Hey everyone! Welcome to Unshakeable with Human Design. I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and we are going to talk today about something that is near and dear to my heart because I struggled with this and I know so many people in my community struggle with this. I hear this from lots of people inside our Human Design Lab, I hear it from other clients, from people I do readings for, and just in general in life I hear this topic come up over and over and over again, and what we’re talking about is perfectionism.

Perfectionism, this is a really big one for me. Perfectionism was my way of protecting myself for a very long time. I think the belief I had was that if I could just achieve perfection, then all of my insecurities would go away. And the insecurities came from dark places, trauma, and other aspects of our lives where we pack that away.

And first and foremost, perfectionism is a trauma response. Any behavior that we seemingly can’t control that feels bigger than us, that is steering us away from our true power and our true alignment.

Perfectionism can sometimes be seen as a positive. This is one of the ones that we can hide behind really easily because we can seem so high functioning. Right? But I’m falling apart on the inside. And we don’t want that. That’s how we end up achieving things and not feeling fulfilled.

So, in this episode, what I want to discuss is perfectionism. I want to talk about perfectionism, what it really is, how it shows up, and then what aspects in your human design chart might be contributing to this being your go to strategy for not feeling the pain that you felt before or for trying to outrun it.

Right? Because it’s a flight response. You know, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. This falls under the flight category. Because we are trying to outrun it. If I just keep moving, then I’m distracting myself with all of this doing.

I’m distracting myself with what seems like very productive behavior, but I’m really hiding from something that I don’t want to feel. And it’s the pain of feeling deep insecurities, or feeling like you are not enough. It could be from feeling not loved, not cared for, not enough by somebody.

Maybe you didn’t receive the love that you felt you should, so you try to be perfect because you think if I could only be enough, if I could only be better, then I would be enough for that person. And there’s lots of reasons that this can happen and that perfectionism can show up for us.

Maybe you don’t think you’re smart enough, maybe, and maybe that came from a place of being made fun of in school or maybe not doing well in school. So many places that our psyche can hide the trauma and hide under something like an activity or a behavior like trying to be perfect. But we all know that perfect doesn’t exist.

Perfect is an unattainable goal. So we’re setting ourselves up for failure, and we’re setting ourselves up for pain, and usually burnout when we do this, but still we chase it, right? Because trying to be perfect is a trauma response. This is where nervous system regulation work comes in.

So going in and clearing out your nervous system of the past experiences and your emotional ties to those past experiences. Actually feeling the pain is how we ultimately release the grip that those past experiences can have on us, and that are causing our nervous system to go in a loop with this stuff.

When you don’t feel like enough, you run into perfectionism. This is an automatic program that we’re running until we tell our system no longer to run this program. So, this is the nervous system regulation work. We do this inside of the VIP version of the Human Design Lab because they combine human design along with deconditioning and nervous system regulation work, because this is how we let go of the past. This is how we let go of how we were conditioned, because trauma response is part of conditioning.

But what I want to talk today about is not necessarily the nervous system regulation work, because that is deep and very personal to each person, but the human design aspects, so here’s how human design can show us that there’s nothing wrong with us.

You look at the chart, we see all that we are, and then what I want everybody to do is be looking at their chart, and you may have heard me say this before, I’d like everybody to be looking at their chart and be seeing everything from a very neutral place. You’re looking at all the activations in your chart and you’re recognizing what they are and you’re not judging any of them.

If you are judging them, then that is work that you should be doing on why am I judging this? Why do I see this as being a negative thing for me? Why am I being triggered by seeing this in my chart? It’s one of the first things you should be looking for, but to be able to look at it from a neutral place and say, what here just needs to be tweaked, adjusted, loved, looked at differently, because it’s in a low expression of something that is a potential gift.

Every single thing on your chart is a potential gift. Every single thing. And if you can start seeing yourself that way, it starts to take away some of that initial feeling of what’s wrong with me, which then we try to be perfect and then we go on that false quest, right?

So, the goal isn’t to be perfect. The goal is to be whole. The goal is not perfectionism. The goal is not perfection. The goal is wholeness. How can I be whole? How can I just be all of me without judgment? Without trying to be something else? How can I let go of the ideas of what I should be and just be who I am?

This is the essence of what human design teaches us. And part of the power

of it is that it takes the power away from the mind. Forget about what you think you should be, or what your parents thought you should be, or what the world is telling you you should be. And come back home to what you are, to who you are, to who you were truly meant to be. It’s a beautiful process, and it sounds so much simpler than it is.

It’s simple, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. Because there’s years and years, lifetimes for all of us that are grown adults coming into this world. You have a lifetime of the shoulds and the examples that you feel like you’re not living up to. And then you push and push and push.

Now there might be aspects of your human design that make you more susceptible to fall into perfectionism. And there are a couple of them. I’ll give you some examples from my life. So being a 5/1. Both the 5 and the 1 carry a need for perfectionism. The five resonates with guilt. We feel guilty about everything. So we’re trying to fix everything. It’s the archetype of the fixer. So it’s really natural for a lot of us to want to fix ourselves.

And we’re dealing with the projections from the outside world, from all the people that we are around. When we feel those projections, we feel the pressure. And we feel like we should fix. Fix ourselves. It must be me. That’s what it feels like to be a 5.

It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me. So we try to fix it. We try to be perfect. And when you can let go of that, that has been a huge part of my journey as a 5 line, of letting go of that need to be perfect. Or even the notion that I should be. Which is how it feels when the five goes into super reactive mode.

And the one line. The one line wants to be secure. The one line wants to know everything. So that can result in this, I’ll never be ready. I’ll be ready soon. I’ll be ready when I know more. And we can overwork and overprepare in that space. I also have gate 62 in my throat center, which wants to be very, very prepared all the time.

Now this does not mean that with all of these activations that I’m doomed to be a perfectionist all the time. It’s just probably going to be something that I deal with. And it has been. But even the act of knowing, even just that I know that these exist, and that there’s nothing wrong with them. Actually there is a function to each of these aspects of me. That these are just low expressions of actual gifts that I have.

I mean, my profile is one of the greatest gifts that I am to this world and if I can’t overcome my perfectionism, if I can’t have a healthy relationship with my need and desire and drive to fix, then I end up not getting the results that I want. The people that I’m working with don’t get the results that they want.

Because I am out of alignment with what I’m doing. I’m out of alignment with the way that I’m fixing things. I can’t come at it from this space. Perfectionism is just an overreaction of some of this stuff. Some of these aspects in our design. Now this can happen with so many other aspects of your human design, and this is where things like coming into the Human Design Lab, or into a reading. And whenever people book a reading with me, what I do is I ask questions on what’s happening in your life, what are you struggling with, what are you dealing with, and then I can point out the aspects of the chart that maybe need adjusting based on that experience. It’s very tailored and very personal to each person that I do a reading for, because that’s what we’re trying to do.

How can we get you to the fastest results possible and how can we use human design as that map to show us where maybe you made a wrong turn, or there is an automatic program, a low expression that’s running here. And then there’s always the nervous system regulation work that we do inside the VIP.

So there are so many ways that you can come about this. And human design provides this beautiful window into why we operate the way that we operate, and how we can bring ourselves back to alignment very easily and very simply. So, I hope that you found this helpful. If you’re interested in going deeper into this, check out my deconditioning guide.

This might be a good place for you to start if you’re interested in that. DM me the word deconditioning on Instagram and we will automatically send you that free guide, and you can get that where you’re getting a good handle on how to start deconditioning your human design according to your specific body graph.

So I hope that you found this helpful. I hope that this helps you loosen the grip that maybe perfectionism has had or does have on you. It does not need to be this way. You can still be achieving, you can still have very high standards for yourself without being locked in the grips of perfectionism. And that is the beauty, because then when you can let go of the need to be perfect, then you’re starting to allow the ability for you to finally love yourself and be whole.

So I hope you found this helpful. Please leave us a little review on iTunes or wherever you’re listening to this. Let us know that you loved the show, what you thought about it. And remember, In order to have an unshakeable business, you must first become an unshakeable human. So thanks for letting us help you on your journey of becoming Unshakeable with Human Design, everyone.

We’ll see you next time.