Habits versus goals from a Human Design perspective - which one is better for Generators and MGs? I've been reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and experimenting with implementing more habits into my life as opposed to focusing on goals - and seeing massive results! But how do we develop habits in alignment with our Human Design? Let's discuss!
Mentioned in this episode:
Order my book, A Modern Guide to Human Design
Find me at www.puregenerators.com
Instagram: @puregenerators
Twitter: @puregenerators
Habits versus goals from a Human Design perspective - which one is better for Generators and MGs? I've been reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and experimenting with implementing more habits into my life as opposed to focusing on goals - and seeing massive results! But how do we develop habits in alignment with our Human Design? Let's discuss!
Mentioned in this episode:
Order my book, A Modern Guide to Human Design
Find me at www.puregenerators.com
Instagram: @puregenerators
Twitter: @puregenerators
On this episode of New Paradigm Human, we'll be talking about habits versus goals from a Human Design perspective.
Hi, everyone, it has actually been a really long time since I recorded the first episode. I think it just needed some time to integrate and marinate. I went on some trips, I had big thing happen so now we're back. over the last few months, the concept of habits has really been in my sphere and if you are a sacral being you know that if something is kind of coming to you over and over and over again and all these different forms, it's probably a sign that it's something you should at least look into or respond to and see if it's something that you have energy for or that should be in your life. I personally have been changing the way that I operate in a lot of areas of my life over the past six months or so, particularly around this concept of goals. I have written about this before in my blog and I will link the post below. But I have had some very miserable experiences in my life by focusing on hitting goals. Which I view is different from desires or things that you want to manifest, which is also something I'm thinking about a lot lately because I'm working on the first batch of the new guide to your personal manifestation process, readings or offerings that I have been revisiting what it is to want to bring something into our lives, make something happen as sacral beings, and how do we go about that in a way that is in alignment with our design, without experiencing that really bad feeling of getting a goal and feeling extremely miserable? This is a story that so many people have told and I really understood it last year. So anyway, that's the backstory.
I feel like I had kind of put a question out into the universe about how do we as sacral beings navigate desires and goals and habits and what's the difference and why do I have this kind of negative connotation to habits is this thing that's meant to box me into life and things like that. So I was introduced to this book Atomic Habits by one of my favourite youtubers, MaiFam. She's really great. She's like 19 and a projector from what I can tell and really mature and aware in a lot of areas of her life, which I personally find very impressive for someone that young, and it really just felt like that book and that concept would not leave me alone. So I got the book. I read about a quarter of it. On a flight. He lays out his general concept of how he thinks about habits and integrates them in that part of the book and I'm still making my way through all the specifics of sort of the four pillars that he breaks it into. I find this book to be so engaging, and I have so many stimulating and exciting moments as I read it. So I'm having to make my way through it kind of slowly. I've been taking a lot of notes, but I really get the gist of what he is trying to say about habits versus goals. And that's the topic that I think is the most exciting for us as generators and MGs. I've mentioned this a few times over the last couple of months on stories and other people have been interested in it so I figured I'd make an episode of this about it.
Again, this book is Atomic Habits by James Clear if I didn't say that, and it really was just chasing me. I kept seeing new places then I was sitting in a cafe in Palm Springs while I was down there for an event. And I look over and this guy is just holding that book. I mean, it's a popular book, but it came out quite a while ago. So it's just in the sphere right now so can't ignore it any longer. And I'm glad I did because this is amazing. The universe just always knows what to bring us. And when we allow ourselves to respond to whatever that is that’s showing up, ahhh magic unfolds. From what I can tell James Clear, who wrote this book, is a projector. I believe Mai is also a projector. So this is definitely a book that appeals to people of all energy types. It would make sense that projectors would be so interested in this because I think that it is a unique way of looking at how we operate that cuts through a lot of the BS out there which is something that projectors are so good at doing. But so much of what he's talking about I could not stop thinking about it in terms of how we live as sacral beings, generators and manifesting generators, and how our lives unfold step by step. I cannot stress this enough. It's something that I've been weaving really heavily throughout these guides to your personal manifestation process. Because I'm just being reminded again and again, how much of our chart particularly some channels that come out of the sacral talk about this. Obviously, most of the channels that come out of the sacral have to do with this particularly the ones that go down to the root and also the ones that go to your identity centre.
They all operate a little bit differently, but they all have this idea of we are here for the journey, even if you're someone who's here to focus on one thing to manifesting one thing at a time to accomplishing one thing. You're still here to then centre back on the journey. And so I'm starting to see this concept of habits as very much a part of that. So let's first talk about how he distinguishes between goals and habits and why he feels like focusing on habits is a much more effective way to accomplish things in your life and make things happen. I don't know about you, but for me personally as a generator with an undefined throat was one unconscious channel so not a lot of direct manifesting ability. This is something I also cover in the guides to your personal manifestation process. I have a hard time trusting that my efforts will always lead to results. Lately, I have been going to the gym three times a week. I have fallen in love with weightlifting and I am seeing pretty dramatic results in my body after three months of doing this consistently. And I'm not gonna lie there was still part of me that kind of felt like oh well I mean, at least I'm enjoying this because I'm not gonna focus on results, i’m not gonna get down. I started to find myself looking at metrics that are not very helpful like weight, or measurements and feeling like Yeah, even though I am doing this because it is joyous for me and energising. I would also like to see some results because we live on the earth plane and yeah, it just for humans, we like to see material results. But finally I saw some photos of how I had been looking when I started doing this in February and I was honestly shocked and seeing that there were those results through building a habit into my life because that i think was my first experiment with this idea of focusing more on habits as opposed to goals. And the fact that I'm actually seeing results is really energising and I think what I've learned through this process is that if you are doing something consistently which consistently does not mean every day you don't have to box yourself in depending on who you are. We're going to look at this concept of consistency a different way. But if there's something that you're doing love enough to bring it into your life over and over again, over a period of time, though the laws of earth will see results that can be in relationships in business and our creative lives in any kind of skill we're trying to improve. Because yes, we are these beautiful sacral beings, these open auras that are here to be and to exist in the present but you know we show up with consistent energy every day. We want to see changes for the energy that we're putting towards something. So anyway, all that is to say that seeing these photos, this difference from this effort that I had put in through creating this habit in my life which really all the habit was was finding something that I really enjoyed and was truly energising to me and making space for it in my life was so satisfying. So I'm really glad that I got a chance to test all of this out and improve my personal relationship with habits, which I think is something that probably a lot of us can relate to.
So here we got James Clear talking about the difference between habits and goals. He lists a few problems that he has with goals from his own experience and what he has seen in life. He could be one three, I don't know his actual birth time, so I'm not sure but it has one three profile vibes for sure. But the first problem he sees with goals is that winners and losers in what he's talking about have the same goals. So he's basically saying that just by having a goal that does not make you successful, or able to obtain what you want it like he uses a lot of athletes as examples, but he's like the goal of winning a gold medal. Every single person who's competing for that has it and I don't really resonate with a lot of this like winners and losers stuff. On the open heart. I don't really feel like I'm in competition with anybody in life, but I see what he's saying. It's like success or being able to manifest that thing or see results really doesn't have to do with your goals. Your goals are kind of really really pale in comparison to what he thinks of as a system of improvement or a habit Basically.
The second problem he says is that achieving a goal is only a momentary change, and I so feel this. So he says imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up. Then you will have a clean room for now. And as a messy person I can agree. I can have a goal to have a cleaner over and over and over again. But if I don't change your habits, I'm sure I will always have a messy room. I'm sorry I am still working on that. Says but if you maintain the same sloppy packrat habits that lead to a messy room in the first place. Soon you'll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. And that's so true. And that's why this idea of motivation is so distorted in our world because I've talked about this many times. A lot of us know this about human design. 70% of us don't have consistent motivation. So motivation alone is not going to help us achieve or manifest the things that we really like. It's really just all a symptom. We have to address the cause it's like he says, so he says achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That's the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change is our systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good you need to solve problems at the system level. fix the inputs and the outputs fix themselves. So true. And if we want to think of this, from a sacral being, sort of human design perspective, for our energy output that we're putting towards something that we should be finding satisfying and joyful, to result in a tangible change in our lives which is something that so many of us struggle with. If you are a generator, Often you can feel like things are going slow, you're plateauing. You're not seeing the results or also that some change you want to make in your life, in your work, In your relationships, in your pleasure, in your enjoyment of life, is just too overwhelming. That was where I was for so long. I'm sitting in this job, I'm looking I'm like, I know I need to work with myself. How do I possibly go from here to there? Or I want to have this type of relationship. But I am struggling in these ways I can see I'm not ready for that. How do I possibly get from here to there to make these changes in my life, that I know I need to make, that are things that I feel energised by, but the thought of like hitting the goal or whatever you want to call it just felt so overwhelming.
For a manifesting generator, It can be like you want to expand in some way you want to make some kind of change in your life. You have some kind of desire, but it might not feel like all of the things that you're doing are kind of like cohesive or adding up to that or you're just not sure how this really nonlinear path you're taking will come together in the end. That's what I hear from manifesting generators a lot. So it's really like okay, similar thing. If we're tuned into what we feel like doing in the moment, it's very easy for the mind to be like yeah, but how is that going to get you to where you're trying to go? And that's just the magical thing about being your sacral being but also the difficult thing as we're deconditioning in our mind is learning to take its place as the observer consciousness and allow our bodies to guide us, is the things that we need to do at the moment that our body feels energised by, in the moment don't always make sense, at least the way our mind views like the destination we want to go to. So then I think sometimes we either let go of the destination completely, which is wrong and it's good to kind of tuck it away but at least for me for a long time I was afraid of having any kind of goal or desire because I felt like it just gave me anxiety. Or we hyper focus on that goal or desire. And then we get just into guiding ourselves mentally and then we take ourselves out of our natural energy flow. And then we're doing things that are draining and then yeah, and then we end up burnt out and drained and not enjoying life.
The next thing he says about goals, is goals are at odds with long term progress. Finally, a goal oriented mindset can create a “yo- yo effect”, many runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line they stop training. The race is no longer there to motivate them. When all of your hard work is focused on that particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it. This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits After accomplishing a goal. The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems or habits is to continue playing the game. True long term thinking is goalless thinking. It's not about any single accomplishment. It's about the cycle of endless refinement and continuously continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress. And yes, I very much agree with this. Often we get sucked into goals that perhaps are actually at odds with how we as sacral beings enjoy using our energy day by day. Often a goal will come with maybe a time constraint or focus on something that isn't actually the most joyous part of the experience. And then when we're using our willpower, which only 30% of us have consistently to drive ourselves to that goal or we're borrowing willpower from the outside world in the form of other people motivating us or being motivated by social pressure or attention like external factors, which it happens to everybody. Then once we hit that goal, it's like where did the joy go, where did the process go and the way he describes that just sounds so generatory, which is interesting. He says it's about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. And while i actually don't think that is necessarily what everyone is after, when we think about how all of us are differentiated human beings, there may be some manifesting generators that aren't interested in that at all. They may be interested in expansion, novelty and excitement and pushing the boundaries. So I think we can kind of rewrite that to be something that really resonates for us. But the more general idea I would say is instead of building a life of daily joy, enjoyment of our energy outlet, feeling energised by the things we do and feeling satisfied, when we do them every day. We don't need to wait until we've hit a goal to feel satisfied. We can feel that way all the time. And what I'm beginning to see is that we get our best results when we're just stacking that satisfaction. I can definitely see myself as someone who has never maintained any kind of consistent exercise routine as an adult and had a lot of blocks and issues around exercise to the point where I feel that my health was really suffering. There was something about thinking about this and alignment more with my human design that has allowed it to actually become something that is creating results in my life. So after every single workout after every single set, basically every time I put on my gym outfits, which I really love and maybe are kind of part of my favourite part because I'm a white kitchens person and it's a scene, the gym is a scene. I just felt satisfied with every part of that process. So of course it's going to be something that I can keep doing and something that can become a habit. I am not a person that has willpower. I can not force myself to do something just because it's healthy especially now I think as we decondition we get worse at forcing ourselves to do things just because we think we should I just cannot execute on a should for the life of me these days, which can be kind of scary because a lot of us in survival mode operate with a lot of shoulds.
So as we decondition what we do, truly has to be satisfying. It truly has to be joyous. It has to be feeding into our desire for expansion and refinement and growth and mastery and all of these things that as generators and manifesting generators are important for us. So now that he's dissected all the reasons that goals are not as powerful as habits. He talks about what he then replaces that with and for him that is a system. So he says if you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you, the problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves, again and again. Not because you don't want to change but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your system. I think this is very interesting. And I feel like we could replace this idea of systems with our signature, as generators and manifesting generators or the way that we operate. So for us our system would almost be like our strategy and authority of waiting to respond and then doing the things that feel energising for us. That is our most base system that's built into our bodies. So that's what I would say we can consider a system because sometimes these concepts like a system feel a little bit abstract. He actually does a really good job in this book of breaking it down and making it very tangible. But of course without this human design knowledge, all of us are going to be operating a little bit differently. So I feel like a lot of these more general concepts that people come up with, and particularly this really, I think, brilliant one by a projector who is really good at seeing through this type of thing and seeing the system. What can make it even more powerful in our lives, is just having this human design knowledge and knowing how to kind of adapt these ideas in ways that we know work for our unique aura. So he goes on to say that for him the system is what allows us to make small gains all the time. Small consistent gains, which does not mean every day, it can mean every meeting, every month, whatever you want it to be. I do not have like a consistent gym thing, where I go everyday this time. Every Tuesday at this time. I don't have that at all. I allow a lot of room for flow and of the moment responsive decisions in my life. And i think most generators and manifesting generators thrive with some flexibility. All of us will need different amounts, some more, some less. But basically he's saying that these small incremental habits are what add up to massive changes and I so agree with that. The reason he calls the book Atomic habits is because he's thinking about the smallest of the small atom, Atom sized habits.
Another really great concept that he introduces in the beginning part of the book is that with the small habits we don't see results right away. I do feel that depending on your design, how much direct manifestation ability that you have in your chart, this is something I also covered in the guides to your personal manifestation. Depending on that you may see progress faster depending on how your design is. Probably if you have an undefined throat you're gonna see a little bit slower. And if you have a defined throat depending on what it's defined to, you'll see it a little bit faster. And this is just I think how we are as humans, we're kind of naturally a bit impatient. So when we start this habit and we don't see results right away, we want to quit but really there's a lot of this that has to add up in order to finally sort of get over this plateau or reach I would think a bit more is like a critical mass or like a tipping point for actually seeing it all start to add up and like I said before, I think for generators that a lot of like consistent actions toward mastery. I think for manifesting generators that can be a lot of expansion into different areas that finally comes together. But the example that he uses is how ice doesn't melt until it hits 32 degrees and above. So you can start at zero and be raising the temperature one degree by one degree by one degree and it looks like nothing's happening. And so it's really easy to be really down and discouraged because nothing's changing. But really, you are making a big change and eventually one day you're finally going to see this big shift. So I also love that analogy too. And particularly when we're taking on making a change in a big area of our life. For a lot of us it has to do with money, a relationship we'd like to bring into our life, something we like to manifest in our creative lives. It's helpful to tell our mind, not to expect necessarily to see that result for quite a while but to still understand that engaging in that habit that is energising, satisfying, life giving and joyous always means that we are on the right path.
The other and probably last very interesting part of this book is that he then moves into talking about habits from the point of view of being identity based. So this is something that is not a new concept for me. This is something that is part of hypnosis, or subliminals. I have personally found subliminals to be incredibly helpful. And that's why Jasmine and I made are set for sacral beings and I'm definitely going to be making more of these in the future for other things. I also have a YouTube video on this. I'll link all that below. But upgrading your identity or basically expanding who you are, in order to step into creating a result in your life. I 100% agree is one of the best ways to actually make a lasting change. But what I think is interesting about this is looking at your human design lens. This identity is more or less going to live in our identity or G centre and so it's gonna operate a little bit differently depending on whether you have that defined or undefined. From what I can tell I'm pretty sure this guy James Clear who wrote this book has an undefined identity centre which would make sense with the way he talks about this. But he's general enough that I think we can all kind of apply it to ourselves which is sort of how these books get away with not having to use a tool like human design again. But what I would say is, it is very true, that going to the absolute root of who we want or need to become in order to create a change or a habit is so helpful. I would say if you have an undefined identity centre, you really can it's like you're stepping into this new expansion of yourself. You're trying on a new identity. You're moving into something that you've responded to out there in the world. You're creating a new self, which may be highly dependent on who you're around, the environment You're in, all of these different factors. And that's great. That's just how you operate. And there's this incredible flexibility in that. So that's probably how it's gonna happen for you, If you have an undefined identity centre which would make sense, where you're like, Oh, I see this thing I feel really like I'm responding to it. And so I'm gonna create this entire new part of myself. And I love that.
For those of us with defined identity centres, I would say it's more like a stripping away. Our identity has been more or less consistent from the time we were born, that's why so many of us with this, you know, they'll ask the question, who are you as a child or people with an undefined identity centre? They're probably not going to resonate so much with that question, because they're like, I don't know who I was. I've always been all these different things. I've always tried all these different things. I've always wanted the freedom to be all these different things. For those of us with a defined identity centre for the most part, we can pinpoint who we were, who we came out of the womb as, what we loved as a child, what has always called to us. For us all those things are going to feel quite consistent. Just now, some things are happening in my life, where I realised wow, I knew that's who I was when I was a child. I knew that's what I love to do. I knew that's what I wanted to do. I did my eighth grade or I wanted to do my eighth grade career project on the type of energy output, but I didn't because I felt embarrassed to claim that. It's so funny. And it's like now just now I'm getting these opportunities to step into that part of myself. So I'm not creating this new identity. It's more like it's a stripping away of the conditioning in order to allow my innate identity, my consistent identity that I was born with, to shine into the outer world. So I think that's an interesting distinction, too, that when we become the person who has this habit, it's either like a creation and an expansion or can also be a stripping away.
So essentially, his premise is that by going at this at the identity level and becoming that person or stripping stuff away to reveal that person is how we're most likely going to have success with integrating a habit into our life. And I do feel this kind of identity work is helpful. I find hypnosis and subliminals to be incredibly helpful for this. Even some journaling prompts around identity can be really helpful for this. But I would say when we think about it from a human design perspective, part of it is just claiming a desire we have in our sacral honouring this desire because if we have this desire to become something, it's because we're going to become that and so claiming that desire sitting with it, allowing ourselves to see how we are becoming that and allowing ourselves to take those steps as guided by our authority is sort of the mechanical aspect to how we actually become that thing.
As defined sacral is our becoming is always going to be tied to our sacral energy so it's going to happen step by step through each decision. And by starting with honouring a desire, the way he sums it up, as he says, it's one thing to say I'm the type of person who wants this it's something very different to say that I'm the type of person who is this. So this is definitely still something I am playing with. I have talked, I just talked about the ways that I have made sort of identity upgrades, which for me as a defined identity person is kind of a stripping away over the last six months and it's been really effective in my life, but I'm sure there are other ways to do this. So yeah, if you find something that works for you, that's what's important. So he says the goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, The goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument, The goal is to become a musician, and I actually think these this is really true. But for us as sacral beings, this always has to stem from an internal response. So like for me becoming a gym goer, it started with a response to seeing YouTube videos of people putting on active wear and going to the gym and then more and more of that started to come into my reality and I felt this strong response of like, well, that looks fun. That looks interesting. I think I could try that. I love the idea of having somewhere to go. I love the idea of having another like white kitchen environment to be part of oh, I guess there's this gym right down the street from my house that I kind of had never really thought about. And then once I saw how much I loved it, that was a really important part, the how energising it was, how much I really responded to the whole experience. So I would say for us sacral beings, Our response to things always has to be the root of this identity change so don't worry about making up an identity for yourself until you find something that you feel like you've really responded to internally.
So he says to start at the identity and work backwards from there as opposed to starting at the want or the goal. And I think this is fine, but I would say for us as sacred beings, we can amend that to say start with the response. See what is the identity that's in alignment with that response, and then allow ourselves to continue doing the things that truly are energising us and bringing us joy and satisfaction daily.
So to summarise, this is just a couple broad strokes of this book. And I highly recommend getting it I think it's a really interesting book. It's easy to read. I'm definitely going to keep reading it and finish the whole thing. But basically I sacral beings focusing on a result and on achieving that result takes us out of our natural energy flow and our way of moving through the world through response so quickly, instead for us honouring a desire and then building habits through what we are feeling energised by and what is manageable for us and satisfying for us on a daily basis is what's actually going to walk us automatically into that result or manifestation. So if you're interested in how this works in your specific chart in your centres, your gates and channels, specific things to your type and your authority. Then check out my guide to your personal manifestation process. It's on pure generators.com And I'll put a link below. But yeah, overall habits, daily satisfaction, daily joy, over goals any day because once we allow those things to be present in our lives consistently, that's how we're going to wake up one day and realise that we truly just walked our way right into the results and achievements and hitting the goals that we wanted. So thank you. I'll talk to you in the next episode and I hope that you are remembering how magical and powerful you are as your unique self and I'll talk to you next time.