Why I walked away from $75K.

Because my Sacral told me to.

It's decisions like these that keep people from exploring their Human Design because they're terrified of the consequences of shifting their decision-making from their mind to their body.

I get it. When I first met my Human Design I invested an entire summer just listening to my Sacral and doing it's bidding on low stakes decisions, like what household or gardening projects to do on a given day. Listening to the decision-making apparatus of my higher intelligence is not easy for someone who has made a living their entire life using the logical thought processes of the mind.

My first job out of college was at Oracle where I excelled at business process re-engineering, which got me into business school. After business school in the early 1990's I became a solopreneur, supporting large software companies like Sybase and PeopleSoft to certify their software development processes to the ISO9000 standard. For the last 17 years I've been a strategist and storyteller for business leaders, educators, and philanthropists.

Logic has not only helped me succeed in the business world, it also helped me navigate a childhood that was chaotic and unpredictable. Logic was my coping mechanism — it allowed me to identify patterns in human behavior and anticipate outcomes based on cognitive dissonance between what people said and what they did. Logic allowed me to prepare for and preempt decisions that could hurt me. Logic allowed me to thrive in spite of the persistent confusion and loss.

Logic is also a prominent feature in my Human Design:

[Download your free Human Design chart here.]

I once heard it said that "a weakness is an overused or misapplied strength," and this was the case of my Channel of Logic (which we call "The Strategist").

For more than five decades, logic was my crutch and my companion. It was my most extraordinary strength, but it also became my weakness. It's what all our childhood defense mechanisms become — the habits and behaviors we pick up as children to create safety in our tribe becomes a glaring disservice and disadvantage to us as adults if we never recalibrate. While nobody can connect the dots or track a strategic throughline like I can — I mean, I am really, really good at building bulletproof strategies and positioning — I was awful at making decisions in other ways:

• At Oracle I said 'yes' to taking on massive responsibility in my early 20's "for the experience" without demanding matching pay — because I did not want to appear "greedy" at a time of Oracle's cash crisis. (I went from being a solo contributor to managing 42 people overnight, without a salary adjustment.)

• As a solopreneur in my late 20's, I enabled a contractor who went against our signed agreement to poach the client whose project they were assigned to — because I wanted to appear "agreeable" with the client.

• As a dot.com entrepreneur in my early 30's, I did not stand up for myself or my business when my original co-founder failed to recognize the disruptive merits of our business strategy vs. all others in the pet category and joined the competitors instead because they were socially prominent and had better VC contacts than I did — because I wanted to be "above the fray."

These decisions in my late twenties and early thirties broke me, emotionally and financially. I was so confused. I had this amazing mind and this amazing drive, and yet it kept feeling like I had one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. For the life of me, I could not get out of my own way — and I lived like this for decades.

Until I met my Human Design.

I have a lot of definition in my design, and people who have a lot of definition may feel a lot of inner conflict because they have energies that may actually be in opposition — until they learn how to operate them together in harmony.

There are so many conflicting energies in my design — I thrive on being alone, yet I am driven to make a meaningful impact on humanity. I am driven to "rise up" socio-economically, but it can't be through efforts that are purely self-serving, it must also be in service of the greater good. I have an exquisite grasp of systems-thinking, yet I crave artistic expression. Understanding the underlying nature of these energies and working with them to create energetic harmony in how I show up and what I do has been nothing short of transformative.

Because for all the competence and capability in my chart, there were two things in my energetic blueprint that kept undermining me: an open Heart (ego) and an undefined Solar Plexus (nervous system).

Together, these areas of my design kept me locked in patterns of low self-worth and people pleasing, which meant I routinely went to great lengths to give others what they wanted or needed — to my own detriment — because I didn't want to disappoint the other. I was unable to break free of these patterns because I did not know about things like "conditioning."

We have all been conditioned all our lives by thought forms from the outside: what others think, what we should want, how we should look, who we should love, how we should live, what we should do for a living, who we should become as an individual.

It's a giant burden that strips us of our sovereignty, our individuality, and our true self. Instead of keeping our energy pure and in service of who we uniquely are, we pile on layer after layer of people pleasing or proving ourselves or trying to be noticed for any of a variety of reasons that move us further and further away from our pure, unadulterated essence.

Instead of living lives of radiance and magnetism (which we are all designed to do) we become these dull, bitter, resentful shells, dragging our heels through life and wasting away our true potential. We live, as another loner who loved his solitude and words even more than I do said:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

— Henry David Thoreau

In other words, it's our inner intelligence — our innate wisdom — that has the answers for us, and only us.

The beauty of Human Design is that it is a marvelous gift for the mind — a mind that serves our ego and conditioning and does not want to relinquish its power or control. It's a bit of a Trojan horse to get the mind on board with its own demotion and demise. The Human Design blueprint is a "soft landing" to begin contemplating a life lived in energetic alignment with who you uniquely are.

Your life is no accident. And it's definitely not meant to be lived on auto-pilot.

You are a creator in every moment.

You are creating the next moment right now — and the moment after that and the moment after that. Energetically, if you're living in "meh," that's also what you're creating. A "good enough" life is not truly living. And the path from "good enough" to bliss begins with knowing the energetic blueprint of your design — what is your unique potential and how to work with your energies to magnify the true you and recalibrate the energetic frequencies that aren't you. Your design is built around the energetics of your birth, so it cannot be hijacked by your mind in the way personality tests allow it to.

It's this knowledge and practice that allowed me to walk away from $75K at the end of last year. I did it without hesitation and without remorse and without knowing when the next $75K would land. I did this because at the 11th hour of contract signing, a request was made to change the terms.

My first thought was "no big deal, it's fine, we can recalibrate and clear the air once we start working together."

But I know my Human Design and I know my energetics and I know my former conditioning and I know my patterns and I know my energetic "authority" is my higher intelligence and beyond logic — it operates at a level I can't touch or prove or rationalize except through the evidence of previous decisions I've made with and without it, and then compare the outcomes.

Those three decisions I made in my late 20's and early 30's that blew my life up, destroyed my sense of self and self-respect, and made me deeply suspicious of the integrity and motives of other people for years afterwards — I made those decisions with my mind. I made those decisions with the conditioning of my open and undefined energy centers.

So as the day wore on and I sat in the energy of one potential future, that of following through and signing the agreement to close the year with a bit of a bang, I was getting more and more agitated. I am a Manifesting Generator and these are the feelings of being out of alignment. My frustration is growing. I feel it in my belly and it starts spreading to the rest of my body and everything feels heavy.

So I begin to consider other possibilities.

I begin to remember the devastating impact of decisions I've made before that looked great on the surface yet required weeks, months, or years to recover from. I respond to the request saying I cannot make this last adjustment, realizing the client might walk away, but this is the necessary risk I must take because this decision is in alignment with my energy. It resonates.

When I received an email response a few hours later detailing the many "misunderstandings" during our negotiations, and that I shouldn't be making a big deal about this last change (a change that would have had a measurable impact on my profitability), it was all the clarity I needed to pull the plug entirely.

My frustration had reached its pinnacle and I could gently and lovingly release this opportunity. It was not correct for me. I don't need to know why and I don't need to question my decision because the second I sent my reply, the weight of the world lifted. The sun came out, I was back in my bliss. I was energized.

If you are a Generator or Manifesting Generator with Sacral Authority, this is how your decision-making works. Your Sacral is signaling one thing and one thing only: whether or not you have energy for this — this person, this project, this opportunity, this social event, this deal. Because when you have energy for this, it means it's "correct" for you and the rest of your design.

When you're physically pulled toward something, your Sacral is saying 'yes.' When you're physically contracting or resisting, it's saying 'no.' When you're feeling nothing, it's saying 'not yet.' Your Authority is sort of like a Magic 8-Ball, only it's a portable internal operating system that you carry with you wherever you go.

Since I've turned toward my inner intelligence for the important decisions in my life, I've learned a lot more about what's packed into that 'yes' and 'no' pulse and vibration about whether or not I have energy for the person, place, situation, or thing. I've come to realize that this energetic pulse toward or away is shorthand for, "that project doesn't pay enough for the difficulty you will encounter," or "these people will be difficult to work with because they're not aligned around what they really want," or "there's another project that's an even better fit waiting for you" — which is exactly what happened.

Four days after walking away from that $75K, another client brought a better opportunity.

This is the power of living in alignment with your Human Design. Important decisions made in alignment with who you uniquely are — decisions made in confidence rather than fear or grasping will ultimately lead you down the path of your highest potential. Decisions made out of alignment will create delays or take you farther away from your true self.

If you've ever suffered the negative consequences of saying 'yes' when you should have said 'no' about a new hire, a new client, a product release, a job offer, a relationship, or any other important decision that can have life-changing consequences, it's worth exploring the energetics of your Human Design.

Your energetics are always operating whether or not you are aware of them. When you're not aware of them, you can make some really shitty decisions that diminish you (like I did) and that set you back, taking valuable time and energy to recover. When you are aware of them, you make decisions that empower you and accelerate your path to achieving your highest potential. Decisions that, one by one, combine to remake your life into your best life ever.

Human Design. Don't leave home without it.™

(That's a joke for those of you who read this far.)

Note: Every Human Design chart is more than the sum of its parts, and every element of a chart affects — and is affected by — every other element. Human Design is a deeply layered, complex system that integrates eastern and western traditions and wisdom. When I share discrete elements of a chart, I am simply sharing glimpses into the mechanics of Human Design (and the Gene Keys) to show others how they, too, can discern practical insights from their own charts into their uniqueness and the patterns of thought, behavior, conditioning, emotions, and psychology that keep them from achieving their highest potential.