Human Design for Career Coaches: The Correction Before You Position Yourself

There is a version of this article you were probably expecting. Get certified, call yourself a Human Design career coach, run charts, tell people what they should do for a living. I am not going to write that one, because the premise underneath it is wrong, and if you build your positioning on it you will end up selling something you cannot actually deliver.

Here is the discrepancy, and I say it out loud to every group of students I teach.

Somebody hears what you do and says, oh, you’re a career coach, okay, tell me what career is right for me. That is not in the materials Ra Uru Hu gave us. We are not going to say, oh, you would make a great this or that. What we do instead is give people their power back in terms of how to make decisions.

That distinction is the whole article. Everything else is what follows from it.

Why naming the job is the wrong deliverable

The instinct to name someone’s calling feels generous. It is what the assessment market has trained everyone to expect, and it is what a client will ask you for directly, because they arrived in pain and they want an answer to take home.

But the mind takes what you hand it and runs. I had a client, a mental advisor with a very open chart, who attached to something I said in passing. An undefined G center means identity and direction are flexible, and those people are extraordinary chameleons. They can fit in. They can be incredible actors. So if you tell somebody hey, you would make a great actor, they take it and run with it and think it is an invitation. It is not.

Same trap in every direction. Somebody with an open splenic function can sense whether another person is healthy or out of balance, and it is tempting to tell them they have the ability to be a healer. I do not like that framing at all. What actually happens to advisors who are undefined there is that they absorb other people’s material, sometimes literally taking on their ill health, because they are designed to penetrate, focus and absorb. Handing them an identity to occupy is conditioning with your name on it, dressed up as a career recommendation.

So no. Here is what you are good at, now go be an actor. That is not your job, unless you happen to be the one hiring them for that job.

It is not fortune telling either

The second misconception rides in behind the first, usually when cycles and transits come up. Your future looks great. That is not what any of this is. When we are doing this work it is an education in their mechanics, in their design.

The tell that you have slipped into fortune cookie mode is that the client is receiving instead of experimenting. That is why the foundation comes first. If a person is not yet experiencing what it is like to be their own authority, they cannot get much value out of whatever you give them next, and they are far more likely to take a cycles analysis as a prediction. Give them their foundation, then go into the rest.

There is also a plain integrity reason for it. Those of us trained deeply in this system are taught to make sure we are giving clients their power back, not telling them what to do, not lording it over them. Ra was clear that this is an experiment and not dogma. The era of believing gurus outside yourself is over, and a practitioner who quietly reinstalls themselves as that guru has missed the point of the material they are selling.

You are not a crutch. Do not become one.

What clients are actually bringing you

None of this means people show up with abstract questions. In the career and business world they are extremely concrete. They are looking to find a job or change jobs. They are trying to figure out what kind of job to look for, where they best fit, where they belong, how they are designed to work. They are feeling stuck. They want to shift their business, or their business is starting to fail. They need guidance on who to hire and who to fire. They are having problems in their current position and want to move companies to move up.

This material genuinely helps you advise on all of it. It does not make the decision for them. That sentence is the honest scope of the service, and it belongs in how you describe your work.

Underneath every one of those problems, the answer converges. Ra used to make the joke that whatever your problem is, the solution is always to live your design. They want a promotion or more money, make decisions you can trust. They want the business to run smoother, make decisions you can trust. They want to hire the right people, make decisions you can trust. They want to become a better leader, manager or owner, make decisions you can trust. The problem lies in the mind making decisions. The solution is always going back to their decision making process.

Which reads like a dodge until you notice it is a harder and more valuable deliverable than a job title, because it keeps working after the session ends.

Where a coaching background is an asset

If you already have a career coaching background, this material can absolutely help you. I mean that as a genuine yes rather than a consolation prize. If you came up through the classic career development world, the sort of thing people learned from What Color Is Your Parachute back in the nineties, you already have the client conversation skills. What this adds is depth, provided you dig into what the strengths and life aspects actually mean in that client’s context rather than reading traits off a list.

The people who struggle are the ones who expect the chart to replace the coaching. It never does. What it gives you is a map of where a particular person gets thrown off track, which shadow tendency is running the show, and how that same tendency turns into something productive when it is worked with instead of fought. Our job is to take the shadow area and transform it into a positive that is genuinely productive for the client. If they are constantly trying to figure out how to attract attention, the wisdom potential is knowing when to attract attention, and where. It is the same coin, turned over.

How to position without overpromising

The last piece is a marketing question, and the answer is not a cleverer promise.

People hire you because of authenticity. If somebody does not resonate with you, there is no way they are going to give you money. Some people see straight through false fronts and false narratives and someone pretending to be what they are not. And they will not invest their time, energy or money in you unless they believe you can help them.

What changed my own practice was deciding to stop hiding my screw ups and to teach from the mistake instead. That has been the greatest gift, because more people related to my humanness. When I name a problem I have faced and come through, the people carrying that same problem are drawn to me, because I can lead by example on how to be empowered despite it. Undefined willpower and the self-worth questions that come with it is one of mine. Here is the problem, here is what I learned, here is what might work for you, try it and see. That is a real offer. It is also more materially successful than polish, because it is real.

So market the problems you solve and the decision making capacity you restore. Do not market a job title you will never actually hand anyone. The correction costs you one line of copy and saves you every client who would have arrived expecting an answer you were never going to give.