Next steps to Align Your Life

Exploring the next steps to get unstuck, flow more, and feel more at ease.

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This is the second part of a 2-part series (for now). Here is the first part.

Let’s recap: to align our lives with what feels more alive, real, and "really us," we are proposing a basic exploratory framework based on the OODA loop, which stands for:

Observe
Orient
Decide
Act
(and then repeat)

We covered the first two steps, Observe and Orient, so now what is left is to Decide (what to do) and Act (doing it); then check what happened, where we landed, and start observing again.

We list these as separate steps to make them clearer. Nothing is set in stone, and often observing comes as a package with orienting and deciding (with or without explicitely acting). At times, stopping and noticing where you are and how you are doing is enough.
And hard enough, as anyone that practiced mindfulness knows very well.

Maybe just making a list of the stuff in your life, or setting time aside to assess how you are, is enough. That (noticing) can be the very action needed.

The following is for when some more explicit work is necessary.

Decide

By now, if you followed the previous steps, you should have a list of options (or several lists), and ideas of how they would feel: you can now decide what to do, what to try.

Generally, when you start ideating actions, various parts of yourself will have opinions.

“Sure, not [doing something unhealthy but fun] would be very healthy, and boring”
“You failed all of the other times”
“You should have done this years ago”
“You already tried everything, and nothing worked”
“If you tried this, and got better, it would mean that it was you fault that you were suffering”

and so on, and so forth.

This is normal. It is part of the process. This is where you learn more about yourself. See if you can welcome the parts, ask them to give each other enough space to discover more about them.

The idea at this step is to explore possible courses of action, possible small steps, and to find an inner consensus.
It does not have to be that all of us are a “hell yes”.

It is enough if all parts are open to giving it a try. We are looking for some supporters, and no one setting a veto.

Maybe a part with a very strong opinion will be open to the idea of trying something they are sure won’t work for just a week.

Please note: it is quite important to ensure that the part is genuinely open to giving the experiment a fair try. If the part wants to be right, it can just make the experiment fail (and so we end up thinking we have “inner saboteurs”. We don’t. We just did not involve everyone in the decision process, and some of the inner team members are not happy about it).
If a part of you is not open to giving the experiment a fair try, that is fine and good to know. Maybe it needs to be listened to more. Maybe it knows something that we do not. Maybe something else needs to be tried first.

This can be a long negotiation.

At times, we need to change course. Make things smaller. Different.

Maybe we need to start from somewhere else.

The goal here is to find some sort of alignment. Not having a tug of war happening inside.

There are different ways to do it. We find IFS to be very helpful in this.

And, like at every other step: you could realize that you get very, very activated by something that you feel should be easy. At that point, you can take the opportunity to go inside and explore what is there.
Or bookmark it for another time, and try something else for now.

The recommendation is to have 1 course of action, and 2 backups, for the next 1 to 4 weeks.
Why this:
- you want to try one thing, not huge, that can bring some results in one to four weeks. Anything that would require more time to be tested should possibly be split in smaller steps. More than one thing can be tricky.
Can you walk 5 minutes a day? Or 3 times a week? Can you [insert X]?
- at times you will get blocked, and it does not depend on you. Or simply, at times you realize as soon as you try that no, this will not work. That’s good to know, too.
Only, if you have to wait one (or more) weeks before trying something else, you could lose momentum: so we invite you to have a few backups.
“I will try doing yoga twice a week. If that doesn’t work, I will walk 5’ a day. If that doesn’t work, I will try going dancing”.
- having a bit more space on what to try can allow you not to feel too tight, too pressured.

Please note that all 3 experiments should feel realistic, and none should be a punishment for not doing the other. It is fine to cater to very different parts, as long as they feel clear that they will not make one fail so that they can try their favorite experiment.

Other guidelines:

• make the steps small, actionable. We are talking about one step, not the whole journey

• things should be practical, and process oriented. “Feeling better” is a bit vague. “Being better than John at X” requires something from John. “Going for a 5’ walk” is a small, actionable action (or 5 more minutes, or anything)

  • with “process oriented” we mean that we are in control of doing/not doing/trying.
    As an example, “going for a 1km run” is a goal for yourself. Even “running 1km 5 seconds faster than last week” is a goal that is about yourself. “Winning a 1km race” requires everybody else to be on board.
    You can decide to ask someone out. Or to send an email about a project.
    You should not require it to succeed: doing the action and seeing what happens IS success, here.

• if at all possible, make things reversible. Taking a month off work is easier to reverse than leaving our job. Taking a break with a partner is easier to reverse than breaking up.
  The bigger the change, the more it is important to look for ways to prototype it and start small.

Please note that there are tools to explore bigger journeys, changing life path, big life changes.
To embrace a cliché: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

In general, here, we want to decide about small actions.

 If it is about changing job, what could you try in 1-4 weeks? What first step in the 1000 miles journey you can try to find out if you are going in the right direction?
At least getting out of the door, and checking you have packed what you think you need?
(If this was not a metaphor, we would highly recommend to ask people who did that journey about their experience, do some research on what’s there, test good shoes, try a 10km then maybe even a 100km journey, or at least make sure you can stop in the middle, and possibly come back)

Act

And then you do it.
Or not.

Maybe a week passes, and you did not manage to do that small thing.
It looks that, at least for some parts of yourself, that was not that small of a thing.
And now we know there is something there: this is great.

Alternatively, everything goes great. Congratulations!

Alternatively, you manage to do everything you decided to do, and the results are completely different from what you expected.

Or anything in-between.

The way we think about this, we are trying to make this impossible (or at least very difficult) to fail:

• if you do the thing, and things happen as you expected, that’s great.
  Your life is a bit better now. Hooray!

• if you do the thing, and things end up being different: that can be annoying or painful, but now you know it doesn’t work, and hopefully you DID follow the guideline about “making small steps” so you can take it back

• if you realize you do not manage to do the thing, now you know there is something there.
  Maybe it was not as easy as you thought, maybe it was not a thing but a lot of things, maybe it depended on others… or maybe you just discovered something you can work on inside (a “trailhead” in IFS lingo)

Please let us know if there are other possibilities.

And then… loop.

After the action, observe what happened.
If things are good: celebrate. Enjoy. Thank whatever parts allowed it.
If things are less good: lesson learned, and celebrate the lesson. See what needs to change. “OK, I tried this, now what?”.

If you are still stuck in the same way: now you know there is something to work on here.
(Or maybe that you want to act on a different direction)

This is also a practice of mindfulness: noticing what happens, stopping, appreciating. You observed where you were, oriented towards something meaningful, decided how to proceed, and acted on it. And you need to notice what happened, and celebrate having done it.

More loops, until we feel it is enough.

Often, once a part of you life feels lighter, more aligned, other parts emerge as requiring attention. You stop one alarm blasting, you realize that there is another one, less loud, but still ringing.

And at times: knowing when enough is enough, is enough.

What are the results?

Align Your Life works “from the outside in”: you begin by looking at the situation and noting what concrete steps could make it better.

Our goal is making the process “impossible” to fail, even when things don’t work out.
To repeat again, when you try some steps to improve our life, the possible outcomes are:

Success: you do the thing, things improve as expected. That’s great.

Learning: you do the thing and things turn out differently. It might be annoying or painful, but now you know it doesn’t work. By following our guideline of taking small steps, you can easily adjust or take a different path.

Discovery: you find we can’t manage to do the thing, it reveals something important. It might be more complex than you thought, dependent on others, or you just uncovered an inner challenge you can work on.

This approach ensures that every step, whether successful or challenging, brings valuable insights and progress towards alignment.

The final results are:

• More Clarity: Discover your values, needs, and principles.

• Getting Unstuck: Overcome internal blocks and get closer to your potential.

• Achieve Goals: Set and accomplish meaningful, achievable goals.

Oh, and feeling aligned, lighter, more yourself, of course. “More in Self” in IFS terms.

Where does IFS fit in this?

The process includes some parts work: becoming aware of the different parts of yourself that want different things, what to change, what not to change, being happy where we are, unhappy, criticizing you for not changing, for not having changed before, or for failing at what you tried in the past, and so on.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a powerful tool to explore inner forces, motivations, wounds, desires. Being a therapeutic system, it tends to focus on the inside, allowing us to work “from the inside out”.

And yet, at times you just feel stuck.

Everyone feels stuck on something: probably every adult in the world can answer the question “where are you stuck right now?”.

So, at times, you are stuck and you don’t understand where, or why. Or you know perfectly what you should do now, it is very clear, even simple. And yet…
For example, it’s August, and a New Year's resolution is still not accomplished.

What now?

Try it.

Map where you are, and where you could go next, and see what happens.
If anything interesting happens, let us know.

If you want some support in the process, and several variations, you can book a session with one of us.