Alignment is a word I’ve been pondering daily ever since I declared it as my word of 2022. To me, alignment means closing the gap between what I want to be doing and what I am doing – fusing my actions with my aspirations.
Nearly every time I’ve made something that was improbable happen in my life, it is because I was clear on exactly what I wanted, and I was able to aim directly at it.
Having a vague sense of direction will only get us to vaguely the right place. To get exactly where we want to go, we must be precise with our aim. We need a specific destination.
Right as I was having these thoughts, I got to spend some time with a friend that I hadn’t seen in a while. She had moved to a different city and essentially reinvented herself since we last saw each other.
She said point blank: “I manifested this life for myself.”
As I evaluated where she is now, compared to where she was when I knew her, I realized that she had done just that. Everything from the people she spends time with, to where she goes on the weekends, to what she’s doing, where she lives – it was all by design. It was all laid out clearly in her head before it became her reality.
She had created a life of alignment for herself, and it was no accident. It was incredibly intentional.
Without designing a specific image of what we want our lives to be, our chances of living in alignment are slim to none. Without clarity and intention, we are betting the outcome of our lives on luck, instead of actively steering our lives where we want them to go.
To cultivate the life we want, we must set an aim, and then take actionable steps in the right direction.
The importance of setting aim
Setting aim is a prerequisite to living a life of alignment.
There is a quote from Yogi Berra I think about often:
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get there.”
Imagine getting in a car and driving without having any idea where you’re going. With no sense of direction, your ultimate destination will be completely random. You leave the outcome of your journey up to utter chance.
Most of us travel through life with at least some sense of direction in mind, though. Maybe we know we want to settle down around age X, buy a house, start a family, work in a field like Y. We have a high level idea of where we want to go, but we don’t have a clear destination.
If we were in the car, we would probably have a city, a town, maybe even a neighbourhood in mind, but we wouldn’t have an address, a postal code, a mental image of the destination we want to walk into when we get out of the car. Conversely, when we have a postal code that we can punch in and set ourselves on course for, we have a very high (almost certain) chance of getting to our target, of walking right through the front door of that destination. Even if obstacles get in the way or certain roads are closed, we can take a detour and still get to the right spot, because our aim is clear and specific.
The same goes for designing a life we want. We must be rigorous — utterly and excruciatingly detailed — in cultivating a vision for the life we want for us to have any real chance at achieving it. We must determine the postal code for where we want to go, and begin heading in that direction.
Creating a life of alignment
I recently had the distinct feeling that I was converging on alignment, but as I continued to progress, I realized that I was only operating with a sense of direction in mind, not a destination. To get somewhere specific, I needed to design a clear image of where I wanted to go. So to recalibrate, I went through a quick writing exercise to define an aim I could begin moving towards. I’ve done this whenever I’m trying to refocus my energy and close the gap between what I want to be doing and what I am doing.
Below I’ve outlined the series of prompts/exercises I use to recalibrate when I’m feeling misaligned:
Summary of the approach I use to re-calibrate towards cultivating alignment in my life, expanded below.
Setting an aim
The first step to setting your aim is paying attention to what your life is like today. We need to take inventory of our lives to evaluate what is missing and what we’d like to pursue to get closer to our ideal life. This requires us to reflect on everything about our life.
1. Take inventory
Some prompts for this reflection:
- What is an average day in my life like?
- What do I spend my time on?
- What information am I consuming?
- What kind of people do I spend time with?
- What do I eat?
- How do I move?
- Where am I?
- What do I see every day?
- How do I feel when I wake up?
- What do I do on the weekends?
- What do I do in the mornings?
Be specific, clear, detailed. The purpose of this exercise is to take a complete, holistic inventory of your life.>
2. Identify your priorities
Once you’ve determined the state of your life today, get clear on the key vectors you would like to optimize for in your life moving forward. There are infinite things we could optimize for in our life.
Examples:
- Money
- Family
- Familiarity
- Comfort
- Friends
- Culture
- Ambition
- Intensity
- Growth
- Weather
- Health
- Lifestyle
We can only optimize for a few of these key vectors at any given time, so it is important to be clear and intentional with what we want to be optimizing for. Otherwise, we allow the inertia of life to set our priorities, instead of doing so ourselves. For example, if you’ve never moved out of your hometown, you’re probably optimizing for family, comfort, and familiarity, and potentially opting out of anything that your current location isn’t helping you strengthen (this could be growth, career, etc.)
If we don’t design our life around our priorities, our priorities will merely become a reflection of our environment. By clearly outlining what we are optimizing for, we sharpen our clarity on what a life of alignment might look like.
3. Look for inspiration
If you’re not sure what you want your life to look like or what you’d like to optimize for, look for inspiration. Consider:
- Who are the people you admire most?
- What do you admire about their life, specifically?
- hat do they do that you’d like to do more of?
Tease out aspects of the individuals you look up to to make a mental mosaic of things that inspire you. Think about it like a mental collage of traits, qualities, goals, places, career paths, etc. that are associated with the life you aspire to.
What does the mosaic of these things look like together? This should begin pointing you towards what an aligned image of your life might look like.
For example, I really look up to one of my favourite authors, Erica Katz. She writes fiction books (she’s averaging one book per year) while also working full time at a law firm. I love how she’s integrated writing into her life alongside her career, and hasn’t sacrificed one for the other. This is something I can see myself doing in the future… so, she has become part of my mental mosaic. By gathering a collection of people like this and the parts of their lives that inspire us, we can get clearer on the mosaic that resembles the life we want.
4. Describe your ideal day
The goal we are working towards with these exercises is to describe the life we’d like to get closer to. This can be a big task, so it’s best to start small.
Try describing your ideal day in 6 months. If 6 months feels too close or too far, adjust the time period. But be very clear and specific: go from when your eyes flutter open in the morning to when your head hits the pillow at night. No one will read this except you. Be radical, be ambitious, be everything that you want. Pull it all into your ideal day.
Prompts to get you started:
- Where will you be in 6 months?
- Who will you be seeing?
- Where do you go in the morning?
- What are you working on?
- What are you thinking about?
- What are you talking about?
- How are you spending your time?
Having a vision of your ideal day in the future allows you to align your actions in the present with this destination. You can approach this exercise similar to the first exercise where we took inventory of our present day life – think about this like your future self taking inventory of their average day. I encourage you to write this in present tense (not future tense) to actually stimulate the feeling that this is a reality you’re already living in.
If you don’t know where to start, set a timer for 10 minutes, and put everything down that comes to mind that you might see yourself doing in this day. It doesn’t need to be written perfectly or make perfect sense, but it needs
Make your future vision a part of your present
This ideal day in 6 months will become the postal code you can begin moving towards with your decisions. To make this ideal day your reality, tease out parts of it into your present.
It is worth reflecting on how utterly real and visceral dreams feel. There is almost no way to distinguish a dream from reality when we are in one. They feel so believable, so immersive, so absolute that we consistently wake up in shock and confusion to the reality that it was all just in our head, a product of our imagination.
This is the type of association we want to create with our ideal reality. We want it to feel so real, so utterly true – that we can hardly believe it is not our life yet.
To do this, we need to visualize ourselves in this reality — describe the details to ourselves in our head and on paper. Think about it constantly, and ultimately, act like the version of ourselves in that ideal reality.
Think: How can we bring more of our ideal day to life, today?
- What can we do today that we would do if we were the version of ourselves in that vision?
- Where would we go?
- Who would we talk to?
- What would we talk about?
- How would we feel?
Then start doing these things, today. Go where you would go. Talk about what you would talk about. Reach out to the people you would be friends with. Seek out opportunities to move to the place you want to live in.
By pulling our one-day-vision into the present through visualization, writing, and ultimately, action, we can work towards cultivating a life of alignment.
Final thoughts on creating alignment
We hear words like “manifestation” thrown around constantly. Casually. So much so that we have become desensitized to the power of designing and visualizing what we want. I think the nuance of these tools (manifestation, visualization, etc) that gets lost in translation is that it all comes down to choices. None of us have a fairy god mother that is going to show up on our door step, tap our head three times with their magic wand, spin us around and drop us in our ideal reality (though watching Fairly Odd Parents growing up certainly had my 9-year-old self thinking this was possible).
It takes intentional effort and action to get us there. Sure, there’s some luck involved as there is with everything, but it is hardly worthwhile to depend on luck, since we have no control over it. What we can count on is the power of decisions. By clarifying what it is that we want and then heading in that direction by taking initiative, changing our behaviour, and seeking opportunities that align with our aim, we begin to act like the version of ourselves that we are trying to become, bringing us closer to the vision we defined.
That is how “manifestation” works. It’s not about magic, or luck, or fairy dust. It’s about setting clear intentions about where we want to end up, and then acting in alignment those intentions. It’s about the simple decisions we make every day that get us closer to where we want to go.
By (1) defining our aim, (2) outlining our priorities, (3) drawing inspiration from those we look up to, and (4) designing our ideal future day, we can close the gap between what we want to be doing and what we are doing, moving closer to alignment, one day at a time. If we put enough days of doing this in a row, we will eventually meet ourselves in the vision we created, living out our ideal day in reality. And it is precisely at that moment — when our actions meet our aspirations — that we are living in alignment.
And then, we can recalibrate and do this again :)