Episode 456:

Hello and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design, everybody. I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and it’s just you and me today. We’re going to dive into an element of human design that I don’t think people are talking about enough. And some people talk about it’s so valuable. And I think part of the reason that a lot of people don’t talk about it is because it’s a bit complex, and it is something that eludes a lot of people, how they can really explain it in a way that people can understand, which is where I hope to come in and explain this in a way that brings it down to earth for you. In this episode, we’re not going to be talking about strategy and authority, although that is important. 

What we are talking about, you know, titled this episode the human design element that makes work feel like flow. Right. And I want you to know that this isn’t going to be, you know, your run of the mill human design episode. It’s not going to be about, you know, well, oh, to make it feel like flow. You’re going to be in alignment with your type. I’m going to operate from the standpoint that you already know that’s already something that you understand now, whether you’re living by it or not, that’s a completely different thing, you know, and if you’re not living by it, then I encourage you to kind of come out of the podcast consumption realm of, like, taking in human design information and actually going out and using it. 

And if you aren’t aware about the human design authority lab that we have that we started a few months ago, that is my membership community, where we’re teaching you to do exactly that. So I encourage you to get into a space like that. It doesn’t have to be mine, but just someplace where you’re putting this into practice. You can’t read a book about going to the gym and expect to get fit. It’s the same thing with human design. Okay? So we’re not going to be talking about the basics of human design. We’re going to go deeper because this is a deeper element. And because it’s a deeper element, that’s actually why it’s so challenging to get a handle of this, to really understand it. And I want to encourage you to. 

To allow this to wash over you, to not try to, like, engineer this so much, but to just sort of take in this information and see how it hits you. Okay? So the reason that I’m talking about this and why it’s had such an effect on my life is because I used to think I was a really big procrastinator. And I’m not saying that I wasn’t. I could procrastinate for sure, but. But that was only partially true. It wasn’t totally true. And something I did realize at one point was that the level of success I could achieve was directly related to shrinking the time between when I said I would do something and when I actually did it. How fast could I move? And when human design came into my life, it was like, how fast can I move in alignment? 

So in the beginning, quite frankly, not very fast. I lacked trust in myself. I was absolutely operating from my mind and just saying, like, I’ve got to do this thing and forcing myself, which. That’s not how you have sustainable success. It’s not how you have a success that’s yours. It never felt like mine. I would, like, have something that went right, but it didn’t necessarily feel like I could recreate that. It didn’t necessarily feel like something that I could explain to somebody how I did it. It was like. It was very mechanical, but it didn’t necessarily feel like I worked correctly with my energy, didn’t feel repeatable. Right. So I worked through that aspect with deconditioning. 

So that specific aspect of feeling like I was forcing things and coming into alignment with my type of, my authority, my centers, my profile, all of that stuff that we are normally talking about when we’re talking about human design. I did all of that deconditioning work and that helped a lot. That helped tremendously. And if you’re doing that work, you’re in a good place and you’re doing the right things and keep going with that. I highly recommend that you stay with that. I encourage you to keep at it every day with the intention of just. I’m going to intend to be more aligned today than I misaligned. And I’m going to face the not self and I’m going to notice things and I’m going to be aware of these specific things. 

And once I took that human design work to heart and really started to live by it, so much changed. I absolutely shifted. I could move faster, I could take action on something, I could say I was going to do something, and then I could go do it in pretty short order. Now I’m an emotional authority. I still need to wait. I still have some waiting in my design. Some people are going to have way less waiting than somebody like me. So I have a little bit more of a gap between when I say I’m going to do something or. And actually really feeling like it’s time to move on it. However, that gap was huge in the beginning, and so much of it was because I was fighting myself. And the reason for that, like. 

And then I go through the human design journey, and I start to really decondition. I decondition my way, which is, you know, with EFT and breathwork and these other tools and somatics, and so that I’m actually moving through things and not just cognitively changing. So that’s another reason why I deconditioned quickly. But there was another layer that I couldn’t seem to get past. There was another layer of fighting myself that was just so defeating because I just really felt like I was, in my own way, for lack of a better term, I was so in my own way, I didn’t know how to change it. I felt like I was working so hard. I had done so much work, inner work as well as outer work, and then I discovered this deeper level in my human design, and when I found it, everything changed. 

And I don’t mean when I read about it. I don’t mean when I heard a podcast episode about it. I mean when I really started to work with this aspect of my design, that the first thing that it does. And I hope that this episode does this for you, which is it might take some of that, like, that feeling like it’s your fault, that feeling like you did something wrong, that feeling like there’s something wrong with you. I hope it alleviates that. That’s what that first, like, you know, the information delivery does for you. It’s sort of like when people get diagnosed with, like, adhd. I hear people do that all the time. They’re like, oh, I have adhd. Like, explain so much. 

And it makes them feel better about all the ways that they maybe told themselves that they were a failure or they were, you know, they were a flake and they couldn’t focus on things, and it gave a reason. And we love reasons for something being the way that it is. And I know that there are techniques and stuff where people can learn to work with their adhd, but for me, this is how I Started to work with my design on a deeper level. So I’m going to take you through what this is and what this aspect is. What we’re really talking about here is variables. We’re talking about the variables in design. And if you’re interested in this topic, if this is something where you’re like, I want to go to that deeper level. 

I have been playing in the human design sandbox for a little bit and I want to go that level deeper where I’m starting to understand how I work on a deeper level so I can reach that greater level of productivity. And I just mean when I say productivity. I used to talk about productivity a lot. That was actually part of what my business was in the beginning and I don’t use it anymore because I think it’s very misunderstood. When I say productivity, I think about it. You know, I kind of coined this term, which is float activity, which is, I get a lot done in alignment with who I am. It feels good, it feels easy. And it doesn’t feel easy because, you know, learn some magic trick. It’s because I learned to work with the way I work. I stopped fighting myself. 

And most of us are okay. So if you’re interested in the masterclass that I’m teaching, this is part of my. I teach a masterclass now on some human design topic every single month. Now, if you’re a member of the Human Design Authority Lab, you get the masterclasses, plus you get our co working sessions and you get the other base content that we have in there. We have some courses in there that are just there for our members. And every month it grows that group. If you are a part of it, you automatically get this masterclass. So if you’re listening to this and you are a member of the Human Design Lab, you are a member of the aligned brand builder or business by design programs that I teach and that I host. You automatically get this and you get the VIP option as well. 

But if you are not part of those things, one, you could join the lab. If you’re like, these masterclasses are amazing. We did one last month on the 2027 change. We, we did one before that on Recalibrate, which was about the G Center. We really are taking a deeper dive into these concepts than most human design content will give you. And it’s all for our members. So you could join the lab. Or if you’re like, nope, Nicole, I just want to learn about the variables. And that’s it. That’s cool too. You can buy just the masterclass and just join us for the masterclass either at the regular level or the VIP level. I will be going deeper with some extra teachings on the vip, which is the following day. And there’s a Q and A with me. It’s totally up to you. 

If you’re interested in those. DM me the word Lab on Instagram, I’m nicolelainoofficial. Or go to nicolelaino.com lab if you’re interested in the lab. And if you want the variables Masterclass on its own, DM me variables MC like masterclass on Instagram again at nicolelainoofficial or go to nicolelaino.com forward/ variables and you can sign up right there. You can purchase the masterclass by itself. We’ll have this all linked up in the show notes for you, of course, so you don’t have to remember all of it, but it’s there for you. So let’s dive in. If you’re interested, we’re going to go even deeper. But I want you to listen to this episode and be like, you know, is this something I want to go deeper with? And if you choose to, that’s how you can. All right, let’s continue with the episode. 

To purchase the Variables Masterclass, please go to nicolelaino.com/variablesmc or DM Nicole “VARIABLESMC” on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/nicolelainoofficial/

We have a NEW HD membership community where you get ALL of our monthly HD Masterclasses included and so much more!! It is all about creating alignment, action, and consistency in your business with Human Design. To join The HD Authority Lab at the special Founding Member rate, click the link here: http://nicolelaino.com/lab or DM Nicole “Lab” on Instagram for info.

So like I said, normally when we’re focusing on human design, we’re learning our type, we’re learning our strategy and authority, we’re learning our profile, we’re learning our defined and undefined centers, how they work for us. Maybe we’re going into channels and things like that, but there that is like the bread and butter of human design in our day to day in like how it’s much more obvious to us those things. We can see them a little bit deeper, or I should say we could see them a bit easier. Sorry, I’m getting into the depth already. But there is something deeper in the subconscious architecture of the way your brain and your body operate as a system. This level deeper. 

It either makes depending on what you have, it either makes your life and work feel painful or it makes it feel like flow, depending on how you’re working with it. When you’re in alignment with it, then things feel really easy and you know when they feel hard, how to get out of the hard. You know how to kind of like work with your stuff. Like, I know when I hit a roadblock now how to deal with that roadblock. I know how to deal with that roadblock. I am not at all sitting here powering through anymore. I know how to get what I need to done. And part of that is my regular human Design that I type, authority, all of that stuff that were talking about. But a big part of it is this subconscious architecture, because I know what’s happening under the hood. 

This is something we refer to as below the line. So we have, you know, I’m a 5 1. That’s my profile. That’s my line theme. Below that, even lower. So just to give you an idea what the architecture looks like, so we have a gate. My conscious sun is gate 64. It’s in a line five. So we have the 64th gate, which has a theme, but then we get more differentiated and we say, okay, well, not only is there gate 64, there are six expressions of gate 64, line 6, expression, line 5, expression, 4, 3, 2, 1. Right. So we have that layer, but now you can go even below that. You can go to. So I’m a line 5, gate 64. Now if I go below that, there is a color, tone, and base to each of those. 

So there is a color to line five. There is a base to below that line structure. Okay? So that determines the things that we actually have far less control over. But we’re seeing them in our daily lives. We will see it in our behavior. We’ll see it in our experience. Basically, we’ll see if things are working or not. So it’s almost like a debugging framework. Okay, that’s not working. That doesn’t feel good. This doesn’t feel like flow. It gives you a new set of questions to ask yourself as to how you’re operating. That’s the power of this. So that’s how it was for me. I have a particularly challenging architecture that once I figured it out and I learned to work with it, I became infinitely more productive. I started to enjoy my work a whole lot more. Why? 

Because I wasn’t fighting myself to get everything that I need to done. And that has been, you know, people look at me and I think I’m a good example of an entrepreneur who was not at all an overnight success. And the truth is that I think that most people who seem like overnight successes are not. It just looks that way to the outside world. I struggled for a long time. I was up and down, and I didn’t know how to, like, keep it all going. And I was stressed and I fought myself. And a lot of what I started with was I built through stress and force, and I couldn’t hold it. And it was very difficult for me to keep going. And I was plateaued at the same number. 

I was plateaued at six figures For a very long time, like, I could not bust through that number. Dear God. It was just like, that’s just what you’re gonna make. No matter how I did it, I had two companies at one point, no matter what I did, I was like, oh, well, I’ll start this other thing. I had these other things going. One would lose money and the other would make money and I’d end up at the same dollar amount. There was so much to that. But there was always that question of how do I grow? I was plateaued. I was stuck financially and I was stuck in productivity wise as well. I wasn’t able to really see a path to how I could accomplish more because I was having such difficulty doing the things that I was doing in the first place. 

I was maxed out, right? And what this did, this gave me a window into why some things were taking me way more time than they should. Why some things would just be hours and hours and hours when it should be like 30 minutes maybe. And I couldn’t get past wasn’t what I was doing, it was the way that I was approaching the work that I was doing. It was the way that I scheduled myself. It was the way that I had, like structured the way that I worked. Right. I was a bit overly structured for my particular architecture. So what we’re really talking about, let me just tell you, like the specific piece of the variables that we’re talking about here that I’m kind of giving you some insight into, it’s the arrows. 

So if you’re not familiar with variable, when you run your chart, you’ll see that on the side of the head center and the Ajna center, you’ll see a set of four arrows, two on each side, and they’re either going to be turning left and some right. It might be all left. It might be all right. And what those tell us that’s this is the heart of variable and this is sort of the easiest piece to grasp. And then we have an even deeper architecture underneath it. That’s the stuff I’m going to talk about in the VIP session of the masterclass, which is like the more specific elements of this. But the arrows are actually going to tell you that’s the productivity side. That’s the thing that’s actually going to help you find your flow. Why? 

Because the left arrows, what they mean are they are more in alignment with masculine energy. So all the things that we think of when we think of masculine energy, not men, but masculine. So when we’re talking from an energetic standpoint. Masculine energy is strategic. It is active, independent, focused, linear. That’s what masculine energy is. It is more facts and figures than it is art. Right? And then on the right, when we had arrows turning to the right, this is more passive, it’s more receptive, relationship oriented, it is more relaxed. So these are the things that it naturally is when we are not in alignment with those things based on these arrows. 

So if you have a right arrow and you are trying to be super strategic and you’re trying to be super independent and you’re trying to be super focused, you’re pushing against the grain rather than with it. You are making it harder for yourself because that’s not how your brain works. And you’re actually putting yourself into a form of. It’s almost like a fight flight response. It’s almost like that same feeling that, like locking up, where we’re not able to do what we want to do. We’re not able to be present, we’re not able to really be able to move through that because you’re hitting a break and you don’t even know it. Why? Because you’re looking at somebody else do it who maybe has a different configuration. And you’re watching them and you’re saying, I should be like them. 

Maybe it’s your partner, maybe it’s your best friend, maybe it’s your mentor where you’re looking at them and you’re saying, oh, well, she does it like this. And it’s very natural to look at a mentor and emulate. It’s very natural to look at somebody demonstrate something that they are doing that they are winning at. You paid them and be like, I should do it just like them. And we can naturally kind of do that when, especially as entrepreneurs. But even if you’re not an entrepreneur and you’re just working in life, you get swept up. If you work at a company, you see how other people are doing it, you feel pressure to be like them. You know, oh, they’re a top performer. I want to get a good review. This is what my manager wants. So I must have to be like that. 

And nobody cares. Everybody just wants you to get what you have to done and done well. So however you have to work, you have to advocate for that with yourself and with others if you have other people to answer to. So these four arrows each have a different function, they have a different theme. And so the individual arrows have their own functions. But what’s more useful and more insightful and really gets to the heart of this Is the configuration of them. It’s which ones turn right and which ones turn left. Not looking at them like that’s a right arrow. So that needs to be passive. But looking at, well, that’s a right arrow. And this one is left and that one is right and this one is left. What does this mean when we put the four of these together? That’s the magic. 

That’s the thing that’s going to help you understand. Oh, that’s me. Because the four puzzle pieces are really interesting. And it’s like, you know, chapters in a book that nobody told you were part of the same book when you read them by themselves. But when you put them together and you give it an intro and you wrap it together and you start looking at it, you’re like, oh, I get this now. The arrows. Kind of the analogy that I have for this. If you listen to this show or you’re part of my world, you know, I love analogies. Nicole’s weird analogies. They’re always coming out. But the one that I think of for this is that we’re all here. We’re souls in a skin suit, right? We’re all driving this vehicle called our body. 

And we’ve all been driving our vehicle like an automatic transmission. We put it in drive and we just expect it. The gas pedal and it moves and we hit the brake and it stops. And that’s how it works, right? But we are really a stick shift transmission. And these are all the gears. We are far more complex then that automatic transmission. To drive it properly and to get what you want out of this vehicle in this lifetime. So that’s actually what I’m going to be sharing in the masterclass. I’m going to go through all 16 configurations. I’m not only going to tell you what they mean. I’m going to break down how your specific one, how you work with it, the things that you have to look out for, how you can. 

When you hit a roadblock, what you need to do, you need to ask yourself, you need to shift. How do you like? I’m actually going to give you a framework for how you work with this. Not just like this is what it means. Good luck. And questions to ask yourself. Some people just like, this is the most important thing. If you have this, you have to. You’ve got to do this. I’m going to break down the whole thing. So we’re going to break down each configuration on its own and I’m going to spend time on each one and I’m going to Walk you through it. I’m going to say, okay, here’s this configuration. This one means this. Here’s what you might expect, here’s what you might see. Here’s the thing that’s most important. 

I’ve worked with people with all of them, so I can kind of bring that flavor of like, this is what we see with people with this. And I’m really going deep with you there. And then in the vip, we’re going to go to that next level of looking at the color and looking at environment and we’re going to look at motivation and we’re going to talk about those in more depth and how you can work with those. Because that’s like the next level. But the first level of getting productive is learning how to work with these arrows. So I’m going to break the entire thing down for you, all 16 configurations. So if you come to that class, it’s not going to be like, oh, she talked about this, but she didn’t talk about mine. No, I’m talking about every single one. 

And if you come to the VIP too, you can be asking, you can come with those questions too. Be like, I didn’t understand this. And we’ll give you chances to do that as well in the main session if something isn’t clear, of course. But if you want to join us, all you have to do is DM me variablesmc on Instagram, I’m nicolelainoofficial or go to nicolelaino.com variablesmc and you can register and sign up and purchase right there. Or if you’re like, I want all the masterclasses, I want all the courses in the membership. I want to be able to be in that community and be sharing and be creating with people and doing the co working sessions and all of that. If you want to do that DM me lab on Instagram or go to nicolelaino.com lab. We’ll set you up there. Super awesome. 

To purchase the Variables Masterclass, please go to nicolelaino.com/variablesmc or DM Nicole “VARIABLESMC” on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/nicolelainoofficial/

We have a NEW HD membership community where you get ALL of our monthly HD Masterclasses included and so much more!! It is all about creating alignment, action, and consistency in your business with Human Design. To join The HD Authority Lab at the special Founding Member rate, click the link here: http://nicolelaino.com/lab or DM Nicole “Lab” on Instagram for info.

It’s a high value, it’s a really cool spot and I hope you join us. So thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you. And 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. We’ll see you next time.