New Year's Resolutions and Human Design

This is the time of year where we all start making New Year's Resolutions and deciding what we want to change about our lives in 2025.

Much of the time, we start out with these grand plans of how we're going to lose weight, drink less, exercise more, earn more money, etc etc.

But a week or two into January, the motivation is gone and we feel like failures for not being able to keep to them.

It is beneficial to ask ourselves where our resolutions have come from. Is it something we really genuinely want to do and feel ready to do, or is it based on what we think we 'should' do or because someone we admire is doing it?

Human Design can be extremely helpful with New Year's resolutions because it helps us understand how our energy naturally works.

For many years, I would set myself a 30 day January challenge. They varied from year to year, but they were usually health-related in some way.

Sometimes I would stick to the challenge for the whole of January and sometimes I wouldn't be able to. I didn't realise at the time why this happened, but now that I understand my own Human Design chart I can recognise what was different about the challenges I was able to complete.

The difference was whether the decision to set the challenge had come from my mind or from my inner authority*.

*In Human Design the inner authority is our most supportive process for decision making

For example, one challenge was for me to do a minimum of 10 minutes of pilates every day throughout January. This was a challenge I had mentally decided I was going to do - I planned it out, decided exactly what I was going to do, and was relying on my willpower to stick to it for the month.

In Human Design, the ego centre is the body centre for willpower and self-worth. People who have this centre defined have more fixed and consistent access to willpower, and are more able to power through when they have committed to something. People who have this centre undefined have inconsistent willpower. It may be there one day and not there the next, so it is not something they can consistently rely on for their commitments.

I have an undefined ego centre, so on days when I didn't feel like doing pilates I often wasn't able to find the willpower to push myself to do it anyway. And as a result, I was not able to complete this challenge.

For me, making a mental decision to do this challenge did not work because I didn't naturally have the consistent willpower to follow through.

Another challenge I set myself in January 2020 was to complete Veganuary. This was not a mental decision for me. My inner authority is self-projected, which is all about identity and sense of self. One of the ways my authority speaks to me is through a deep inner shift of identity, a feeling of "OK, now is the time to change this thing, this is part of your identity now".

In the run up to that January, I felt this internal shift around veganism, and knew that Veganuary was the right move at the right time. I felt ready for it at a deep level. There was no willpower required because I felt like I was vegan now, that this was my new identity.

And so I successfully completed Veganuary, and then I continued. It's now been 5 years and I'm still vegan. And I know that this success was because this January challenge had come from a deep inner knowing and not from a mental decision. I was working with my natural energy and not against it.

Different people's energy works in different ways. Different people's inner authorities will speak to them in different ways. But for me, understanding how my unique energy works has been such an asset in determining which life changes are right for me and which aren't.

This year I have not set myself a January challenge because I have had no internal nudges from my inner authority, and I'm honouring that. I'm not forcing a challenge on myself from my mind. That could of course change in an instant - who knows, maybe there will be a February or a March challenge if the shift happens!

Would you like to learn about your own Human Design Chart? You can read more and book a 1-1 chart reading with me here.

Happy New Year and I've love to hear about any resolutions you're setting in the comments!

Emily