Your Human Design strategy gives you insight into the best way for you to engage with life with ease. Your strategy helps guide you towards action that leaves you feeling your signature feel: peace, satisfaction, success, or surprise.
Have you ever started a project, relationship, job thinking it was a great idea, only to be met with frustration, anger, bitterness and disappointment? Maybe you engaged in it for a while and then slowly burnt out – exhausted, depressed and uninspired?
Human Design offers a fascinating perspective on how to engage in activities that are meant for you to engage in (imagine that!)!
When we engage incorrectly with the activities of our life, we force our system to produce energy where energy may not be available. Burnout is never the result of working too hard, it’s the result of working too hard at something that doesn’t light you up.
You can probably think of many instances where you were doing something that you wanted to do, but things fell flat or didn’t work out as planned. Where you felt frustration, anger, disappointment, or bitterness. Perhaps it came up after the fact, in hindsight you could say, “Wow I hated that, it bled my energy dry!”.
Those emotions: frustration, anger, disappointment, and bitterness, are signs that you’ve engaged incorrectly with the world around you. It may have been the right thing, but the wrong time, or the wrong person.
Human Design offers us a unique strategy to make sure we engage in the world the correct way for our type. If you haven’t read up on your type, click here!
By learning your Human Design type, you gain a special strategy for engaging in the world around you. Find out your type at mybodygraph.com and then read for your strategy below. After that, head over to this post about authority and learn how you can make better decisions for your authentic self!
Manifestors: to inform
Manifestors are here to initiate action in the world. Only 9% of the population is a Manifestor which means you have a special task of getting things started! In ancient times, you were the emperor – creating law and initiating communities (while the generators did the work!). Your strategy is to inform the people who will be affected by your action. This is incredibly important because it ensures that the actions you initiate run smoothly without resistance.
You act quickly and most of the time you’re miles ahead of everyone else. You get an idea and you go for it. When you don’t inform the people around you, you seem unpredictable and other people might feel an increased need to control you. This is going to make you angry, because it feels like they’re trying to stop you, like they're slowing you down. The reality is that people don't like uncertainty, they like to know what's going on.
You might think that informing will give them even more opportunity to stop you. That's fair, because as a Manifestor kid you probably learned that asking for forgiveness was better than asking for permission. Childhood probably looked like: you initiated action (without informing), got in trouble, then next time you asked (informed), they said no, then you rebelled and did it anyways or retreated and went passive into anger.
Surprisingly, when you inform, you actually reduce resistance. You let people in on the action, you build trust, and you get the peace to manifest what you want, when you want.
For example: Imagine if you wake up in the morning to discover there is no coffee. You initiate the action and go to the store to get some, without informing your partner. You’re gone for 30 minutes – but in that time your partner wakes up with the kids to find you missing. There’s no note, no text. You get home and find your partner frantic and frustrated. This might lead to an argument or an attempt to control (“you can’t just leave like that! You have to take your phone places! You have to tell me!!”) and then you feel angry.
Now, had you informed your partner how would this have gone differently? They likely also wanted coffee, and probably would have been happy you’d go get it! They could have woken up a bit earlier to get the kids ready and wouldn’t have had to worry about where you were. Informing = peace to act.
Try out informing over the next few weeks – before you act, tell the people who will be affected. See how it goes! (And parents of Manifestors: teach your kids to ask permission/inform, but make sure you allow them the space to initiate that action. The more you control, the more they'll rebel)
Generators: to respond
Generators are our worker bees, you do, do, do. You have access to the sacral center, the big motor! When you are doing something that is incorrect for you, that energy will not be activated and you will burn out.
The generator strategy is to wait to respond. Generators have an enveloping aura that brings in things to respond to – people, comments, sights, sounds. Generators are always responding and depending on your authority, you’ll be listening to body cues to respond to life with a yes or no.
If you try to initiate without waiting to respond, or say yes when your authority says no (or meh): you’ll run into frustration. Frustration is a sign you’re operating from your not-self, and you likely tried to initiate instead of waiting to respond to something. The sacral energy wasn’t turned on.
Waiting can feel difficult to a generator, especially when you have a great idea, but it’s critical to wait to respond to something before acting. When you do, your sacral can give you all the power in the world to complete the correct job – leaving you feeling satisfied as hell! When you have a great idea, write it down, talk it out, and let it simmer; if it’s right, you’ll receive something to respond to in life, you’ll feel the sacral YES = satisfaction!
Start noticing how often you already wait to respond in life. Maybe you look outside and see that its a beautiful day and you respond by going for a walk. Maybe you're hungry and instead of initiating what you want to eat, you look in the pantry and respond to the peanut butter and make a sandwich.
Having a trusted confident ask you yes or no questions can be a great tool for generators learning to use your sacral response. The more you trust in your sacral response, the more you’ll be drawn towards experiences worth responding to, the more satisfaction you’ll experience in life.
Manifesting Generators: to respond, visualize, inform.
Manifesting Generators are powerful generators with some rad manifesting traits. They’re a subtype of Generators, so scroll up and read the Generator section, too!
Manifesting Generators can act more quickly (unless you’re an emotional MG) than pure Generators but you still need to wait to respond to avoid burnout and frustration.
The strategy for Manifesting Generators can benefit from “dipping your toe in”. I’m an MG and after responding to something with a sacral yes, I’ll try it on by dipping my toe in with a quick visualization, and then respond again to that. If it’s still a yes, sweet! If it’s a meh or a no, I wait a little longer or let it go. I talk about using this strategy when I was deciding whether or not to travel to New York, in this blog post.
Manifesting Generators can also benefit from informing. Once you’ve responded to something with that sacral yes, you can be quick to initiate action and you might be off like a bullet train, much like Manifestor. Letting those involved know what’s going to happen next will help reduce resistance.
Wait, Visualize, Inform can make things flow with ease, but the most important aspect of being an MG is waiting to respond to ensure the energy is there.
You are a multitasking, prolific, energetic human being – make sure you have the sacral energy to back it up by following your strategy.
Projector: to wait for an invitation
Projectors are our guides. The Manifestors initiate, the Generators/Mani Gens do, and the Projectors guide us along. Without you? Mania. At only 22% of the population, you are our wise leaders – so don’t waste your energy screaming into the wind!
Like Manifestors, Projectors do not have sacral energy, so you are prone to exhaustion and burnout when you are sticking your neck out for people who aren’t ready to receive it. By following your strategy, to act when invited and recognized, you can become selective in who gets access to your energy.
When you wait to be invited, you are ensuring you will be recognized and heard. Your valuable insight and wisdom will be well received, and you’ll feel sweet, sweet success! Have you ever tried to force your opinion into a meeting? Or tried to initiate an action that you thought was great, only to have it fall flat? Tried to give advice that got rejected? You probably felt bitter and maybe even then wanted to try harder to be heard.
Avoid the bitterness by putting yourself in environments and communities that recognize your wisdom and let go of the ones that squander you. Once you’re there, trust that the moment will come, you will be recognized, and this time when you share your wisdom - you'll feel successful.
"The invitation" does not need to be signed, sealed, and delivered by a carrier pigeon, it does not even always need to be a direct verbal invitation. The most important thing in the invitation is that you are being recognized - by yourself and the other. Recognize your contribution as valued, know who you are and what you offer, and trust that it will be invited by the right situation.
Waiting to be invited can be a challenge at first, you might fear you’ll never be recognized, but once you start reserving your energy and wisdom for only those who recognize your power – you’ll become magnetic! You’ll find flow with life where you know that the right people will invite you to share and you’ll be recognized for your strategic leadership. Success is waiting for you in the invitation – let it come to you!
Reflectors – to wait a lunar cycle
Reflectors are the 1% - you have completely undefined (white) charts, meaning you don’t have consistent flow of energy in your centers and you are constantly amplifying the energy around you. It’s critical for Reflectors to be discerning in your environments and who you spend time with. When you do, and you follow your strategy, you become our judges, our mirrors. You are incredibly connected, awakened, and can easily reflect the injustices of our world. You keep us on our path as a collective.
The strategy of Reflectors is to wait a lunar cycle (28 days) – keep in mind this is for major decisions, not what to eat for lunch…what a slow and hungry life that would be! Because you have such an open chart, you are always experiencing a myriad of energy, you can easily become conditioned to make decisions based on other peoples emotions, ideas, desires, and identities. When you make not-self decisions, you might feel disappointment. By waiting a lunar cycle, you leave room to breathe and see that decision in every light of the cycle – and I’ll bet you find yourself pleasantly surprised by what comes.
Reflectors benefit greatly from taking time to diffuse the energy they take in. Take time in nature, you are deeply connected with it and it can offer you the opportunity to cleanse your open centers. Other ways of diffusing energy: taking time alone, have a space to call yours, take an Epsom salt bath, talk to someone you feel comfortable with. Making this a priority can help your decision making further because you’ll be more connected to your openness.
What's next?
Start playing with your strategy over the next four weeks as you engage with the world. See what changes, does life feel easier? Is there less resistance? Do you feel more peace (Manifestors), satisfaction (Generators/MG), success (Projectors), or surprise (Reflectors)?
Up next you can read about your Authority and how it impacts your decision making – this takes stepping into the right relationships/activities/job to the next level!
And if you're ready for the whole map of your Human Design, book a personal reading! We’ll discuss how your design might be affecting your life and what you can do to make life work for you!
