Human Design Basics
A No-Fluff Guide to Understanding Your Human Design Profile
Learn how you naturally learn and interact with others
What Is the Human Design Profile?
“Profile in the Human Design System is the costume that we wear. Each one of us fits this costume perfectly in the way we behave and live out our lives. It is a major component in coming to understand how we are designed.” ~Richard Beaumont
As described in the quote above, your invisible costume, designated by your Human Design Profile, gives you clues on how you relate to other people in your life and how you best learn and share your wisdom and experiences.
Since you wear this costume throughout your life, it’s worth spending some time to know how you’ve been wearing it, and how you can look your best in it!
Using Your Profile for Self-Awareness and Personal Growth
There are 12 Profiles, made up of 6 Lines, arranged like a fraction. The first digit shows the conscious part of your Profile, which you would identify more with, and the second digit indicates the unconscious part where you might be more unaware.
For example, in my chart below, you’ll see that my Profile is 4/6, where Line 4 is my conscious line, and Line 6 is my unconscious line.
You can generate your Human Design chart for free and find out what your Profile is at this link.
By learning and reflecting on the two Lines that make up your Profile, you will have a good sense of the ‘costume’ you’ve been wearing, and how you’ve been relating to it all these years.
When you start to feel more comfortable wearing this costume by following your Type and Strategy, you will find yourself feeling a lot more fulfilled and ‘shiny’ wearing your ‘outfit.’
As you feel more in sync with your Profile, you can take a step further to understand more about the actions and motivations of your loved ones through the lens of their Profiles too.
This helped me understand why my eldest son Julius needs more alone time, my middle child Jayden values friendship, and my youngest son Joel seems to be the most charismatic of all! Can you guess what their conscious Lines are? I’ll reveal the answers towards the end of this article :)
Why You Might Not Resonate With Your Profile
You might not recognize how your Profile shows up healthily in your life so far. Why is that so? There are two possible reasons:
- If you don’t resonate with your Profile at all, you might have generated the wrong chart. Double-check the birth data you entered. To get an accurate Profile, your time of birth needs to be at least correct to the hour, and you can check the charts for +/- 1 hour from your birth time to see if the Profile changes if you are unsure of your actual time of both.
- When I first learned about my Profile four years ago, I felt like the total opposite of a healthy 4/6. This misalignment can happen, especially when you have experienced a lot of conditioning in your life by limiting beliefs and traumatic life experiences.
I will share more about my personal growth through the context of my Profile in a later section of this article.
Brief descriptions of the 6 Lines
In this section, I will explain what it’s like to wear the costumes in each of the 6 Lines.
Find out what your Profile is and see if the descriptions of your Lines resonate with you.
Line 1 — Investigator
You are like an investigator who likes to get to the bottom of situations that matter most to you. Specific topics of interest or life experiences or even this deep sense of inadequacy can energize you to build a deep foundation of knowledge to share with others.
You are like a walking ‘Google,’ with in-depth knowledge and wisdom to share with others keen to know and feel reassured in learning from you.
This focus is very internal. It doesn’t matter who is around you. There can be this desire to ‘block-out’ the rest of the world whenever you need to explore more deeply.
Line 2 — Hermit
As a hermit, you need lots of time to be by yourself to restore your energies and feel like yourself again.
When you are most comfortable being by yourself and not feeling self-conscious, you start to feel free to play more, and this ‘playing’ can evolve into some natural talents that look super impressive to others!
Once you start to hide from the crowds, other people notice that you’ve ‘disappeared’ and try to seek you out. This is how you tend to get discovered and get called to enter new relationships.
Affirm that spending more time alone is healthy, which might seem like a lot more time than others.
Line 3 — Martyr
It is so vital for you to adopt this trial-and-error approach to life. What doesn’t work can be valuable or even more valuable than knowing what works.
You are brave and resilient and adopt a fun, playful approach to learning about life. You have a wealth of varied life experiences to share with others.
If you have this Line 3 in the unconscious part of your Profile, you might not feel that you enjoy learning by trial-and-error. It would feel more like weird situations, and people bump into your life unexpectedly, which causes you to reflect on how you might want to shift your conscious approach to life.
Line 4 — Opportunist
You are here to be a stable influence, so it can be challenging to make changes or adapt to new transitions in your life.
Your relationships are so vital to you. You love feeling emotionally close to a few significant loved ones and feel fulfilled when you are of service to one or a few communities.
The health of your various networks is key to your success in life.
Line 5 — Heretic
You are highly charismatic and a bit of a mystery to others! You are an energetic mirror to the people around you. They see the best or worst sides of themselves through you, which has nothing to do with your actual behaviors and actions. The higher purpose of this energetic mirror quality is that you naturally help others heal by seeing the worst or best sides of themselves through you.
They also expect you to solve their problems for them. If you solve their problems, you become their ‘savior’ and generate more success, as they will help boost your reputation. But if you don’t meet their expectations and disappoint them, they will tell everyone about your ‘failures’. This can be painful to experience.
What helps Line 5s is to remind yourself that you can’t control what others think about you. Just keep following your Type and Strategy to follow your own bliss.
Line 6 — Role Model
The Role Model is here to be the role model by being fully authentic and not caring what others think and judge.
But to be a role model, you need to go through these 3 phases in life:
- birth to 28 years old — an experimental phase where you’ve tried out many approaches to life, and mostly ended up with undesirable or even grave consequences, leading to a pretty negative outlook in life. This causes you to start going to Phase 2.
- 28–50 years old — after the disappointments in Phase 1, you go up to the rooftop, shifting from a subjective to a more objective point of view. You observe how others play out their lives from the safety of your rooftop. It feels more tiring to form new relationships and more comfortable to watch more instead of participating proactively. This is the best time for you to study or start a business. You can be in a good state here to give others helpful and objective guidance on how they can improve their lives too.
- 50 years old and beyond— a significant event causes you to jump down from the rooftop to engage with the rest of the world. You are no longer too conscious of how others see and judge you. By fearlessly being who you are, you start to inspire others to be authentic also.
My journey in realigning to 4/6
When I first heard about my Profile 4/6, I consider myself as more of a loner rather than a person with many connections. But as I continue to follow my Type and Strategy as a Sacral Generator and take guided action, I’ve discovered that it’s much easier for me to connect authentically with new friends worldwide through the internet!
Being a Line 6 who’s currently on the ‘rooftop,’ I don’t have a lot of energy to be a passionate friend, but I do take time to support my friends and show my appreciation.
Now, I have begun to make new friends who are fellow solopreneurs, healers, coaches, and even sensitive, empathetic Medium writers! I love recommending them to one another too. This is why I am starting to enjoy conducting heart-centered interviews and sharing them with my networks.
Here’s an article about how I no longer feel like a lonely drop of water in the ocean anymore.
Some case studies for you to dive into
Are you intrigued to find out more about how other people are living out their Profiles?
I’ve got lots of real-life examples for you! Here are some interviews and case studies where I’ve included a mini-analysis of my interviewees’ Human Design charts. Do click on the links to see how their profiles fit into the sacred work that they do.
Profile 1/3
Kellita Maloof (Showgirl Shaman) has a deep foundation of knowledge, wisdom, and various life experiences to share with her awakening showgirl clients what worked for her and what didn’t. She helps them to feel safe and loved through being seen.
Profile 2/4
Lisa Keskin is wearing her costume as well as a ghostwriter! There is a constant need to balance being alone and helping others too. Being a ghostwriter allows her to spend lots of time alone while she writes, and the completed works are a huge blessing to her clients.
Sayaka Ganz (artist), Karen de Souza (embodied movement coach), Maia Thomlinson (artist, poet, and intuitive guide), who I recently interviewed, have this Profile too.
Profile 3/5
Marie-Eve Provencher (Inner Light facilitator) and Lori Halliday (Founder and Executive Director at Horse & Heart Ranch) show their passion for trying out various modalities and career paths to find out what works and what doesn’t like a 3/5.
Profile 5/1
Ursa Swenson (catalyst, mentor, and activator), Cristina Costantino (founder of Love Squared Alcheme), are natural leaders with their Profile 5/1.
In particular, my interview with Andrea Kartika Deierlein shows her journey from letting go of the stresses and massive external expectations in her corporate job, to realigning with herself as a Reiki practitioner and spiritual teacher.
Profile 6/2
Scott Walker (bipolar stability expert) and Suzanne Culberg (weight loss mindset coach) are in their ‘rooftop’ phase in their conscious Line 6, so one of their gifts is in giving others helpful and objective guidance to improve their lives. They need to balance this out with lots of alone time to come home to themselves too.
Closing notes and quiz answers
Have you guessed the right Profiles of my sons? Here are the answers: Julius is a 2/4, Jayden is a 4/6, and Joel is a 5/1!
I hope that this serves as an exciting and straightforward guide to appreciating your Profile, and of your loved ones too.
I’d love to know what you’ve learned more about yourself through your Profile. You can share it with me by leaving a comment here.
If you’d like to know about this fascinating modality and have a quick walk-through of your incredibly complex chart as a beginner, please look at these two articles I wrote.
