Alignment: Cliché or Critical?
If you’d asked me eight years ago...
If you’d asked me eight years ago what I thought about the word alignment, I would have told you it was vague, overused, and far too fluffy to mean anything real. It felt like one of those words people threw around when they did not want to commit, when they were unsure, or when they wanted things to feel easy without being willing to do the deeper work.
Back then, I was focused on building, rewiring my mindset, and creating results. Learning how to hold a business that actually worked. I was immersed in the practical, the strategic, the tangible. Alignment sounded like something that belonged in a yoga class, not in operational plans or launch debriefs.
But over time, especially as I began to look back through my own story, my decisions, and the turning points that shaped me, I could see that alignment had been there all along. I just hadn’t known how to recognise it yet.
And most recently, it became impossible to ignore.
I was pregnant with my third child, my daughter, when things began to shift. From the outside, the business looked strong. Multi-six figures, well-respected, fully booked. It was the kind of business most people would describe as successful, solid, enviable even. But inside, I could feel the friction… A quiet resistance... A growing sense of disconnection from what I had built.
It began in small ways. Hesitation before going live, tension in my chest when I opened my calendar, a reluctance to speak about offers I used to love. I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t confused… I was misaligned.
This is the kind of misalignment that hides easily when you are high-functioning.
When everything is technically working.
When people are still buying and your brand still looks polished.
When people lean in and tell you how successful you are, without knowing the internal torment it takes to keep performing a version of yourself you’ve already outgrown.
So I made a choice.
Not to walk away or ‘burn it down’. But to realign. Quietly, intentionally, and with clarity. I brought my business, my voice, my time, and my delivery back into congruence with the identity I wanted to align to - not the one that built the business, but the one I was growing into.
That decision did not come from pressure or urgency, it came from truth, and it shifted everything.
Misalignment rarely shows up in chaos
It shows up in the small things, the micro-moments of everyday.
You feel drained after a client call that should have felt energising.
You procrastinate posting about a programme you used to love.
You feel a tightness in your chest when you look at your calendar, even though it is filled with people and projects you care about. It’s not confusion, it’s not burnout, it’s misalignment. And unless you name it for what it is, you will keep reaching for solutions that don’t touch the root.
What I have come to understand is that we don’t ‘find’ alignment. A deep seated feeling of absence comes first.
We feel it in our body first, we catch the micro-moments where something feels heavy, forced, or distorted, many might call it a ‘gut instinct’. I know for me at least, the feeling came from my gut and moved to my chest. But when you are aware and you catch that feeling in those moments, that’s where the magic lies. The magic of being able to choose to lead yourself forward into alignment.
That is what alignment really is, just a sequence of self-led honest moments and decisions, made again and again, with precision and presence.
It’s not something you stumble into, it’s something you build, moment by moment.
What alignment actually means
The dictionary defines alignment as arranging things in a straight line, or placing them in correct relative position. That definition works well for spreadsheets or furniture, but when it comes to business, identity, energy, and structure, it becomes something deeper.
Alignment, in this context, is the ongoing practice of bringing your actions, decisions, values, and self-concept into congruence. It is the point where the way you show up, the way you build, and the way you hold yourself all reflect the identity you are choosing to align to.
It’s not about perfection, it’s not about always feeling good, it’s about structural and energetic integrity. When your work, your voice, your offers, and your systems are all moving in different directions, your nervous system feels it. Your creativity dulls, your momentum stalls, and no amount of strategy can override that.
What creates sustainable success is not scale. It is coherence. That is what this work is about.
Alignment is critical because misalignment fractures everything
When alignment is missing, the business still works - for a while. But eventually, you begin to notice the leaks. The resentment after calls, the exhaustion through launches, the increasing resistance to showing up, even when everything looks right on paper.
Misalignment erodes the parts of the business you cannot see in your Stripe account. It makes your messaging harder to write. It makes your offers heavier to hold. It makes your decision-making foggy. Eventually, it stops you from trusting your own voice.
And the most dangerous part is that you can still perform through it. You can still create results. You can still hit revenue targets and hold space for others.
But it costs you.
And the longer you perform through misalignment, the more you will disconnect from your power.
That’s why alignment is not a nice-to-have… it is critical to your sustainable success. It’s what separates sustainable expansion from strategic performance. It’s what allows you to lead with clarity instead of pressure, and build something that holds you in return.
You do not need to be in collapse to realign
When I chose to restructure my business, it was not because something was broken, I could have kept going. The systems were working, the clients were happy, the numbers were strong. But the identity I had evolved into was no longer being served by the structure I had created. And that dissonance was costing me energy I was no longer willing to sacrifice.
I didn’t walk away at all, I just chose to rebuild my business in alignment with the identity I wanted to grow into and the life I wanted to lead. And that choice has changed the way I make decisions in every part of my life.
You don’t need to wait until you are burnt out or fed up to realign. You just need to recognise the signs. The friction, the resistance, the places where your actions are no longer in integrity with your truth. The places where the business still relies on a past version of you to function.
This is the work of alignment. Not a cliché, not a surface-level buzzword, but a practice, a structure, a recalibration. A powerful choice to lead yourself in creating the life, the business, and the success that actually reflects your values, your energy, and the identity you want to align to.
And it all begins with awareness.
Not action. Not strategy. Awareness.
The ability to pause long enough to notice the tension, to catch the override, and to name what no longer fits. Without awareness, there is nothing to recalibrate to - no signal to follow, no truth to choose.
This is where we’ll begin next.
In the coming posts, I’ll be walking you deeper into the real architecture of alignment, starting with awareness as the root system behind every honest shift. We’ll explore how misalignment actually feels in the body, how it hides inside high performance, and how to start recalibrating in real time, without needing to burn down what you’ve built.
To aligned decisions, and the life they unlock.
