Notes on Becoming More Yourself

She replied “ouch” to something I posted.

The offending sentence?

“There comes a point in knowing yourself where self-improvement starts to feel suspiciously like self-rejection.”

I understood the ouch.

After more than 300 Human Design readings, I’ve noticed how often people arrive wanting to understand something about themselves that, underneath the curiosity, they’ve already decided needs fixing.

The sensitivity. The inconsistency. The need for space. The fact they change their mind. The fact they don’t seem to work like everyone else.

They want to know themselves. But sometimes the question they are carrying is closer to: how do I stop being like this?

And that is a very different starting point.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to change. I want to learn things. I want to become better at parts of my work. I want to notice when something I do is making life more difficult for me or the people around me.

But I think it matters whether we are responding to a real difficulty or to an idea of the person we should be.

Take the need for space.

You might notice that a crowded week leaves you with very little room to think. That is useful information. It gives you something practical to work with: your schedule, your commitments, the time you allow yourself between conversations.

Or you might decide that needing space makes you difficult. That other people seem to manage, so you should manage too. Now the same information has become evidence against you.

Before you have investigated what helps, you are already trying to get rid of the need.

It is worth asking where that judgement came from.

Is there a problem you want to solve?

Or have you inherited a standard that you have never stopped to examine?

Understanding gives you more to work with.

One of the things I value about a reading is the opportunity to pause that automatic correction.

What if this isn’t a defect?

That question doesn’t settle everything. It opens a conversation that may have been closed for years.

We can look at when a pattern shows up, what it makes possible, where it creates difficulty and what you have already learned about living with it. We can bring your experience into the room, rather than treating it as something to explain away.

This is where my approach to Human Design begins with your life.

Your history, your interests, the roles you find yourself taking, the things people consistently come to you for. A chart offers a lens through which to explore those patterns. It does not replace your experience, and I don’t want it to become another set of instructions you feel obliged to follow perfectly.

If you leave with a new identity to perform, we have missed something important.

I want recognition to make more choices available to you. Understanding what you are working with can help you decide what to support, what to practise and what genuinely needs to change.

There is an understandable concern here. If we stop treating parts of ourselves as problems, do we simply give ourselves permission to do whatever comes naturally? I don’t think so.

Understanding a pattern doesn’t remove its consequences. Needing time to process a conversation, for example, doesn’t mean the other person’s need for a response disappears. It might mean you learn to say, “I need some time to think about this. Can we come back to it tomorrow?”

You have acknowledged your own needs and made a clear commitment to someone else.

That is a change you can practise. It asks something of you without requiring you to become a person who never needs processing time.

Working with yourself can involve effort, uncomfortable conversations and new habits. The difference is that you are making decisions with more information and less contempt for the person making them.

Awareness gives us choice.

It doesn’t do the choosing for us.

If there is something about yourself you are currently trying to improve, I wonder what would happen if you described it without a verdict attached.

“I’m inconsistent” might become “My interest has changed, and I haven’t worked out what that means for this commitment.”

“I’m too sensitive” might become “That conversation affected me more than I expected.”

Neither description tells you what to do next. But each gives you a more specific place to begin. You can investigate a changed interest. You can reflect on a conversation. It is much harder to work constructively with the conclusion that you are simply wrong.

You may still decide to change your behaviour. You may realise you need support, a clearer boundary or more practice. You may discover that something you have been fighting deserves a place in your life.

The point is to give yourself the chance to find out.

That is the conversation I want to have here, in Notes on Becoming More Yourself. About the distance between knowing things about ourselves and trusting ourselves enough to live with that knowledge. About what becomes possible when our decisions, work, style and expression begin to feel more like our own.

Maybe you don’t need fixing.

Maybe you need understanding.

And maybe you just need a Human Design reading to help you find out.

Jaz x