Walk down any street from New York to New Orleans to Newcastle and ask any random passer by this simple question: do you want to live a life that’s “aligned”? Assuming they think you’re some kind of a creep, they’ll probably respond with a simple, “yes”.
That’s where we start.
It’s a funny thing about the human condition, for many of us life isn’t lived in the conscious realm, rather the subconscious. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact. Such a fact (in fact) that psychologists tell us that over half of our life is lived through our subconscious. Let’s translate that: more than 8 of your average 16 hours of being awake every day are spent doing and saying things that you don’t even think about – they just come.
2 Worlds
But as humans living a largely unconscious life, we exist in two worlds: our internal world and our external world. Our internal world holds both the light and the dark in our minds and our souls. It’s how we see ourselves in the world around us and it’s how we think of ourselves as we wander through it.
And then there is our outer world. The thumbprints we leave behind. The money we make, the difference we create, the lives we change, and sometimes how we really just muck everything up.
But remember: we all want to live a life aligned and this is true be we from the Empire State, the Pelican State, or the Evergreen State. But yet sometimes we don’t. Sometimes something doesn’t feel right. We are out of sorts. Not in the right place and sometimes not in our right minds. These moments are more cumulative and acute…they build slowly, sometimes over months and even years, until we are misaligned.
3 Scenarios
Consider these three scenarios of misalignment:
The person who wants to fully fund all retirement accounts as they drink, smoke, and eat their way through the drive thru (you get the point).
The woman who says to the therapist, “I want to have a loving and intimate relationship with my partner” and then goes home to be abused. The man who tells the therapist “communication is the most important part of a great relationship” but won’t talk to his partner.
The 20 or 30 something who says he/she want to be in the top 1% of all earners but doesn’t think they need to work more than 6 hours a day.
These, my friends, are cases of misalignment.
4 Fixes
Misalignment is just another problem, and every problem you confront has a fix even though it may not seem like it at the time. The next time you find yourself in one place and not the other, consider employing a combination of these ideas:
1. Clarity of Thought
The real problem in modern society isn’t a lack of “enough”. We have more than enough (and maybe more than we should). The real problem is we don’t know what we want. When it comes to “clarity of thought” a simple rule applies: people who know what they want usually get it.
Figuring out what you want isn’t just a question, it’s the question. You may say you know what you want, but how clear are you about it? Have you written it down, have you reviewed it weekly, and have you adjusted your agenda?
If you misaligned, probably not.
2. “No” is the New “Yes”
Many of us struggle with learning how to say “no” to the wrong things in life. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a problem that often leads us to misalignment.
The most common application of saying “no” is as an exercise of boundaries and that’s important, but sometimes when you say “no”, you’re really saying “yes”. Your tank can only hold so much, there is only so much bandwidth, and so much time in the day and in your life. It’s only by saying “no” to the wrong things that you create room to say “yes” to the right things.
3. The Acquisition of Pain
Until you have enough pain, you’re not going to change anything significant. You can talk all day long about your apps, yoga, and even your proactivity, but it’s all really just a lot of fodder until you associate enough pain with what you are doing and probably know you shouldn’t be. Pain is a motivator. It’s perhaps the greatest motivator in human history.
The antonym of pain is pleasure, and pain and pleasure are strange bedfellows who share a room in the hypothalamus region of your brain. As they poke back and forth, remember who who will always win the argument: you will always do more to avoid pain than to seek please. That’s the role of pain in alignment.
4. Remember the Journey
Every storyteller worth their salt knows that a well told story is always about one thing: transformation. Characters in a story go “from” where they currently are, “to” their destination and ultimately their destiny. This is true whether an epic episode of Star Wars or the ho-hum doldrums of a rainy Tuesday afternoon in your world.
Take inventory of where you are now. Be unwavering in the honesty of your assessment and deliberate in your avoidance of denial to assess whatever your situation. Then go back to the clarity of thought. Determine what you would rather have. Check in with your relationship with “no” and use pain as a guide. Then don’t think, just do.
Good luck and have a good week.
Joe Still
2023.07.16
Cite
“You perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.”
– Brian Tracy