If you have a defined Heart Center, you like to be in control of your own life and your resources. That includes what you wear, when and where you work, and which demands on your time you will respond to. You also recognize your own value, although at times you may tend to inflate it.
It is healthy for those with a defined Heart Center to exercise their willpower, to make and keep promises with regularity. With consistent access to their willpower, they have no problem making and keeping their promises or resolutions. It is important that they do what they say they are going to do. Since this is how others develop a level of trust in them, they should only make promises they can and will keep. In this way, they strengthen their natural sense of self-esteem.
They enjoy working, though they prefer to be in a position where they can be their own boss. In this way they can follow their natural internal mechanism which tells them when to work and when it is time to rest. They enjoy successfully delivering the goods, and being willful and competitive comes naturally to them. When they listen carefully to their inner guidance, they will know when their great ego strength can best be brought to bear on a situation, and still maintain a balance between work and rest.
Those with a defined Heart Center should not allow anyone to deny them an honest and clear expression of their ego and will power. Their assertive 'I, me, mine' statements strengthen the heart, whereas suppressing their natural ego energy can be detrimental to their health. They are proving themselves all of the time, which is both important and correct for them, and they will do it naturally as long as they follow their Strategy and Authority. They willingly commit their willpower to provide for the family and the community when it is right for them to do so. Even though they enjoy their work, they like to be appreciated and rewarded for their contribution.
With a defined Heart Center, it is easy to get carried away and come across as too forceful. When not guided by their Strategy and personal Authority, they can place unrealistic expectations on those with an undefined Heart Center to be competitive and willful as well. They can attempt to pump others up, or push them to perform beyond their capacity, which eventually leads to unnecessary pain and misunderstanding. Eventually, these behaviors will meet with resistance, indicating that it is time to step back and regain a healthy inner balance of power.
People with undefined Heart Centers are not designed to be willful and competitive, yet they often feel driven by a need to find the courage to exercise their will. "Why can't I get what they have?" they ask. "Why can't I be as fast or as good as they are? I should be able to compete with them." While they want to exercise willpower, and to make and keep promises, they do not understand that they have no consistent energy to support either one.
We live in a world that sends a constant stream of messages that we should/could/can be better, prettier, richer, faster, and more successful if only we would do this or that. This propaganda puts tremendous pressure on us to make more, do more and be more. People with an undefined Heart Center get trapped in a vicious cycle. If they fail to live up to expectations, or to fulfill their commitments and promises, they make further promises to make up for their sense of elf-deficiency, only to fail again. Each time they fail, they feel worse and their self-esteem spirals down further.
Over-achieving is one way the undefined Heart Center compensates for its seeming lack of will, for a sense that it doesn't have what it takes. When a person undervalues themselves to begin with, they will attempt to accomplish more than anybody else in order to prove how valuable they are. They 'will' themselves into impossible situations, trying to do something they can't possibly complete.
An undefined Heart Center is susceptible to amplification by a defined Heart Center's will power, and can deceive itself into thinking it suddenly has the will to make and keep a commitment. This 'borrowed' willpower evaporates, however, as soon as the person with Heart Center definition leaves. This is frequently the case during motivational workshops, where one supposedly leaves with enough direction and enthusiasm to follow through and accomplish the goal, only to watch the good intentions and the will power fade away when on one's own again.
The challenge for those with an undefined Heart Center is that they generally do not consider themselves worthy and will accept less of everything, including love, money and happiness, because they assume they do not deserve it. If they rely on their minds, rather than Strategy and Authority, they will be proving themselves forever. The more the mind gets into the game of trying to prove value or worthiness, the more one is going to fail, and the cycle of self-deprecation will continue to repeat itself The solution is to relieve the mind of its assumed authority and return the authority to where it belongs.
The mantra for an undefined Heart Center is: never make a promise to yourself or others. The open Heart has NOTHING to prove to anyone, under any circumstance, ever. It is such a gift not to have to prove one's worth. Imagine 63% of all people at peace with themselves, knowing that they will be guided to commitments which are correct for them by their personal Authority, not by a need to appear worthy.
With this realization comes wisdom and awareness. A person without Heart Center definition can take in the vibration of other egos, becoming wise about who has a healthy sense of self-esteem and who does not. They recognize who can or cannot deliver on a commitment. They learn that they do not have to compete with anyone, and they do not let anyone convince them to do or to commit to anything merely to demonstrate their worth.
People with completely open Heart Centers do not naturally have a good, solid grasp of what worthiness is, how to measure it, or what one needs to do to achieve it. When not living within their realm of personal Authority, they are prone to wavering between feeling an exaggerated sense of importance and of having no worth at all. With fragile or inconsistent self-esteem, and a nagging sense of inadequacy, they are particularly vulnerable to being manipulated and controlled by people who promise to convey worthiness on them by association, or by believing this or that propaganda.
When it comes to wisdom about the trustworthiness of one's word, and the use of money and personal power on the material plane, however, these are people to look to. Their wisdom is released by accepting that they have nothing to prove, and that they can rely on their Strategy and Authority to provide for their needs.
The resources in the HDKB were pulled from several places, including The Definitive Book of Human Design by Lynda Bunnel, The Book of Destinies by Chetan Parkyn/Carola Eastwood, and various other source material recordings and PDF transcripts of Ra's lectures. If you find value in this content we suggest supporting the original creators.