149. Desire vs Alignment vs Obligation
If you’re like most people, you’ve got something on your to-do list you keep avoiding.
Maybe it’s something you want to do, maybe it’s a necessary step towards a desired outcome, maybe it’s some requirement of being a human being in the year 2023.
Let’s be honest, there’s probably several things that fit this category.
(And full disclosure, I experience this, too. A lot of what I teach and talk about comes up as I deal with my own human self while building my particular delicious life.)
So how do you move forward when you have 1-23,000 things you’re avoiding working on?
One framework that I’ve found to be useful in situations like this is understanding the difference between desire, alignment, and obligation.
Desire can be confusing because there’s the thing you want to work towards and then there’s the thing you want to do in the moment.
Like wanting to double your revenue, but in the moment wanting to reread Pride and Prejudice instead of sending out proposals.
Or wanting to cultivate a deeper intimacy with your partner, but in the moment wanting to watch TikToks instead of having a difficult conversation.
Or wanting to have more close friends, but in the moment wanting to scroll on insta and compare yourself to folks who seem like they have super satisfying friendships instead of actually putting yourself out there in any way whatsoever.
This is where alignment comes in handy.
Alignment helps you choose actions that will move you towards where you want to be, even if those actions are not what you feel like doing in the moment.
Alignment is literally the only thing that gets me to go grocery shopping.
I don’t want to get up from the couch and go, but grocery shopping is aligned, so I do it.
It’s a gift to my future self, to stock my fridge and freezer with yummy food and drinks.
I don’t depend on wanting to go, because I never want to.
But I do want to have food at home. So it’s an overall desire, even if it’s never an in-the-moment desire.
Thinking through the lens of alignment helps you understand and choose activities you want to be done, even in in-the-moment you never wants to do them.
It also helps you stop waiting til you magically want to do them, because that day is not coming.
You simply choose to do them (or outsource them) and then you praise the sh*t out of yourself for choosing alignment and working to create the things you really, really want (vs the things you feel like doing in any given moment).
To learn more about alignment and how to use it (and what all of this has to do with obligation), be sure to catch this week’s podcast.
It’s going to help you actually make progress on those 1-23,000 things you’ve been putting off.
If you want to join me for an in-person deep dive day where we coach all day on whatever you want, DM me on Instagram or send me an email to find out more!
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
The difference between desire, alignment, and obligation.
Examples of how you might operate based on in-the-moment desire, alignment, and obligation.
Where obligation comes from.
What happens when you make decisions and take actions from a place of alignment.
How to begin moving closer towards alignment.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about desire, alignment, and obligation.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. It is Friday for me. I know it’s Wednesday for you, but it’s Friday for me when I’m recording this and I’m so excited because tomorrow my best friend is flying in from China. Now, by the time y’all hear this, this trip will have come and gone already because I’m batching my podcasts early so that I will be able to spend time with my friend and not have to record podcasts, and also because we’re traveling this month.
But I want to tell you what’s going on for me right now, so I’m going to do that. So my bestie has been living in China for years teaching English. And I think it’s been really great for her. But I haven’t seen her in a really long time and so she’s coming tomorrow and she’s staying with us for two weeks and I’m fucking stoked.
And, like I said, I’m recording a bunch of my podcasts ahead because the room I usually record my podcast in is the room she’ll be staying in, so we want to give her all the space and not have to be like, “Oh, can I come in and record a podcast?” So just getting these recorded early.
And I also have so many things I want to talk to y’all about right now, so it feels easy right now to record all these podcasts and that’s fun and I want to take advantage of that because creativity ebbs and flows and the things I want to talk about ebb and flow. So I’m kind of always keeping a tally of things to record podcasts on, but when I’m feeling really talky, really in the podcast mood it’s fun to record a bunch and kind of like capture and take advantage of that feeling or state.
Which kind of relates to what we’re going to talk about today. Today we’re talking about desire, alignment, and obligation. And I think this is going to be really interesting and I think it’s going to be really helpful for you as well. So something that comes up a lot in coaching is I want to do this thing, but I don’t ever do it. Or I want to do this thing, but I don’t feel motivated. Or I want to do this thing but when I sit down to do it I don’t want to do it.
Or I want to do this thing but instead of sitting down to do it I do all this other shit that I kind of don’t want to be doing, like scrolling Instagram or watching 78 Netflix shows in a row. Or some of y’all do what I call procrastiworking where you’re like, I want to do this thing but instead I’ll do all this other productive shit. I’ll do all these loads of laundry and unload the dishwasher and load the dishwasher but not do the thing you actually really want to do, like maybe sit down and write a novel or whatever it is for you.
And so I think a lot of us think a lot about what do I want to do and we think a lot about what should I do? And I think fewer of us or less of the time are we talking about what’s in alignment. What’s in alignment with my goals? What’s in alignment with the kind of person I want to be? What’s in alignment with the kind of life I want to live?
And I think the frame of alignment can be a really, really helpful, and beneficial one. So let’s take an easy example. So a lot of us want to get up early but when it’s time to get up early we do not want to get up early. And listen, I understand because I wake up before my alarm sometimes and I’m just like laying there and it’s all cozy and it’s warm in the covers but it’s going to be cold outside of the covers.
So even though there might be part of me that wants to get out of bed because I want to go take a walk or I want to go take a bike ride or I want to do my physical therapy exercises, there’s this other part of me that does not want to get out of bed.
I’ve talked about this before and sometimes I call it in the moment brain, right? Like planning brain is we should get up at 5, but in the moment brain is like, fuck you, I’m going to stay in bed, right? And so when we have this desire where the desire wants to do multiple different things, it can be kind of confusing, right? We’re like if I want to get up so bad, why do I also not want to get up?
And that’s part of why I think this framework of desire vs alignment can be so useful. So in the moment desire is often going to be to not expend energy. In the moment desire is often going to be to experience pleasure. Or in the moment desire might be to avoid pain, to avoid discomfort, to avoid difficulty, right?
So if you want to write your novel but you also worry that other people might not like it or maybe it won’t be very good, of course, in the moment brand is like, that sounds painful, I don’t want to do that. Also, it seems like it’s going to cost energy, I don’t want to spend that. What if we watch TikToks instead, right?
So I do think desire is really valuable and really beautiful, but there’s in the moment desire and then there’s overall life desire, right? Like I’m a person who sometimes struggles to go to bed. And so in the moment desire might say, stay up, let’s keep playing or whatever. Overall life desire, which is kind of that alignment piece, that overall desire is like, I want that eight to 10 hours of sleep.
So alignment then is alignment to my goals, to my vision, to the overall desire, to my wildly satisfying life, to being deeply delighted, right? Versus in the moment desire is just usually what would be convenient, what would be easy, what’s going to feel the most good or the least bad right now.
Okay, but this podcast is also about obligation. So when I was originally conceiving of this podcast, it was just going to be desire versus alignment. And I was telling Alex about it, and she was like, what about obligation? And I was like, oh, that’s brilliant because so many people do things out of obligation also, right? They’re like, I have to, or I should, right? I think, should is actually what she said, what about the word should?
But I kind of frame should as obligation, right? Like this is what I should do. This is what I must do. This is what I have to do. And I love to question shoulds. I love to question obligations. Do we really have to do that? Do we really want to do that? Why are we doing that?
But I think it’s another layer into the framing, right? It’s like, in any given moment there’s what in the moment desire wants to do. There’s what actually aligns to who you want to be and the kind of life you want to live. And then there’s what you feel compelled to do, because of obligation, right?
And where does that obligation come from? A lot of it comes from how you were socialized in your family and what you were taught by your specific parents. But it can also come from how you were socialized in our culture at large and what you were taught by society. And it can also come from what area of the country you grew up in or what books and media you consumed, right?
We all have different ideas about what we should do. But should is about obligation. It’s not about your desire and it’s not about alignment. Well, actually, sometimes it kind of is about alignment, I guess. I hadn’t thought this through before the podcast, but let’s go there. We love to just think on the fly.
So yeah, if you have certain goals and visions your brain actually might come in with should. Like if you want to feel good at five in the morning, you should go to bed. The thing is, the word should, for me, often makes me feel resentful. Often I feel like someone is putting something on me, right? Someone is making demands of me, even if it’s me. Versus alignment kind of feels more delicious. It feels more empowered, it feels more choosy, right? I’m choosing this.
So in the moment desire is like this is what I feel like doing. Should and obligation are like, this is what you should be doing if you want to be successful, if you want to be a good person, if you want to be liked, if you want to be loved. It’s a lot of pressure, right? Whereas alignment is all about you. If you’re aligning to yourself, I guess you could be aligning to something else. And I would invite you to maybe stop and think about if that’s what you really want to do.
But when you’re aligning to you, it’s like thinking through like, okay, who do I want to be as a person? What kind of life do I want to have? What would be wildly satisfying to me? What would be delicious to me? How do I want my career to go? How do I want my relationships to go? What do I want my house to be like? What do I want my habits to be like? And then how can I align to that? How can I make aligned choices?
Now, real life is not like a podcast. So things are probably not going to fall 100% neatly into buckets, like this is 100% in the moment desire, and this is 100% alignment, and this is 100% obligation. In real life it might be kind of more blurry. But I think about how can you be moving from wherever you are to like 5% more alignment, 6% more alignment? Moving a little closer to alignment from obligation. Moving a little bit closer to alignment from in the moment desire.
Not that there’s anything wrong with in the moment desire, it’s just usually not going to help us get to the thing we’re dreaming of, or the thing we’re envisioning. In the moment desire usually kind of keeps things the same or maybe even takes us out of our habits, right? Like I have a lot of habits that I think are super helpful and in the moment desire often comes in and is like, what if we don’t do that?
I do think if you’ve set a habit up it’s easier to do the thing, and I don’t know about your brain but for my brain at least my brain is still, like I do physical therapy most days like little activities, little workout things. And most of the time my brain is like, oh yeah, we just do those every day. But sometimes it’ll be like, what if we didn’t? It’ll be like, what if we didn’t do it just today? Or what if we didn’t do it just this week, right?
So my little in the moment desire will kind of come and see if it can separate me from my habits and separate me from my progress. And so sometimes it’s even not upholding the status quo, it’s even like knocking the status quo down and taking me further away from where I want to be.
And I think obligation, the thing about obligation is it’s kind of like using anxiety as fuel. Sometimes you can create stuff that looks really cool for a little bit, but it usually has some not so great side effects, right? A lot of times when we’re doing stuff out of obligation we burn out or we become resentful. Or we’re successful but it turns out that the success we’re creating doesn’t actually fit with what we want to have and be and do. So that’s just something to be aware of and keep your eye out for.
Let’s look at a few more examples. An example I talk about all the time is almost never do I actually want to drive to the grocery store and do the grocery shopping. I do drive to the grocery store and do the grocery shopping even though I know I could use something like Instacart because I like being the one who picks up my own groceries.
And once I’m there I kind of like looking at all the stuff. I like looking at all the produce. I like seeing what interesting new products are available. But in the moment I’m never like, yeah. I’m usually like, no, right? In the moment brain would totally rather sit on the couch and watch TikToks for four hours. But alignment is like I want to have the food that I want to have in the house and so I’m going to do it.
And obligation could come in also and be like you should do this and you should do that, and you should do it that way. But I don’t really feel obligation that much about this task anymore, so I can’t even really imagine where it would fit in. But I’m sure it does. And it used to back in the day for me probably, like you should go grocery shopping at this time or in this way. But it doesn’t really show up for me in that area anymore.
Now, let’s take a work example. Let’s say you need to have an important conversation with your boss, right? Obligation brain actually may come in and go like, you really need to have that conversation. But if that doesn’t feel empowered, if it doesn’t feel like you’re choosing that, then you might be like, no, I don’t want to have that conversation, right?
In the moment desire is probably like, I don’t want to. I’d rather play Candy Crush or check Facebook, or do something that’s not going to feel emotionally and mentally taxing. But if you have alignment, you can think about what do I want to have happen and what’s aligned to that? Like what kind of relationship do I want to have with my boss? Who do I want to be in my work life?
And you could decide, oh, actually, it’s not aligned for me to have that conversation and then, okay, so maybe we don’t. But if it is aligned, I think you’ll find it’s easier to get yourself to do it if you’re doing it from a place of alignment and you feel empowered and you feel like you’re choosing on purpose. Not because you have to or you should, but because it matches who you want to be and the kind of life you want to create and the kind of career you want to have and the kind of relationships you want to have at work.
Okay, let’s look at one more example. Let’s say you have a parenting situation where your kid is doing something, you don’t like it. But in the moment brain is like, it’s easier just to not fight with them. And then obligation brain is like, if you were a better parent, that sounds actually more like a judgy brain.
But judgy and obligation brain can kind of go together, right? If you were a better parent, your kid wouldn’t be doing this. Or obligation brain could come in and be like, oh my God, it’s mandatory that your kid never does that again, that reflects badly on you. You have to punish them.
But then you can think about what does alignment brain say? Making the choice from alignment might be like, part of me doesn’t want to deal with this right now. But I know it’s actually in deeper alignment for me to address this with my child, even though it’s going to be inconvenient and emotionally taxing.
And I’m going to address it with love and care because that’s in alignment versus the obligation brain might be just trying to shut down the kid’s behavior, which a lot of us were parented in that way where we were parented to shut down the behavior. But then the parent just didn’t see that behavior anymore. It didn’t teach us as the children how to actually handle things differently.
So if you’re in alignment, you might be choosing a different style of parenting or a different style of engaging with your child about unwanted behavior that they’re displaying.
Okay, so you have lots of examples. And I think this is going to be super helpful for you. Just think about an area in your life where you struggle to do something and think about like, oh, how much of that struggle is in the moment desire? And how much of the struggle is not being clear on the alignment? And how much of the struggle is getting wrapped up in the obligation aspect versus like the empowered choice aspect.
And then see how this framing can help you make different choices and bring you closer to that wildly satisfying for you life and career. I’m so excited to hear how you use this tool to create more of what you want in your life, so come send me an email or come talk to me on Instagram and tell me all about how you’re using this and what you’re accomplishing with it.
And if you want more tools like this and you want my brain laser focused on whatever you’re doing, as you kind of bring your life and career into alignment with your satisfying as fuck of vision for what they could be, come sign up for a consult call and let’s talk all about how you can do that. And if it sounds like a good fit, I’ll tell you how you can work with me to support you in your efforts.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all today. Thank you so much and have a lovely week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. It is Friday for me. I know it’s Wednesday for you, but it’s Friday for me when I’m recording this and I’m so excited because tomorrow my best friend is flying in from China. Now, by the time y’all hear this, this trip will have come and gone already because I’m batching my podcasts early so that I will be able to spend time with my friend and not have to record podcasts, and also because we’re traveling this month.
But I want to tell you what’s going on for me right now, so I’m going to do that. So my bestie has been living in China for years teaching English. And I think it’s been really great for her. But I haven’t seen her in a really long time and so she’s coming tomorrow and she’s staying with us for two weeks and I’m fucking stoked.
And, like I said, I’m recording a bunch of my podcasts ahead because the room I usually record my podcast in is the room she’ll be staying in, so we want to give her all the space and not have to be like, “Oh, can I come in and record a podcast?” So just getting these recorded early.
And I also have so many things I want to talk to y’all about right now, so it feels easy right now to record all these podcasts and that’s fun and I want to take advantage of that because creativity ebbs and flows and the things I want to talk about ebb and flow. So I’m kind of always keeping a tally of things to record podcasts on, but when I’m feeling really talky, really in the podcast mood it’s fun to record a bunch and kind of like capture and take advantage of that feeling or state.
Which kind of relates to what we’re going to talk about today. Today we’re talking about desire, alignment, and obligation. And I think this is going to be really interesting and I think it’s going to be really helpful for you as well. So something that comes up a lot in coaching is I want to do this thing, but I don’t ever do it. Or I want to do this thing, but I don’t feel motivated. Or I want to do this thing but when I sit down to do it I don’t want to do it.
Or I want to do this thing but instead of sitting down to do it I do all this other shit that I kind of don’t want to be doing, like scrolling Instagram or watching 78 Netflix shows in a row. Or some of y’all do what I call procrastiworking where you’re like, I want to do this thing but instead I’ll do all this other productive shit. I’ll do all these loads of laundry and unload the dishwasher and load the dishwasher but not do the thing you actually really want to do, like maybe sit down and write a novel or whatever it is for you.
And so I think a lot of us think a lot about what do I want to do and we think a lot about what should I do? And I think fewer of us or less of the time are we talking about what’s in alignment. What’s in alignment with my goals? What’s in alignment with the kind of person I want to be? What’s in alignment with the kind of life I want to live?
And I think the frame of alignment can be a really, really helpful, and beneficial one. So let’s take an easy example. So a lot of us want to get up early but when it’s time to get up early we do not want to get up early. And listen, I understand because I wake up before my alarm sometimes and I’m just like laying there and it’s all cozy and it’s warm in the covers but it’s going to be cold outside of the covers.
So even though there might be part of me that wants to get out of bed because I want to go take a walk or I want to go take a bike ride or I want to do my physical therapy exercises, there’s this other part of me that does not want to get out of bed.
I’ve talked about this before and sometimes I call it in the moment brain, right? Like planning brain is we should get up at 5, but in the moment brain is like, fuck you, I’m going to stay in bed, right? And so when we have this desire where the desire wants to do multiple different things, it can be kind of confusing, right? We’re like if I want to get up so bad, why do I also not want to get up?
And that’s part of why I think this framework of desire vs alignment can be so useful. So in the moment desire is often going to be to not expend energy. In the moment desire is often going to be to experience pleasure. Or in the moment desire might be to avoid pain, to avoid discomfort, to avoid difficulty, right?
So if you want to write your novel but you also worry that other people might not like it or maybe it won’t be very good, of course, in the moment brand is like, that sounds painful, I don’t want to do that. Also, it seems like it’s going to cost energy, I don’t want to spend that. What if we watch TikToks instead, right?
So I do think desire is really valuable and really beautiful, but there’s in the moment desire and then there’s overall life desire, right? Like I’m a person who sometimes struggles to go to bed. And so in the moment desire might say, stay up, let’s keep playing or whatever. Overall life desire, which is kind of that alignment piece, that overall desire is like, I want that eight to 10 hours of sleep.
So alignment then is alignment to my goals, to my vision, to the overall desire, to my wildly satisfying life, to being deeply delighted, right? Versus in the moment desire is just usually what would be convenient, what would be easy, what’s going to feel the most good or the least bad right now.
Okay, but this podcast is also about obligation. So when I was originally conceiving of this podcast, it was just going to be desire versus alignment. And I was telling Alex about it, and she was like, what about obligation? And I was like, oh, that’s brilliant because so many people do things out of obligation also, right? They’re like, I have to, or I should, right? I think, should is actually what she said, what about the word should?
But I kind of frame should as obligation, right? Like this is what I should do. This is what I must do. This is what I have to do. And I love to question shoulds. I love to question obligations. Do we really have to do that? Do we really want to do that? Why are we doing that?
But I think it’s another layer into the framing, right? It’s like, in any given moment there’s what in the moment desire wants to do. There’s what actually aligns to who you want to be and the kind of life you want to live. And then there’s what you feel compelled to do, because of obligation, right?
And where does that obligation come from? A lot of it comes from how you were socialized in your family and what you were taught by your specific parents. But it can also come from how you were socialized in our culture at large and what you were taught by society. And it can also come from what area of the country you grew up in or what books and media you consumed, right?
We all have different ideas about what we should do. But should is about obligation. It’s not about your desire and it’s not about alignment. Well, actually, sometimes it kind of is about alignment, I guess. I hadn’t thought this through before the podcast, but let’s go there. We love to just think on the fly.
So yeah, if you have certain goals and visions your brain actually might come in with should. Like if you want to feel good at five in the morning, you should go to bed. The thing is, the word should, for me, often makes me feel resentful. Often I feel like someone is putting something on me, right? Someone is making demands of me, even if it’s me. Versus alignment kind of feels more delicious. It feels more empowered, it feels more choosy, right? I’m choosing this.
So in the moment desire is like this is what I feel like doing. Should and obligation are like, this is what you should be doing if you want to be successful, if you want to be a good person, if you want to be liked, if you want to be loved. It’s a lot of pressure, right? Whereas alignment is all about you. If you’re aligning to yourself, I guess you could be aligning to something else. And I would invite you to maybe stop and think about if that’s what you really want to do.
But when you’re aligning to you, it’s like thinking through like, okay, who do I want to be as a person? What kind of life do I want to have? What would be wildly satisfying to me? What would be delicious to me? How do I want my career to go? How do I want my relationships to go? What do I want my house to be like? What do I want my habits to be like? And then how can I align to that? How can I make aligned choices?
Now, real life is not like a podcast. So things are probably not going to fall 100% neatly into buckets, like this is 100% in the moment desire, and this is 100% alignment, and this is 100% obligation. In real life it might be kind of more blurry. But I think about how can you be moving from wherever you are to like 5% more alignment, 6% more alignment? Moving a little closer to alignment from obligation. Moving a little bit closer to alignment from in the moment desire.
Not that there’s anything wrong with in the moment desire, it’s just usually not going to help us get to the thing we’re dreaming of, or the thing we’re envisioning. In the moment desire usually kind of keeps things the same or maybe even takes us out of our habits, right? Like I have a lot of habits that I think are super helpful and in the moment desire often comes in and is like, what if we don’t do that?
I do think if you’ve set a habit up it’s easier to do the thing, and I don’t know about your brain but for my brain at least my brain is still, like I do physical therapy most days like little activities, little workout things. And most of the time my brain is like, oh yeah, we just do those every day. But sometimes it’ll be like, what if we didn’t? It’ll be like, what if we didn’t do it just today? Or what if we didn’t do it just this week, right?
So my little in the moment desire will kind of come and see if it can separate me from my habits and separate me from my progress. And so sometimes it’s even not upholding the status quo, it’s even like knocking the status quo down and taking me further away from where I want to be.
And I think obligation, the thing about obligation is it’s kind of like using anxiety as fuel. Sometimes you can create stuff that looks really cool for a little bit, but it usually has some not so great side effects, right? A lot of times when we’re doing stuff out of obligation we burn out or we become resentful. Or we’re successful but it turns out that the success we’re creating doesn’t actually fit with what we want to have and be and do. So that’s just something to be aware of and keep your eye out for.
Let’s look at a few more examples. An example I talk about all the time is almost never do I actually want to drive to the grocery store and do the grocery shopping. I do drive to the grocery store and do the grocery shopping even though I know I could use something like Instacart because I like being the one who picks up my own groceries.
And once I’m there I kind of like looking at all the stuff. I like looking at all the produce. I like seeing what interesting new products are available. But in the moment I’m never like, yeah. I’m usually like, no, right? In the moment brain would totally rather sit on the couch and watch TikToks for four hours. But alignment is like I want to have the food that I want to have in the house and so I’m going to do it.
And obligation could come in also and be like you should do this and you should do that, and you should do it that way. But I don’t really feel obligation that much about this task anymore, so I can’t even really imagine where it would fit in. But I’m sure it does. And it used to back in the day for me probably, like you should go grocery shopping at this time or in this way. But it doesn’t really show up for me in that area anymore.
Now, let’s take a work example. Let’s say you need to have an important conversation with your boss, right? Obligation brain actually may come in and go like, you really need to have that conversation. But if that doesn’t feel empowered, if it doesn’t feel like you’re choosing that, then you might be like, no, I don’t want to have that conversation, right?
In the moment desire is probably like, I don’t want to. I’d rather play Candy Crush or check Facebook, or do something that’s not going to feel emotionally and mentally taxing. But if you have alignment, you can think about what do I want to have happen and what’s aligned to that? Like what kind of relationship do I want to have with my boss? Who do I want to be in my work life?
And you could decide, oh, actually, it’s not aligned for me to have that conversation and then, okay, so maybe we don’t. But if it is aligned, I think you’ll find it’s easier to get yourself to do it if you’re doing it from a place of alignment and you feel empowered and you feel like you’re choosing on purpose. Not because you have to or you should, but because it matches who you want to be and the kind of life you want to create and the kind of career you want to have and the kind of relationships you want to have at work.
Okay, let’s look at one more example. Let’s say you have a parenting situation where your kid is doing something, you don’t like it. But in the moment brain is like, it’s easier just to not fight with them. And then obligation brain is like, if you were a better parent, that sounds actually more like a judgy brain.
But judgy and obligation brain can kind of go together, right? If you were a better parent, your kid wouldn’t be doing this. Or obligation brain could come in and be like, oh my God, it’s mandatory that your kid never does that again, that reflects badly on you. You have to punish them.
But then you can think about what does alignment brain say? Making the choice from alignment might be like, part of me doesn’t want to deal with this right now. But I know it’s actually in deeper alignment for me to address this with my child, even though it’s going to be inconvenient and emotionally taxing.
And I’m going to address it with love and care because that’s in alignment versus the obligation brain might be just trying to shut down the kid’s behavior, which a lot of us were parented in that way where we were parented to shut down the behavior. But then the parent just didn’t see that behavior anymore. It didn’t teach us as the children how to actually handle things differently.
So if you’re in alignment, you might be choosing a different style of parenting or a different style of engaging with your child about unwanted behavior that they’re displaying.
Okay, so you have lots of examples. And I think this is going to be super helpful for you. Just think about an area in your life where you struggle to do something and think about like, oh, how much of that struggle is in the moment desire? And how much of the struggle is not being clear on the alignment? And how much of the struggle is getting wrapped up in the obligation aspect versus like the empowered choice aspect.
And then see how this framing can help you make different choices and bring you closer to that wildly satisfying for you life and career. I’m so excited to hear how you use this tool to create more of what you want in your life, so come send me an email or come talk to me on Instagram and tell me all about how you’re using this and what you’re accomplishing with it.
And if you want more tools like this and you want my brain laser focused on whatever you’re doing, as you kind of bring your life and career into alignment with your satisfying as fuck of vision for what they could be, come sign up for a consult call and let’s talk all about how you can do that. And if it sounds like a good fit, I’ll tell you how you can work with me to support you in your efforts.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all today. Thank you so much and have a lovely week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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