Achieving Your Life’s Goals

Alignment as Destiny

As suggested in the previous blog post, individuals are subject to the same cause and effect relationships existing between alignment and results that organizations are subject to.  That is,  

“Individuals are perfectly aligned to produce the results that they get.”

Similarly, the corollary principle that applies to organizations also applies to individuals:

“A good definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

The Four Human Dimensions

The internal alignment of every person is arrayed along the four dimensions that all humans are known to possess: 1) physical, 2) mental, 3) social/emotional and 4) spiritual.  These four dimensions—in the language of mathematics—are thought and said to “span the space,” meaning that everything that is known, or can be known, about our humanity must fall within the span of those four dimensions.

Physical: To live.

To be physically healthy requires proper nutrition, exercise, rest, and some form of stress reduction.

 

Mental: To learn.

To be mentally healthy requires mental stimulation in the form of reading, writing and thinking.  It has been said, for example, that “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

 

Social/Emotional: To love.

To be socially healthy requires that we maintain good relationships with the important people in our lives while, to be emotionally healthy requires that we maintain a good relationship with ourselves.

 

Spiritual: To leave a legacy.

To be spiritually healthy requires that we continue to work on our legacy, the thing that we will always be remembered for after our time on planet Earth has come to an end.  Spirit and legacy are identical, and can co-exist even in the absence of a religious context, since one can be religious without being spiritual and spiritual without being religious.  The two come together in some, but not all, people.

 

The Internal Alignment of Individuals

Experience teaches that it is possible to change our internal alignment along one or more of those four human dimensions and thereby achieve a desired goal that would otherwise have been unattainable. However, the price for making that change, as Stephen Covey taught, would require bringing to bear the same three components needed to create any good habit, namely knowledge, skill and desire.

 

In short: 1) one would have to know (or learn) something relevant about achieving the goal in question; 2) one would have to practice to acquire the skill or skills necessary for success and, most importantly; 3) one would have to want it badly enough to do whatever was necessary to achieve the goal in question.

 

"Those who think they can and those who think they can't are both right."

                                                                                                                                            Henry Ford

 

Consider for example amateur runners who one day set a new goal: to shave 30 seconds off their best times in the 5k run.  There is no mystery as to what would be required of those runners to achieve that goal.  They would need to change their internal alignment along one or more of their four dimensions! 

 

They would need to acquire knowledge of physiology, especially the latest discoveries that continue to refine the cause and effect relationships between the four human dimensions and—in this case—aerobic exercise.  They would need to practice diligently to develop the skills needed to acquire the technique and stamina required for faster running times, and they would need to summon and maintain an unrelenting desire to do all of the things necessary for success in achieving the ultimate goal.

 

Physically, they would learn that many changes would be required, including: better nutrition, better exercise routines, better coaching, better sleep patterns and better stress reduction.  All of these things would be required to maximize the likelihood of achieving their goal.

 

Mentally, emotionally and spiritually, a whole new support industry has emerged in recent decades designed to improve sports performance while leaving the physical dimension to other practitioners.  “Sports psychology” has become a huge business that even highly paid professional athletes employ when they are having a “slump” but are not otherwise hampered by physical injuries.

 

Two Fundamental Truths

 

A great deal of research has documented the validity of the following two statements:

 

·         People perform better when they feel better.

·         People feel better when they are treated better.

 

Both of these fundamental truths have familiar manifestations. For example, there is a belief in the world of sports that home-field advantage stems from familiar surroundings and the “home cooking” that the locals get, while the visiting team eats and sleeps in unfamiliar restaurants and beds.  Consider the way some home-team fans treat visiting teams—attacking arriving buses, hurling invective and occasionally flashlight batteries at opposing players—all of it intended to “psych out” those players in hopes of inhibiting their game performance to help ensure a home team win.