One of the core principles of intentional living is… alignment. To live intentionally entails to choose your actions and behaviours based on your intentions and not from auto-pilot. 60% of our daily actions are auto-pilot. Though that’s great to save you energy - it is worth regularly questionining this to check if these behaviours support you for your long-term goals, and are within alignment with your values.
Intentional living means stepping away from pre-conditionned patterns to choose your own response to life and circumstances.
Being aligned means living in accordance to your values and principles. Alignment comes from being clear on what matters to you most, your vision, your goals, and your purpose.
“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
Thomas Merton
There are several tools you can use to make sure you are living and working in alignment - let’s dive into them in this article.
Clarity
To live with alignment requires honesty and courage. You can only be aligned with what’s important to you, if you know what’s important to you - makes sense, right? That’s why the very first step is clarity. We need to examine ourself, our principles, our perspective and view of the world, in order to check if we are aligned.
Clarity isn’t a one step process: uncovering clarity is like peeling the layes of an onion, you go deeper each time.
The core elements that are essential for alignment are: values, principles, vision. These become the filter through which you view each decision, relationship, action…
Values are the ideals that drive your actions, behaviours and decisions.
To gain clarity on your values:
Emotions: Notice when something jars you, or irritates you. There is a strong likelihood that that behaviour goes against your values.
Decisions: Think back to some of the main decisions you made in your life. Some of the core factors of those decisions are linked to your values.
Stories: Remember some of your most significant emotional stories (positive or negative) - these are directly correlated with your values.
Value Canvas: Choose the values that speak to you most from a values canvas. For instance: honesty, respect, freedom, passion, curiosity, independance, safety, courage, loyalty, integrity, authenticity, joy, progress, efficiency …
Value Prioritising: Once you are clear on your values, you can ask yourself: which matter most and why? For that purpose, you can role play different scenarios and see which value you would prioritise over the other? (eg. freedom vs safety)
Ownership
You cannot lead a life of alignment without taking ownership. Alignment and ownership go hand in hand. Taking ownership means choosing your response to circumstances, and not blaming external circumstances.
Once you are able to be the master of your ship, you don’t blame the waves in the sea, but you embrace them and you focus on guiding the boat. In life, this means, you don’t look to justify why something isn’t working in your life but instead choose how you respond to this hardship.
One of my mentors once told me:
“Each time you justify why something is hard, you are making it harder.”
In the same way, each time you complain, blame circumstances, others (and even yourself!), you are making it harder for you to take ownership and lead a life of alignment.
“Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our response.”
Victor Frankl
Once we are aware that we can choose our response and that it is a choice!, this changes how we show up in the world, the actions we take and our entire attitude. Living in alignment derives from constantly remembering that we have this choice.
Focus
Maintaining a clear focus on both your values and your vision is key for alignment. When ‘life happens’, and you lose that focus, that’s when you are most likely to compromise your values, or shift back into auto-pilot.
Defining a clear vision will support you with greater alignment. To be clear on your vision, project yourself in the future and let yourself dream big! You can also see what inspires you most around you in your peers or online, and use that as inspiration for your vision.
“Do not confuse things that are hard with things that are valuable. Many things in life are hard. Just because you are giving a great effort does not mean you are working toward a great result. Make sure that mountain is worth climbing.”
James Clear
To maintain clear focus, a few things can be helpful:
Vision Board: Having a clear vision board with your core goals and principles acts as a powerful reminder of what is most important to you.
Tracking: Keeping track of your days and weeks, either through journaling or through an app like Notion. While you are tracking, you can make a note, and ask yourself how aligned you felt that day.
Screen savers: Having in the background of your phone or PC, a quote, or some core words that remind you of your core priorities.
Self-Inquiry: On a regular basis, you can ask questions such as:
Does this action take me closer to my vision?
Am I staying true to my values and beliefs?
How do I feel about making this choice and why?
If I were to make this action a habit, how would I feel about it?
Boundaries
Living with alignment is challenging because your auto-pilot, society and your peer group will regularly question your actions.
For instance, one of my core principles is: Live Healthily. As a consequence, I don’t drink alcohol and this behaviour is often questionned by my peers. It takes regular small bouts of courage to choose my aligned action over the default/ assumed action.
For many people, this can be challenging, because they want to ‘fit in’ and they end up taking actions that aren’t aligned just to ‘look the part.’
That’s where boundaries come in.
Once you know what your values and principles are, that’s when you regulate your actions and behaviours to fit your values.
This means: Stopping comparison and Stopping ‘shoulds’.
“We don’t have to be perfect, just engaged and committed to aligning values with actions”. Brené Brown
Having clear boundaries and being able to say no will support you in your alignment. Of course, there will be times, where you cannot impose your views and principles on others, but it’s about finding the right compromises and not always squashing yourself to suit other people.
During this whole process, compassion is a must. Leading with alignment is a wonderful gift, but only if it comes from a place of self-compassion and not from a place of forcing.
Checking
If you are not in alignment, you will most likely: experience self-doubt, regret, procrastinate, seek approval from others, and have lower emotional resilience.
As you progress on a life of alignment, there are several check-ins you can do with yourself on a regular basis to check how aligned you are at the moment:
Think/ Say/ Do: Ensure that what you think, what you say and what you do are the same. If you are thinking ‘my health is my priority’, but you are saying ‘sure, it’s fine, I can make an exception’ and you are acting by ‘eating unhealthy more often than you would want to’; then what you are thinking/saying/doing is different - this is a lack of alignment.
Regret Check: Look back at some of the small and bigger decisions that you regret. These decisions were probably not aligned with some of your values or principles, and you can learn a lot from this (instead of focusing on the regret)
Million Dollars Check: Ask yourself: ‘What would you do differently if you received a million dollars tomorrow?’ Often, we lead our life in a certain way to provide financial safety. Though that’s normal, it can sometimes derail us from what is most important for us. For instance, if you answered to that question: ‘spend more time with family’, or ‘start this new hobby’ - these are indications that these are areas that are lacking in your life at the moment.
Listening: Mostly alignment comes from listening to your body and your intuition. If you pay close attention, you will notice each time you make a decision that one option feels heavier than the other (Hint: the heavy option is the non-aligned option). If you feel joy, and lightness when making the decision, it is most likely in alignment with your values.
The Ultimate Check: This is a powerful check, and can be very useful in reviewing how aligned you are in your life. You ask yourself, if you only had a few years to live, what would you do differently? This can show you other thoughts, options and possibilities that you had not considered before. It can also help you remove the superfluous layers, and drill down into what really matters.
Last Note
On a note of caution, for those of you who like to do everything to 100%, it is not possible to live a life that is fully aligned. The reason for this is because some of your values and principles will come into conflict from time to time. For instance you might very highly value your work, your family and your health and in some moments, there might an inner confict. Or you might truly value the environment, and yet need to fly for your work. There are hundreds of examples why 100% alignment cannot exist.
What we aim for is 90% alignment - where the vast majority of the time, you feel aligned with your values and principles - your decisions sit well with you, and you don’t have any major regrets.
And that’s already pretty great!
“One of the regrets of the dying is that they haven’t lived a life authentic to themselves.”
Leading a life of alignment is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
Thank you for reading,
Connect with the magic,
Katie