The Power of Alignment

“Try not to become a man of suc­cess, but to become a man of value.“
– Albert Ein­stein (1879–1955)

“When your val­ues are clear to you, mak­ing deci­sions becomes eas­ier.“
– Roy Disney

Peo­ple say “change your atti­tudes” or “have a pos­i­tive atti­tude,” but I don’t agree since atti­tudes can not be changed. They are results and not causes. They are byprod­ucts of your inner­most con­vic­tions. They are reflec­tions of your deep­est val­ues. You can’t just change them on a whim because your out­side is but a mir­ror reflec­tion of your inside.

If you’re going to change your out­side, you must stick to your val­ues. If you remain con­sis­tent with them, you remain true to your­self and will become gen­uinely moti­vated. You will nat­u­rally have a pos­i­tive atti­tude because you are con­nected with your higher self.

Like I said ear­lier, many peo­ple achieve their goals only to ask them­selves in the end, “Is this it?” “Is this what I really wanted?” “I worked hard for this?” “Why am I not happy?” or, “Where do I go from here?” Obvi­ously, goals alone can cre­ate a great deal of frus­tra­tion even after they have been reached.

If you plan activ­i­ties that revolve inex­orably around your core pri­or­i­ties, your sense of pur­pose will there­fore guide you in cre­at­ing bet­ter goals and activ­i­ties with which you will be much more pro­duc­tive in exe­cut­ing. How do you do that? First, you set your val­ues and pri­or­i­tize them — these are your pri­or­i­ties. Then and only then, you set your goals and align them with your priorities.

So, before you climb the lad­der of suc­cess, you must ensure that it is lean­ing against the right wall by align­ing your goals with your true pri­or­i­ties. Ulti­mately, goals and val­ues should become one and the same. We, as indi­vid­u­als, are dif­fer­ent not only by our core val­ues but by the hier­ar­chy of those values.

Let me give you an exam­ple. Hyrum Smith, author of The 10 Nat­ural Laws of Suc­cess­ful Time and Life Man­age­ment, uses an imag­i­nary “I-​​beam” exer­cise in his sem­i­nars. An I-​​beam is a steel beam used in the con­struc­tion of build­ing frames.

While they can be as long as sev­eral hun­dred feet or even more, they’re only about a foot and a half wide. In fact, they are called “I-​​beams” because a cross sec­tion of the steel beam would look like the let­ter “I.” (If you put the beam on its side, it would look like an “H.”)

Mr. Smith tells his audi­ences, “Let’s say we have an imag­i­nary I-​​beam stretch­ing across the con­fer­ence room floor. You’re at one end of the beam and I’m at the other.” Mr. Smith then asks, “Can you walk across the beam with­out falling off?” “Sure,” the audi­ence replies.

Mr. Smith then changes the sce­nario. He says, “What would make a dif­fer­ence in your think­ing is if I took the beam and hung it between the two World Trade Cen­ter tow­ers in New York city, dan­gling sev­eral thou­sands of feet above the ground and braced at both ends.” At this point, he asks, “Would you cross the beam now?” The audi­ence shouts, “Of course not!”

“Would you do it for a hun­dred dol­lars?” adds Mr. Smith. “Would you do it for a thou­sand or even a mil­lion dol­lars?” Now, the last fig­ure does cause some peo­ple in the audi­ence to hes­i­tate a lit­tle bit. But even then, most peo­ple refuse the offer. They value their own life far more than they do the money. “They would far rather be alive than be rich,” as Hyrum would say.

Nev­er­the­less, what Mr. Smith tried to do in this par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion is to have peo­ple reveal their true pri­or­i­ties, espe­cially to them­selves. In an instant, money, which was long thought to be a pri­or­ity, became sec­ondary when their own lives are placed in the scenario.

How­ever, it didn’t end there.

Some peo­ple value other things even greater than their own lives. For instance, after ask­ing the par­ent of young child to par­tic­i­pate, he con­ducted his exer­cise and then said, “What would you say if I kid­napped your child, held a gun to your child’s head, and asked you to cross the beam or else the child suf­fers the con­se­quences? Would you cross it then?” Many par­ents would cross the beam, obvi­ously with a great deal of fear and trep­i­da­tion, but with­out ques­tion. They value their children’s lives before their own.

Mr. Smith, who had been doing this exer­cise flaw­lessly many times in the past, encoun­tered a snag one day. He did his I-​​beam test with a mother of a two year old and asked her to cross the beam. To the amaze­ment of both Mr. Smith and the audi­ence, she refused to cross. When asked why, the mother answered, “If I die, I have nobody to take care of my seven other children.”

As you might imag­ine, there was a tremen­dous sigh of relief that could be felt across the entire room. Nev­er­the­less, the point is that every sin­gle per­son has not only a dif­fer­ent set of val­ues but also a dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of those val­ues. In this case, the mother didn’t want to deprive her seven chil­dren of a mother.

While each person’s set of val­ues may resem­ble one another, the order of impor­tance in which they are placed is clearly an indi­vid­ual process based on many dif­fer­ent fac­tors. One’s expe­ri­ences, edu­ca­tion, philoso­phies, upbring­ing, cul­ture, sex, race, reli­gion, and of course, con­di­tion­ing play very dynamic roles.

This is why there is a third ele­ment to this dis­par­ity between us humans.

In addi­tion to per­sonal val­ues and their pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, a person’s unique­ness is also defined by the man­ner in which he is aligned with his dis­tinct hier­ar­chy of val­ues. This is the rea­son why some peo­ple are gen­uinely moti­vated and love what they do, while oth­ers need con­stant rein­force­ment or a “carrot-​​and-​​stick” sup­port sys­tem. It’s also why some peo­ple can deal with their chal­lenges very eas­ily while oth­ers quit or cut cor­ners when they feel chal­lenged or overwhelmed.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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