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Clay Nelson, Life Balance: Aligning with the World Around You
My assistant recently returned from a vacation that included 21 other family members, and they all stayed in one large house. Even the most patience-filled person could have issues given those circumstances, and it got me thinking about what it would take to have a great vacation with 21 other people (half of whom were children), all with competing agendas.
Before you decide you don’t need to continue reading (since you aren’t insane enough to subject yourself to that kind of craziness), think about your co-workers, dealing with crowds at the airport, or even your own nuclear family. We all have moments when the masses are headed in a direction we either don’t like or don’t agree with. So, what do we do? We take on “creative alignment.”
Creative alignment is an agreement you have with yourself and other people where you find a way to align with the direction they are going, although you may not totally agree or want to be in charge of that direction. It is a “go with the flow” kind of place, and creative alignment is something each of us does every minute of every day, often without even thinking about it.
For instance:
» Stopping at a traffic light when it turns red.
» Sitting at the dinner table wanting dessert first, but you’re served salad.
» Taking your children out to eat burgers, when you really want sushi.
» When you fly, having the liquids in your carry-on luggage in containers no larger than three ounces, all of which fit into a single, quart-size, tip-top clear plastic bag.
The list could go on and on. Each and every day we all are creatively aligning with the world around us without realizing it.
If creative alignment is something we do automatically nearly every waking moment of the day, why have a discussion on it? Because when it comes to the less automatic ways of being and thinking — the situations where emotions are more involved (such as sharing a house for seven days with 21 of your closest relatives) — creative alignment isn’t always what we default to. Yet, when we default to being right or having things our way, no one wins — not even ourselves.
You can be 100 percent right or go your own direction when you choose to, but you also may be all by yourself. Or you can choose to always hang out with people who think exactly the way you do, but you learn nothing. That doesn’t sound like any fun either.
So, rather than having things “my way or the highway,” you give a little, the people around you give a little, everyone gets along, we communicate, we negotiate and we all eventually win. Without creative alignment, someone will always lose something.
Creative alignment is incredibly powerful, and it is nothing more than doing what we need to do so the masses around us get what they need or what is best for the mass. It could be a situation where you simply agree to disagree. The point is that creative alignment is actually a generous place from which to live our lives, and we do ourselves a favor, too, when we realize that some things simply aren’t worth arm-wrestling over.
I’m not saying that you should settle for anything less than what you want and where you want to go. What I am saying is that sometimes we need to make compromises in how we get there.
You may not like stopping at a red traffic light, but why do you do it? Because you know you will get a ticket. You may have strong opinions about the taxes you pay, but why do you pay them? Because if you don’t you’ll go to tax prison. You may really want to fly, but why don’t you jump off cliffs? Because you can’t fly! These are all examples of compromises we make in order to creatively align with the world around us.
When you have a conflict with a person, idea or something you are supposed to do, creative alignment can get you through it, too. And the best part is that you already know how to do it; you do it every day.
Creative alignment is something we take on from the simplest of everyday activities to some of the more difficult things we will tackle in our lifetimes. Yet when it comes to our emotions and personal “want-tos,” if we would get present to how creative alignment serves us, it becomes easier to put our personal emotions aside, stop arm wrestling and become part of the solution, rather than the person who gets to be right all by themselves.
If the world took on creative alignment everywhere all of the time, the planet and the state of billions of lives would be much different today. Think about this article as a call to improve our own corners of the world. As each of us does so, we can make a global difference — one corner at a time.
— Santa Barbara resident Clay Nelson founded Clay Nelson Life Balance™ to provide businesses and individuals with what may be missing in their lives: purpose, personal and business planning, fun, effective delegation through team management, and accountability. Click here to download Clay’s complimentary e-book, The Balanced Life — How to Put Fun, Family and Financial Freedom into Your Business and Personal Life. Click here to subscribe to the free podcast of The Clay Nelson Life Balance™ Hour.
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