ON THE JOB / Professionally adrift? Consult your inner neutrinos

My Human Design mandala. Photo by Chris Colin My Human Design mandala. Photo by Chris Colin Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close ON THE JOB / Professionally adrift? Consult your inner neutrinos 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

By rights we should be covered on the career development front. From executive coaching to transition coaching, career mentoring to career rehabilitation, Myers-Briggs tests to the Strong Interest Inventory to the Work/Life Values Checklist, there have never been more ways to establish the color of your parachute. Problem is, parachutes are merely nylon. Our vocations? A far more mystical blend. Follow your dreams, we're told, chase down that passion, listen to your heart -- hardly the stuff of earthly solutions. Never fear, career wanderers, you can now buy employment advice from out of this world.

Welcome to Human Design, where the I Ching, Hindu chakras, the Kabbalah, quantum physics, biochemistry and astrology merge conveniently to reveal your true personal nature -- and deliver you a roadmap to professional success, if that's what your personal nature is into. The minute you were born, a squad of inconspicuous neutrinos shot down from the stars and into your being, conferring on it a mode of existence that can finally be uncovered. Turns out all your stress, uncertainty and general career ennui is merely the result of you fighting your nature. Learn your true Human Design and everything will fall into place.

"It's your blueprint, and it's a decision-making process." Carol Zimmerman told me. "If you were a program, this would be the tool that shows you how the program works. It tells you how you were designed to operate in the world, so that you're going with the flow rather than against it."

Note the language -- blueprints, programs, tools. Human Design may sound soft and New Agey, but it presents itself as a thoroughly data-driven "system of knowledge." I drove down to Zimmerman's beautiful Los Gatos home office for some of this data not long ago; she's been working there as a Human Design guide, and general life coach, for the past few years.

For over two hours, we wandered an ornate realm of hexagrams and amino acids, activations and DNA codes, zodiac symbols and neutrino streams beamed down from above. Guiding us was my bodygraph, a vaguely scientific-looking illustration of a human torso, crisscrossed with colorful pathways connecting assorted Human Design hubs. Cough up a precise birth time and place, plus $150, and you can have one, too.

Zimmerman didn't always do this. Over the course of her career she's gone from elementary school teacher to education publishing, then on to marketing, then a series of tech industry jobs, including one at Oracle as it went public. She was successful and burned out. In 2000 she took what she'd planned to be a brief sabbatical. Seven years later, she's happily absent from the corporate world. She lives her dream of working at home with her dog curled up in the corner, and she helps others achieve their dreams, too.

Your sacral frequency tells me you're curious how distant planets and unrelated ancient texts manage to get at those dreams. I don't know. I listened careful and took notes and later read everything I could get my hands on. Zero comprehension. Given the years of study and the financial investment it takes to become a full Human Design analyst, I think I'm supposed to sit back and let the experts explain me to me:

I'm really busy, Human Design informed me. My wife Amy, the environmental reporter? Naturally curious. Are we close, Amy and me? Yes? Well, the sun and the Earth were in the same gate when we were born, very rare. The data tended to be flattering: I like to get to the bottom of things. I've got a deep sense of love, and a certainty about who I am. I'm not shaken easily. My mind is "open," as opposed to "defined," and guess who else had this condition -- Einstein!

As with horoscopes and psychics and your better fortune cookies, the Human Design data had a ring of accuracy -- it's true, I am opinionated! -- while also happening to apply to just about anyone on the planet. Even when specifics were ventured, they struck me as statistically safe bets: Amy does prefer an earlier bedtime than I, but women also tend to go to bed earlier than men. On the occasion that a reading seems off, it can always be seen from another angle: When I disputed Zimmerman's assertion that I'm a "natural leader," she informed me it just hasn't kicked in yet.

Parts of Human Design are blandly commonsensical. Of course we should seek out our inner desires and inclinations. But the system also strays into murkier territory at times. At one point, when I suggest that maybe our "design" is more malleable than the literature suggests, Zimmerman pushed back: "No, it can't be thwarted." A big pill to swallow if you're turned off by the idea of fate or inevitability.

I'm picking at my mandala -- and possibly offending a kind and compassionate-seeming Los Gatos woman -- because it's hard not to. (Or because I'm a naturally skeptical "5/1 profile," as Zimmerman explained when I voiced my doubts.) To sit and hear that my life was designed one June morning according to the positions of some distant planets -- I can't begin to imagine how that would work. I'm generally open to all things -- for all I know, breakfast this morning was the dream of a butterfly. But I have my suspicions, and anyway I'm okay putting faith in the scientific method. A longitudinal study released in 2003 was just one of the latest to debunk the fundamental claims of astrology. When Stephen Hawking took it on too, my inner Gemini felt fairly won over.

* * *

Easy enough to chip away at astrology-based career diagnostics. Harder to understand why they seem to work for a number of people.

"I so appreciated it. It was monumental," said Elizabeth Mollner, a career nurse in Northern California and one of Zimmerman's clients. "It was mind-boggling. I feel so much more confident in my life."

Mollner recently took a bold step into self-employment, starting a business as a biofeedback practitioner. She says Zimmerman helped her see that this was the right decision, and that being her own boss "totally fit my design."

Donna Bach, a florist in Brisbane, Australia, says Zimmerman's work allowed her to see her potential as a photographer. What she learned about her design gave her the confidence to charge ahead, and she's now working with a photo agent.

What about all that neutrino stuff? Does it make sense to Zimmerman's clients? Shouldn't everyone born at the same minute in the same place end up with the same personality? Aren't upbringing and, I don't know, candy intake the things that shape us?

"I don't get hung up on the belief part of it," Mollner said. "I prefer living from a place of possibility."

Bach agrees. She admits she can't get her head around the why or the how of Human Design, but she sees no reason to argue with so accurate a system.

To poke holes in Human Design -- neither Mollner nor Bach are entirely certain of the birth times they gave Zimmerman, for instance -- is to miss the point: Programs like this come into being because there's a hunger for them. At no point in history have humans faced such anguish over the simple decision of how to spend the work day. No longer do we automatically inherit the blacksmithing operation, or follow the college major unquestioningly through to its related profession. We dig deep for inner vocational truths. The decision can seem downright cosmic, and so it's tempting to ask a cosmically connected stranger for direction. And why look on mountaintops when you can just take the freeway down to Los Gatos?

It seems plausible that the vast and varied coaching field will only continue to grow -- laterally, upward to the stars, wherever. As Zimmerman herself noted, more and more people are confronting employment angst of one kind or another. Changes in the economy mean more of us have to think more creatively about how we make a living. Maybe Human Design isn't about the answers so much as taking a step -- any step -- forward in this daunting project. There are times, after all, when spinning the globe and jabbing at a random country can get you moving far faster than endless deliberation.

Of course I'd say that, though. I'm a Generator.

Chris Colin was a writer-editor at Salon, and before that a busboy, a bread deliverer and a bike messenger, among other things. He's the author of "What Really Happened to the Class of '93," about the lives of his former high school classmates, and co-author of The Blue Pages, a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, the New York Observer, McSweeney's Quarterly and several anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.