Nicole Laino (00:30)
Hello and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design. I’m your host, Nicole Laino and I have a question for you. Have you ever had something come up that you encountered and thought, why am I dealing with this again? I already handled this, I already healed this, I already did this, I worked through this already. And maybe it’s the same thing. Maybe it’s like the same money fear, maybe it’s the same relationship pattern, maybe it’s the same.

visibility wound, something that you thought you made easier by working through it, something that you thought you opened up and expanded from, suddenly starts to contract again. I understand this, and this is the most common thing, and I want to kind of break down what we’re really dealing with here. Now, personally, I am almost seven years into my deconditioning journey, which in human design

Is supposedly the amount of time it takes to decondition, heal, and become the new you. That in seven years all of your cells will turn over and there won’t be any part of you that remembers being the old version of you. That’s kind of the theory, the and the loose framework based on it. Now, one of the biggest misconceptions I think about deconditioning and really healing work in general.

Is that somehow we deal with something once and then we’re done with it. That, I did that next. That’s unfortunately that’s not how it works. Just because you’ve dealt with something before doesn’t mean that you’ll never deal with it again. And the fact that something came back doesn’t necessarily mean that you failed or that you didn’t do the work right. It just means that you are in a different phase with that thing.

We have all heard that saying, new level, new devil. Well, I always say, new level, same devil. It’s just wearing different clothes. Your relationship to the devil has changed, but we’re going to revisit these things. So what we’re gonna talk about in this episode, I’m gonna break down for you why old patterns and triggers come back even when you’ve already worked on them. We’ll talk about why awareness does not equal embodiment.

Does not guarantee change. How I use human design as a map to understand where conditioning is showing up and to continue this work of remaining expanded. And I’m gonna share with you a really simple framework that I use and I use it with my clients to take something that’s triggering me or them and figure out what it’s actually showing me so I can work with it. Okay.

Before we get started, we actually do have a free guide that we’ve we’ve redone it. So we have a deconditioning guide, which I’ve had for a really long time, but we have actually revamped the entire thing. We have expanded it. We’re including this simple framework that I’m sharing with you in the episode in this guide. So please, if you would like to get the new guide, so even if you’ve gotten it before, this is vastly different from the old one. The old one is one of the first guides I ever created after my human design.

Part of my business started and now we have changed it to be more updated with the way that I teach now. So even if you’ve downloaded it before, please download it again. Get the new version because it’s so much better. All you have to do is go to Nicole Laino.com forward slash decondition or DM me the word decondition on Instagram. I’m at Nicole Laino official and we will send it to you right there. Okay. So the first thing I always tell my clients when they encounter

Something difficult. When they encounter one of these patterns, they hit a pattern where they’re just like, I did this already. And I hear this all the time. The first thing and the most important thing is that they meet this with curiosity, not criticism. Instead of why am I doing this again? I thought I healed this. Why haven’t I gotten past this? Instead, we’re just asking it in a different way: why is this here? What is this showing me?

Why did I do that again? What’s happening right now? And what happened in the past with this thing is probably going to be different than what’s happening right now in this moment. Now, I believe it’s through our patterns and our triggers that the universe shows us where we still need healing, shows us where we have asked for something because we’re asking the universe for things all the time, right? Or at least we consciously are.

And we are saying, I want this life, I want this next level, I want this new thing. And the universe says, sure, but right here, right there, you are gonna have to work on this, or I can’t give it to you. It’s behind this action, this healing, this experience that you need to go through. The triggers that we have.

Are information, I actually look at them. One of my sayings is triggers are gifts. Triggers are gifts because it is showing you here’s where the work is, here’s something to look at. It doesn’t mean that you haven’t healed at all. It might mean though that there’s another layer of this available for you to work through.

And when you’re on this journey, you have to be game for that. You know, because you could be encountering this same wound at an entirely different level for the life that you are leading right now. So even though you’ve done money work before, it doesn’t mean that you’re never gonna have to do money work again at a new level. So I was trying to think

of

An analogy for this because expansion is an ongoing practice. Expansion is something that it’s growth. We’re growing, right? So I was trying to think of an analogy for this, and what came through for me was running. So if I want to start running, I could just start running, you know, and I start running and I run a mile or whatever. But if I decide that I want to run a half marathon, I have to kind of get a little bit serious, right? I have to train.

for the half marathon. But the fact that I trained for a half marathon doesn’t mean I can run a whole marathon. It’s very different. Now I’m still a runner. I run that half marathon and I run on a regular basis. Like I’m a runner. I have taken on that identity. That’s fine. That’s cool. That’s totally mine. But I’m not a marathoner yet.

I would need to train further and differently in order to condition myself differently in order to become the person who can run the marathon. And even after I’ve run the marathon, if I don’t continue to train and keep up with it, I can’t necessarily go run another marathon three months from now. If I just stopped and I didn’t do anything to keep up with it, and I wasn’t continuing to keep up that level of conditioning.

I would not be able to run a whole other marathon, or I shouldn’t expect that that would be easy, that I would be able to do it, that I’d be able to finish. That wouldn’t be something that would be right for me to assume. Just because I train for one, doesn’t mean that the next one in six months or a year, that I don’t have to train for it. No, you have to train to do these things. Athletes understand that. And even people who don’t consider themselves athletes.

But they are athletic people, understand this. Expansion is an athletic process to me. It’s a continual process of staying in emotional shape, staying open, staying expanded. But we treat personal development as though it’s a one-and-done process, that, I did that already. I took the money course, I worked on my money blocks, I dealt with my visibility issues, I healed this relationship wound.

Okay, that’s fine. And that got you to where you are right now. But where you want to go, if you’re bumping up against it again, then you’re going to have to deal with it again. Because if you want to make more money, or you are making more money, or you need to be visible in a different way, or maybe you need to be more visible truthfully.

Maybe you don’t have to be visible more frequently, but you need to be visible more completely. Maybe you want to show more of yourself, and that’s the new level with it. Maybe the relationship needs to go deeper. Maybe the stakes are higher. You’ve been asked to hold something you didn’t have to hold before. And that is going to require a new level of expansion and a new level of capacity. And that’s what a lot of people don’t understand.

And the other misconception is that awareness, being aware of these problems, being aware of these things, so maybe you understand that you have more work to do. Maybe you understand that there’s more healing. Maybe you understand that you have to meet yourself at a new level. But a lot of personal development work will stop too early because they’ll stop at awareness. And awareness means that you know about it.

But it does not mean that you did something about it. And that is a real key factor. Awareness does not guarantee that you become anything. If you want to live differently, you’re going to have to behave differently. If you want to be different, you’re going to have to behave differently. And you’re conditioned to behave in the ways you’ve always behaved. The ways you felt you would get what you wanted, the ways that you felt

would make you more likable or more palatable to other people. The ways you learned you needed to be in order to be loved. Like all of these, are ways that we stay safe. Sometimes awareness is enough and it can get you pretty far. Like to say like, I noticed that I’m doing that. I’m going to stop doing that. Sometimes we can we can do that, right?

We can catch ourselves, we can choose differently, and we can create better habits, and eventually we’re not doing that thing anymore. But what happens when you can’t will your way out of it?

What happens when knowing better doesn’t actually cause you to do better? Doesn’t actually cause you to behave differently. That’s where the deeper deconditioning work comes in. And this is why human design is so powerful. So I could write you an entire book and tell you about how I was conditioned and what my journey was like and

How I deconditioned myself and the work that I did and the beliefs that I had. And that might inspire you to go on your own journey. And that’s wonderful. That is a wonderful thing. But here’s the important part about this: that my conditioning is not your conditioning. This is what makes human design so powerful, because it gives you your own map to your own conditioning. And

That completely changes the game. Your vulnerabilities are going to be different than mine. Your gifts are going to be different than mine. And the remedies of healing these aspects are going to be different for you than they were for me. So we might have some that are the same, but we’re going to have quite a few that are different. And traditional personal development a lot of times does not take that into account, does not really

have space for that. And human design gives you this map to remind you of what’s possible for you. Human design can remind you of what expansion looks like for you and what your gifts in practice look like.

But knowing your human design is still just awareness. And this is something that I deal with because I love to be in my head. I love to think about things and ponder them. I am a thinker through and through. And boy, can I trick myself into thinking that having the answer is the answer. But it’s not. The answer makes me really good at talking about the answers.

It makes me really good at explaining this system and how it all works, but it does not inherently change me.

Human design is a map. It’s not the treasure. The map doesn’t do the deconditioning for you. Embodiment is something that we always have to work on. We can always go deeper. And this is what makes it a practice.

Because embodiment is how we become somebody new. We can only do that through making this an ongoing practice. And having that human design chart, the way that I study it and the way that I work with my clients to do this is it is a constant awareness and a constant relationship with these gifts to show you what is possible for you and help you understand.

what you could become if you embodied these aspects and if you did the work. It’s a mirror of your best self.

So, like I said, sometimes you can see the conditioning and you choose differently, and that’s wonderful. Hallelujah, when it works out like that. I’m acting like I need to prove myself. I’m gonna stop doing that, and I’m just gonna show up with total openness. Fantastic if you can do that. But more often than not, there’s something underneath that behavior, underneath that conditioning, that has a much more emotional charge.

And this is where other tools are necessary. So I use EFT, which is the emotional freedom technique. There are also tools like breathwork and somatic healing, which I also use those in my practice, although EFT is the main one. And what these allow you to do is release it from your body, release it from your emotional store, because it’s the emotions that glue these beliefs and these behaviors to us.

Because it’s what keeps us safe. We don’t want to feel that emotion again, or we don’t want to feel an emotion that’s uncomfortable for us. So we keep ourselves safe from it. So human design is the map. EFT and these other modalities are what we use to go deeper than what the map is showing me into the actual aspects that are keeping you in alignment with your conditioned behavior rather than with your highest self behavior.

Because a lot of times what we’re dealing with are wounds that created adaptations of us. So we learned something through an experience and then we developed a way of behaving that helped us feel safer. And the way that I usually refer to this is it’s trauma. But I look at it like there’s big T and then there’s little T trauma. big T, small T trauma.

Something doesn’t have to be one of these earth-shattering seeming events from the outside to have left a really deep wound on us. You know, if you were bullied as a kid, I was bullied. And that can be something that can teach you a very powerful thing about who it’s safe to be, how visible it’s safe to become, how safe other people are, or what you need to do in order to be accepted.

So the event can be over. I’m not being bullied anymore, but the adaptation of my own behavior, the protection that I have put up as far as the way that I behave and how close people are allowed to come or how much of myself I will let people see, that is absolutely still running in our own internal programming until we go into it and we create more safety there.

So healing is about getting to the place where that wound becomes a scar rather than something that continues getting ripped open every time something touches it. We truly have to heal it because when the wound is festering and it hasn’t really been fully cleaned out, we continue to protect ourselves. It continues to make us wince and cause us to protect that area and not go into some of these practices, some of these.

Behaviors that could move our life forward. So life becomes a deconditioning practice. And I don’t mean that to sound like, you know, we’re constantly healing, because people can really fall in love with healing and get trapped there. It’s this equal parts healing and action that we have to be taking. But you have to stop thinking you need to go looking for all of your conditioning too. Your life is gonna show it to you. And this is the part that I think.

Changes the people that I work with. My my clients get obsessed with this because you start to see life in a totally different way. First of all, you have to think about the fact that the universe is always supporting you. It’s supporting you in your forward growth. It wants you to be the highest version of you. It wants you to live your potential, which is why it is showing you your triggers and your areas for healing, your wounds through your life. Your life is a mirror.

So pay attention to the things that trigger you. Don’t dismiss something because it seems ridiculous or too small. I’m actually gonna share with you a little bit of a story because mine was on a pair of socks. And I’ve told this story with my clients before, and they’re like, I get it now. So I’m gonna share that with you when I share the framework with you. So in my deconditioning work, I created this really simple framework called STEW S-T-E-W. It’s an acronym.

Where we can start to recognize when something is triggering us. And it doesn’t have to be this crazy trigger.

The point is to take something that happens in your actual life, in your everyday life, and follow it to what is really underneath it. Because that’s what triggers are. Triggers are often not about the thing that we think they are about. Which is why sometimes when we talk about the things that upset us, some people can look at us like that’s not a big deal. Because it isn’t about the thing that happened, it’s about what it represents.

to our nervous system. So a trigger I would define in this scenario as anything that takes us out of a neutral or expanded place or anything that we want to move toward, but for some reason we self sabotage and our inner self keeps us from moving in that direction, from taking that action. Okay?

So I’m gonna share with you the STEW formula so that you can start using this in your life. And this is what’s inside the deconditioning guide, among other things. It’s a it’s an extensive guide. But this formula and a worksheet for it is in there. Okay? So let’s start out. First of all, it’s it’s an acronym. So we start out with the S and the T. They represent two different things, but we can look at them together. So the S and the T stand for situation or trigger. So what actually happened? Ask yourself what actually happened.

Don’t analyze it yet. Just ask what was the situation that triggered you? So for me, in my story, was literally my husband’s socks on the floor. This is something that I had always asked him to do was pick up his socks. And I found socks in the kitchen one day as I was doing a million other things. And don’t judge your trigger because you think it’s stupid, because that was what I did. The socks aren’t important, but my reaction to the socks

in that moment was interesting. So I started to freak out about the socks and get really pissed. And then my instinct was to shove it down to not get upset. Like, you shouldn’t get upset about socks. It’s not a big deal, Nicole. Just pick up the socks. But at that time I was doing this work and I was like, no, let’s go into this because there’s something underneath, which brings us to the next piece, which is emotion.

So instead of just being like Nicole, you shouldn’t get upset about a pair of socks, just pick up the socks and move on. Instead, I asked myself, what did it make me feel? For me, I was angry. I was pissed off. I was frustrated. These were the emotions that were coming up. Angry. I was really, really pissed. So name the emotion instead of immediately trying to get rid of it.

So that was what originally what I wanted to do was just take, you know, don’t get angry, Nicole. Don’t get pissed. You shouldn’t be pissed because this isn’t a big deal. And truthfully, if I had brought it to my husband in that moment, I would have seemed like I was way angry for something like socks on the floor. Like, okay, but you’re like, you’re like way overreacting, right? And this is why we overreact, because it isn’t about that.

So now we’re moving away from what happened and toward what happened inside of us is really the goal here. That’s what we want to do. So instead of just being like there are socks on the floor, well, what is it making me feel? Right? This is the E. What is it making me feel? The emotion. What emotion is coming up? Now the next piece, this is where we get into the deep stuff here. So the W stands for WHY

Why did this make me so? And then the emotion, why did this make me so angry? Why does it bother me so much? Why does that matter? You want to keep asking why a few times to get deep enough here. Keep following the thread because you’ve if you’re able to do this, and this is what I teach people to do with EFT. But for me, the socks eventually became.

Nobody listens to me. Because I had asked him to pick up his socks before. And my husband is wonderful. This is not me picking on him. But this was me being triggered because there was something underneath. So to me it was nobody listens to me. I’m taken for granted. I have to do everything. And ultimately what I got to, which to me, this is honestly one of the core beliefs that almost everybody I work with is grappling with in some way.

The belief that I’m unsupported.

And then if I really looked at that unsupported, what was really underneath it was this feeling of how am I supposed to create this business? Because I was in a really pivotal moment of it was really hard in my business. This was years ago. And things were very difficult. And I wasn’t making money and I was working really hard and I was, I mean, I was waking making money, but

The business wasn’t profitable to the level that it needed to be. So it was a very stressful time. And so I’m doing all of this stuff. And that’s what’s underneath it. Because underneath it is how am I supposed to create this business? How am I supposed to make these dreams come true? Like on my back and this life that I want to have if I have to do everything myself, including pick up the fucking socks. Now we are not talking about socks.

anymore. It is not about the socks. But the trigger gave me access to find my wound. And that set me off on a whole journey. And that changed my life.

But it wasn’t just that. Let me add one other thing on here. It’s not part of the acronym, but we do have to recognize that you have to do something with what you found because this is where we come right back to awareness versus embodiment. Awareness is not enough. Awareness is not embodiment. Awareness doesn’t inherently change us. So the STEW formula helped me to understand why I was triggered.

I tapped on it with EFT and helped me work through the emotional charge underneath it, but then there was something that I actually had to do differently in order to have this change my life. I needed to ask for support. So instead of silently picking up the socks, being pissed, and building resentment, I had a conversation with my husband. I explained what I was trying to build and that I could not do everything myself.

I explained the type of support that I needed. I explained what I was feeling. And I did it from a place where I was not charged up because I had worked through the emotions. I didn’t sit down with him from this heightened emotional state and throw all that emotion on him. I worked through it. I processed it. And when I landed on what I needed, I was able to come to him in a neutral and expanded place and articulate what I needed from him.

For me, I needed to ask for support. That’s embodiment of being able to move differently because of the work that you’ve done. It’s not just the understanding. I didn’t just understand myself better. I used what I understood in order to behave differently.

This is why I don’t believe that deconditioning ever really ends. I’m almost seven years into that deconditioning process, and I don’t expect to wake up one day and say, Great, I’m done. That’s like running a marathon and saying, Great, I’ve completed fitness. I will never have to do that again. I’m gonna run a marathon every year from now, trained once, done. It’s not how it works. And we understand that with physicality, we understand that in athletics. But when it comes to

This stuff. There are so many people in this game that don’t understand that we need to keep expanding. And once we’ve expanded to a certain level, we have to keep that vessel open. When we want to get to a new level, it’s going to require a new level of expansion.

New levels that we want to reach are going to expose different things in us or expose old things at a new level. That doesn’t mean that you’re going backwards. It means that you need to meet that with curiosity, not criticism. Ask yourself what this is showing me. What capacity am I being asked to build now? And what do I know that I haven’t fully embodied yet?

What do I know that I’m not doing? Recognize that expansion is a practice, embodiment is a practice, and deconditioning is a practice. If you commit to that practice, just like you would going to the gym five days a week, if you wanted to be somebody who was fit and healthy, if you want to be emotionally healthy, and if you want to be an expanded person on a path of growth so that you can live more, do more, and be more.

Then you have to commit to the practice of expansion. And it’s not easy. I’m not gonna say it is. It’s work. I feel like most things in life that are worth something are not easy. A lot of times they’re simple, but they’re not easy. And this is absolutely one of them. But I find it to be the most rewarding thing that you can do is to continue to challenge yourself, meet yourself, and expand into your potential.

And if you want to start identifying where conditioning might be showing up for you specifically, then download the free human design deconditioning guide. It is really, it’s expanded. Again, if you’ve downloaded it before, please download it again because it’s completely different and it’s super easy to get. You can either go down to the show notes and click the link there, go to nicolelaino.com forward slash decondition, or go to Instagram, I’m at Nicole Laino official, and DM me the word decondition, and we will send it to you right there.

But I’m gonna wrap this episode up. I appreciate you. 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.