A little more than ten years ago, I started my self-mastery process, and like many, I was eager to go deeper. I went online, and Google provided me millions of results featuring practices and applicable concepts like yoga, gratefulness, meditation, visualization, Reiki, Tai Chi, chakra energy, high vibration, journaling, healthy eating, and many more!
At that point, I wanted to do it all because my focus was to reach that place of experiencing a better life. However, the broader I went, the list of to-do overflowed any notebook that I could get my hands on. Quickly, I found myself not knowing how to start and what to do about my new resolution of being the best version of me.
The list of things available to support our self-mastery process is there, a click away, but how can we tackle all those in real life?
The truth is that our self-improvement process has to happen parallel to everything else. Which means going to work, making lunch, cleaning the house, laundry, taking the kids to school, studying for the final test, preparing the documents for the next meeting, etc.
It’s clear that we don’t have 24 hours available every day for this amazing journey. And based on my experience, that wouldn’t be enough either considering the number of things I wanted to do back then. So, how do we make it happen? How do we start our transformational process if getting 15 minutes for ourselves can be already a big challenge?
By allowing ourselves to be guided.
This principle doesn’t apply only for when we are getting started on the personal evolution path. It’s actually going to be key for the never-ending learning process we are embarking on.
Vibrational Match and Alignment are two concepts to understand to be strategic in our self-development process and harvest results faster. Don’t get me wrong! Personal evolution is not fast food, but it doesn’t have to be daunting, and allowing our inner guides to support our journey will make the road less bumpy.
Vibrational match and Alignment.
Not everything to which we are exposed to will grab our attention. Many things might be too cuckoo for our current level of transformation, but many will make sense, and we will want to embrace all of those. The latter, are the ones that are a Vibrational Match for us at that specific moment. However, it doesn’t mean we are Aligned with them, and that we will be able to grow by practicing those.
Alignment is when everything makes sense and flows. At this point, our human experience will provide many hints through mortal concepts like price, time availability, technology access, date, resources, budget, location, language, etc.
I mean by this, that whatever we feel will propel our improvement, if we are aligned with it, it will manifest and be obtainable with ease.
It might look like a Chakra course that usually is $499, and you can’t picture yourself making that investment at that point. But then, you discover it offers a payment option that, despite it means getting out of your comfort zone, makes sense, and it’s doable.
Or, it might present as getting an exclusive invitation to an excellent opportunity to immerse yourself in transformation, but the time requirement surpasses your availability. You get frustrated and instruct yourself to let it go. Yet, without knowing why, the idea of asking X person to help out keeps popping on your head.
That’s the language of our inner guidance, inspiration. Follow those and take action. Sometimes it will present the solution right away, and some other times it will guide you to another set of steps that will finally provide what you need at that time.
The key is to don’t get obsessed with what your ego wants to do, and allow your wiser self to guide you in what you should invite into your life.
By listening to our inner guidance, the list of things to do will reduce substantially, and we will see that only a handful of practices are waiting for us.
Next step, human translation.
This is a critical step because the thrill of change usually motivates us to quickly pack our days with new things we want to do. By considering the plenty of avatars that compose the human life, and how they impact our goal of creating a new us, we will give ourselves a chance of reaching the next level of consciousness.
Let’s say you are determined to kickstart your mornings and decide to commit yourself to wake up earlier, meditate for 20 minutes, do a quick yoga class, have a healthy smoothie for breakfast, journal while drinking it, and observe your manifestation board for 3 minutes. For an overstimulated mind, you can pull that off. Still, from a more rational perspective, it’s easy to see how unsustainable it can be an operation that demands to carve out 1.5 hours of a busy daily schedule.
Even with just one goal, real-life will kick in and take us out of track. Picture this. Your inner self guided you to sign up for that meditation challenge. You are excited about it, and that stimulation will support the transformation process for the first couple of days, but then, the unexpected will show up. You might want to sleep in a bit more, and the guided meditation will end up not being included in the morning routine. In the best-case scenario, your will may get you back on track that same night helping you to catch up, but the busy 24-hours will still be there, and next time, you’ll be so exhausted from pushing yourself that the practice will fade.
This happens because of a typical behaviour that Tony Robbins described very well in his quote, “most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.”
Since we live in a fast-paced world and are bombarded by the overperformance that advertising sells, we do the same thing even on a smaller scale of 1 hour. We tend to overload our agendas with things-to-do, forgetting that the core goal of the self-improvement journey is to be – I want to be happy, I want to feel better.
Most of what we think we have to do, we don't have to do at all, and even less when the purpose is to reach a feeling.
Human translation focuses on unframing the mindful discipline we want to acquire and adding a bit of flexibility. In short, it’s a step where we are invited to don’t push ourselves to the “ideal” practice, and instead, live by the premise of under-promising and over-delivering.
Let’s take the meditation challenge sample and strain it through what could easily be your itinerary.
- Monday. Production meeting at 6 a.m. sharp.
- Tuesday. Last class ends at 9 p.m. Tuesday
- Friday. Driving your daughter to singing lessons early morning
Mondays already start way too early and smashing another task early morning doesn’t make sense, waking up every Wednesday to meditate isn’t viable because you will be tired from last night’s class, and Fridays are a no-no because you are committed to driving your daughter. In this case, aim to meditate twice a week.
The purpose is to avoid forcing yourself to do it four days a week and trash talk you later because you missed one day.
Under-commit and allow yourself to feel empowered by reaching the goal every week, you will see that just feeling proud is the best accountability partner. And if based on the example, you can squeeze in a Tuesday, you will feel like a champion, which will fuel you and push you a step forward.
Starting your self-improvement journey and sticking to it requires compassion and humbleness. You don’t have to be perfect form day one; you only need to start and set yourself up for success. Remember, this path is about BEing a better you, not DOing another you.