What Would You Be Secretly Relieved Not to Do?

Several months ago I became a bit obsessed with understanding Human Design (HD), a neo-typology that has emerged in the last 40 years combining Jewish Kabbalah with the Chinese I Ching and Vedic Astrology. While I do wonder if it was an immaculate conception born of counter culture in the bohemian refuge of 1970s Ibiza (the founder “Ra Uru Hu” lived there during his “revelation”), it has stimulated me into trying to live in a more embodied way. That is, to make decisions with an additional body level awareness rather than exclusively from the mind. Through my explorations, I discovered Jenna Zoe’s podcast “Align” where she shared a fascinating tool for decision making that I wanted to share with you today.

Zoe’s tool is a question that you can use when facing a decision and it’s the title of this post: “What would you be secretly relieved not to do?”. It aims at identifying the deeper knowing within yourself to empower you to make decisions in a coherent way [2]. Uniquely, such decisions are not always a “Type 1” all-or-nothing situation. They may be as basic as: “Should I go to X event or stay home?”, “Do I want meet up with Y?”, “Do I want to continue this course?”. The theory being, an aligned life is a product of aligned decisions — not unlike getting to a given destination requires you to follow the right directions (i.e., no “wrong turns at Albuquerque”). If you’re facing one of these situations, the question Zoe suggests to ask yourself is: “What would I be secretly relieved not to do?” [3] which can trigger turmoil to a large number of people — let’s explore why.

Many human beings resists asserting their authentic wants and desires — we fear upsetting harmony or group dynamics because exile, often historically and to some degree presently, threatens survival. My guess is that a Big 5 assessment of our human collective would reveal a majority skewed higher towards agreeableness given our high sociality. But group or tribe harmony, while useful, is often a natural compression function to authentic and individual choice; to avoid conflicts participants agree to abide by set practices or protocols to remain uniform and aligned [1]. Jung discusses part of this dilemma in his short work “The Undiscovered Self”,

Discussed in “Who Are You When You Stop Becoming”, roles are perimeterisations that create a sense of the known and perceived safety to the mind. It is easier to reason and act on a perceived ordered ensemble than to reason and act on a group of random and opposing members. Said differently, if you want to know which “decision making monkey” you need to influence in a monkey tribe in order to get the bananas you want, you need to know whether the monkey tribe is even structured and agrees on whether or not there is a “decision making monkey” in the tribe at all, otherwise your efforts are for not. The perimeter in versus out group messaging are subtle programs that shape our decisions and therefore lives each day; without awareness to these programs, we risk becoming hostages to them — here Zoe’s question becomes a useful one for a few key reasons.

The question is a clever probe for three reasons: it triggers preference revelation, our emotional information systems and uses negation to get to the heart of our true desires. First, Zoe asks us to introspect in “secret”. Secret, is a useful code word you can use in your daily life. Secret gives us the permission to differentiate our stated versus revealed preferences. In other words, we draw the line between preferences we think we must express in order to remain in harmony with the group, from our preferences revealed in actions (usually representing our “true preferences” [4]).

Second, Zoe uses a wonderful and felt emotion to ground the body: relief. Because we live under the influence of gravity we have a firm intuition for the feeling encumbered and burdened by a weight. When we are handling conflicting desires, i.e., in tribe stated preferences to individual revealed actions, psychologically we feel weight in ourselves. Therefore, relief sparks a body level awareness of an affinity towards a choice. It’s easy to imagine what it would feel like to be “relieved” of the troubles and difficulties than to be “happy” or “aligned”.

Finally, Zoe uses via negativa (“the negative way”), to get resolution into our true desire. Via negativa is theological approach to define something by what it is not instead of what it is. In this case, we are attempting to gain resolution on something that is inherently “unknowable”: ourselves [5]. To understand this, let’s take a side alley adventure to understand why negation can be more elucidating than affirmation.

Negativity bias is a concept supported by research from Kahneman & Tversky (1979) in their studies on loss aversion. The idea is as humans, from an evolutionary bias towards reproduction and survival, we tend to pay greater attention to what will hurt us rather than helps us and avoid loss over potential gain. Neurologically and physiologically, it is suggested by other studies that negative stimuli activates the amygdala (the brain’s fear and threat center) more strongly than positive stimuli activate reward centers. This heightened activation suggests negative experiences could be processed more intensely. Therefore, it can be easier to identify what we do not want to happen rather than what we do want [6]. All in all these properties make it a useful tool to consider, but not without challenges.

It is important to note that, due to our cognitive and fixed mindset biases, in addition to sloth, what we feel we want might keep us from growing in a direction that could ostensibly “benefit” our lives too. In other words, our loss aversion might push us away from growth even if it could benefit us too. For example, if you really want to get a promotion, it might require you to take on more responsibility without reward for a little while, which intrinsically might not trigger “relief” in this decision making process. This is one wrinkle of self-deception I struggle with intrinsic to this question. While there is a nauseating and opened ended discussion we could follow from here in saying, “Well is getting the promotion really what you want or is that just more social conditioning?”, I leave that for a different time as it would require us to more unbounded and metaphysical questions.

All together, however, I still think Zoe’s question is a useful tool that I do find myself using more frequently day-today when conflicted about a given decision. I do think it requires a certain amount of faith or “trust in yourself”, or at the least openness to experimentation, but it can be something helpful to try with low-stakes decisions. In doing so, you might discover more of your true preferences and tap in more to self-trust than you might otherwise have been able to.

Footnotes

[1] It is important to realize that what what one perceives as their authentic choices, may in fact be conditioned. One such example being choosing “not to give a f*ck about X”, which in reality may be a cultural cliche that one abides by causal to the social rewards it yields. Many choices and ideas we have are, in fact not our own.

[2] It is my current general though that all humans are seeking ultimately to live in a state of coherence. Coherence meaning alignment between internal values and philosophies with outward behaviours, situations and circumstances.

[3] If we are being the detailist, technically this is a question best used by “generator” types in HD which are most “aligned” when acting from an existential gut level decision making process when their “authority function” is “Sacral defined”. Importantly, what I like about human design, is that the promoters often encourage you not to “believe” anything but to try it and see if it works.

[4] This is if we accept action as axiomatically “life affirming”, that is to act and experience is a more “affirmative” and “vital” existence than to merely contemplate — to some extent elucidated in Notes from the Underground

[5] I estimate that you can never truly know yourself for reasons described in Who Are You When You Stop Becoming