Put it on the Shelf: a "wait to respond" hack for Generators & Manifesting Generators

Our Human Design lays out our Decision-Making Strategy: how we're meant to make decisions from our bodies wisdom, from our higher self, and from our intuition, as opposed to from our mind. Because contrary to what we most of us were taught and the way that we've lived most of our life, our minds are really terrible at making decisions for us.

Why our Mind is terrible at making decisions

What really helped me understand the difference between making a decision from my body and my intuition, and making a decision for my mind was this robot metaphor:

Scientists and computer engineers have been trying and making great strides, obviously, in machine learning and artificial intelligence. But they still aren't able, at this point anyway, to create a robot with a sophisticated enough architecture that it can navigate, for example, the lobby at Grand Central Station at rush hour. In a super busy place where people are moving in many directions at many different speeds, quite unpredictably, the robot just can't handle all the input, and it's machine learning can't keep up with it, and it literally melts down, stops working and shuts down.

And that's kind of what happens to our brains when we try and make decisions with our mind: our mind gives us all these stories, it's trying to help us think of all the different possibilities, and then we're getting into this swirl around all of the options and the pro/con lists and the logical, rational, "what's the return on investment going to be like?", all.of.the.things. And we can just melt down trying to make a big decision.

You've had that experience where you wake up in the middle of night, you're like, "oh, shit, I made the wrong choice. I could have done it this way. Or if I change this one thing, how would that have turned out?" And it's frustrating. We've all experienced that.

And still, society says, "make the smart choice," think it through in your mind, look at look at it from all sides, list the pros and the cons, that sort of stuff.

When we have within us the the ability to trust our bodies, and to make a decision from a much higher wisdom, a much higher place than our minds, which is our intuition, which is the connection that we have to our higher selves.

Which is kind of like how humans navigate Grand Central Station at rush hour! We don't even think about it. We just intuitively do it. We slow down, speed up, change directions, let someone step past us. As long as we're not buried in our phones we don't run into anyone.

Our bodies have a lot of wisdom and are able to take in a breadth of information that we simply can't handle in our minds, that we can't even see or access with our minds.

Making better decisions with our Decision-Making Strategy

Our Decision-Making Strategy gives us the map to how to trust that, how to trust our intuition and understand how it shows up and what we have to look for.

And that was a huge aha moment for me personally when I was new to Human Design. Because when people have said to me before Human Design,"just trust your intuition!" I was like, "Well, what does that even mean? And how does that even work?!" And your Decision-Making Strategy is the answer to that.

Our Human Design Decision-Making Strategy (Strategy & Authority) is like the guts, or the gold of our human design chart, really, it's where everything starts and finishes, you always come back to that.

Even if you don't understand anything else about your design, and all the numbers and colours and shapes, when you look at a body graph, if you know your Human Design Decision-Making Strategy, you can start your experiment, your n=1 experiment of one to see how does it feel to make decisions intuitively, according to my decision making strategy and not be in my mind, and what happens? Does it feel better? Does it lead to better decisions?

So that's what the scientist in me loved about it. Because I came into Human Design pretty skeptically and being able to do my own experiment and just try it out, was a big piece of why I'm here doing this for my business now. It was following my Decision-Making Strategy that really started to change everything.

My Strategy & Authority: Waiting to respond and Trusting my gut

So what is my Decision-Making Strategy? And what was my experience with starting to follow it?

My particular Decision-Making Strategy, as a Manifesting Generator with Sacral Authority, is to wait to respond and trust my gut. Those two things come from Strategy and Authority if you're looking at your Human Design chart, and those are the two pieces that make up our  Decision-Making Strategy, always.

For me to wait to respond and trust my gut means that my intuitive way of making decisions is something comes to me -- something out there in the world comes to me -- and I can feel into my gut for the Uh-huh, or the Un-un.

Sometimes it can actually come out as a sound. If someone asked you a yes or no question, you might answer Uh-huh, or I feel the Uh-huh as kind of bubbly or fizzy in my gut, or that sort of gut excited feeling like butterflies. Or maybe a physical leaning forward even.

The Un-un I feel like a pit in my stomach or a weight or a contraction. And it's sometimes it's like a physical leaning back.

So it can be something that comes out of your mouth, or it can be a really a felt sensation in your body. But that is what a sacral response is. And that gut response that this is something that all Generators and Manifesting Generators have access to.

If your authority says emotional, then you have another piece of needing to wait for clarity (that's a topic for another day!) but you still have this gut response.

I see the gut response for a Generator or Manifesting Generator really like a direct line to our higher self. It's how we get the intuitive yes or no. However, our gut can only respond when it has something to respond to, and it has some trigger.

If you if someone was to ask you, "what do you want to eat for dinner?" You can't feel a gut response to that, so you go into your mind to start thinking about what you might want to eat for dinner.

Whereas if someone says, "Do you want to get pizza for dinner tonight?" Now you can feel the Uh-huh or Un-un without going into your mind.

So in order for our Decision-Making Strategy to work, we have to have something to respond to and this works really great when there are people around you asking you things asking you yes or no questions or proposing new things. Or if someone sends you an email and says, "Do you want to be a guest on my podcast?" Or if the opportunity presents itself to go on vacation somewhere specific and you feel an Uh-huh. That's what it means to respond. If you start to tune into your body, you'll know what the correct decision is.

But how do we respond to Ideas??

Where I was starting to get tripped up when I was first practicing with my Decision-Making Strategy and waiting to respond was with ideas.

I have an undefined mind in my Human Design. (The top two triangles in my bodygraph -- the Ajna and the the Crown -- are white.) And that means, especially when I'm around other people, I am bombarded with all kinds of ideas and inspiration, but they are not always MINE.

Trying to decide, trying to be able to feel in to my Decision-Making Strategy for ideas, was another layer that was tripping me up a little bit in the beginning, because I could have an idea, and it sounded like a really good idea. And I would, you know, go and execute on it.

(Previous to discovering Human Design this would happen all the time, especially as a Manifesting Generator, I'm a real quick start and I would go, make the 25 step plan, start doing it and then get into it and be like, oh, so frustrated, why is this not working the way that I want it to work?!

Because I initiated. I initiated on just this random idea. I didn't wait to respond to anything.

And waiting to respond is the first step. That's the only way that I can get the Uh-huh, that's how my body's intuition can speak to me and how my higher self can weigh in. How I know I have the energy for something. How I know it's the right thing for me at the right moment.

What could I do about all these ideas that are just coming from inside me?? They're not coming from anywhere outside me, I can't really feel my Uh-huh/Un-un, they're just in my head, they're just dropping in.

The Shelf

I was afraid that I would lose them if I didn't put them somewhere (which may be legitimate with an open ajna and an open head! I live for lists.) So what I started to do was just write them down.

Then I would ask the universe to send me a sign, send me something to respond to about an idea on my shelf, if it was correct, if it was the right time and the right idea.

Because we get external input all the time. There are so many ways that our guides, our higher self, the universe can talk to us that if it's the right time, and the right idea, the green light is going to come.

So I just started playing with that, I put all this stuff on what I was then calling My Shelf, because it's like a metaphorical shelf of ideas, and waiting for the universe to send green lights.

Now, it's not about just waiting there passively doing nothing while waiting for the sign or the thing to respond to (not that we could sit still anyway!). When we're doing what lights us up, when we're busy, being satisfied with whatever we're working on, whatever we're learning, whatever we're doing, our auras are magnetic, we are actually magnetising the right things to respond to into our path.

So putting something on the shelf isn't just "shelving it," It's literally like, "I'm going to put it here, waiting for a green light. And in the meantime, I will go out and do what lights me up and watch and keep aware of things to respond to."

How using The Shelf can help

Here's a concrete example from my own life: 

At some point when I was first doing these experiments, I had the idea that I wanted to share Human Design with a friend and mentor of mine, who I was actually working for at the time. And when that idea crossed my mind, I was like, "oh, that sounds that sounds really exciting." But it was just an idea. So I put it on my Shelf, and it sat on the Shelf for three months before she made a response to a Facebook post of mine. The post was not directly about Human Design but her response made me think, "this is the perfect opportunity to ask her if she's interested in hearing about human design." And that was the green light for it to come off the shelf.

And that interaction was actually the beginning of how my business started to pivot into the Human Design space. Looking back, if I had followed the idea and initiated on the idea when it first came into my mind, the interaction probably wouldn't have been as fulfilling and pivotal as it was because I didn't have the depth of knowledge, yet, I didn't have that many more months of study and my own experience. And at that point, she was in the middle of something really big in her business. So she wouldn't have had the bandwidth either to take on something new and to start experimenting with it and to be open to it.

So it can be the right idea, just at the at the wrong time. And that's the cool thing about our Decision-Making Strategy. And it's there to guide us.

Another example of this:

I had a Generator friend who had the thought, "I'd really like to offer some mini photography sessions, not like not full branding shoots, but mini kind of refresh shoots." So she put the idea on her shelf and literally the next day she signs into Facebook and sees a post from a group in her newsfeed where people are saying, "I wish I could get like a small inexpensive shoot to have a couple of new photos to share on social media." And it wasn't even the group that she was going to pitch or the person she was thinking of, or any of that, but it was it was the green light for her to check in and be like, "Is this an Uh-huh? Do I want to go forward with this idea that's on my shelf?" She did end up putting the offer out to the group she was thinking of, and it sold out within within a couple of days.

So using the shelf can really help you make sure that you're waiting to respond, it helped me stop initiating on every single good idea that like my mind thought was good (which would end up wasting so much time and energy because I would be going down the wrong path!) And knowing now that when I get the Uh-huh, and when something comes off the shelf, that it's the right time, also gives me a level of trust in my action that previous to Human Design, I wouldn't have had.

So if you're a Generator or Manifesting Generator, give the a Shelf a try. Ask the universe to send you something to send you a trigger a sign, something to respond to so that you can see whether or not it's the right idea at the right time.

And if you're not a Generator or Manifesting Generator, that's okay too. I think that writing down our ideas or desires and then asking for signs and guidance can work for any type -- it's just crucial for us sacral beings to make sure that we're waiting to respond and not initiating.

Curious about your unique built-in Decision-Making Strategy? Grab a plain English introduction to your Human Design Type, Strategy and Authority so you can make better, more confident decisions here.