Hi, I’m a Manifesting Generator! What about you?

The term Manifesting Generator comes from Human Design—a system that explains how you were coded at birth. We live in a world that’s tasking us to live our best lives and be our best selves. While self-care rituals and empowerment techniques are on the rise, what I think is still missing is a set of personalized tools to help anyone reach full their potential. That’s where Human Design comes in.

Human Design offers a map, or a guideline, for how you can make decisions, communicate most effectively, and bridge the gap between who you are and who you want to be. This system unfolds how you were built and is a tool to show you how to best respond to the world based on your own makeup. Look at it as a combination of your natal birth chart and Myers-Briggs.

The system combines principles from many modalities including The I Ching, astrology, Kabbalah, Hindu-Brahmin chakra system, and quantum physics. When you explore your Human Design, you’ll quickly discover your BodyGraph—a chart calculated using your birth date, time, and place, to reveal your genetic design. The diagram shows your strengths, your potential weaknesses, your gifts, and talents. It is the basis for learning more about your design.

The first time I heard about Human Design was at an event at The Assemblage in New York City—a coworking and community space that’s committed to helping ignite the collective imagination of what might be. On the stage were Erin Claire Jones, Human Design guide and leadership coach, along with Jared Matthew Weiss, founder of Touchpoint. Together, the duo spoke about how couples and individuals communicate best in relationships based on their Human Design.

As someone who communicates for a living but still hasn’t found love, I was instantly hooked on learning more about myself and what I might’ve been missing. What I didn’t understand at the time was just how vast the system of Human Design was and how it’d help me color in the parts of myself I spent my whole life wondering about.

Of course, when you go to learn about any new topic, you can be pummeled with an overwhelming amount of information. So I went straight to the source and spoke directly with Erin Claire Jones.

“Human Design gives us our energic DNA. We each have our own blueprint and it gives us that language and acts as an operating manual,” Jones said. “It helps you decide the steps to get you where you want to go.”

When there are so many personality tests and tools out there, what I really wanted to answer was why add Human Design into the mix? From Jones’ experience, it’s because “it’s not changing who we are but giving ourselves permission to be who we’ve always been. It’ll transform the way we operate by inviting ourselves to become ourselves and to show up as ourselves in every single decision.”

Human Design is comprised of nine centers, thirty-six channels, and sixty-four gates, all of which present as either open or closed, connected or absent, on or off, respectively. With millions of different configurations, Human Design offers a unique level of depth and accuracy in comparison to other modalities.

There are four main types when it comes to Human Design (although some say five—with the addition of Manifesting Generators in the Generators category).

Human Design Type - Generators

Human Design Type - Projectors

Human Design Type - Reflectors

Human Design Type - Manifestors

The geometric shapes you see in the charts are called Centers, and there are nine of them. If they’re colored, that means they work consistently within you and influence other people and groups. If the centers are white, they work inconsistently within you, and they are areas you can get influenced by other people.

The Nine Centers

Once you grasp Types and Centers, you’ll also need to understand your Authority. Together, it becomes your Strategy & Authority which will help you make better decisions throughout your life. All of our Centers communicate with us, but our Authority holds the message we need to pay the closest attention to when making decisions, and there are seven of them. All new to you? It was for me too, and I know there’s still so much to learn.

Human Design is still not mainstream and in the early adopters' phase, which I find exciting. The system was created in the 1980s by Ra Uru Hu (née Alan Krakower)—a former advertising executive from Montreal. Ra left his family, went to Ibiza, had a mystical eight-day experience, and channeled the 400-page system that is Human Design today.

One of the reasons that Human Design is quickly gaining more steam and interest is because it’s not a belief system. Jones touched on this further by explaining, “It’s a frame. Things will flow for you if you align with it, but it’s all an experience. You don’t have to believe in anything, but ask yourself more deeply about what resonates with you. The magic of human design unveils our unconscious.”

Through my work, I noticed that the majority of places I was seeing Human Design talked about was in parallel to spirituality. So is Human Design spiritual? “People who are drawn to it now are the seekers and those exploring different modalities, but there’s no belief system attached to it. It’s for people who are invested in their own growth because it’s actually really mechanical,” said Jones.

Another reason Human Design is more accessible than other modalities is that it’s a personalized infrastructure of your being. You’ll continue to express it differently throughout your life, and it’ll evolve as you become wiser, but the framework will remain the same. Once you learn it, you have the power to leverage it whether or not the moon is in a specific phase. You’ll continue to express it differently throughout your life as long as you choose to.

If you consider it, the results we get from many other systems are based on us answering the question about who we think we are at the moment. With Human Design, it’s all about your own makeup and includes the unconscious elements you may not be acknowledging.

Human Design doesn’t just help you with decisions about your love life or your career path. As Jones puts it, “It helps all areas of your life because, at the fundamental level, Human Design about how we cultivate opportunities and make decisions. It’s how we overcome shadows that take us off track.”

Understanding your design means getting a glimpse at how you’re hardwired. Once you have a look at this, you can access how to best use your natural energy to make decisions that do or don’t speak to you. It’s like receiving an internal compass to guide you in the direction that most resonates with you and permits you to create more informed boundaries.

One of the most significant benefits I observed in Human Design is that it gives you tools for how to best communicate with yourself and the world. According to Jones, “It gives people a language to understand how to work with the people around them. The challenges in a romantic relationship or a business relationship are always about communication and understanding that we’re different.”

There are also more specific intricacies you could learn with your blueprint, too. Your Human Design won’t tell you what food to eat, but it could tell you what conditions you’d digest it best in (i.e., eating while the sun is up or down). Your Human Design won’t tell you where to live, but it might inform what environment is best for you (i.e., if you’re designed to live up high that might be around mountains or a higher floor of an apartment building).

When I got my blueprint, it was a lot of information to take in. Just look at the above image. Wild, right? It’s best to have an expert in Human Design take you through it to best understand the intricacies and variations—for me, that was Jones.

When Jones was taking me through the different elements of my design, I quickly noticed that many of the things would’ve never resonated with me three, five, ten years ago. For one, it told me that I was independent, not meant to work in groups, and meant to build and create things. Try telling that to the shy wallflower afraid to walk to class by herself at 16 years old.

When I asked Jones whether some people were in disagreement of their results, she told me, “I expected that to happen more often than it does, but my experience is that it’s only when people are stuck in a way that they’re operating. It’s not designed to be mental; it’s meant to reconnect to our bodies and ourselves.”

You need to be ready for Human Design. While it can be very validating and permits you to act, it also introduces more questions you need to ask of yourself. It’s a lifetime study but so is learning about yourself. You become wiser and stronger by going inward. The deeper you unravel the consciousness and unconsciousness, the more tools you’ll have to make decisions in your everyday life that lead you to live the life you were meant for.

In the end, it’s all about having faith in yourself as you are. As Jones said, “Human Design is a process of real surrender, and you must trust when you enter from that place.” Get your free chart here and enjoy your self-discovery.