Trust the Process of Personal Development

“The human design system is not a quick fix. It’s a process.”

Welcome to Palm Tree Talks. I invite you to join me as I dive into the personal development system called human design. Let’s talk about travel, business, mindset, self love. How to translate the insights of the human design system into your travel and work life.

The human design system. It’s not a quick fix, actually it might be the exact opposite of that. It is the long game, right? It’s a process. It’s really important to trust that process because it’s so easy in this information day and age to just jump on your laptop or your phone, type into Google a question that you have and you get an immediate response and that satisfies our questions, right?

But with human design, it’s a lot about contemplation and it’s a lot about an awareness process in a way. So, you might find some information, but that information might not resonate with you. Maybe you’re not ready for that information to resonate with you. Because you’re just not there yet in your process.

And that’s, I think, one of the most interesting ways of looking at the human design system because it’s not a quick fix, it is a process. And to trust that process takes bravery. It takes courage to trust something that you don’t know. And nobody has any answers for you. There’s no one on this planet that will feel the way that you feel.

That experience life the way you do because you have a very specific lens at the world that you’re living in and the environment that you’re living in. But it’s definitely a process for sure. So on the one hand, it’s a process of awareness. So you become more aware of who you are, what are your core qualities are, how your perspective and your motivation and how your role plays a significant part in your life.

It also makes you aware of what your specific energy is and how you relate to other people. How you attract other people, what happens in a room when you step into that room, you’re affecting everybody else in a very subconscious way, with your emotions, or with your openness, or with all the defined centers that you bring to the table, basically your spark, your energy.

So that awareness process is really, really fun. But it takes time. It takes time and it also takes kind of like a patience to it. There needs to be room for experimentation, right? I mean, if you’re working really busy, you’re a nine to five and you’re in over your head, you’re stressed every day. And there’s a lot of frustration in your life or a lot of anger or bitterness, and you don’t really have any time for yourself.

Maybe you’re in a very busy job or you’re in a very busy situation. Always taking care of everybody else and not really having a lot of time for self care or to have a few days to just be yourself and don’t do anything else for other people, then there might not really be room to implement and experiment with human design.

And that’s why I really love to work with travelers and people who travel full time, like digital nomads and location independent entrepreneurs. Because even though they can have very busy lives as well, there is a part of that lifestyle that requires slowing down. The word slow mad is not invented for nothing, right?

I mean, the digital nomads who discovered that fast paced traveling is not for them and started to slow down and became slow mad. That’s a thing, right? I mean, slowing down is definitely one of the biggest things you can do for yourself. Because there needs to be space to create that awareness, and there needs to be space to create the time to get some knowledge about human design, but also the time to experiment with it, because it’s all about experimentation.

I mean, I can give you some clues and your human design chart will give you some clues, but it’s up to you to do something with that, right? And the other part of the process is the process of letting go of the control. Because Ross said, no choice. I’m still struggling with those words, to be honest, like no choice.

Do we have a choice? Do we not have a choice? Is there fate? Is there not fate? Who knows, right? These are very, very complicated topics, and I don’t have the answers to these topics, for sure. But what I do recognize, though, is that it is a process of letting go of the control. The best way to describe that feeling to you is A metaphor actually.

So imagine that you’re holding a beach ball. A beach ball that you just filled with air and that you might use on the beach or playing volleyball with or hanging out within the pool. So you have that ball which is basically filled with air. And you’re holding it with two hands and you’re pushing it on the water.

That takes a lot of strength because that air wants to go up, right? I mean, that ball of air definitely doesn’t want to be underwater. It wants to be free. But yeah, we are trying to control that ball and to keep it on the water. And that’s what we call hard work. And sure you can do it. I mean, that’s what I call the mental game, right?

Mentally we’re trying to control our lives because we’re so afraid and our natural fears are so strong that we try to grasp every little ounce of control that we have and we’re trying to force these. In vents, our environment, we try to control our time, essentially, we are holding on tight to everything that we know, because that is something that we know, and therefore we try to control it.

So we push down that beach ball, right, filled with air, we push it down under the water. What is really interesting is what happens when you let go of the ball. Because As soon as you let go of your hands and you basically lean back and you just release that control, that beach ball soars into the sky because it wants to be free and it found its freedom, right?

There’s a huge burst of energy there and that ball is happily floating above the water. It flies up. And then eventually, after that initial burst of energy, It comes down again, because, hey, gravity, right? So, it lands on the water, and it just drifts on the water, because that is where the current, or the undercurrent of the water is flowing.

So wherever there is a jet stream, in the swimming pool, or if you’re in the sea, I mean, there’s always a current, right? Water is always flowing somewhere, and then we also have the wind. So the wind is also a conditioning force that is blowing us certain directions. And you could use that as a metaphor.

The wind being the transit that just affects us from time to time, and it just breezes as a little bit of a wind. And then it passes, and then another storm comes, and then it passes, and then there’s another gentle wind that comes. So the ball just flows on the water, and that’s basically when your life is flowing, in free flowing state.

And that’s what happened when you let go of all the control and you just let life come to you instead of you trying to force every little bit with hard work and all the mental things that you think that you need to do. As soon as you let that go, and again, it’s a process of letting go, but as soon as you learn to let go of that control and to release those fears and to just…

Let life come to you and flow that’s the best way to describe a deconditioning process Because you will hear a lot of people talk about oh, it’s conditioning. You need to decondition But conditioning is really hard to understand right? Especially when you’re still in that world and all the conditioning If I look back to my conditioning process, it’s interesting because when I was in my human design classes, we were talking about the conditioning process and how the decision making tool is the biggest key to unlock that process.

Because that allows you to make decisions based on the wisdom that’s stored in your body versus what you think that you need to do. But what’s interesting about my own process, my own deconditioning process, is that when I initially thought like, Oh okay, I, I know human design a couple years now, I’m a couple years into my deconditioning process.

And then suddenly the teacher said, maybe you have been deconditioning for a longer time than you think if you ever had a situation where you learned to use your gut feeling and you relied on your gut feeling. And that sentence struck me so hard because every ounce in my body felt like, okay, this really rings true for me.

And when I was driving back home after that lesson, I just suddenly was reminded of the time that I felt completely free. I had the most freedom in my life that I’ve ever experienced. And I also followed my sacral response, basically every day. So what happened and when it happened, it was actually on my World trip.

I was traveling in Australia, I bought a car, and together with a friend we tried to go from Sydney to Melbourne, Adelaide, and then to Perth, and the plan was to go from Perth to Darwin, but we never made it there, at least not with the car, we went by train in the end, but that’s a different story. But the only decisions that I had to make in that time were really do I go left or do I go right here?

Do we want to stop here? Do we don’t want to stop here? Do we want to eat something? Do we don’t want to eat something? And those very basic questions and Sequel response to that, it was all based on, there was no logic to it. It was such a free time because we were sleeping in our car. We did van life work.

Car life, actually. It was a beautiful Ford Falcon, a green car, and still have a lot of good memories on that trip. We spent three months in that car and it was absolute bliss to travel Australia that way. But without me knowing it, having so much freedom, that really changed me. That’s kind of what travel does, right?

We don’t know it when we’re right into it, but then later on, years on, we realize like, wow, the things that I experienced during that trip, that transformed me. So, after a year of having a lot of freedom, and I visited a couple of other countries after Australia, but especially that time where I was living in my car, and the very basic questions of left or right, or do we stop here or not, and that’s it, we didn’t have to do anything else.

That allowed me to listen to my gut response, and that allowed me to be in tune with my body, that allowed me to not experience stress. And then when I came back home after a year of traveling, and I basically went back into the rat race, after a year being out of the rat race, that never really fitted anymore.

The piece of the puzzle that I was trying to get back into a system, but I was already so much changed, like that system didn’t fit for me anymore. And I really had a hard time coming back home because I just didn’t fit in the system anymore. Even though I tried really hard and from having a lot of freedom, I really felt restricted because mentally here I was back into this environment, a very toxic environment, especially on the work fields and all these mental concepts of, okay, but I need to work.

I need to get money. I need to behave. I need to fit in. I need to be good enough, but it just didn’t work anymore, right? I was changed. The pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit anymore, but it took me quite some years to figure that out. So the funny thing is that when I look back at my deconditioning process, and when I was driving back from my human design lesson back home, it clicked, right?

I was just like, wow, I came back to the Netherlands in 2011 after my world trip. So I left in 2010 and I came back in 2011. In 2018, I jumped into this adventure that’s called Digital Nomad Life, or actually Location Independent Life, because I just bought a house before I left the country. And that is a seven year cycle, and we grow in seven year cycles.

So if I look back to what has changed since 2011 versus 2018, I mean, it’s a huge transformation that went on there. And in 2016, I really started to become more and more aware of that I want to do things differently. That’s when I started my journey to create a stress free life, to create more freedom in my life.

After years of trying to basically fit into a system that I couldn’t fit into anymore, the rat race was clearly not for me anymore. It was a good insight to have that it was already a cycle of deconditioning that I went to. So I’m in my second cycle of deconditioning. The more I let go, Life will happen for me.

It doesn’t happen to me. And I just wanted to give you that piece of mind that it’s okay to not rush things. It’s okay to dive into human design knowledge, and that’s all great. Especially if you have a want in your design. I mean, go for it. Deep dive into it. I know, it’s fascinating stuff. But, allow yourself the space and time to embody it, and that requires a process of slowing down.

So, I challenge you, do you create enough space in your week, in your day, in your month, in your year, to slow down? Do you allow? The time for personal development there. Can you make changes in that department? Can you drop things? Can you do less basically? Cause we’re not human doings, right? We’re human beings.

So sometimes being is just enough because that allows you to give some space to work through things, to do some inner work, to let go, literally, basically. Letting go of the control, letting go of fears, and yeah, that is something that I want to leave you with. So I hope you have a good day and see you next time.