The Power of Alignment
Lean into Your Values
In the past three months, I’ve joined three coaching groups.
It started when I got an email from a business alignment coach offering a Relax and Refocus Retreat. I, along with a few other female small-business owners, went to a 5-hour retreat at the coach’s home. During the retreat, I mentioned I had two businesses - a college admissions coaching business and Happy Asian Woman.
The Coach said, “Everyone has one core business.”
That sent me into a minor panic. Which business would I drop?
In the process of talking to the Coach and other attendees, I realized that my college admissions coaching business is an extension of Happy Asian Woman. You could call it Happy (Asian) Kid because I’m teaching the same principles I’m sharing for Happy Asian Woman — mental wellness, mental strength, owning one’s power, etc. — to the next generation. Hopefully they will start learning and implementing these skills before they hit adulthood. Life is too short to be unhappy.
I’ve already been informally teaching my students these life skills, but I’ve decided to lean into the offering and highlight the focus on my website and during prospective family meetings.
I firmly believe life skills are more important than where one goes to college because nowadays there’s more than a 95% chance that a teen won’t get into a top school like Stanford. I want to ensure the next generation is “successful” no matter where they end up.
I want to teach my students how to be industrious and create their own opportunities. In this day and age, when people can make $100,000 a month selling T-shirts online while working 30 minutes a day, I think there is a lot more freedom in how we approach careers and make a living. The Internet has opened a lot of opportunities, and I want to teach my students to be creative in their approach to career and life.
The Coach also said something that shifted my perspective — she encouraged me to think about what I want to offer and then attract my ideal clients. I’d always heard the opposite advice from business coaches — they typically encourage people to ask potential clients what their needs are and offer what they want.
It feels very different to think about my values and strengths, and align my work with them.
Since the Retreat, I’ve started attracting families who value having their teens acquire life skills, rather than just solely focusing on outcomes of the college admissions process. Results are impossible to control, but we can control the process.
It is invigorating to be aligned.
Are you in alignment at work and if so, how were you able to make it happen? If you chose a career because it pays the bills but you’re not in alignment, how’s it going?