How I finally gave myself permission to quit

I’m a millennial, so it has been ingrained in me from a very young age that quitters never win.

It’s important to stay the course. You’ve got to push through and give it all you’ve got. Just do it. Keep going. Don’t give up.

And honestly, that conditioning was valuable. It created a lot of the grit I’ve needed to survive in this world, and for that I am forever grateful. As I’ve shared before in My Subconscious Confirmed I Didn’t Want to Live, I have very much pushed through and forced my way through my life in order to get the results I wanted.

But I’ve also pushed against so many things that actually felt natural to me, because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.

And then I discovered Human Design.

Human Design helped me understand that I’m actually supposed to be this way

Human Design can be such an interesting awareness tool, because it gives you a framework for understanding how you naturally operate. It’s essentially a blueprint you’re born with that can offer insight into how you move through the world, make decisions, interact with other people, and experience yourself.

And if you subscribe to that belief, which I do, it can be fascinating to see how much of yourself is reflected back to you.

For me, one of the biggest realizations was learning that as a Manifesting Generator, specifically a 6/2 Manifesting Generator, I’m actually supposed to have a lot of different interests. I’m supposed to try things. I’m supposed to explore. I’m supposed to fail at things, learn from them, try something else, and really just get out there and live my life.

And especially because of the 6/2 component of my profile, the first thirty years of my life are supposed to involve a lot of that experimentation.

So when you look at my varied resume, varied relationships, varied friendships, varied hobbies, and all of the different businesses and ventures I’ve explored, you could look at that and say, “Wow. Ashley really can’t stick with much, can she?”

But that’s really not the reality. The reality is that I’m a multi-hyphenated, multi-passionate, very dynamic individual.

I’ve known this about myself. I’ve felt it in my core. And I have also held onto so many things with a freaking death grip, because I was conditioned to do so.

I was taught to stick it out.

When staying the course isn’t actually the right thing to do

There is absolutely something to be said for longevity. Staying committed to something, building something over time, and developing the grit to see something through can be incredibly valuable. For some people, that is exactly how they’re designed to operate.

For me, though, I’ve learned that once something stops being an F yes, it’s a no.

The problem was that knowing that intellectually didn’t automatically make it easy to live that way. I could understand my Human Design. I could understand that I was designed to explore and evolve. I could understand that it was okay for me to have many interests and move through different seasons of my life.

But somewhere underneath that conscious awareness was a whole lot of conditioning around what it meant to quit.

Because underneath all of that was this deeply ingrained belief that I was supposed to stick with it.

So when I became a PSYCH-K® facilitator, this was one of the first areas I wanted to work on with myself. Because I could consciously tell myself, Ashley, you’re a Manifesting Generator. You’re allowed to change direction.

But my subconscious needed something different.

There is a difference between knowing something and believing it

This is one of the things I find so fascinating about subconscious work. You can consciously know something and still have your subconscious running a completely different program.

I knew I was allowed to move on. I knew I was allowed to sell my business. I knew I was a multi-passionate person. I knew my life could evolve.

But that didn’t mean my subconscious beliefs had caught up with what I consciously understood.

So the beliefs I worked with were about trusting myself to know when something had run its course, trusting my inner knowing, feeling safe to change direction, and allowing myself to evolve.

Those beliefs were much deeper for me than simply telling myself, “It’s okay to quit.”

Because this was never really about quitting. It was about learning to trust myself enough to recognize when something was complete.

Human Design can show you the pattern. Subconscious work can help you live it.

That distinction is huge. Awareness is incredibly powerful, and learning about your Human Design can give you language for things you may have already known or felt intuitively about yourself.

But awareness alone doesn’t necessarily change the conditioning that has been running underneath the surface for decades. Unless you were introduced to your Human Design very young and raised with an understanding of your natural design, chances are you’ve spent years being conditioned to operate in ways that may be completely different from what comes naturally to you.

That was certainly true for me. I knew I was multi-passionate, but I had been taught to stick with things. I knew I loved exploring different interests, but I had been taught that consistency meant staying with one thing. I knew I wanted something different, but I had been taught to push through.

So PSYCH-K® became one of the tools that helped me bridge the gap between knowing who I am and actually allowing myself to live that way. And that has made a huge difference in the decisions I’ve made in both my professional and personal life.

You are allowed to change your mind

I think this is the bigger lesson for me.

That doesn’t erase the value of what came before. And it certainly doesn’t mean you failed. Sometimes you learned what you needed to learn. Sometimes you became who you needed to become. Sometimes you simply changed.

There is a difference between persistence and forcing. There is a difference between honoring a commitment and abandoning yourself to keep one. And there is a difference between quitting because something is hard and moving on because something is complete.

For me, the work has been learning to trust that difference.

If you’re exploring your Human Design and having those moments of oh my gosh, this explains so much, but you’re also wondering how the hell you actually start living that way after years of conditioning, this is where subconscious change can be incredibly powerful.

You can understand yourself on a conscious level and still have old beliefs running underneath it all. The good news is that those beliefs can change.

And when they do, you may find that the version of you that you’ve been trying to become has actually been there all along.

You just needed to give yourself permission to let her live.