First entry

This blog is a diary of my journey. I stumbled upon Human Design in August 2020 at a point when I felt exhausted, very low in energy, and I was on the verge of a burnout. The year 2020 has been challenging, awesome, eye-opening, but not easy. It has shown us what works and what needs to be changed. This is exactly what happened in our business. Let me rewind a little bit…

Hello Australia!

Jacob (my husband now, my boyfriend then) and I came to Australia for 8 months in September 2013. We fell in love with the lifestyle, the people, and the 300 sunny days a year. But in order to be able to stay and start a life here, we had a long journey ahead of us and did not know where it would take us. We arrived in Sydney without knowing anyone. We started from scratch, living in some dodgy places, working some very sketchy jobs, and were just making enough money to pay for rent and end-of-day sale sushi. There were a lot of moments when I thought to myself:  “Is this worth it? I have a fresh master’s degree and I could be sitting in an office job back home not needing to pay  crazy rent and living in all the comfort I am used to.”

But the thing is, I felt really good here. No matter the shitty jobs, no matter the money struggle, it just felt so nice to be able to go to the ocean any time I wanted. And, it was the first time in my life that I had time for myself. Both Jacob and I had our eyes on one target: we would do anything to get permanent residency, and from there, life would be easy.

We got the PR

About 5 years later, we were reading an email from the Immigration Office saying, that we had become permanent residents of Australia! We could not believe we did it, it felt so sweet.

Then the realisation came – what’s NEXT?

For 5 years we had been focusing on this very moment, putting all our money into uni and visa-related stuff, and I just thought: “Wow, I don’t know what to do now.” I felt pretty lost back then; however, it did not take too long before our next project emerged. During those 5 years we were not only working our butts off, we were learning and discovering what we truly love and enjoy. I fell in love with yoga, Jacob went through multiple diet and exercise experiments, and we both embarked on our Zero Waste journey. We started paying more attention to our health and we soon realised how closely the health of people is related to the health of the planet. We started picking up rubbish on our walks, and we started shopping in bulk shops and small grocers who were able to sell us their produce without plastic packaging. I was also working as a barista; throughout the years I worked in several positions in local cafes in Eastern Sydney, from trainee barista, to head barista, to cafe manager, to barista trainer. I love learning new skills and I soon realised that I also love working on my feet and being around other people; contrasting this, the vision of a normal 9-5 was the scariest thing for me. We were also lucky to meet some super inspiring people: business owners who were creating a life for themselves. We decided that we would take the leap and see where it got us.

This was us in 2018 when Jacob decided to leave his secure IT career and open a Zero Waste coffee shop with me.

Cat & Cow

It took us about 1 year to find the right location, and to be honest, it was one of the hardest parts so far. We did not know what we were looking for, we just knew that we needed to find a place that felt good. (I will get back to this stage in a future post talking about a Projector’s waiting for an invitation, because that is exactly what happened with our cafe.)

Once we found the right location and signed the lease, we had 6 weeks to fit out the shop and get everything ready. Until this day, I still do not understand how we managed to achieve this crazy goal, which we would never have been able to do without the support of our friends and family. But we did it: Cat&Cow was a real Zero Waste coffee shop and we were two super proud owners who had no idea how to run a business.

Cat&Cow was born in August 2019, founded on the concept that mindful daily actions limit the unnecessary waste that every one of us creates. We both feel that running a business is one of the most transformative experiences of our life; it is rough, eye-opening, and humbling, but it also has empowered us in a way that words cannot describe. However, there was a lot of fear at the beginning and lots of lessons learned in our first year. Six months into running our first business, we started to feel that it should be getting a bit easier. I had planned a 3-week trip to see my family in the Czech Republic after 2 years of not being back home, and then Covid showed up.

Global Pandemic

When you plan to open your own business (and you actually get to write your business plan–unlike us), you need to consider the risks, the worst-case scenarios, and look at your cash reserves in case something unexpected happens. We had this in mind, but we never thought we would have to face something like this. The shop got busy from day 1, and everyone coming our way loved the Zero Waste ethos and our no single-use cup policy. We felt like we were slowly transforming the way people thought about their morning on-the-go coffee,  seeing that  they were willing to bring their own cups or sit down and savour their coffee instead. This policy was one of the scariest steps we took and probably the one that drew the most attention to us. We were different. In the long process of planning this concept in my head, I figured out how to eliminate almost all the waste from our daily operations so that there was no single-use plastic anywhere in the shop. I could not believe that the thing that scared us the most (because people say you obviously cannot survive without single-use takeaway cups) was actually the thing that made us different and successful. Thanks to our concept, we have met so many interesting people who are doing their bit for the planet, and it is awesome to be a part of a positive change.

However, March 2020 came, all my plans for holidays in Europe crashed, and so did our false sense of security. Covid-19 came and the things we deemed impossible mere days before became an everyday reality. Closed borders, social distancing, hand sanitizer EVERYWHERE.

And so much fear.

Fear for our business, livelihood, families, and health. It was so overwhelming that we decided to close the shop for a week. In that week, we were both on the verge of depression, and anxiety led me to experience my first panic attack. We stayed inside, did not see people, and consumed the news as if our lives depended on it. A week in, we decided this was no fun. We talked about what the worst scenario would be, and once we said it out loud it became much less scary. We had to let go of the idea of control. We had no idea, but no one else did either. We decided that we would reopen the shop in a very minimal way and see if people would come back. We opened for coffee only, 5 days a week, just the two of us, 3 hours a day. We also had to make the hard decision to introduce compostable takeaway cups. It was the only sustainable option in a time when we did not know if we would be able to afford to pay rent and wages. This was the time when we stopped fixating on profit and loss every week and became grateful for every single person buying just one coffee. This was a massive mindset shift that completely changed the way we run our business. But people were coming, and it was so beneficial for our mental health to stay in touch with our community. We felt privileged to be able to have human contact when most of the world remained isolated at home.

Looking back, the global pandemic, and resulting lockdown, was the best thing that could have happened to us (of course this is not considering all the suffering in the world that is still happening).

It made us stop.

It woke us up.

It showed us WHAT MATTERS.

We stopped looking at how other people run their businesses, and we started letting go of the idea that to be a successful business owner you need to be constantly busy and available 24/7. BTW I have no idea where we got this notion in this first place; neither of us wanted to run our business under these conditions. We both knew since the beginning that we cannot work 60 hours a week and lead a happy life. But we did it anyway, and for 6 months it was our life and it wasn’t fun. The first 6 months were an exciting and valuable experience, yet we dreaded the day when we would fully reopen and would have to do it all again. For about 2 months we stayed open in a limited regime, which we found much joy in. We walked to the beautiful Centennial Park daily with stale bread for the fish in the ponds, we read books, we exercised, we cooked, and we had time for each other. We limited our social encounters to 2 nights a week, and it was bliss.

Meanwhile, restrictions were easing, people started venturing out, and we got permission to reopen the shop for sit-in customers, with a limited capacity. We received government support that helped massively, and we decided to start employing people again and to invest all the support we got back into the business. It was a great decision, hiring and training a completely new team, as we tried to maintain a little bit of our new-found peace of mind and working as full-time work again took its toll. By the end of July, the business was thriving, more and more people found us as their daily escape from their home office, and we were exhausted.

We wanted our freedom, long walks, and time for each other back, but it felt impossible again. I started to feel depleted and anxious, and that was the time when I discovered Human Design. I had heard about it a few times through my beloved yoga teacher Emmie Rae @thedailyrest, but I never really knew what it was. Then one day in August my friend Nikki came for a coffee and saw how tired I was. She asked me: “Do you know what your Human Design is?” I knew that I was a Projector, but that was pretty much everything I knew. Then she said: “Of course you’re exhausted, you’re not meant to work all the time.” These words lifted something heavy off my chest. I wanted to know more. I needed permission to stop and slow down. I needed to rest. And I knew it, but there was so much guilt attached to all those needs. But I decided on that day that I would give it a go. I would give this Projector thing a go for a month, schedule myself for short days only, and make daily rest my priority.

Oh my god.

I could not believe how much I needed it.

I started peeling back the layers of my conditioning. I started learning about Human Design and became more and more fascinated about how freakin’ accurate this feels to me. I got my reading done, and then Nikki compared mine and Jacob’s charts. They are so different, yet each of us fills the blank spots in the other’s chart. It was incredible to actually dive into our charts and, for the first time in our long-term loving relationship, talk about how different each of us feels about making decisions and navigating life. It gave us tools to understand each other so deeply that it instantly started strengthening our connection. Human Design is a long journey and I only just started, but to be honest, this has been the best 6 months of my life. I feel my most authentic self, and I have the tools I need to come back to my best self. I will leave it here, with much more to come. I hope you enjoyed the read and reach out if you want to get in touch or learn more about your Human Design.