The Art of Alignment, Part 1: Knowing Yourself and Your Direction

Matthew Gottesman (0:02)

Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.

Welcome to episode 898 and the start of a four-part series on alignment. I think this is a beautiful topic because you hear the word used a lot, but living it is a practice. It requires experience. It requires trial and error. It requires knowing yourself. It requires personal reflection, character development. Know you're non-negotiable is your values, your standards, your principles. You know, there's a lot in here. And I see a lot of them get taught a lot about. And so I was writing about this this morning in four different key areas, and I'm going to tell you what the four parts are, so you know what's going to be coming. But then as I looked at it, I was like, that's like 20 bullet points, because I was doing about five in each. I'm like, all right, let's break this up. Let's break this up into four episodes. This episode is going to be on knowing yourself and your direction, how knowing who you are changes what you're willing to pursue. This is in a lot of things in your life. We're going to go on a nice little tear. Part two in the next episode will be effort, timing, and surrender. Knowing when to keep showing up, when to stop forcing, and what to release. This is in all areas of your life. Knowing when to keep showing up, when to stop forcing, and what to release. Part three will be on relationships and reciprocity. This is for any type of relationship that you have, business, personal, whatever. Recognizing the differences between genuine connection and constantly trying to maintain one. And part four, the art of alignment on growth, peace, and discernment. Learning to make choices that reflect what matters, even when life isn't entirely certain. And guess what? There's a lot of times in life where things don't seem certain, but how do you know what feels right? All right, so we're going to go into all those. We're going to start with part one, knowing yourself and your direction. So I've got five bullet points here I want to tackle. The first one being alignment becomes easier to recognize when you stop needing everything to make sense to everyone else. That's right, not everyone will understand your choices, values, or direction. And the less you need everybody else to understand that, the less you're editing yourself. So you're able to receive the help, receive the guidance, receive the right opportunities, receive the right people, whatever it might be that are actually aligned for you. But if you are needing your choices to make sense to everybody else, you might actually be missing the very things that are in the hands of you that are here to help, right? Other people's definition of success, of how they should do things, all of that stuff does not have to become yours. And so you have to be careful not trying to fit your choices into their path. Their path is theirs, yours is yours. And so, and the reason this is important is because let's say you know what you're doing with career or where you want to live or whatever it might be. And others have a different definition of that. If you're not careful, you can watch how they're making decisions, and that can be the way you end up trying to make yours. Or if they're not necessarily approving of like your decision, well, yeah, but you have a different path. So that may not make sense to mine.

So alignment, the things that are for you become easier when you stop needing everything to make sense to somebody else. Why are you doing that way? Well, that's what I think is going to make sense to me. Like, well, that's not how you do it. Like, well, no, that's not how you do it. But this actually might be the path that feels more aligned for what I'm trying to do with what I'm trying to create. Well, it's never been done that way before. I'm like, well, that's because we're all unique individuals, and I'm trying to bring my own unique taste to it. I mean, aren't we all supposed to be differentiated in the market, quote unquote, from the business term? Right? So let me bring my own uniqueness to it.

And finally, on this point, and this is very important, is that the less external approval you need, the easier it becomes to trust your own judgment. I think that that's gotta be the most important part of this point. The less external approval you need, the easier it becomes to trust your own judgment. You need time and practice making decisions that feel good to you. Now, will they always be right? No.