32. How You're Designed to Make Decisions: Human Design Authority

In this episode, I'm sharing my favourite aspect of Human Design: Authority.

Authority is often described as the way we're designed to make decisions. But over the years, I've come to experience it as so much more than that.

For me, Authority has become a practice of self-trust. A way of reconnecting with the place within us that already knows. The place that isn't trying to figure life out from pressure or fear, but is instead responding to what's true in the present moment.

In this conversation we explore:

• Why so many of us have been conditioned to seek certainty outside of ourselves
• Why our lives are shaped one decision at a time
• Why Authority is, in my experience, the most practical and empowering aspect of Human Design
• How learning to recognize and trust your own inner guidance can fundamentally change the way you move through life

I also share something I've been quietly creating over the past several months: a complete library of Embodied Authority Orientations, designed to help you not only understand your Authority, but begin living it in your everyday life.

Whether you're brand new to Human Design or you've been experimenting for years, I hope this episode invites you into a deeper relationship with your own knowing.

Resources mentioned:
• Explore the Embodied Authority Orientations
Don't know your Authority? Get your free Human Design chart 

Let Me Support You

These are a few places people often begin...

• Some start by discovering their design for the first time → Generate Your Free Human Design Chart 
• Others move directly into living it → Live Your Design
• And some prefer a deeper, personal exploration → Work With Me

Whether you're just getting curious or ready to go all-in – start where you are, and follow what feels most alive.

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/justin-lee/wanderlust. License code: IW32DDNZ8FH40VWO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Designed for More, a podcast about what it means to live in alignment with who you really are. I'm Julie, former CEO Turned Human Design Guide and Soul-led Enpreneur. Here we explore the journey of remembering your true nature and creating a life that feels deeply good from the inside out. Because you were never meant to settle. You were designed for more. Hi everyone, welcome back to Design for More. I am approaching this a little differently today. I'm sitting on a bench in a beautiful nature park near my home. If you can hear splashing, it is my dog Rainbow, our Black Lab. So the Black Lab named Rainbow. Apparently, our children have a sense of irony because they are the ones that named her. And I'm just feeling moved to record this right here, right now. I don't know how the quality will turn out. I also know that it doesn't matter because it's not the quality of the recording, it's the quality of the energy and whether it's alive or not. And I'm feeling that aliveness right now. And what I'm feeling aliveness around is to speak to authority. Now, this is probably or let's just claim it, okay? It is the favorite aspect of mine of human design in my own life, in terms of sharing with other people, and I'm excited to share it with you now. So let me explain why. And let's actually talk to it starting with like my whole premise. One of the things that I believe and feel so deeply is that we, you, I are designed for more. And when I say more, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, if you've heard the first episode, you would know. And if not, let me tell you that I don't mean more as in producing more, creating more, trying harder, doing anything perfectly, any hustle, any effort. We so many times throughout our day are already the hardest ones on ourselves to tell us that we should be doing more, trying harder to figure it out, to secure it, to feel safe, to prove our worth, to belong. And that is not what I'm talking about when I say that we're designed for more. I mean that feeling that you've, I'm sure, had at one point or maybe even now in your life where you're like, is this it? Like this just I feel like there's more, that I'm designed for more peace, I'm designed for more joy, I'm designed for more love, I'm designed for more intimacy, I'm designed for more ecstasy, I'm designed for more pleasure, I'm designed for more satisfaction, I'm designed for more rest. I'm designed to chill more, I'm designed to read more, I'm designed to feel more alive, I'm designed to feel more on purpose, I'm designed to feel more like myself, even if I don't know what that means or is. I just feel like there's something more and I can feel and taste and sense it, and I just even if I don't know how to put words on it, and the thing that I see blocking that more time and time and time again in my own life and in the lives of the people that I work with is trust, trusting yourself, trusting the universe, trusting that desire, trusting your inner GPS, trusting your intuition, trusting your guidance system, trusting your yes, trusting your no, trusting. And the tool that I have found in my life that really deepened and really I want to say activated and was like the sacral yes for human design for me was authority because it is a tool, a an offering to bring awareness to the fact that we all carry an inner authority in our body, and when we can trust it, when we are aware of it, when we can embody it and sense it and know what it feels like, and then go the step further and trust that knowing, this is where we move into more, whatever that more is for you, inner authority, knowing it, embodying it, sensing it, trusting it is the tool that I have found is the most radical, the most rebellious, the most empowering tool that I have ever said yes to, that has ever come into my awareness, that has changed the game in my life. I mean, when you think about it, our whole lives we are conditioned to seek outside of ourselves for knowing. From an early age, we seek it from our parents telling us what we want to sign up for, uh, you know, what we're doing today. Yes, you want to go to that party, yes, you want to get a hug from your auntie, you know, whatever it is. And so we begin to uh override our knowing, even if we're not even conscious of it, and then we're told to seek it from teachers and the school system and rhythms outside of ourselves, and then in authority, and then in experts, and so on and so on, when all along we've had an inner guidance systems in our body speaking to us the whole time, but whoever teaches us that that exists, whoever teaches us how it feels, how to trust it, how to move with it, how to honor it. And more than that, we're taught to trust our mind. We make decisions from our mind, we try to figure things out, and our mind is a beautiful tool. It is the thing that can help us to communicate, it can help us think creatively, it can help us to see patterns, it can do so many beautiful things, but it is not the source of our wisdom, it is not the source of our inner knowing. And we get trapped in the mind. We feel pressure. The mind is a pressure center, so we can feel so much pressure to answer open-ended questions, to close the loops, to just take any decision to relieve that pressure. And decisions that are made from our mind are by nature so narrow because we can only pull from what we've experienced, we can only pull from what we can see, we can only pull from the future that we can predict. Whereas in our body, we are listening to the present moment, we are saying yes or no, or making decisions, or pulling away from, moving closer to whatever is alive now, especially when it's scary, and this is where big magic happens. Because our life is made up of decisions every single day. We are being asked to make decisions what to eat, what to put in our body, when to move our body, what to say yes to, what to say no to, what to leave, what to devote ourselves into, what to create, when not to create, when to rest, what rest looks like, decision after decision after decision. And so when we can connect with the source of our knowing, our inner GPS, our wisdom from within, and take the decisions from that place, it is again the most radical, empowering, expansive process that I have ever been on. It makes decisions so much more easeful. Not to say that it's always easy, especially if one of your authorities involves, for example, taking time to make decisions, which goes against so many cultural norms, which asks you to again trust not only yourselves but others to support you in taking that time or trusting the data that you receive when they're not giving you time and knowing that that is information too, and doing something with that information. But so many people come to human design, they come to sessions with me seeking support on making a decision when in fact they know the decision that their body is telling them to make. The question is whether or not they're going to trust it, or they're seeking validation, they're seeking someone from outside of themselves to tell them what the decision should be, that it's okay, when in fact it's all happening in you and through you. Which brings me to the next level of love that I'd like to share with you, which is that authority for me has been one of the most sacred spiritual practices of my life, actually. Because when I'm working with my inner authority to take decisions, I automatically feel on purpose. I no longer search for purpose through my job, through a title, through my work, through identifications, labels like being a mom, being a wife, being a leader. I am on purpose every single time that I follow my own communication with that that I connect to, that which I know is wanting to flow through me, wanting to animate me. Maybe for you you call that source, maybe you call it God, maybe you call it creation, maybe you call it nature, maybe you call it your soul, maybe you call it your higher self. Whatever that is for you, that's speaking to you, that's speaking through you, through your inner authority, through your body, giving you the guidance, honoring your free will that you can choose whatever you would like to choose. And there's always a thread back home. There's always a thread back to alignment, there's always a thread back to yourself, there's always a thread back to the path of least resistance, the path of your highest good, and that thread is listening for, feeling for, embodying and trusting your inner authority. It's always speaking to you, it's always available, it always wants to bring you back home, it always wants to bring you back into your heart, back into your sacral, back into whatever center it is, whatever authority that's uniquely belonging to you. There are seven, by the way, I'll get into that later, that is bringing you back to the highest good, that is bringing you back to how love would love to flow through you, to how sacral energy would like to move and regenerate in this world through you, to what wants to be reflected in this world, to what perception feels like truth to you, to your voice reverberating the truth back to you in your body, so that you might feel on purpose, alive, aligned, right more of the time, maybe even all of the time. And in that process, which kind of for me feels like a co-creation, it feels like I'm listening for the whisper, I'm listening for the divine that's speaking through my body. Where else? We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and that spirit, that nature, that divinity, that essence is speaking to us through our physical vessel, through our body, it's always speaking to you, right? So the question isn't is my body speaking to me? It's am I taking the time to listen to it? Do I know what it feels like? Am I embodying that and am I trusting that? Am I honoring that in the micro moments? Because the micro moments matter. The small moments, the small things that we say yes and no to, what we eat, what invitations we say yes and no to, how and when we move our bodies, how and when we create, how and when we rest, how and when we play, all of these things, all of these small moments are what help us to gain trust for the bigger moments when we say, Hey body, hey authority. I'm listening and I am trusting in this small moment again and again and again, and layered and layered upon one another, and we build safety in our body, we build trust in our body, we begin to rewrite patterns, we begin to build capacity to trust decision making outside of the mind, decision making within ourselves instead of outside of ourselves, so that when the bigger moments happen, when we need to make bigger decisions that maybe involve resources, whether that's a bigger amount of time or effort or aliveness or money or uh involve other people, then we can trust that because we've been trusting it in all of the moments that matter throughout our days and our weeks and our months and our years. And this is when our life can truly begin to unveil itself and all of its synchronicity and all of its beauty and all of its potential and all of its juiciness and all of its aliveness because we're not deciding from pressure, we're not deciding from what is a conditioned version of safety, we're not deciding from patterns and conditioning that we absorbed in childhood or at other parts in our life, we're deciding from our true nature, from the knowing that we were all given, the GPS that we were all given at birth, that is speaking to us through our bodies at all times, and that is in human design what we call authority. It is the most practical part of human design, in my opinion, and again, why I initially fell in love with human design, and that deepened over time into this more spiritual nature, into this experimentation that began to really, really deepen with the system, with myself, with nature fundamentally. But the thing that really hooked me at the beginning was its practicality because I'm a Gemini, I love to absorb all kinds of systems, all kinds of wisdoms. I go down many rabbit holes, and where I tend to feel resistance or tend to not go deeper into something is when I just is that it's not practical when I can't use it in my actual life, like on a Tuesday afternoon, in order to support the experience of my life, and authority and human design is so unbelievably radically practical because it is supporting you to take decisions, to take decisions that you can feel that you can like really anchor in your body where you don't no longer need to search outside of yourself, you no longer need to keep spinning and spiraling and wondering and questioning where the clarity is going to come. You always have access to it, you can feel it, you know how to support yourself through it, you know what the process feels like, what it looks like, what a yes feels like, what a no feels like, whether or not you need time, whether or not environments matter to you, whether or not you need to speak it aloud, for example. It is so incredibly practical. So that decision making is one huge thing that you have to worry about less, and not only like that that you worry about it less, but you actually begin to enjoy because it feels so good, it feels so sometimes you know we don't have clarity, we don't know all the steps, we don't know all the plan, but we can feel certain. Most times life is asking us simply to feel certain, not to have clarity. Like I am certain this is a yes, I am certain this is a no, I'm certain I need to move over here, I'm certain I need to call that person, I'm certain I need to explore this thing, and I don't have clarity on the why, I don't have clarity on the how. I don't have clarity in all of the steps, I don't have clarity on how long this is gonna take. I don't know for sure that this is gonna quote unquote work, but I'm certain that this is the next move. And this is what it can feel like when we're sourcing it from ourselves through the divinity, through the nature, through the creation, through the love that is moving through us and supporting us and always guiding us on the path of our highest good without telling us the whole path, because that is not why we're here, but trusting the information that we have in the moment or that are built up over the moments. And so, authority is one of the things that I'm most passionate about spreading awareness on, about actually even more than that, because what I see again, time and time and time again, is actually any aspect of human design or any aspect of getting to know yourself better. Like for me, yes, it starts with know thyself. This is so powerful and so fundamental. But what I see is that if we stop at knowing ourselves and we don't actually experiment and practice and do the work, which just simply means participate in trusting ourselves, then knowing ourselves is not much help. It actually might be more detrimental because then we know what's correct for us. We know, we recognize how we move through the world, how our energy works and doesn't work, and what feels good and doesn't feel good. But if we don't trust that, well then there's only longing and aching, and we can feel the dissonance, the distortion, even more so. And so I am so passionate about bringing awareness to which of the seven authorities exist with you, how to feel them, to how that actually feels like in your body, what the process of decision making looks like and feels like for you, how to support yourself through that in all kinds of different scenarios, and how to experiment with it, how to have integration tools so that you can experiment with it, you can participate in it in your real life, and then over time, really through the micro moments, through a little bit more today than you did yesterday, actually begin to trust it, which is to say to trust yourself, to trust your intuition, to trust your emotions, to trust your voice, to trust your perception, to trust that which is flowing through you, is animating you, is guiding you, wants the best for you, loving you, is never left your side, is always there, always available, always accessible. And so for the past um probably six months or so, I have been developing a library of authorities. So embodied orientations, similar to the orientations that I've made for each of the energy types, but for each of the authorities, they are full of transmissions. Really, I say transmissions because it was coming through me hot, it was coming through me alive. Um, videos to help bring that awareness to what your unique authority is, what it feels like, what it looks like, how to support you in it, how it works from the energetic mechanics so that the mind can get on board. So this just isn't woo-woo, you know, if that's not your thing, but really taking you through the energetic mechanics so that you can recognize it, so that you can remember it, so that you can resonate with it, or not. By the way, the thing I love about human design is that it is not designed to be another place to outsource your authority. Human design is called an experiment for a reason. It's so that you can participate in it. You can try it on. You can experiment with it and feel how your body responds. Feel whether it feels like resonance or a remembering or a coming home to yourself. Feel whether it's supportive or not. And then decide whether to continue with it or not. It is not meant to be a place that you outsource anything to me or to human design or to a concept or to these orientations. It is meant to bring you home back within yourself, back into your body. And I've developed these orientations to take you through well, what is authority? What do I mean by this? What is your authority? How does that show up for you? How does that feel for you? How do you work with that in your actual, like everyday practical life? There are lots of guided meditations and practices so that you can bring that into the body, so that you can feel what a sacral yes or no or not yet feels like, so that you can feel what it feels like when you speak into your clarity. You can feel what different environments feel like, how your perception and perspective evolves over time. All of this depending on what authority you have and everything and anything that poured through me, so that you have as much support as possible to trust yourself and to move through life from that place, that relationship between you and you, or like you and source, you and love, you in divinity, you in creation, you and your soul, you and what your soul chose to come here and experience and to create and the conditions from which your being thrives. I want that for you. I want that for you, like with all of my being. That is why I believe, like, I believe that we're all designed for more. And I know and believe with my entire being that this work that I've created, this library of resources, of your authority, is something that absolutely will support you in your decision-making process, in your trust of yourself and your intuition and your wisdom and your guidance system, and therefore fundamentally shift how you move through the world and what is available to you in this lifetime. So if anything resonated here, I really, really encourage you to not just let it sit at like head nodding and mm-hmm. And I love, you know, getting emails and notes telling me that podcast episodes resonate with you. That's amazing. But what I'm always wondering is, did you do something about it? Are you accessing the tools that are here to help you actually embody this, integrate it, practice it, trust it, move from that place so that you can have the experiences that you're here to experience with less pressure, with less exhaustion, with less burnout, with more recognition, with more peace, with more satisfaction, with more success, with more surprise, with more feeling of alignment, with more feeling like you're on purpose, with more empowerment, with more certainty, which doesn't require anything except returning back to yourself, back to your body, and trusting it just a little bit more today than you did yesterday. So I'm linking the embodied orientation for each of the seven authorities. That's sacral authority, emotional authority, lunar authority, mental authority, self-projected authority, ego authority, and splenic authority. There's a full embodied orientation for each one, and they are there's a full embodied orientation for each one. Videos, guided practices, and meditations, reflection prompts, integration tools, worksheets, and it's only 30 US or about $45 Canadian. I want everyone to be able to say yes to this information, to this opportunity, to this space, to this integrative container to come into alignment with your authority, to move through the world with trust in yourself and within your knowing and in your life and in life itself. So please, if anything resonated here, if you struggle to take decisions, if you're finding yourself consistently seeking outside of yourself, if you're looking for a kind of certainty that never really seems to come, or if sometimes you you can feel your intuition, you can feel your guidance system, but you consistently override it, then please check out these orientations and feel what that yes and no feels like. If it feels like a no for you, amazing. That is part of actually doing the work, and that's what I'm here for. But if it feels like a yes for you, then go for it because your life will reorganize itself around your yeses and no's, which is why they are important. They are the most sacred practice that we have, and it is why authority can absolutely change how your life is organized, how you experience it, how you're supported by it. So I hope that this resonates. I hope that this supports you. I can't wait to hear from you. I can't wait to see all of you digging in and experimenting and trusting yourselves and hear what opens for you as you do that. So I'm going to be, I mean, if it's still alive right now, it's feeling alive to create more episodes across each of the seven authorities. So I know I didn't go into much of a deep teaching here. You might be new to human design and have still kind of a only vaguely familiar idea about what authority even is, what these seven ones that I'm naming are. And that's okay. Like it doesn't need to unfold all at once. Just feel how this is feeling in your body. Whether there's any kind of tingling or curiosity or openness or expansion or like any energy that's opening up to go check them out, then please do that and more to come. Okay, sending you all so much love. I hope that you're enjoying summer and the sun and this renewed energy and possibility, and that you're also taking time for some yin in the midst of all of this yang energy. Bye for now. Thanks for listening to Designed for More. If you felt sparked or seen in today's episode, I'd love for you to leave a review, share it with a friend, or come find me on Instagram at Julie by Design. And remember, your clarity is sacred and your joy is a signal. You are designed for more.