First steps to Align Your Life

An exploratory process to get unstuck, flow more, and feel more at ease.

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Note: this is partly a written version of a session Alex hosted at the last Parts Work Unconference, and partly an overview of the process that we call “Align Your Life”, integrating IFS, design thinking, Focusing, and mindfulness in life coaching.
It is also part of our Beyond IFS project. The second part is here.

“I do not know exactly what my path is, but I can feel when I am not on it”

At times we are stuck. At times, things do not flow, or we do not flow. That’s one of the ways we know when we are not on the path.

Align Your Life is an exploratory process to find ways to get unstuck, flow more, and feel more at ease. For most of us, life does not come with clear labels (or, worse, the labels we thought were clear turn out to be wrong), and we need to discover our values and strengths, what “our bliss to follow” is, and what makes us flow.
More than finding something, it is often a question of remembering, rediscovering, getting reacquainted: deep down, we know, but we either forgot, or we learned to ignore it.

In Align Your Life we are invited to explore, experiment, find out, learn. It is an explicit permission to look at our life like an experiment (or an adventure), to look back at what worked, what didn’t, and even when things turned out quite bad, say “OK, that did not work, lesson learned, let’s move on”.
(Admittedly, at times “moving on” can require a huge amount of work and effort. We don’t mean to say it’s easy. We just feel it is usually better than staying in a bad situation).

“Align Your Life… to what?”

Good question. This is what we find out in the process.

A bit like having better posture, or lifting weights when we are aligned to our bones: it feels better. We do not necessarily need to know from the inside what the skeleton looks like (even if it can definitely help), we do not need to know the names of the bones: what we need are safe ways to experiment what movements are easier and safer than others for us, what feels better, and we need a way to evaluate if we are getting better or not.

A bit like going from a noisy environment to a more silent one. It is hard to explain “lack of noise” to someone that never experienced it, or that forgot how it feels. And yet, the moment we move away from a grating noise something relaxes.
“Ah, yes, this is better”.

Align Your Life is a process to find out what inner and outer alignment feels like. Once we are more aligned, we can name what we find out.
We can leave a trail to get back home.
We can even be intentional in losing our alignment a bit, to find its contours.

This way, we can understand and map our values, needs, and principles; not what we have been told they are, or what we want to believe they are, or what they “should be”: they will emerge the way knowing what it feels like to stand upright can emerge, experientially.

How does it work?

The basic outline of the process is simple enough:

• mapping and evaluating where we are

• imagining and evaluating possible steps and actions

• finding ways to try them out in a simple way

• actually trying them, checking what happens

We found that the process can be described by the OODA loop, developed by the military (there is nothing warlike, it is just the description of a decision making process), which stands for:
Observe
Orient
Decide
Act
(and then repeat)

When working with us, the whole loop happens explicitly at the beginning of the process, during the first session, and then again, at times just implicitly, and during every successive session where we evaluate what happened (or did not happen), how it felt, where we are now, and what next.

You can do on your own, for big and small things, and for small parts of big things.

Step 1: Observe

At times, we are stuck just because there is so much in our life, and not only do we not know where to start, but maybe we do not even realize how much all of that is taking space in our mind. Some parts of ourselves are constantly trying to keep track, to orient, and are too exhausted and disorganized to make a move. Mapping where we are is a good way to start.

The start of the process is evaluating where we are in our life according to 5 main directions/elements/columns:

health (mostly physical, but mental health counts).
relationships (family, relationships, friends, community, love)
effectiveness in the world (wealth, career, work)
enjoyment (fun, enjoyment, pleasure, gusto)
purpose (purpose, meaning, spirituality)

Notes: the categories are somewhat vague, and the names are not important. See if they make sense to you, and if a name or label emerges.
There is nothing magical or sacred about these five broad categories: they seem to work for us and the people we work with, but change them as needed.
Maybe there is something very important for you that is missing: feel free to add it, and feel free to remove and change whatever you want to change. Before doing it, though, see if what is missing can fit into the framework.

As an example, during a workshop someone asked “what about education?”.
The question is: is education a final goal, or a tool? Is education meaningful by itself (and so it could just fit in the purpose box), is it a tool to be more effective/healthy/have better relationships/have more fun/etc? Is it fun/enjoyable by itself?
There is no right or wrong answer, and you will find your own answer if you ask the question.

For every category, come up with a number from 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst possible, and 10 is the best possible imaginable.

Example: 

health 7
relationships 7
effectiveness in the world 6
enjoyment 5
purpose 6

At this step, and at every other step, note that different parts of you that may have different opinions. E.g. some very studious parts may feel we have lots of fun by reading lots of essays, while other parts may find that life incredibly boring.
If any polarization emerges, thank the parts for showing themselves, and see if you can note their differences . Feel free to expand the categories as much as you want.
Maybe we could end up this way:

health 7 (in general) / 5 (we’re a bit lacking in the beach body department).

Now we have 5 categories, and at least one number for each.

How does it feel?

Are we doing well? Not so well? Terribly?

Often, at this point, we will start feeling a mix of: things we could change, shame for something going bad, realization that things are different than we wanted to believe, or many others…

Step 2: Orient

A Scottish joke:
Visitor to a village stops a local and asks, "How do I get to Aberdeen from here?"
Local answers, "Och, if I were going to Aberdeen, I wouldna start from here" 

Once we have an idea of where we are/what is happening, we can start evaluating it. Is it good? Do we have any idea of what could make it better?

We can now explore around the basic 5 categories, poke to see what could change a bit, how it would feel to change a lot.
Try asking some or all of these questions, and any other that come to mind:

• how important is every category?
  Maybe my career is a 5, but I do not care much about it. Or maybe my meaning is at a 7, but I feel it is the most important thing in my life, and that’s not enough. Or maybe career is at 9, and if I am honest to myself, love and spirit are much more important.
  Mark them again from 0 to 10, and note if there is any mismatch.
  Again: you will probably notice some feeling coming up, either parts, voices, at times something even whispering “do not go there”.
  Welcome them, note them.
  If we were doing this together, we would stop to check and find out what is underneath what is happening. See if you can gently explore in that direction.
  Again, as usual: pay attention to different voices, different parts of yourself.
  Maybe some parts got the memo that you need to get really really rich to be safe, and others disagree.

• how are we feeling about this?
  Explore any mismatch. See if there is any reason to celebrate. If not: celebrate the fact that you are willing to go somewhere scary, bringing some light.

• what could make each category improve a bit, like a +1?
  There are usually different ways to be a bit healthier (unless we are at a 9 or 10!), a bit more social, a bit richer or less poor, having a bit more meaning in our life.
  Note what comes. Invite possibilities. Try to invite 1-3 possibilities for each category.
  Note also what different parts and voices of yourself say.

• are there contradictions? Would any +1 make other things get worse?
  Is there any “free action”, anything that feels both easy and not making anything else worse? Anything that would improve several categories?

• what would feel to be a 10 in each one separately?
  What effect would this have on other categories?
  “Yes, I could spend 8h a day between yoga, sport, and meditation. That would make me super healthy, and the rest of my life would fall apart” (unless we make our life about it. It is a possibility)
  Or: “being a 10 in spirit would probably mean becoming a monk and moving to a monastery. I am not sure my partner would appreciate”.

The idea is to come out with:

•  a list of possible steps.

• different ideas of where we can want to go, possible directions

• and a taste of what a possible (temporary) goal could be

If this feels daunting, maybe start the in-depth process on one or two main categories and explore them. Or do part of the process on all the 5, then go deeper on some as you get more clarity.

Alternative ways to observe and orient

Other possible ways to approach the first 2 steps in the process are

• imagining future lives, improving different aspects. 4-6 years in the future is usually plenty.
  Imagining 3 to 5 possible lives is best, to get unstuck from “there is only one”.

• looking at the past, when things felt great, or just better, then taking inspiration from that.
  In what ways can you take inspiration from that? What parts of that life can you recreate? 

• if tomorrow things were good, how would you know? What would be noticeable?
  See for each category, or in general for your life

• what would happen in our next 5 years (or so) if we were our best selves? What could we realistically aspire to? Take a few minutes to explore that

• what would happen in that time if we were our worst self? In what ways could we make our life miserable? How could we avoid it? Take a few minutes to explore that

All explorations work best if you do them in writing.

What now?

We will explore next steps in a future post.
For now, see if you want to give it a try.: map where you are, and where you could go next, and see what happens. If anything interesting happens, let us know.

Or book a session with one of us.