When I get a really bad crick in my neck—so bad that stretching, yoga, Advil, even deep massage – are inadequate to the de-kinking task, I get myself over to my chiropractor. If I am out of alignment no amount of fighting my body to ‘relax’ will work as efficiently as allowing a professional to straighten me out! I am always amazed to learn that the pain in my neck is actually a result of an over-tight muscle in my back or a vertebra out of line in my spine. Because our bodies are composed of interconnecting parts, when one part is out-of-line it pulls on another and pretty soon the whole system needs tweaking to restore physical health. So how can we handle aligning the rest of our lives?

To create sustainable success and joy in our lives, we must embrace a different and more challenging kind of alignment—the alignment of our words with our actions, the alignment of our thoughts and our behaviors. And unfortunately there is no doctor whom we can pay to do the work for us. When we are aligned, others know who we are, our behavior is consistent, we practice what we preach and we bring to our lives the opportunity for deep happiness and purposeful living. Getting aligned can be a challenge, though, since it involves identifying and eliminating the gaps between what we say we want and what we keep getting, between what we say we deserve and what we keep settling for and between what we say we stand for and how we actually behave. When you start to align your life, you have to face the contradictions and incompatibilities that have settled in so comfortably. Usually we are attentive only to the part of a misalignment that affects us directly—and we’re less attuned to our complicity in creating the negative result. In other words, we don’t usually know that we are out of alignment—instead what we know is that something isn’t working. But if you look more closely and do the necessary soul searching to uncover ‘why’ things aren’t working, very often you’ll uncover a big juicy gap between what you say and what you do. Here are some examples of misalignments that some of my clients have identified and successfully tackled: • Expressed commitment to physical health and fitness yet continued disregard for this core value evidenced by poor diet, overweight, irregular exercise. • Stated desire to eliminate significant debt and ‘cut up the credit cards’ coexisting with a continued pattern of indulgent spending and rationalizations like: “I deserve these things—I work so hard.” • Self-described as honest and caring family man yet professional behavior was cutthroat, unkind and ungenerous and the individual wondered why promotion eluded him and why no one seemed to ‘have my back’ at meetings. • Gaps uncovered in the search for a soul mate. This often shows up as a long list of the qualities he/she must have in a partner when the very same requirements haven’t been actualized in the searcher! For example “I want a man who’s on solid financial footing” expressed by a woman scrambling to stay one step ahead of her credit card debt. • Inability to create financial security despite hard work, consistent employment and marketable skills. This kind of teetering financial insecurity seems to arise because at some deep place the individual doesn’t feel worthy to truly succeed. So while they outwardly say they are trying to create a stable financial picture, there is a more powerful internal voice that tells them they don’t deserve it. Truth telling is the necessary first step on the path to aligning your life. You must start by telling the truth to yourself about yourself. Once you’ve done the hard work and can actually name the gap between what you say and what you do or what you say and what you believe, and can see the impact the disparity has on your life, you’ve completed the hardest part of the job! If you’re having a hard time seeing clearly, ask a close friend for his perspective – and listen without “yeah buts” and without “I don’t really do that, do I?” Don’t explain or defend or sugarcoat your behavior. Listen and think about which of your behaviors are moving you away from what you want and what you believe you deserve. Now what’s left is making the conscious decision to change the behavior. Easier said than done, for sure. But the remarkable thing I’ve noticed in my life and in those of so many of my clients, is that when you clean up your act and work hard to eliminate the gaps that exist inside you, the external gaps that you see in your life begin to close up with ease. An inside that matches the outside is a very beautiful thing indeed!