Human Design. Decide without thinking: How knowing your Human Design Type and Inner Authority helps you make the right choice

By Viktor Kryuchkov

Human Design is an empirical self-discovery system that has emerged during the late 1980s. 

In this book, the author, a well-known Human Design consultant and teacher with years of experience, explains the four main elements of the Human Design System through practical examples: the Rave Chart, the four main Types, and the five decision-making methods, which are based on recognizing the bodily reactions.

This book may be used by teachers, therapists, and experts in other people-related fields, as well as anyone interested in Human Design.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gate 65
• Release date: Mar 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9789916417454

Book preview

Part I

REFUSING INTELLECTUAL DECISIONS

Myth: The best decisions are made with your mind.

Chapter 1

THINK, THEN ACT

Imagine a person who is looking for an advisor on an important question and, after finding them, explains their problem. I can do it! Here’s what you need to do… The advisor says with great confidence, despite it being obvious that they know very little. The advisor’s attitude creates an impression of seeing into the heart of the problem, but everything else points to the opposite. Their advice is very shallow, not even advice as much as a demand; they compensate their lack of confidence with being overbearing. The person who came seeking help tries to have a conversation, but the false advisor with their inflated ego starts making excuses. Turns out, not only do they dislike criticism, but they’re also highly vindictive: the client pointed out a mistake, and the advisor got angry, sure to remember this client for the rest of their life. The client was the one with a problem, but now they’re the one having to calm down the advisor—what a travesty.

For example, a person asks for the advisors’ help to maintain a healthier lifestyle. The advisor persuades the client to start with early morning 10 miles runs. The client has never tried any physical activity before, and a week after the start, they face expected difficulties: their joints are in pain, and they do not get enough sleep because they now have to get up earlier. Now, every morning is a disaster. The client shares their challenges with the adviser, immediately suggests the exact opposite, with the same enthusiasm: «Oh, you should never run in the morning! It definitely won’t help you. No one in their right mind would consult an advisor like this!" The reader might say wrongly.

Everyone does this, when making decisions with their mind: Think, Then Act. This decision-making method is as old as time: listen to what your mind says and obediently do it. Here’s how it happens:

Example 1:

A person gets bad news, and thinks,

I’m not going to tell my family or they’ll get upset.

↓

Stays silent

Example 2:

Meets someone, and thinks,

We’ve been in a relationship for a long time; we need to get married.

↓

Gets married

Example 3:

Sees their friend’s new car, and thinks,

I want a car like this; I’ll look confident

↓

Buys a car

This internal voice comments on every action, reminds of past decisions, discusses future ones; it’s everywhere. It suggests possible scenarios, who to hook up with, what words to say, and it even guides us during work. When you hesitate in life, the voice in your head is sure to give you a push.

People use the Think, Then Act principle without suspecting that it is the root of many problems in their lives, as if someone has put a spell on them that stops them from noticing that the principle doesn’t work. Here’s why it doesn’t work:

1. Intellectual Decisions Take a Lot of Time

Decisions don’t exist in a blissful vacuum: situations change, new complications arise, and so do hidden motives and details we’ve missed. A person who wants to predict everything has to evaluate the circumstances, sort everything into neat little boxes, and minimize the risks, but every new bit of information sets them a step back and skews their priorities. Since the mind cannot see the whole picture, it selectively processes a few favored bits of info and makes a decision, essentially, by the seat of its pants.

The desire to control everything, when taken to an extreme, extends to people’s physiology when they want to fall in love, fall asleep, create, experience joy, move, work, and get sick all on their schedule. That’s when they’ve made a false salvation. Only action movie heroes always know when to act and when to wait. In real life, people often rush things when they need to slow down, and dawdle when they need to react quickly.

2. Intellectual Decisions Are Contradictory, Fragmentary, and Ineffective

Looking for truth in your mind is like asking the advice of a capricious person who acts on a whim. Here are some of the paradoxes inherent to the internal monologue in the Think, Then Do principle:

• Sometimes the mind not only makes its own decisions, but stands by those decisions day and night; sometimes it withdraws, grasping at the utopian ideas of a right thing to do, shifts the responsibility to others, is easily deceived and susceptible to the influence of others

• The mind, beyond any common sense, sticks to its beliefs and experiences from the past, generalizes them, turns them into strategies, and uses them to weight its choices. If a person had once been bitten by a dog in an empty lot, the mind forces them to avoid empty spaces for the rest of their life; if a friend betrayed them in their youth, the mind makes them distrust and suspect everyone, seeing a false foundation in everything.

• The mind makes sure to hide its beliefs behind psychological defenses; it demands every decision be both creative and rational; it can find a justification for any and all of its choices, and it can just as easily disprove them when the choices don’t work. It is the mind that forces a person to vote for a young politician, and it is the mind that judges the person for its own decision a year later: How could you make a mistake like this? Didn’t everyone see that a young politician is not a good leader?

• The mind equates thoughts to reality, mixes them, and mistakes one for the other; one minute it demands that you overcome the physical sensations and act against all odds, the other minute it invents some kind of somatic symptoms like my soul aches or my heart is bursting and—with good intentions—demands that you account for those symptoms when making a decision

• One minute the mind is full of laziness and apathy, indulging the lowest fantasies and desires; the next it orders you to sacrifice yourself and storm some unknown heights. One minute it’s flattering you, making you rehearse your own Oscar speech, the next it’s writing your own explanatory memorandum

It’s funny how people sometimes spend more time thinking about their thoughts and re-enacting by themselves the entire conversation about their decision than they spend analyzing it.

One has just as little luck asking the advice of professionals. Experts from outside have their own agenda, which isn’t in your best interest. Business people need more sales, which means putting attractive wrapping on garbage no one needs. Politicians need to win elections, which means the promises of economic wonders and unity of the people. Experts claim all the answers are in their books that they sell. When professionals give you advice, their agenda sticks out of that advice like a stick out of a popsicle. Even if you find an honest, competent, and caring professional, their method might not be for everyone and might not find acceptance among colleagues.

You would have to take risks, trust and try everything and that means a lot of fuss, and a lot of time and money lost.

3. Translating the Imaginary into Action Is Boring and Difficult

After you have a Thought, realizing the idea is often difficult: you have to force yourselves to Act. Maybe the doubt is the enemy, and once you start Acting, the doubt will dissipate. Beginning is the most important step, after all.

So you begin, you give yourself a push through sheer will power, and suddenly, the decision that seemed so easy to begin with, quickly becomes more and more difficult. One problem follows another, you ask for a favor, and you’re let down, you offer help and are met with disgust; every new step takes so much effort, as if the whole world is against you. Sometimes it’s not just others who rig the game: your own body may become sick, refusing to take part in this nonsense. Nothing is going well. You feel helpless and throw your hands up, regretting starting this in the first place—and to think that the idea seemed so good at the time. Decisions made through Thinking, Then Acting are often met with this kind of resistance.

4. Making Decisions with Your Mind is Uncomfortable: You Keep Doubting and Looking for flaws Even after the Solution is Made

Sometimes one keeps doubting themselves even after calculating everything and beginning; they’re unconfident and uncertain of their choice, still thinking about what they should do. They keep looking back, going over the options, persuading themselves, riling themselves up in doubt they’ve made a mistake or did something they shouldn’t have.

This person doesn’t even suspect that their depression and anxiety are caused not by a certain good or bad decision but by their attempt to make it with their mind. The mind is not built to make decisions—this job is too hard for it. The person is anxious, not because they don’t know how to act, but because they’re using their mind for the wrong purposes.

5. Intellectual Decisions Make Everything Needlessly Complicated

Leafing through books on decision making, it seems that in an ideal world good decisions are made following these steps:

1. Defining the problem;

2. Analyzing the situation;

3. Listing the possible decisions;

4. Making a conscious choice.

But real life is full of stress, speed, contradictory facts, and other people; not even a president has the luxury of going through all these steps one by one. There’s pressure to decide right then and there, not to mention that only highly organized and effective people are able to go over these steps (and then over the sub-steps that will inevitably arise) and not lose their minds.

Even tracking the very moment of decision making is difficult. Sometimes one does something against their best judgement, without knowing why. Sometimes actions grow out of desires: someone falls in love and follows their heart. Sometimes they grow out of needs: people do things because they have to – because they have a duty or they made a promise. Sometimes out of impulse: someone starts trying to solve a non-existent problem when they’re overcome by emotions; later they’re asked: Why did you do this? and can only answer: I don’t know, I just did.

There are no good and bad decisions, only good or bad consequences. Everyone has heard of the Butterfly Effect, and this is why we dedicate so much time to making important decisions: we feel that, if we make the right choice, we can avoid negative consequences. But constantly keeping every action in focus, taking responsibility for it, wasting time and visualizing the possibilities is incredibly tiring, especially since we don’t always know a fateful decision when we see it. Sometimes life is turned around by the smallest thing.

Making a decision according to the technique described above will help you choose a vacuum cleaner for the best quality and price, but that decision making process that you used for the vacuum doesn’t apply to relationships, work, and love. In fact, the decision making process you use to buy things is useless in personal life as you can’t compare the price of one relationship with others. Because of that, there is no single decision making technique that universally applies to everything in life: relationships, work, and buying things. They all require a unique and different approach. What’s more, best decisions aren’t always made behind your desk after much contemplation, comparing and choosing between the alternatives.

So we learn by mistakes, discovering on our own how to make decisions through different, irrational mechanisms:

• Rely on your heart in personal life and particularly important questions;

• Rely on your self-preservation instinct in an emergency;

• Rely on impulse, habits, and ratings when choosing food, books, or films;

• Rely on your experience, standards, education, and precedent in professional questions;

• Rely on your parental intuition when dealing with children.

With time, all this will make you allergic to decisions. Sometimes, as a person ages, they might start distancing from any situation when making a choice is necessary, or calling a concilium of friends and relatives to share the responsibility.

No One Notices the King Is Naked

Making think-then-act decisions is akin to tolerating relatives you don’t like; there’s always an excuse not to do anything.

1. You’re used to it

It’s a habit that has a long history. The mind does everything to support the illusion of its own necessity; it pretends to be hard at work, begetting a vicious circle where one bad decision carries with it a series of new problems.