Hello and welcome to Unshakeable with Human Design, everybody. I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and we are here together today, just the two of us, to talk about a little something called burnout. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you’ve experienced it. I do think that if you’re like over the age of 30 for sure, you’ve experienced burnout in some way, shape, or form.

And if you’re younger than 30, you very well may have experienced burnout as well. I’m just saying, if you’re over 30, I can’t imagine talking to somebody who’s 35 years old and them being like, no, I’ve never felt burnout. I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s a foreign concept to me.

We’ve all had periods of it. So I want to talk today about burnout. I want to talk about the different ways we can experience burnout and ultimately how human design can be the cure for burnout. Why that happens, why it’s such an effective tool for this particular ailment. Now, first, let’s just talk about, who gets burnout.

Like I said, everybody’s experienced it, but I see people who are very successful burning out and they’re burned out, but they are like, it looks good on the outside, right? They are achieving, they have the things that we are all striving to get outwardly on the outs. From the outside looking in, they look very successful and like they’ve got it all together.

But on the back end of things, they’re really unhappy. Or they’re having a hard time keeping it all going. They’re not sure how they can grow more, so they end up getting stuck. So they’re at this point, they hit a plateau basically. And it’s either I don’t know how I can keep this up as it is or I don’t know how I can grow further. So that’s one side of burnout. Then there’s the other side of burnout where maybe you haven’t hit your goals. You haven’t made it to where you want to make it. But you also haven’t figured out how to not hustle your way to everything that you’ve achieved. So your go to, which was mine certainly for most of my life. Which was, if I haven’t reached something yet, just push harder, go further, I will outwork anybody.

And we go and we try to learn new things, and we try to implement new things, and we’re pushing, and pushing, and pushing, putting a lot of effort in, but maybe not seeing the results. So you get burnt out both on effort, and you don’t feel very much like a success, or like you’re not really the effort for reward exchange isn’t really even or balanced.

So it doesn’t feel good, even with all the work that you’re putting in. So that can add to this feeling. So where does burnout even come from? Like, what does burnout mean? And it typically comes from a feeling of us doing something where we don’t feel like we have control over things. Like we have to do something.

We feel like we are pushed into action not based on anything that we’re making a choice in the moment. It’s these obligations or the list of tasks that need to get done in order for me to get to where I want to go. Were doing these things even when they don’t feel supportive to us, even when they don’t feel good to us. We make the decision to just keep going and we’re not paying attention.

Underneath all of that, Underneath all of these ways of experiencing burnout, underneath these different ways of levels of achievement and experiencing burnout at these different ends. Beneath it all is, it comes from a fried nervous system.

We fry our nervous system, we tax our nervous system by not paying attention to our body’s signals. Usually we’re being told what we’re doing, and that it’s not working for us, but we’re not listening. We’re pushing through, we’re going just one more day, one more thing.

We’re not processing our emotions, we’re stuffing them down. They feel inconvenient, they feel like I’ll deal with them later. I don’t have time to feel right now. So we push them aside and we, once again, push forward. We’re not getting enough rest. We’re not really paying attention to that. It’s just go, go, go all the time.

And we push through that pain and the discomfort in order to achieve something, in order to stay afloat. There’s the different reasons why we do it. But, ultimately, a lot of times, what is at the heart of burnout is this need to achieve at all costs sometimes. That we have the goal placed out there and we’ve got our eyes so fixed on it that we don’t pay attention to the fact that the cart that’s pulling us is falling apart.

That we’re just pushing so hard to get to where we want to go. We don’t care what shape we are in once we get there. And a lot of times our body will take us out. Our body will tap out. It will get sick. Something will happen in our lives. If we’re not listening to our bodies, the universe will take us out.

Now we’re getting to the heart of why we achieve and why we don’t, and why paying attention to yourself. Why systems like human design can be so beneficial and so impactful to our success. Because, I want you to think about this, if you tax your system so badly. If your nervous system is fried. If you on the energetic level are thinking, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

I don’t know if I really want to grow anymore, because I can barely handle what’s happening right now. Let alone add more to my plate. This is how we start to consciously say that we want something, but unconsciously we are calling out for something else. We’re calling out for help. So the universe delivers.

It makes us sick. We break a foot. We do something that lays us up in bed for a day, a week, a month, depending on how bad did we let it go. I always say that the universe is giving us signals all the time. It’s telling us, no, stop it. Take a rest. It is knocking at our door, telling us exactly what we need, and the longer we ignore it and don’t listen, the louder that knock gets. Until it’s kicking down the door and eventually it’s just taking us out.

It’s just like, well, you’re not listening. Apparently, I need to really shake things up. And we’re going to take you out indefinitely for a while. Just until you really learn this lesson. So do you see how, even if you had this very clear path to success, you were so determined, you were so driven, but underneath it all, that burnout was really having you cry out for help on an energetic level?

How that’s not going to help you achieve. Because it will take you out, it will cause you to lose momentum, nothing will set you back more than not taking care of yourself. Because you’re either going to start sending out a signal that I don’t really even want this anymore. Or you will burn it down, and you’ll make the choice to burn it down, or you just get taken out where suddenly that’s where you are taking, this is where you feel like you take five steps forward, and then you take four steps back.

Now you worked that hard, you pushed that far only to have to backtrack, only to be set back again. So this is how burnout works. And it works largely because we’re on some sort of autopilot. We’re somehow not really being intentional with where we put our energy, and we’re not being intentional with how we go about achieving what we want to achieve.

And we’re not sometimes even thinking about, do I even really want this? Is this what I want? And is this how I want it? Is this how I want the experience to be? Now, here’s where human design comes in and where it can be so powerful. Because inherently in human design, it takes you off autopilot. It takes that switch.

It says autopilot off. We are no longer going to coast. We are no longer going to have some arbitrary rule that we set up two years ago in our subconscious programming, driving this car anymore. We are going to take the wheel again. So it takes that power away from whatever rules we set up for ourselves, whatever patterns we have, and it gets us one, taking control, but also paying attention moment to moment.

It gets us paying attention to our body, takes that power away from the mind that says, no, no, no, we want this. No, no, no. What matters to us and what makes us feel validated is to achieve. So if you’re an overachiever and your strategy to feel validated and loved and enough in this life was to achieve and achieve more and achieve more and achieve more and that’s your MO and that’s the way that you think and that’s what’s driving everything that you do. Well we’re going to take the power away from that strategy that’s been working you throughout your life, which might’ve made you very successful. 

This can be one of the hardest ones to break because it’s like, well, if I stop operating this way, will I lose it all? Human design starts to show us, you don’t have to turn it all off.

It doesn’t mean that you have to stop doing everything. We’re just going to start paying attention to different things. We are just going to start to pay attention to our body’s signals about what’s really correct for us. Not about that way that we got validated or felt good enough in the past. My famous line with human design.

My goal is when you work with human design enough, and certainly if you work in human design with me long enough. You will be looking at that chart and every time you look at it, you will love the shit out of yourself just a little bit more every single time. Because you will see how on purpose you are built.

You will see why some things are harder for you because you did them somebody else’s way and you’ll find your way and there’s nothing more empowering. You will find your genius. You will find your strategies in this life to find flow. That in and of itself will start to take away any of those feelings of needing to be validated, of needing to fit somebody else’s mold.

That. starts to change the way that you interact with yourself and your life. The sense of purpose that you get from understanding your design. You’re like, Oh wow, I was meant to be this way all along. What a relief. How freeing is that. For me? I looked back at my entire life and just thought it all makes sense now.

 Do you know the level of shame that just goes away after that, starts to lift. I’m not saying it all goes away the second that you learn this stuff. Of course not. We’re human. We have stuff to work through. But if you make a practice of this, that shame of all the things that didn’t work before, the things that you weren’t able to do, the things that were harder for you than they were for other people, so you made yourself feel like you were less than because of that. All of those things, when you start to see that it’s actually the way that you’re built, and if you had just tried things just a little bit differently, That if you try it your way, not somebody else’s way, then you can stop shaming and blaming yourself for it not working when you did it somebody else’s way.

It doesn’t say, well, I couldn’t do that. It was like, that wasn’t my way. I can still get to the same destination. I can still get to the destination that’s correct for me to live my purpose. I’m just going to go a different route. You might be taking the scenic route there. You might not be taking that straight path that other people did.

But your path is right for you and you will get there and you will pick up things along the way that are necessary for you and your journey. So just that feeling of being empowered to be who you are starts to change the way we operate, we’re not so reliant on those patterns that drove us to burnout.

We aren’t so reliant on keeping up appearances, doing things, achieving things in order to feel like we’re enough. And I do mean even if you have a defined ego, I’m here to achieve things, but it does no longer validates me. it’s a very different relationship that I have with achieving things.

The other thing that human design does that helps to alleviate this feeling of burnout and the effects of burnout is introspection. Gets you very curious about specific aspects of yourself. So again, that shame goes away, but it also, just sort of slows us down. It slows us down, but in a way that’s actually building us up and shifting the way that we operate.

If we’re shifting out of shadow, we’re removing resistance where it exists. So we’re becoming more efficient with the way that we work. We’re noticing on a very simple level, if you are paying attention to your not self theme of your type and your signature theme of your type, so generators, the frustration is the not self, satisfaction is the signature theme.

If you’re paying attention to that for your type, you’re automatically going to be one more intentional about how you get into action and what gets you into action. You’ll be using your energy in a way where it’s turned on, so it will be much more powerful, it will be much more effective. So generators, when you go to do something and you realize that you’re frustrated and you stop trying to do it that way.

And you shift, and you do something that feels good, and then you come back to your work. And you come back in a different way, where you’re in satisfaction mode, where your sacral is turned on. Suddenly, that work becomes a whole lot easier. You are no longer taxing your nervous system by pushing through frustration.

Projectors, you’re honoring your rest. So suddenly, you’re not taxing your nervous system trying to keep up with generators. Manifestors. You are no longer conforming to everybody else’s stuff which is making you angry. Which is making you feel like nothing is working for you. You’re losing your power. But then suddenly you shift into empowering yourself and sharing your views in different ways and not asking anybody for their opinion or thoughts on anything that you intend to act on.

You’re not asking for their validation. Now you’re moving through the world with greater ease. And this drives you to your purpose. Everything about human design is about removing resistance in your daily life. And the resistance comes from you and the way that you interact with this world, energetically and physically.

And it’s a pattern interrupt keeping you from operating the way you always have, which has gotten you what you’ve always gotten. There is nothing I have found that gives you a system and a process to follow for finding your own alignment than human design. It’s so powerful because you can do it on your own, because you can take the rules and you can play with them and you can experiment with them and you can see where they lead you and you don’t need a coach with you the entire time.

It does have a coach to go through the deeper aspects of this, to start understanding yourself deeper, to start to do that introspective work, to start to use this differently, to start to understand the dynamics between you and your family and your team and the people that you interact with.

But on a basic level of operating according to your design, all you have to do is start following your strategy and authority and get really curious about yourself and not critical and start to shift the way you do it. It’s so powerful. So I hope that you saw how this shifts you. Following your human design can shift you into greater ease, into flow in your life.

And through that process, you start to alleviate burnout. You start to operate differently and it gets you, like I said, it slows you down, but it slows you down to speed up. It makes you more efficient rather than just doing more. And that’s powerful. And through this process, through that introspection, through the ways that you’re getting curious about yourself and you’re noticing where you’re avoiding feeling your feelings. There is emotional intelligence built into human design.

And the reason for that is, as an emotional authority, you have to understand your wave. You have to start paying attention to your emotions and not be a victim of them. And if you are not an emotional authority of an open solar plexus, you have to start to feel your feelings. So it’s getting you processing them.

So powerful and nothing will heal your nervous system, like processing your emotions and understanding your emotions. Okay, I hope that you found this helpful. If you haven’t run your chart already, please go to nicolelaino.com/chart and you can run a chart there. We have reports that you can download.

Learn more about your Human Design and get your full chart for free. Click here to get your free chart.

Nicole Laino: There’s all sorts of cool stuff on the reports page. You can check it out there or you can DM me the word chart on Instagram and @NicoleLainoOfficial and I’ll sent it to you there. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you for being here and thank you for making it all the way to the end of the episode with me.

Remember in order to have an unshakable business, you must first become an unshakable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakable with human design, everyone.

We’ll see you next time.