How Misalignment is Preventing your Success and Happiness
Transcript below:
What is misalignment?
Thinking one thing and saying another
Saying one thing and doing another.
Having a long-term dream and acting in ways that are discordant with progress towards our aspiration.
Our culture is infected with misalignment.
We all know how important it is to eat healthy foods, and yet we choose the comfort food time and again.
We all know how important it is to exercise and yet we still prioritize other activities.
This is your sign. This is your permission. This is your “no more excuses, now is the time to be the person I want to be”.
The life you desire is waiting to be manifested one decision at a time.
Our lives are but a complex representation of all the choices we’ve made in our past mixed with our expectations of how the future will unfold.
This present moment is all there is. It’s a new opportunity - a fresh start!
It LOOKS like our lives are fixed entities because we choose to see them that way.
“Once I finish this semester I’ll start eating right again”
OR
“Once I close this deal I’ll get back to the gym”
OR
“Once I finish this work project I’ll make time for my family again.”
The idea that your reality will be different in the future than it is now is an illusion. You’re creating the expectations of the future with every moment you continue to act.
Starting habits is hard and each day you put off the life you intend to create is just one more message to your brain indicating that the life you envision isn’t as important to you and so the inertia of implementing it in the future becomes even more difficult to overcome.
You don’t have to wait to have your dream. You can make choices today that are aligned with what the best version of yourself would do and you create that person choice by choice.
Momentary change seems hard only because we perceive it as more than a moment.
For example, switching from a greasy burger to a lean sandwich isn’t the hardest decision in the world, but when your pattern recognizing brain has identified that your regular choice, especially in front of friends, is a burger, then your brain communicates to you that you better choose a burger while ordering at the restaurant tonight.
The reality though, is that this moment is an opportunity - an offering from life, for you to decide how the rest of your experience of life will unfold.
Take a moment and realize that everything you are experiencing, from your satisfaction with your weight, to the location of your house, and whether or not you have kids is the sum total of all decisions you’ve ever made combined with all the decisions everyone else has ever made.
Life isn’t just happening as some foreign and unpredictable phenomena; it’s being co-created by every living being in every living ecosystem simultaneously.
You are a part of life, and therefore have a say in how it develops.
Your life is in your hands, and it can be whatever you want it to be. The society and culture, the norms and traditions, the habits and behaviors – all exist as the bi-product of millions of choices by millions of people over time.
The life we are currently experiencing is both an accident and a will of force by those who intended to act.
Nonetheless, life wasn’t created to be a specific way and yours doesn’t have to fit any mold come before. We are the creators of our future.
No created life path is better or worse than any others. They all simply are.
Life is and always will be what we make of it.
When you decide to learn a new skill, you make yourself a more valuable and employable individual.
When you decide to meditate in the morning, you make yourself more calm and focused for the day ahead.
When you decide to ask about your friend’s or spouse’s day, you make the conscious choice of fostering a mutual relationship of care.
Alternatively:
When you decide to stay in a toxic relationship, you waste precious moments of your only life.
When you decide to skip exercise this week for happy hours with friends, you not only increase your weight and fat, but spend money you could be using to go after your dream of becoming _______.
When you decide spend your workday without a clear plan of attack, you use 8 hours to do what you probably could’ve accomplished in 2 with a focused mind.
We all make decisions every single moment about how our lives will unfold. The more clear you are about what type of person you want to be and what type of life you want to live, the easier it becomes to make decisions that are aligned with that future and slowly move yourself towards that desired reality.
If you’d like help Gaining Clarity about the life you intend to create or seek accountability building habits that will serve your greater purpose, please explore the STRIVENT Coaching website and benefit from both our free and reasonably-priced resources intentionally created to help you be the person you want to be.
This life is yours, and I hope you find energy and fulfillment becoming the person you’re excited about being.
With gratitude,
Dennis McGinley
STRIVENT - Founder, Performance Coach
