The Positive Value of the Not Self (Human Design/ BG5)
Feb 19, 2024“Your best bet for success lies in building on who you already are, not trying to become someone you’re not.” ~Ashley Briana Eve
The Positive Value of the Not Self
As a BG5 Business Consultant my job is not helping clients with spiritual awakening. BG5, Ra Uru Hu’s business application of the Human Design System, is in the business of solving problems to increase profit potential.
Ra Uru Hu said: “They're interested in you because they have a problem. They’re interested in you because their business or their concept isn't working the way they want it to. They're willing to invest in what potentially you can tell them. And they're not interested in you telling them about how they can discover themselves. They really aren’t.“
Maybe that's why you are here. You have done the spiritual awakening side of the Human Design system & you are now left wondering "How exactly does this apply to business?".
You are not alone!
The teams, businesses, & public figures I work with come to me asking:
- How can I be a better manager?
- How can I manage in a way in which I am going to increase productivity?
- How can I lead in a way that increases profit?
- How can I lead in a way that improves company culture?
In other words, they aren’t interested in giving language or understanding to the “not self”. They want problems solved.
This differentiation is also important for people to understand when attempting to apply “Human Design”, the spiritual awakening tool, to business. This misunderstanding has created, what I call “Pop Culture” Human Design, which has created phrases such as “Projectors aren’t here to work”, creating deep confusion within Projectors on what that means for creating their own brand or business.
As I often say, you cannot simply overlay Human Design on to business. It doesn't work that way.
When dealing with leadership, teams, and business what is really interesting is that the BG5 approach, as Ra Uru Hu said, “demands that we give equal consideration to the positive value of the not-self”. Now that's quite something to grasp if you come from the Human Design side. The Human Design person is always in the situation where the not-self is something that you really have to avoid and you have to get rid of those problems in your life and you have to get rid of the not self.
This is not the case in business.
My work in helping businesses & teams (the Penta) includes providing guidance to anyone who is going to be in a managerial position about what to expect in terms of how best to deal with given situations, how best to understand the demands of what kind of attention needs to be paid to which employees and why. I help CEO’s & team leads essentially learn how to leverage their employees strengths to increase profit potential, while being aware of their own potential blind spots & wisdom.
In working with entrepreneurs I am also providing practical strategies in extracting the positive value of the not self to help them leverage their strengths, better understand their blind spots, & deal with given situations within business (ie- hiring decisions).
Not once, in business, do I mention the “not self” or getting rid of it. In fact, a lot of my work with those coming from the Human Design side is helping them move away from that identification. In business, it demands that we give equal value to the positive attributes of the not self without trying to “get rid” of it or shame ourselves for experiencing it. That's quite something to grasp if you're a Human Design person.
An Example, a Triple Split in Business
As a triple split myself (this is not my chart) I am profoundly intimate with the impact this split has on business, my not self mind, & decisions I make in business. With the triple split right away we know that the main conditioning force is going to be the centres, which is not the case for every type of configuration, or split. We know that this person is going to be first making mental decisions from the open centres. That is, with their not-self; this is the way they run their life. They decide things with their mind.
What we know about openness from Human Design is that, if we’re looking at these two open centers as an example, the Splenic Center is holding onto things that aren’t good for you as its basic strategy. If you look at the Sacral Center, the Sacral Center is: never knowing when enough is enough. So here is somebody that can hold onto the wrong thing and hold onto it forever because they never know when enough is enough. This is how you start to see the centres play off each other within a larger context, rather than looking at each one individually.
Ra Uru Hu says: “From a Human Design perspective, here is somebody that decides that it's time to find out is going on because they’re rather confused in life and they come for an analysis, that's a different story. But, this is not what we’re being trained for. That’s not what a BG5 consultant is. A BG5 consultant knows that the not-self is very much going to be a dominant force in their client’s life and they're not going to be able to eliminate it.”
And, ultimately, from a business perspective eliminating it is irrelevant to increasing profit potential or improving team dynamics, at the end of the day. What the goal is, in business, is to take what is going to be the not-self area and transform that into a positive for the client.
The Open Centres
What do we know about open centers in Human Design? In Human Design we know that the open center is the area in which all of this conditioning is flowing through. Referencing the example chart, this person is going to have deep conditioning in the sacral & splenic centre.
But let's think about something else. The other side of that is the wisdom. This is something I am continually moving my clients back to who already know Human Design when they come to me for business/ BG5:
Stop worrying about the not self! We need to look at the wisdom for practical application to business!
How useless to tell you to go off & decondition or contemplate for 7 years over a centre. You don’t have time for that in business, although if it is of interest you can do that in conjunction WITH the practical strategy that moves the business forward.
What is my job?
It is not to try and eliminate the not-self, but try to turn it more and more into a potential wisdom simply by being able to impart specific techniques to my clients.
An undefined open center is not really anything that we want to talk about because that automatically leads into a mechanical description.
In business & BG5 we do not discuss the “not self” or lack of definition. As soon as you do that you open the can of worms of mechanics, which is irrelevant to solving their problems & often opens up more questions than solves.
(Being trained at both the IHDS & BG5 I have accidentally let mechanical descriptions slip & let me tell you, it never serves the client in business, often taking time to get everything back on track.)
Referring back to the chart we are working with here one of the things I may mention is that they have a tendency to latch onto things and they aren’t necessarily wise in making that decision. Now, it isn’t about getting rid of this tendency, see? It is about helping someone hold on to things that are correct for them, rather than constantly stabbing in the dark.
Ra Uru Hu said: “But at the same time, you’re healing them in a way. That is, you’re getting them not to give up on what are their not-self tendencies, but you're working on through technique making the not-self tendency something that can be genuinely productive. Remember, they will gain wisdom out of it.”
Now continuing with this example a little bit more to show the evolution past the triple split itself, we know that the authority here is emotional. And you can see right away that this person is “emotionally handicapped”, as Ra Uru Hu would say.
Ra Uru HU: “What I mean by that is, here is somebody whose emotional system is defined unconsciously, which means their personality has no access to it whatsoever”. As you can see in the chart the channel that makes this person an emotional authority is 19-49, an unconscious channel. And not only is it unconscious, but as you can well see, it is really cut off from the rest of the design. This is significant in how this person navigates their decision making (inner authority).
If you're looking at this triple split, there is one bridge here (62nd gate) between the Ajna above and Throat below and this is going to end up being this persons whole story; the facts, the facts, the facts, are the whole story for this person.
This is an ego Manifestor, of course, and it really becomes the ego just pushing its face forward saying “look at me, look at me.”, fixated on facts & never knowing when to let something go. This not self drive is going to take away the possibility of them being able to recognize what they really need to pay attention to, what they really need to hold onto (open spleen).
On top of that, no matter what kind of personality they have there is always an aloofness to them, a separateness to them, and in that there is a sense of coldness in them relative to those people that are working for them. It is hard for the not-self manager ever to let anybody know what's going on, which means that the employees are often in the dark, they're often surprised with directives that suddenly emerge. And, we can laugh about it through relating to the not self behaviour, however it is not an effective way to manage a team or build a business.
Ra Uru Hu says: “We have to be very realistic about what we see. And then objective in what we see. And then we have to deal with the situation. That's the thing that’s so fascinating about BG5. BG5 doesn't say, all right, we’re going to smash you down and we’re going to start you all over again. It doesn't. It takes a little bit off this, and adds a little bit to that; it smoothes out the hard aspects of the shadow to turn the shadow into something productive”.
If you are ready to turn your shit into gold, aka your not self into wisdom, I have a couple ways to work with me right now:
Now available are the BG5 Career Design Overview 1:1 Session & Full BG5 Career Analysis. You can view those at: https://www.ashleybrianaeve.com/services
I also have an offer that is going to blow the roof off the coaching industry. The BG5 Business Bundle is available to register NOW! At $55 a month, and with access to all my old courses (excluding BRAND by Design 101) this is the place to dive deep into getting paid for what you are best at. You can view this offer here: https://www.ashleybrianaeve.com/bg5-business-membership
I look forward to supporting you within your business or team,
Ashley
Elite Human Design Consulting