To be or not to be self-aligned?

Making choices, making decisions in accordance with our values, keeping up with them over the long term is not an easy task! And yet! What an energy booster! What a feeling of profound well-being when we succeed!

"I dream of managing teams but HR is not convinced!"

"I just passed my bar exam but I'm not sure I want to be a lawyer."

"I'm no longer in line with the values of my company"

"They want to promote me to partner, I don't want to."

"I have achieved all my goals but I'm not happy"

"I absolutely want to change employers, but I don't understand; I only receive negative replies to my applications"

That is the self-talk that sends us the signal that we are not self-aligned and that there is an inconsistency somewhere.

Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and linguist, is the first who gave us keys to understand our inner conflicts with his analysis of the "logical levels". In the 1980s, Robert Dilts, expert in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), formalized them with his famous pyramid, a precious tool to help an individual or an organization to carry out its transformation in a coherent way. At the very top is our purpose and personal mission, then our different identities, then our beliefs, our values, followed by our abilities, our behaviors and finally the environment in which we live.

And then there's Katelyn Ohashi!

When everything is aligned -we are not here talking about planets- but about the harmony between these different levels.

The video, now viral, of the breathtaking performance of this talented 21-year-old Californian gymnast offers us a demonstration of what perfect alignment produces.

Hyper concentrated, totally present at what she does, she performs her choreography with ease and professionalism, giving the impression of great ease and extraordinary fluidity. 

Her ability to manage pressure is exceptional. With the audience (she no longer even needs to ignore it), she creates complicity and feeds on their enthusiasm. Energy is released. 

Katelyn Ohashi is authentic and her enthusiasm is contagious.

The mastery of her art is complete and earns her the highest score from the jury as well as worldwide recognition.

This " peak experience " makes us forget the hidden side of the iceberg: hours of training and strenuous work, injuries, surgical operations, rehabilitation programs, insults about her physique, doubts, temptations to stop everything....

In 1990, Mihali Csikszentmihali, a professor of psychology, defined "Flow": When the body or mind is performing to its limits in a voluntary effort to achieve something difficult and important. According to him, for each of us, there are thousands of opportunities or challenges that can foster our development through the "optimal experience". He established the characteristics: balance between the challenges and our abilities, clear objective, maximum concentration on the task, no distraction, total involvement, immersion in the achievement of one's performance, disappearance of the notion of time, forgetting oneself, wholeness, euphoria, etc.

The secret recipe for top-level performance and growth is therefore our ability to identify personal inconsistencies. It is then up to us to make all the necessary adjustments (of our values, beliefs, behaviors) that will allow us to cultivate alignment and be "in the Flow"!