Thriving as an Underdog: Using Human Design to Turn Adversity Into an Entrepreneurial Advantage

by Editor
Published: Updated:

By Beth Rush

Every small-business owner dreams of being successful. It’s thrilling to build your career and help others by doing what you love, but not if you experience continual burnout.

Learn how to use human design in business and tackle adversities so they become optimistic entrepreneurial advantages.

What Is Human Design?

human design chart

Human design is a principle that combines psychology, modern science, and astrology to inform people about their potential or true nature. Some may confuse it for resources like the Myers-Briggs test. However, it doesn’t use the same possible faulty criteria to create each person’s results because it combines information from numerous introspective sources.

Human design in business grants a deeper understanding of how your mind and body work together. Learning your energy type will guide you to better decisions that support your well-being. If you’re feeling your best, nothing can get in the way of your entrepreneurial path.

What Are the Four Energy Types of Human Design?

After calculating your human design roadmap, you’ll get one of four energy-type results. Depending on their background and preferences, people may be either one or a combination of these energy types:

● Generator

● Manifesting Generator

● Reflector

● Projector

Understanding what each type means will give you the entrepreneurial advantage you need to succeed. Taking a human design quiz to get your results before learning how to use them in your career is best.

How to Use Human Design as an Entrepreneurial Advantage

Anyone can learn how to use human design to overcome adversity by reading their results and making these potential changes to their daily work life. You’ll minimize stress and optimize your productivity, leading to greater professional success without compromising your health.

1. Adjust Your Workflow

Each human design type uses energy differently. A projector may have a brilliant mind but feel at their best in spurts throughout the workday. A generator has consistent energy when they do something they love.

Consider if your human design result matches your experience with your daily energy levels. You could use the description to your entrepreneurial advantage and accept how your brain instinctively works. 

Picture a competing small business that produces a more extensive product line than your company, even though you’re both sole owners with less than five employees.

Once you know you’re a projector, you can schedule your most energy-intensive tasks according to when you’re most energetic during the day. You’ll foster long-term sustainable productivity expectations while your competitor burns out by working at a speed they can’t maintain.

Retaining more energy or using it more purposefully also means you’ll have more to give back to your business. You won’t feel too tired to do essential things like interact with clients in person or online.

Initiating a conversation might seem like an effort, but it significantly improves customer satisfaction because the consumer feels cared for personally. They may leave a great review or spread word-of-mouth stories about their great experience, resulting in more clientele at your business.

2. Make Better Strategic Decisions

Human design energy types reveal if you rely primarily on your emotion, intuition, logic, or a combination to make decisions. That’s vital when rethinking your decision-making process as an entrepreneur trying to care for a business and your health simultaneously.

Someone who makes choices based on what their gut tells them may only change that habit if they mindfully put their instinct aside. They could listen to their heart before adding data-based research to their final decision to create meaningful change.

The same goes for people who think with logic instead of emotions. Imagine you’re a projector and need to hire a new supervisor for your marketing team. Projectors think logically. You know you need this person to have management experience, great recommendations from previous employers, and at least five years of management experience. That way, they know they’ll thrive in the role.

Someone relying only on logic to make decisions might skip the emotional side of hiring a supervisor. The recruit also must get along with your marketing team, empathize with them, and care about them as individuals to keep the workplace engaging. Asking a recruiter to screen candidates with those qualifiers instead of relying on just yourself to pick applicants could result in the perfect hire.

You’ll use human design to overcome adversity by better understanding how your mind works. When potential challenges are on the horizon, or hardships appear, you’ll know how to wield your strengths and weaknesses to your best entrepreneurial advantage.

3. Cheer Yourself On

Positive reinforcement is one of the best ways to learn anything. When you understand and utilize one of your human design strengths to propel your career forward, congratulate yourself. Recognize your accomplishment.

Understanding and using your strengths more effectively also means identifying when you need to recharge. Cheering yourself on helps you avoid burnout, a physically draining condition experienced by 42% of entrepreneurs in the last month.

Imagine owning a T-shirt printing company. You want it to be successful, so you invest money into your brand. Understandably, someone in this position would pressure themselves to be the best when financial and personal stakes are at risk. You could use human design to overcome adversity in this situation by effectively balancing where you put your energy and when you let yourself recharge.

If you know you’re a generator, you understand your strong energy force and drive to keep moving forward. When pushing yourself through a problematic product launch, you might resist your instincts to continue working. Instead, you pat yourself on the back and rest for the next few days.

Relaxing at home would recharge the energy you used to make the product launch successful. You’d be more likely to avoid burnout, which could ruin how you look at yourself or enjoy your business.

Turn Adversity Into an Entrepreneurial Advantage

Every entrepreneur will face challenges along their professional journey. It’s crucial to advocate for yourself to enjoy every step of the way. Once you take a human design quiz, you’ll have more information to do just that.

You can use human design in business to thrive in your industry and for entrepreneurial advantage no matter what comes your way because you’ll know how to do right by your mental health.


Beth Rush is the travel editor at Body+Mind. She has 5+ years of writing about how to travel with celiac disease, nutritional deficiencies, and/or hormonal disorders. She praises bucket list trips and the digital nomad lifestyle as ways to bolster empathy and life satisfaction. 

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