people feel, never practical, actual, physical doing of the marketing and how to manage that daily, monthly and annually.

Enter Charlie.

Now I’ve come to learn that it’s probably because those people I saw are just not 5th lines, so it’s ok for me to be the practical hands on teacher if my clients need that side of marketing support. And I love it!

(Edit 12/12/23)

Leadership with the 5/1

After re-reading this article again, several years after I first wrote it, and a few months after I had published it here on Medium, I realised that I didn’t cover leadership.

The 5/1 profile is a leader profile; in the BG5 system we call the 5th line the Messenger, and the 1st line the Authority (BG5 is the business and career application of the Human Design system).

So let’s discuss leadership.

I’ve never thought of myself as a leader. But during my first 2 years of learning Human Design, my teacher kept reiterating my leadership skills. Through the 5/1 profile, but also through the projector type and my Channel of Inspiration (leadership by showing the way).

And gradually, I remembered all those times in my life where I probably have led, but it felt so natural to me that it wasn’t obvious that’s what I was doing. Simple things like being one of two dancers to be at the front of the dance class so that when the teacher told us what to do, I would do the move and everyone else would follow. Also being the only social media expert in a corporate marketing team of 15, so I was always the one that handled social media training for new starters.

This kind of realisation and conscious awareness has actually made me step up into a new level of confidence. Knowing that I won’t always be seen and recognised by everyone, I can step out into the world, universalise my message (5th line externalisation of my 1st line research), and know that I will trigger some people and lead others.

This is why my business is centred around unearthing your natural power; because I unearthed my leadership role and I empower others to do the same.

So there you have it my stories and journey so far as the 5/1 leader.

👋 Hi, I’m Charlie, and I unearth your natural power with Human Design.

I help service-based business owners to cultivate unconditional self worth so they can be visible, charge a fair price, and stop over-delivering and value-stuffing.

This leads them to a life that’s jam-packed with rest, creativity and nature.

🤍Find out how to unearth your natural power with Human Design if you are new to the system with my free Masterclass here.

🎈Get in touch with your gut instinct (sacral response) with my free Masterclass here, for Generators and Manifesting Generators.

➡Follow me on Instagram

Stepping up into the leadership role — my relationship with my 5/1 profile. (2025)

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