What is Human Design?

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After talking about Human Design online for years now (and getting questions left and right from curious followers), this episode of the podcast features host Katrina Widener going over the basics of Human Design and why it’s so effective in business. Tune in to learn more — and if you’re curious, sign up for a free Badass Decisions Audit to learn more about your unique Human Design!

Find the previous podcast episode on Human Design here.

The episode:

Hi everyone. Today is going to be a little bit different of an episode for the Badass Business Squad podcast, because today is going to be the first episode ever aired that I do not have a guest coming on.

I really have been getting a lot of people who are curious about Human Design and wanting to learn more, so I thought that this was an amazing opportunity for me to give a little bit more information while also allowing you guys to really focus in on how it applies to you and who you are as opposed to the back-and-forth of our conversation.

If you have never heard of Human Design beforehand, I'm going to start at the very beginning. I did have Lauren Armstrong a few months ago on the podcast talking about Human Design, but I wanted to give an even more thorough look at what Human Design is and how it can be applied for your business in particular.

I actually learned about Human Design through Lauren Armstrong, so I'll still link her in the shownotes, but I really know how much of an impact it has had in my business and in all of my clients businesses. So literally anyone who's ever worked with me, even if you're just doing a free session or an intensive, gets to know about Human Design.

So to really kick things off, I want to explain what Human Design is. When Lauren came on the podcast, she really explained it as almost like a Myers-Briggs or an Enneagram personality test, except this has over 60 billion different configurations. So while Enneagram is putting you into one of nine different boxes or Myers-Briggs is using four different letters to help you identify some strengths and weaknesses about yourself, Human Design is really here to say this is how you were innately created -- and it's very, very specific from person to person.

So it gives you basically a blueprint of how to operate in your life and in your business so that you're aligned, which if you know me and you listen to the podcast you know I talk about all the time. But also, so that you're feeling really, really confident in the decisions that you're making, in the way that you're moving through the world, in how you're doing everything from marketing, to hiring, to creating services and offers, to pricing, literally everything gets affected by your Human Design and how you naturally operate.

So once you have this information, it makes everything so much easier. It's just such a huge breadth of information that it really makes it super easy for you to take it slowly and embody it as you learn more and more

Human Design is how you naturally operate without "shoulds", without outside conditioning, whether that's familial conditioning, whether that is societal conditioning, whether that's something that your brain stored as conditioning from a teacher, or a friendship, or sibling relationship, or something you read in a book one time, right?

The way that our brains work is that it's basically a computer. We take information from outside of ourselves and we import it into our brain and store it as patterns and try to anticipate what's going to be happening next based off of the data we've collected previously. Really when we think about it that way, it makes sense why we might be conditioned to store things in really weird ways.

So Human Design is really here to break it down and bring it to the place of, "No, this is how I operate naturally, this is how I work without all of that conditioning, without all of these little truths and beliefs that my brain has decided to store as fact."

Really when we think about Human Design, we're thinking about, "This is how I would act if no one else had any opinions. This is how I would act if I trusted myself completely, if I had confidence in everything I'm doing, if I didn't feel shame or guilt or embarrassment or anger, or like I'm too much, or I'm not enough.`` This is how we would act if we lived in a bubble by ourselves. This is the way that we were designed for everything that we want out of life as well.

It's not necessarily this is how I'm designed, and like Enneagram, or like Myers-Briggs here are innate strengths, and these are our innate weaknesses. Human Design actually is more so like every single thing in your chart is there specifically, and every single thing in your chart is there intentionally. It's there because what you want out of life and what you desire out of life is very personal to you and so you were designed for those desires in mind.

Okay, so I know that I've explained a lot about what Human Design is overall. Next, I'm going to really quickly break down how you find your Human Design chart. I utilize the website that is mybodygraph.com. It's free, it just shows you the chart, it doesn't explain to you what everything means, which is also partially why I'm here. It is basically the biggest tool that you can use to see what type you are, what strategy you have, what your decision making authority is, what personality profile you have, what your arrows are, what your incarnation cross is, what your gates and channels are, what your open or defined or undefined centers are.

Now I know that everyone who's listening to this is like, "What the hell are you talking about Katrina? I don't know what almost any of that means." And that's okay. When you put in your information on your Human Design chart into My Body Graphs, you're going to need your birth data. So your birth date including year, your birth time, and your birth location.

What you're going to see is a super confusing chart of a person with a whole bunch of colors on top, and lines, and numbers. What we're going to talk about today is the Human Design five types, and those types are Generator, Manifesting Generators, Manifestor, Reflector, and Projector. And these are like the biggest buckets we'll say of Human Design. These are the biggest parts of Human Design that are going to affect you on the largest scale.

Each of those big buckets have their own unique strategy for moving through the world. So for instance, my big bucket is Generator. I am a Generator. I generate my own energy. I can get up in the morning and go, go, go, go, go all day long without getting tired. As long as it's something that I really love doing. So therefore my strategy in the world is to respond to my environment. Respond to the people around me, respond to outside stimuli, respond to a podcast I'm listening to that I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that's a great idea, I want to write that down."

Not everyone is a Generator. Not everyone has that strategy to respond. Projectors don't create their own innate energy. They want to operate three to four hours a day and their strategy is to wait to be invited for things. Manifestors also don't create their own energy, and their strategy is to inform people around them. Every single one is different. And this is a great example of why I wanted to give just this like introduction of what Human Design is, but what I really want to tackle today is this understanding of why it is so impactful in your business, and how it can make everything just feel so much easier.

I'm going to use myself as an example, I'm a Generator and my strategy is to respond. Right off the bat, that means, "Hey Katrina, initiation is not response. Cold calling is not responding. Cold calling is going to be very difficult for me and I'm going to get little reward from it." Sure, I might get some people who respond and they're like, "Yeah, great". But overall, the amount of work that I put into something is only going to be really, really beneficial, and really pay off in the long long-term if it is based out of my strategy of response.

So a great example of this, and how this changed my business, is I stopped feeling the pressure to cold call sell to other people. That doesn't work for me. If you know anything about Human Design and you know your type, the only type that cold calling works for is Manifestors. They are able to cold call, they're able to initiate. Literally no other type is able to. We have been taught though as a society (this is where the societal conditioning comes in) that cold calling is how you make money. Cold calling is how you hustle and you do really well in business. And if you don't cold call, then you're not going to make any money. It's a very old school sales tactic. But the thing is is that this is a great example of why Human Design can literally change your business.

Once I gave myself permission to stop trying to cold call people and to know that success in my business will come in other ways through response, I was able to actually 1) enjoy my business so much more, but 2) find so much more success in my business. I got so many more yeses when I did have conversations with people asking them if they want to jump on a call. What we want in business is yeses, but also yeses with people who are really, really aligned with us. We want our clients to be people who love to pay us, who love to listen to us, who love to work with us. And when we are doing something like initiating, we're giving them that wrong energy exchange, and we are bringing in people who aren't actually set up for us, because we're not marketing like us.

When you force yourself to market in a way that's not aligned with you, you're actually doing yourself and your clients a disservice, because they're not getting what they were marketed. They're not getting the person who they were marketed from. They're not getting the promises that you made because you are pretending to be someone that's not like you. When we tune in to things like Human Design, when I can say, "Hey, I'm a Generator, I know that I'm here to respond" instead of emailing someone I've never met beforehand out of the blue and saying, "Hi, my name's Katrina Widener and I'm a local entrepreneur coach. I would really love to offer you a chance to get, you know, one of my services, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." We all get those DMS and those emails that we absolutely hate.

Once I learned that my strategy is to respond, I knew how to make those conversations happen in a way that did not feel sleazy for me or the other person. I knew how to actually only find people that I really wanted to bring into my services and into my programs and actually be able to help them, instead of just cold call selling to them.

This is just one of many examples as to how Human Design is so impactful. Like I said beforehand, there's everything from your type, there's your strategy of moving through the world, there's your personality profile which gives you specific marketing strategies, there's your decision-making authority which actually trumps everything else because if you're making unaligned decisions, or if you're not able to feel confident in your decisions, or if you make decisions that you regret, then you know that you're not going to be able to find a lot of business success because you're not making the decisions that are correct for you in your business.

For those of you who have listened to this podcast, you know that I'm here to talk about alignment and help you build an aligned business so you can increase your bottom line. This is why Human Design is one of those tools that I use. This is why Human Design is something that is so impactful and so important when it comes to building your business. And that's because it is essentially that roadmap that you've been looking for of "how do I build a business that is successful and that feels really good."

I just wanted to have this episode would be a very quick introduction of "what is Human Design?" Let me know if you guys have any other questions about Human Design, anything in particular you want me to go deep into. I've just been getting this question a lot on social media, and in one-on-one conversations, and in my email inbox. So I wanted to address it publicly so everyone can really understand, "What the heck is this thing and how does it actually impact my business?"

If you do have any personal questions, please feel free to DM me or email me. My inbox is always, always open. There are no strings attached. I am just happy to talk about Human Design honestly for hours. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns at all, and I would be happy to help. Otherwise, thank you guys so much for listening, and I will talk to you next week.