Alignment

Alignment is about fine-tuning between efforts, factual circumstances, and personal skills and characteristics. Usually it is an intuitive quality, related to sensitivity. But it may be strengthened and fostered. What can be done about it?

The first thing is to be perceptive. In any situation that requires your own judgement, go to the spot, whenever possible. See the real situation and the real people working there. Look and hear and listen and feel. Get the smell. Hold things in your hand. Don’t be in a hurry. Take your time.
The second thing is to combine concentration with ease. Accomplish any task with undivided attention and a minimum of distraction and interruption. Avoid over-involvement if you can. Retain always some slack and ease. Pay attention to your bodily reactions - and those of others.
The third thing is to get rid of obsolete procedures and practices. Seek always the course of minimal resistance which brings you to your goal. Piggyback on available facilities and opportunities.

There is a simple recipe that covers all this, although it may be difficult to attain that simplicity: be in flow. Alignment brings flow. Flow brings alignment. How do you know that you are in flow? Because you forget the time.

Remove everything that hinders you to be in flow. If you can. If you can’t, at least minimize the frictions. Minimize your inner frictions: irritation, disappointment, deception, worry. If you can’t, consider to remove yourself. No use staying somewhere where alignment is made impossible. They say that wherever we go, we are always taking ourselves with us. That is true, but only a half-truth. Because wherever we stay, we absorb a lot of the conditions around us. The main thing is the irritation, disappointment, deception, worry of other people.

What are handicaps for alignment? The worst are also handicaps for all other aspect of Personal Mastery that I discussed before: clear-mindedness, decisiveness, equanimity and energy. This is my shortlist of common horrors:

  1. Dominating, condemning, manipulative bosses.
  2. Overly rigid systems. Too many rules and regulations.
  3. Sad dogs spreading gloom
  4. Your own over-qualification or under-qualification for the job.
  5. Bad health.

Get moving. get back into flow.

Clear-mindedness

My program about Personal Mastery starts with clear-mindedness. I can't think of any human endeavor in which a clear mind is not an asset. To use our intellect, but also to use our intuition, calm and clear-mindedness help. And if we are very emotional? When we are depressed, very much irritated, deeply worried, radiantly happy or simply in love? Even then clear-mindedness helps. Not to get out of this emotional state, but to experience it fully. When we are clear-minded about our anger, the anger is not less, but different. The difference is between being on an only half-tamed horse as a sack of potatoes that curses the horse or as an accomplished rider who values the horse. Facts are as they are. Our emotions are as they are. And we face them.
So why would we prefer to be 'vague-minded' or drowsy? To dull our awareness, to lessen responsibility, to lessen pain. Clear-mindedness is experiencing things without anesthetics - and without stimulants. Clear-mindedness is to be without drugs, physical or psychological.
Clear-mindedness may be painful: when the facts are painful, when our emotions are painful. But to stay clear-minded is the fastest way out of the pain. Clear-mindedness is the best catalyst of transformation. The enemies of clear-mindedness are irritation, worry, disappointment and self-pity. And raw fear.
In workshops we have the participants find out when they need clear-mindedness the most in their work or in their life, which external factors and which personal factors foster clear-mindedness and which external and internal factors lessen clear-mindedness. A clear-minded view on these factors brings the mind to rest. Our mental representation of the world comes to rest and the fog dissolves. Facing the facts, facing the different personalities with their different backgrounds and views and interests. Facing our own personality, our own background, our own views, our own interests. When our mind is clear, we find our way better, we see the wood from the trees, we realize what we are doing in this wood. Maybe just getting lost.
Without clear-mindedness visions and goals remain blurred and limited and shifting. Clear-mindedness lifts us out of the mire, creates the firm ground we seek. From clear-mindedness we may pursue the other aspects of personal mastery: equanimity, decisiveness, energy and alignment.