How To Handle The Manifestor Pressure To Perform
While many areas of the Manifestor life are frequently touched on in Human Design content, there are some dark corners of the reality of our experience that never seemed to have any light shed on them. While I could write a whole book on this, in this blog post I want to address one area in particular – the Manifestor pressure to perform.
For most of us as Manifestors, we see and hear the same rhetoric over and over while trying to learn more about our energy type.
“You’re here to initiate”
“You’re here to feel peace”
“You’re here to have space and freedom and do whatever you want”
“You have to inform people before you take action”
It is tiring to see these narratives repeated over and over, because it leaves so much unaddressed.
What we don’t hear spoken about often, is the pressure that Manifestors feel to perform and to meet certain standards for our energy type.
What Is The Manifestor Pressure To Perform?
Manifestors experience a pressure (spoken or unspoken) from other people to use our abilities, power and skills in a consistent way. Specifically, we receive pressure from others to consistently use our ability to initiate. Largely, we receive a pressure to use our initiating energy for the advantage of other people.
In my experience, this pressure is more unconscious than conscious. When I look back over my life I can see how this pattern has been playing out. I can see that probably 80% of it has been unintentional – it is simply people responding to my Manifestor energy and being really inspired by that and lit up by that. Or feeling intimidated and threatened by that.
In the other 20% of my experiences, where people have identified my energy and abilities very clearly, they have undertaken great measures to take full advantage of it to initiate for their own good. It is a common experience for Manifestors to have our energy exploited and sacrificed to the point of detriment.
This is a place of wounding. Manifestors experience the trauma, often before we know ourselves that we are initiating or that it is being used in a misaligned way. This is happening in all of our interactions and as we come into the Human Design space and get some language around this, we gain understanding about how much pressure is placed on us to be the initiators; specifically the initiator for other people. Manifestors are commonly expected to initiate for other people and the things that they want, even when they can’t initiate for themselves.
Where Do We Experience This Pressure?
Looking back through my working career, I was often referred to as the person that you want to get on your side. The conversations were framed around, ‘If Holly puts her weight behind this, It’s going to happen. If Holly is involved in this and Holly is pushing this forward, then it’s all going to work. It’s all going to come together.’
As I got older I stopped being only seen as a young girl and I started to notice with a lot more clarity the people who identified my abilities and carefully exploited them. I would be smoothed into promotions or head hunted into taking on extra work, or simply taking on big, extra responsibility.
I shudder with anger when I think back on the number of people that gained significant advantage from using and abusing my ability to initiate for their dreams and for their projects. But I also see that there were a lot of people that did that unintentionally. They weren’t meaning to, they were just responding to my energy.
For a Manifestor who gets taught that they are only valuable for their ability to initiate when we’re doing that for others, the damage and pressure is very real. We are even often taught that if we are initiating for ourselves, then we are selfish or we are crazy.
If you look back at your story you might see people who have benefited from your ability to initiate. You may have used it for your colleagues, your boss, your workplace, your husband, your wife, your children, your extended family, your community or even an organisation.
On a lighter note, recently I have noticed when I have been in a conversation with a customer service representative, I’m ordering something over the phone or booking an appointment, I start seeing a dynamic with the other person when I need their assistance. Often, when the appointment time that I wanted was not available, or perhaps the thing that I ordered got lost in the mail, or perhaps that the color of hoodie that I wanted was gonna be on backorder, I am be speaking with customer service representatives, and they will tell me the problem but not offer me any solutions.
It feels like an energy of dumping that problem at my feet and saying “Well, you know, it’s not going be the way that you want it. It’s going to be broken.” It would be easy to assume this is simply an issue in customer service. It isn’t the way it used to be, is it? Except I kept seeing this response show up in almost all my interactions.
This has everything to do with Manifestor energy. The more potent and unfiltered you allow your Manifestor energy to be, the more unapologetic you become and you let yourself initiate easily, being the catalyst to everything around you. The initiating energy becomes more unconscious.
For those around you, the volume of that initiating energy is being dialed up to 11. People are receiving the energy at a higher decibel and a higher frequency. This creates interactions with people who are unconsciously receiving that Manifestor initiation energy without warning. It isn’t hard to understand that the energetic response is, “Whoa, I don’t know what to do with this. You do it. You solve the problems. You make the things happen”
Once I started to put that together, I decided to play a little game and to start experimenting with this energy. When I met a resistance to take responsibility for a problem, I would ask, “What do you propose is the best solution to move forward?”
I am energetically bouncing the tennis ball straight back into their court. It is a recognition that I am aware they are feeling initiated, and that immediately makes them want to push it all back to me and make me solve the problems, but I will not take on that pressure. I will not perform that role merely to absolve their discomfort.
In so many cases, this response has lit people up. People have come up with amazing solutions and amazing answers. Their energy becomes bouncy. I admit some people find it frustrating, and I can hear them being annoyed. But the vast majority of people really energetically engage in the process.
How To Use The Pressure For Your Good
For Manifestors who are spending their entire lives being surrounded by people who are consciously or unconsciously pressuring them to use their power to initiate, what is the solution? Will bouncing a question back to the other person really be enough?
Perhaps not.
We have the power to commence. We have the power to light the match and start the fuse that makes things happen. As a Manifestor, you have to start claiming back that power for yourself instead of lending it to others. We simply must stop letting other people have this precious energy. This will look different for each person, depending on what environment you are in. Maybe that looks like stopping working for somebody else. Maybe that looks like changing the dynamics or putting boundaries in place with your family. Maybe that looks like stopping being the self-sacrificing mother that is always doing everything for her children. Maybe that looks like stepping out of leadership roles within your communities or within the organizations that you participate in. Maybe that even just looks like not being the person in your workplace that all of your colleagues rely on.
You are not here to use your energy, your abilities or your power as a Manifestor so that everybody else can latch onto your back and get an easier ride. You are not here to be the best in your workplace. You are not here to push your boss forward. You are not here to keep the peace in your family. You are not here to make all the decisions and all of the action for your partner or your children. That is not how your power was designed to be used.
Your power was designed to be used solely and specifically for your Creative Urges. That’s it. Your power is designed to be used solely and specifically for your Creative Urges.
The more we commit to that and give that to ourselves, the more powerful we become. Your ability to initiate gets called home. This allows you to radically change the world and to follow your Creative Urges. Your initiating energy belongs there.
Following your Creative Urges is going to benefit everyone in the way that they actually need, not in the way that they currently see that they can exploit it to benefit them. You are here as a Manifestor to initiate on behalf of the collective, but that does not mean that you are here to give your power away to everybody in the collective to benefit from it while you slowly die.
We all need to be working on this as Manifestors because the collective around us is not going to change that until we change that.
So the question is, where are you sending your power out to where are you that, journal on that, speak out loud on that. Let that integrate and then take initiating for other people?
