Human Design and Leadership Development
When I first began my formal ‘quest’ to discover the best leadership development tools on the market I never expected it to lead me to a tool based on the time, location, and date of my birth, and yet here I am, writing this blog and changing lives on the daily with this powerful development tool…
In one of the ‘Bible’ books of leadership, Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results, which also includes its own, very comprehensive self-assessment names Leadership Circles, happens to align perfectly with the results the Human Design System offers (turns out it really is a science!)
Leadership Circles is a highly complex, beautiful system that highly trained HR Professionals often recognize as a comprehensive 360 tool that offers psychological insights into a leader’s ‘inner’ world, how you see yourself, and ‘outer' world, how others interact and receive you. A quote in this book from Warren Bennis, that long lived on the front page of my website, sums up precisely why, and more importantly what makes Human Design the ultimate leadership development tool:
Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. -Warren Bennis
Human Design, unlike the highly complex Leadership Circles, is a simple tool based on complex ancient wisdom and modern science, with the power to instantaneously returns you to whoo you were before the world told you otherwise. I’ve watched hundreds of clients transform themselves, seemingly overnight! This tool is OWL the permission you need to become more yourself, transforming the way others receive you and the way in which you receive them!
If it sounds like I’m selling snake oil here, well I suppose that is exactly why my clients say, “I feel like you are a fortune teller,” or as a 5/1 Manifesting Generator and Sr. Director of Engineering said after our second session together last week:
Katie is a fantastic coach, great listener, and has an uncanny ability to extract the personality from the few threads of information I have shared about myself.
Coaching school taught me to listen. Human Design showed me how to hear your heart, to Be my full self, and bring my intuitive knowing and wise solutions, whenever I’m invited. In Leadership Circles he describes the integral leader, the leader who understands we are all interconnected, and you can’t hate or fight anyone, for it is you that you’re hating and fighting. It is not enough to be Pro-Active Leader or a Creative Leader.
Silicon Valley is full of Creative Leaders, the problem with this leadership is they get too focused on championing a vision of greatness to be able to seek first to understand. These leaders also get trapped in the Shadow Projection, seeing in others a projection of their own shadow self, unable to see all the damage that their shadow is causing—these leaders are not complex enough to lead truly large-scale, sustainable, systematic change—this requires the Integral Mind…
The art of developing the integral mind and leaders, as the author puts it, is two-fold:
Create Clarity
Drop something powerful into that space and observe its ripple throughout our being
I can attest that this is, in fact, how it is done in my executive coaching sessions. And NOTHING is as clarifying, with the ability to drop something powerful into a space and watch it ripple in a way that appears to alter the physical DNA inside of a leader than providing them with a Human Design (HD) Reading. Written in the stars (mostly planets and the neutrinos stream), HD is a snapshot of how you’re designed to operate best, and where you will fall into the trap of being the ‘not self,’ or the shadow self as Gene Keys refers to it.
The more clients experiment with letting go of the ‘not self’ and living in alignment with their ‘true self’ and inner authority, the more ease, flow and synchronicities they experience along the way. And for me, that is not only the definition of an Integral Leader, aware of their own shadow projections, it is also a leader living a life well-lived and in alignment with their purpose, even if they are unclear what their purpose is, because they don’t have one!
The S.C.A.R.F assessment hits the brain in a similar way, creating clarity and powerfully altering the way an individual communicates with their own shadow projection and others. But this tool takes a bit of work for the brain to get good at working with it. However, its ability to deliver empathy with real lasting impact puts it into this Integral Leadership category, worth mentioning here, but I digress…back to Human Design
The founder of the Human Design system, Ra Uru Hu, was also a 5/1 profile like me. This profile is OWL about simple solutions that yield the best results. If we examine it with our 1st line researcher profile and decide it is not useful for others, we immediately discard it.
I have a degree in history and am OWLstanding at evaluating sources and identifying who the true experts are—my personality is based in pattern recognition, and studying human behavior. As an only child, I’ve been interacting and studying adult and child behaviors my entire life; which is how I know in my bones that every single individual is the exception to the rule.
I imagine this is what drove me to hate labels—they give you perspective, and then they become your perspective—but what if the perspective is flawed?! The ‘labels’ Human Design offers are ‘locked in’ by the neutrinos stream before you were born (0-9 months imprinting becomes your greatest gift as well as your core wound to heal) and ‘locked in’ by the neutrinos stream on the exact day, time and location you were born.
Simply put, Human Design is a user manual for leaders to become themselves, freeing them up to do OWL that other stuff leadership requires and that I happen to be excellent at coaching them through. It is also the Science of Differentiation—every individual is honored in this invitation to ‘experiment with your design.’
It truly is you without conditioning, after all the only information you provide is birth location, time, and day/month/year. It is not, however, a belief system. Unless of course you need to believe science in order to believe it is worth trying. In that case, it is rooted in science. Which is what makes it an opportunity for you to experiment with it, as a hypothesis for yourself.
The results speak for themselves. In this case, through the words of a 4/6 Manifesting Generator towards the end of her career:
If you don’t use Human Design with your all of your clients, you should! All my life I’ve been searching for my purpose, for that ‘thing’ that was missing. I don’t think I would have gotten there without Human Design. I even told my boss about it.
Ready to take your life (and leadership) to a place of permeant self-acceptance and self-authority? Get your Human Design chart & say OWL do it!
Being Awake isn’t about hiking the Himalayas and doing mantras for 35 years, and it isn’t about waiting for some kind of light to shine—it isn’t for the master’s word. It is simply to follow your nature—being yourself. - Ra Uru Hu
