Episode 457:

Hello and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design, everybody. I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and today it’s just you and me. We’re going to sit down and we’re going to talk about one of my favorite aspects of human design. I think this is a real unsung hero, and it has so many applications and implications, whether you are in alignment with this aspect of your design or not. And I want to say it’s one of the more advanced aspects simply because it really runs undercover. So you do have to kind of get yourself in alignment with the rest of your design a little bit before this one starts to really click into place in a meaningful way. You might find that you’re fighting with it. 

But what I do believe is that from the very beginning, I wish I knew about them sooner. I wish that I knew about this aspect earlier in my human design journey, because, quite frankly, nobody was talking about it. And I still don’t hear people talking about this enough, at least in my estimation, in reference and, you know, putting it next to how important this is and how impactful it is, I would think everybody would be talking about it. But I do also think that it’s kind of elusive. It’s not talked about in many of the certifications in depth enough, and I think it’s a more difficult thing to explain to people. But I try to make things simple. 

So we’re going to go into it a little bit here because I want to talk about lots of things which these episodes are the hardest for me to title. They’re the hardest for me to, like, wrap my head around because I’m like, this is just something that I want to talk about, and. And I just need to go with it. So actually very at the heart of what we are talking about here, about following your design, about doing things the way you’re meant to do them, not necessarily the way that appears to be correct. So the time I’m recording this, we’re going into the lunar eclipse in Virgo, which, by the time you’re listening to this will have already happened. But we’re still going to feel the effects, and we’re still going through this season because we are in Mercury retrograde. 

If you’re listening to this. We’re before March 20th of 2026, we will be in a Mercury retrograde which rules over Virgo. Mercury is the ruler of Virgo. So there’s a lot that is going on right now and that need for things to be perfect. I think particularly we’re all going through this. This eclipse is bringing up a lot of things for all of us. It’s all the same theme. But for those of us, like myself, who have a lot of Virgo placements in prominent places in their chart, this is required curriculum for us. And what it’s really asking all of us to do, but really asking me, and maybe you, if you have a Virgo rising or you’re a Virgo moon, or you have Virgo in strong placements in your chart, your Virgo sun, like me. 

We are all being asked to let go a little bit. We are all being asked right now. And I think the astrology and the transits that we’re going through this year have been, like, emotional thinking about them, because it really feels like they are preparing us for 2027. It really feels like we are going into this is like, a serious crash course of, like, the final year we’re in, like, the residency, right, where we’re gonna become a doctor. You know, it’s like, okay, we’re out of school, we’re doing the thing, but we’re still being supervised, and we’re being put through our paces to make sure that when the time comes for us to be handling patients on our own, so to speak, that we’re ready, that we’re not going to go and screw something up so badly. Sorry. 

I’ve been watching a lot of that show the Pit, so I’m feeling very much in, like, medical residency. It’s all making a lot of sense to me right now, this analogy. I hope it is for you, too. But what I want to talk about is that what we’re being prepared for is to be more in alignment with our intuition, to be more in flow, to trust ourselves more. But we can’t trust ourselves when we’re thinking about everything. And we can’t trust ourselves when we are constantly looking at the outside world for a reference point as to how we should act, what we should do, what is correct for us. We get tripped up. And when you get tripped up, it isn’t about how many times you fall down, it’s about how you get up. I trip up all the time. 

But because I understand this particular aspect of my design, I’m able to get up, course correct and shift into flow very quickly and easily now. And I have to tell you, I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been before the variables, which is what we’re going to talk about. I had a life before I understood what the variables were, and I have a life after. And let me just tell you, it is a world of difference into how I operate and how I show up in the way that I understand myself and the way that I work with myself. So it makes me infinitely more productive. And I don’t mean productive for the sake of getting more stuff done. I mean productive in a way of I’m able to just continue. 

And when I think back to, I was just talking with someone about this. I started out not, you know, just like Everybody else, at $0 a month, zero clients. And that was a slow climb up to where I am now. I’m very proud to say that at this point we have served thousands of people between all of our offers and ways that we work together. We’ve had hundreds of people go through Business by Design. My group coaching program where I’m working more closely with people, we are making multiple six figures now in this business, like a machine. And that all comes from tenacity. That all comes from my ability to stick with something, to stay at it, continue to grow and take lessons and really learn from them and really feel like the universe was working with me and for me, not against me. 

Human design, I think, is one of those life changing frameworks because it allows you to do that with such greater confidence. It really allows you to trust yourself. And when you trust yourself, then those times where you fall down, you’re like, okay. But I know that I’m on the right track. I know, I know where I’m going because my inner compass, I know works. And when you start working with your variables and we’ll get into some detail around it. I really want to talk specifically about creativity because if you’re an entrepreneur, you are creative. You know, you may not be paintings or doing anything like that, you know, making music or things that we typically associate with being creative. But we are creating new things all the time for our businesses. 

We are showing up and we have to come up with new ideas, new offers, new ways to market them, new ways to talk to people about the things that we do, new ways to show up. We are always coming up with new stuff. That is creativity. We are asking new things to be bored. We are creating new shit all the time. And it can be exhausting and if you don’t know how to tap your creativity, then that becomes incredibly draining, that becomes incredibly difficult. And it can really feel like you don’t know if you’re cut out for all of this, particularly in the beginning. So what I want to talk to you today about is the human design variables, which are the arrows on either side of the head center. 

When you run your human design chart, they represent different aspects of the way that you work. So in the last episode, I talked about the left and right configurations, that the left configuration is more masculine in nature. By masculine, I don’t mean male. I mean, you know, when we talk about masculine energy, structured, strategic, linear, more in alignment with supporting that type of thing, taking care of survival, like going after stuff that is masculine energy. Feminine energy is the opposite. It’s more passive, it is more receptive, it is more open, it is more intuitive and less strategic. So if you have more left arrows, you might be more strategic in nature. 

As far as the way that your circuitry of your design works, what we’re really talking about with variables is how your brain and your body work together, how you relate in space and time. So how you are related to your environment, what type of environment nurtures you. I think about it as like the hidden wiring of your nervous system. So obviously we have real life triggers and traumas and things that trigger our nervous system that happen from the outside world. But we are also wired a specific way. And what the variables start to show us is it will show you what is the most hospitable way for you to operate, where your nervous system is at ease, where you are in a calm and relaxed state from the inside out, not just looking at it, where it’s like, oh, I feel good right now. 

It’s like you can feel it in your bones and your cells that there is a calm. Now, there would also be another layer to this. If you are familiar with Ra, who is the founder of human design, what he would have said is that your human design variables will put you in the right place in the right time. Your strategy and authority gives you the yeses and the no’s and the ways to find your way in the outside world. But ultimately, there is this underlying architecture of your variables that will tell you the type of place that you should be in. So for instance, if you One piece of this is the environment arrow. Now, there are certain types of environments. You might have a shores environment. 

Ra famously talked about his shores environment and how when he went to go live in New Mexico, where There was no shore, there was no natural body of water for him to be near, that things started to fall apart in his life. Now, I don’t know about things falling apart in your life or doomsdaying, you know, the choices that we make. But I do have a friend who’s a shores environment and I remember she was going to move to Arizona. And I never give unsolicited advice. I’m never telling anybody. Your environment ensures you don’t move. I ask people questions and then I see, obviously if I’m asked, I will offer. And I asked her, I’m like, are you excited about the move? And she lived in a coastal town. She lived in California, near the water. And that was her place. 

She was gonna leave it. And I asked her how she was feeling about it and she was like, you know, not really. I’m really not feeling good about it. And we broke it down and we talked a little bit about it and she was like, you know, but I want to do this, you know, I think that it’ll be a good place for me. That was her mind. Her mind was saying, it makes sense. I have people there, I’ll have opportunity there. There were all of these reasons, right? And I’m not going to go into the details of her life, but she had reasons that she was going there. But in her gut, her intuition was saying, do not leave here. This is where you belong. This is your place. Don’t leave. And when she told me that, I’m like, can I offer something? 

And then I shared with her that she’s a shores environment and if that place doesn’t feel right to her, it very well may not be. And if where she is living on the coast feels right to her, she should trust that because this environment is probably the best environment for her nervous system right now. Why are we talking about nervous system when I’m talking about creativity? Well, because if you are in fight flight, you cannot be brilliant in that place. We are fighting ourselves when we are in fight flight. We are fighting ourselves when we are working against our variables. Now, I did a whole variables series a while back here on this show. You can go and listen to those episodes where I broke them all down, you know, went into pretty strong detail. And we actually have a variables guide. 

If you haven’t already downloaded that, just DM me the word “variables” on instagram. I’m @nicolelainoofficial. Or go to nicolelaino.com variables it’s a free guide. You can download it there. So if you’re interested in that, go to that. If you haven’t already gotten that. It’s a great guide. But you can break down the different arrows and you can say, okay, well, my perspective arrow is left. My environment is passive mountains. My mind operates in a strategic way. There’s all of these things where you can get all the pieces right, but it’s the way that they work together that determines how easily things come to you. I see clients all the time who are struggling, and they’re struggling to make something happen, and they’re struggling usually to be creative in some way. The ideas aren’t coming. 

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

That is a creative process that you are a part of. If you have blank screen syndrome, where you sit down and you’re like, I don’t know what I’m going to say. That is all part of the variables that can all be tied to the approach that you have to your work versus the work itself. And that’s where people get confused. They think that it’s the work. They think, maybe I’m not cut out for this. And this is where I have people tell me I’m a generator. I was in response, but the ideas wouldn’t come, and I just couldn’t make it happen. And it just wasn’t feeling good about it. Right. Or I’m a projector. I got these invitations, but I don’t know, it just didn’t feel like I couldn’t make it happen. It didn’t feel right. 

And when I look at their chart, I always go to the variables first. So why do I do that? Because they’re making it harder on themselves. And I want to make sure that they’re at least approaching this from a correct standpoint of the way that they’re entering into things. Because the variables are a very difficult thing to see until you’re already in it. It’s sort of like you’re in the quicksand. And you go, okay, I’m in quicksand. Because you look down and you realize that’s where you are. It wasn’t like, oh, I think there’s quicksand up there. So I’m going to steer clear of it. That’s where you’re getting into. The more the advanced stuff, we end up falling in the pit, and it’s just a matter of, do you know how to get out of it? 

I fall in the pit all the time, but I do know how to get out of the pit, and that’s the beauty of this. And so it isn’t just the isolated arrow and what it means, it isn’t just the isolated variable and what it means, it’s how they work together. So there are different configurations. You might have your top arrow on the left might be turned in right. Your top arrow on the right might be turned in left. That configuration of the top left arrow being turned to the right and the top right arrow being turned to the left, that particular configuration has a certain challenge to it. 

I don’t like the term rules, but there are rules of thumb to go by which will help you understand, you know, when you get into a rut or you get caught in your variables, what it feels like. It’s sort of like those Chinese handcuffs, the finger cuffs. You know, you just keep pulling and pulling and it makes it worse. That’s what all of alignment teaches us, is that usually the harder we push and the more we force, the worse our situation becomes. And the variables are the same. So there are simple things. There are things like, I know that I’m a mountains environment person, and I’m a passive mountains. So I know that if I’m going to do deep work, I might go and rent a room on a high floor in a hotel, or I might actually go to the mountains. 

Maybe I do that. I go someplace where I have a great vantage point. I go someplace where I have a view. I go someplace where I can feel expansive in the way that I look at things and I can play with that. Now, do I engineer everything that way? No, sadly, I bought a house on flat land. It’s a one story. That is what it is. My life didn’t fall apart. That’s what I mean. Like when Ross says, you know, your life will fall apart. No, I haven’t found that my life has been perfectly fine since we’ve been here. But when I get stuck, or when I know I have to go deep with something, or when I know that I have a big project that I’m currently kind of trying to work through now I don’t push anymore when I’m being creative. 

I’ve gotten really good, very proud of myself at the fact that I’ve grown so much that I don’t push myself to be creative. Now I can play. And when I learned to play, I became more creative. And that’s what being at ease and leading yourself does, because that’s ultimately what we’re talking about. It’s not just about a technique or a framework for working with your variables. And your strategy and authority always matter. So when you are working with your human design type, like that is going to give you a certain level of insight and that’s going to give you a lot of the mechanics of what to do. And it’s going to give you that signature and not self theme where I know if I become frustrated that I need to take a pause. 

So that’s giving me like real life kind of ways of relating to my situation and basically speaking to my intuition. My intuition is talking to me. Yours is too. It always is. We’re just not listening and we don’t yet speak the language of it. And as we start working with our human design more we start to speak the language of our nervous system, of our intuition, of our highest self. Is how I think about it, that it’s trying to communicate with us. And it does it through all of these ways. And I’ve just found that there are certain pathways and certain aspects that I think it’s loudest and I think it is the easiest to start to or the most productive way, the highest impact way of communicating with your intuition to have the greatest impact in your life. Right. 

So as you are starting to work with this, it’s really about leading yourself. You know, when you fall in the pit or hitting challenge, you go to be creative and it’s not working. In the past, may have looked to the outside world for that answer. Maybe you would have sat there and said, I’ve got to lock myself in this room until I get this thing done. Or you might have said, I got to go buy a course on how to be creative this way, how to write a book, how to do this. But the problem isn’t that you don’t know how to write the book. The problem is you haven’t found the way to work with yourself. 

That creating something like a book or a podcast or you know, a body of work or a substack or whatever it is where you’re looking to pour your creativity into it. You haven’t found the way to structure yourself. And the way that you work, where that becomes an easy thing for you to do, where that becomes something that feels like flow and not like work. It is about leading yourself. You might have thought that you needed something in the outside world before. You might even still think that might still be where you’re going. 

And look, I sell something that’s part of the outside world, but you know, the courses and the programs and the things that I run and you know, the human design lab and all the things that we do in my world, but I pride myself on the fact that we’re teaching you how to do this yourself. We’re teaching you how to lead yourself. Right now. I don’t think that it’s optional. I think it is necessary. But what I was talking about the eclipses and what I was talking about, you know what I feel this is preparing us for this Virgo lunar eclipse has been preparing us. And all of this time with the north node in Pisces and the south node in Virgo that we have been going through. And we are in the end times of that, the end period of that. 

What it is teaching us to let go and it’s teaching us to follow intuition over planning and strategy and linear thinking. We still get to be linear thinkers. We still get to have strategy, we still get to have a plan. But we will be so much more effective at this if we learn to trust ourselves on the inside. If we don’t trust what we know and we trust what we feel and we can move on something other than pure logic. Because logic is going away in 2027. I’m not saying, of course we’re still people that think logically, but themes were part of the 2027 masterclass that I taught. I went through how logic was played a very key role in the cross of planning phase that we have. 

The last 400 years that we have been under the cross of planning had a very strong. I went into detail there. But we also have this effect of the cross of the Maya that has been influencing us in the background for 400 years. And facts play a very strong role in that cross. That cross will be ending as far as being the background frequency for humanity on February 14th of 2027. Facts and logic don’t really play a role in the new themes as a background frequency, as something that humanity will be valuing and following. It’s going to be different stuff. It’s going to be intuition, it is going to be emotional intelligence. It is going to be leading with spirit understanding that abundance is more than just money, that it is so many other things. There is so much that is changing. 

And I feel like we have been given. I think the universe has orchestrated this really amazing final course for us. And this eclipse portal of letting go of everything needing to be perfect, of everything needing to be linear, of everything needing to be structured and just so is teaching us and helping us to follow our flow, to trust ourselves, to move on trust, not uncertainty. Can we create certainty within ourselves so that trust becomes something that we are, something that we move with, not something that we look out and say, once that thing is proven, then I’ll trust it. This is the new way. And the human design variables play a very key role in that because it can be very easy to see yourself trip up with the variables. 

Where the variables are the things that, like when you’re not in alignment with them, you might find that you are fighting yourself a lot. Some people would draw a line between people being ADHD or neurodivergent and the variables. I have no way to prove that. But I do believe that there are similarities between the way that people work with ADHD and the way that I work with variables and the way that I help people with that. I think that there are some similarities between the challenges that people face. I have yet to find a correlation between like, oh, everybody who has that problem has this particular configuration in their adhd. I can’t prove that and I have not had supporting evidence of that. 

But I think it’s the same type of thing that we are talking about, that when you approach something like being neurodivergent ADHD or, you know, some other neurodivergence, you’re saying my brain doesn’t operate like normal brains. There’s a difference. So I’m going to choose to learn new ways of doing this. That’s what the variables teach us. But what happens is when you’re out of alignment with your variables in your everyday life, what we have is we end up in trouble and then we look to fix it with yesterday’s tools and that’s not what’s required. You have to look at it from a different lens. You know, you go to fix productivity with more time blocking on your calendar or some sort of productivity tool, you’re going to download a new app or you think notion or something like that will fix it. 

That’s not it at all. You have to learn to work with the way that your brain and your body function together. So I’m actually teaching a masterclass on this. We have the free guide DM Me “Variables” @nicolelainoofficial. We’ll get it to you there. We also have a masterclass that I am teaching. This is for members of the Human Design Authority lab, members of Align Brand Builder, our group coaching program, and then of course my Business by Design clients who are part of my signature program where they’re working with me more closely. If you are part of any of those, you already get this. So you don’t have to worry about it. 

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.

If you are not a part of any of those, but you want to know how to work with your cognitive architecture, how your brain and body work together and get an exact plan for how your type, your specific configuration. Everybody will get one in this masterclass where I go through the specific configuration and tell you how you can work with that specific one. There’s not going to be like a, oh well, you know, you have to put these things together yourself. No, I’m going to look at it and say, okay, there are 16 possible configuration. We are going to go through all 16 of those. So if you want to be a part of that masterclass, it’s going to be really high value. It’s going to help you get so much more done. It’ll help you be more creative. 

I swear to God, it will change your life. If you start to work with your variables. If you want to be a part of that masterclass, just DM me the words “variablesmc” like masterclass on Instagram, I’m @nicolelainoofficial or go to that same URL nicolelaino.com “variablesmc” and you can register right there on the website. Thank you so much for being here. I hope that you enjoyed this. I hope that this gave you a little bit of insight into how creativity and human design are connected, how being self led makes you more creative. Because you aren’t trusting something in the outside world, you’re trusting yourself, you’re going with it. Because when we aren’t trusting ourselves, we’re so worried about making a mistake. And that is the enemy of creativity, worrying about making a mistake. Mistakes are what get us to the best ideas. 

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

Mistakes are what get us to the greatest pieces of art. We have to sit down and start creating and start somewhere. You have to dare to suck. You have to dare to just put something out there and see what’s there before you start to peel away and shift, change it and try to make it into something different. And most of us don’t even get started. So I hope that this opened you up to how this can really open up your creative process and how this can change the way that you work and the way that you are able to, you know, tackle a lot. I’m getting more done now than I ever have in my life and I have more space, which is really exciting. 

Those two things together, the fact that I am infinitely more productive, I’m able to sit down and in a session where I work and get what I need to done and if I don’t, I have free time and I know how to switch it off. That is power. That is where you get to feel like you have a really good life. Okay? And that’s what I want for you. So I hope you join us for the masterclass. It’s going to be amazing. I thank you for being here. I appreciate you. And remember, in order to have an unshakable business, you must first become an unshakeable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakable with human design. We’ll see you next time.