Recently I attended DestinyFest in Toronto, a self-development conference I always enjoy. I’m a sucker for inspiring speakers and places where leaders openly uplift and encourage other leaders and—because I struggle with social anxiety—I keep trying to practice humaning with other humans.

After running events (including a music festival) for five years (to raise money for my former children’s charity), teaching college for two years and facilitating workshops for four years, you might think I’d be more comfortable with being around a lot of other humans…but no. Not yet. I mean, I’m fine if I know everyone. But I still find it really (really) hard to walk into a room full of strangers.

This is partly because I started out as a business journalist. I was a senior editor at what is now Financial Post Business magazine. Back then, whenever I told anyone what I did, they would look at me with a basic level of respect. At the very least, they never looked at me weird and then backed away.

Fast forward to DestinyFest. We did an exercise at our table where we all shared what we do and why we were there.

The founder I was paired with told me about his company and said he wanted to create more alignment in his life and business.

I smiled and said, “Awesome. That’s actually what I do. I’m a a high-performance clairvoyant coach for leaders and entrepreneurs.”

Blank look.

“It’s a form of spiritual coach,” I elaborated.

He leaned back in his chair.

“Oh,” he said.

I could tell, from the look on his face, that our conversation was over.

Since I already struggle with humaning, this meant we were both uncomfortable. He barely glanced at me for the rest of the night.

But it was his loss, really. Because, even though I suck at communicating what I do in networking situations, after 12 years of doing this work full time, I am very confident in my ability to align leaders. And since he and I were at the same table for a full day, I could have easily helped him at least inch forward in that direction.

The funny thing is, and the reason I’m writing this post, is that he didn’t seem to know that alignment has a spiritual component.

While I get that there are different types of alignment, in my personal experience, real alignment isn’t an intellectual idea—it’s an energetic experience of being.

Alignment is an ongoing consciousness-level recalibration toward a life that feels profoundly true.

And where does that feeling of “true” originate?

In your soul. In your very essence. Just like an acorn that grows into an oak tree, it was there from the moment you were born.

The Remembering Process

Alignment is the journey of remembering who you are: a soul having a human experience. This remembering can’t happen in your mind—it must happen through lived experience. Life becomes deeper, more nuanced, more profound.

You don’t need a dramatic spiritual awakening for this to occur. Sometimes it happens naturally because it’s simply who you are. But recognizing that you are the spiritual experience helps accelerate the process. Every mundane moment—every breath, every decision, every conversation—IS a spiritual experience.

I also have to say this, because it’s something that bugs the sh*t out of me, and it’s the reason why I completely avoid so-called “spiritual” communities: alignment doesn’t have anything to do with being performatively spiritual. You don’t have to use spiritual words, have a special name, wear flowing robes, or move into an ashram.

That’s humans playing roles they choose to play or believe they should play. And that’s fine. We’re all allowed to play whatever roles we want to play here. But don’t believe any of that means anything, because it doesn’t.

You are spiritual no matter what you believe, say, do or wear. And everyone else is spiritual too.

If everyone is inherently spiritual, how can anyone be more spiritual?

Answer: They can’t.

Alignment is the process of us remembering this, which often happens more on the soul level than the human level.

What Alignment Looks Like

At the human everyday experiential level, moving toward alignment often manifests as things falling apart, or the opposite: you get everything you want, just to discover that you still feel empty.

Once you reach the other side of that, alignment manifests as losing interest in external validation and entering a playful exploration of who you are right now.

The Paradox of Spiritual Hierarchy

It has to be said: aligned people aren’t “above” others, nor are they more important and valuable than others—they’re simply happier, calmer, and kinder. Since they know who they are, they no longer worry about competition, validation, or even death.

Think of alignment as the Hero’s Journey we signed up for. We had to begin our journey without it—otherwise there would be no adventure, no growth, no reason to come here.

The Closer You Get, The Messier It Becomes

No, it’s not just you.

The journey toward alignment gets weirder and messier as you approach it. You must release everything that’s not an energetic match for true alignment, and that’s not always fun.

Increased alignment requires letting old identity aspects die. The worlds those identities inhabited will no longer fit. They have to fall away for us to go forward.

The Relevance Trap

Most of what our human identity chases is empty—titles, validation, money. But where do those desires originate?

You discover the real answers only when you stop everything. Only when you have no distractions, including attention of any kind from others, can you begin discovering what you’re addicted to. It will become extremely apparent because you’ll be craving it.

A couple decades ago I read this meditation prompt that helped me a lot:

One hundred years from now everyone you know and everyone you are trying to impress will be dead, and so will you.

So it’s a good idea to stop and check if you’re doing, and being, what feels absolutely true for you.

When you’re facing the end of this life, looking back to see if it was worth the trip to Earth, it’s going to matter to you that you lived your life in alignment with that.

I’ve stood by the side of three different people in their final days, including my brother (and only sibling), and I can tell you that the things you THINK matter won’t matter at all when there’s no more time left.

The Great Leaders’ Secret

We all have blindspots. That’s part of the game of Life. We think we’re doing all the right things, and we think we know what’s best for others..but often we’re wrong.

Clarity usually requires going deep inside yourself. You can do that with a coach (like me), or a meditation retreat, or a trip somewhere alone without your phone. If you do it on your own, you need a place without distractions, and where your old identity cannot continue to hold onto its old ways of being and doing things. There cannot be any form of entertainment. You need to be stuck with your own thoughts, so you can take a close look at them and begin cleaning out what doesn’t serve your highest path.

This is why the greatest leaders often hit rock bottom before creating their most meaningful work. They face the death of all previous versions of themselves and all their illusions about what mattered.

Consider Nelson Mandela’s 27 years in prison and Jose Mujica’s 14 years. When you’re tortured daily, as Mujica was, or spend 18 years in isolation, as Mandela did, things like money, validation and achievement become irrelevant. When you spend thousands of hours alone in pain and darkness, your greatest achievement becomes maintaining your sanity.

Both of these men could have been broken by hell. Instead, they let it burn away everything that didn’t matter, focusing only on what mattered to their souls. They became two of history’s greatest servant-leaders.

Nothing they did was performative. They had no energy left for that. They spent every ounce of their remaining years focused on creating a better, win-win world in real, practical ways. When I think about “aligned leaders” it is their faces I see in my mind. They blazed a trail for the rest of us so we could see what aligned leadership really looks like, and the sacrifices it sometimes requires.

The Ultimate Outcome

When we remember who we really are, we can only see what Mandela and Mujica saw so passionately and clearly: it’s all about creating a better shared experience in this game of Life for everyone—a win-win world. It becomes impossible to care about anything petty, vain, or shallow. The desire to abuse power dies when you remember the truth of who you are; you realize you’re only hurting other parts of yourself.

The fastest way to uplift this world is for leaders to do the inner work to remember who they really are—that is the fast track to becoming truly aligned.

I’ve discovered that we can teach our human identity to work in partnership with our higher-self intelligence. This creates a win-win situation. It makes it easy for us to do what we came here to do. When our human works in partnership with our higher self/soul, that human taps into and channels unique genius into this world. It leads, creates, and lives at its highest potential.

If you struggle to answer that question, as many of my clients do, I have a deliciously cathartic exercise you can play with.

1. Get a piece of paper and drawn a line down the middle.
2. On the left side, write a list of everything that doesn’t feel aligned. In fact, go further, write down everything that you’re hating right now: about your life, your business, your partner, your team, your health, etc. Don’t hold back. Go wild. No one ever has to see it. It’s just an excavation of the truth. Because what we hate is also true for us, but often we don’t allow ourselves to have that truth, for various reasons we can get into another time. For now, just write your list.
3. Now comes the fun part. On the right side of the paper, write down the direct opposite of everything you wrote on the left. So, if you wrote: “I hate feeling worried all the time.” Then, on the right: I want to feel calm and confident all the time. (or whatever the opposite looks like for you).
4. When you’re finished writing the whole list, get a pair of scissors and cut down the line in the middle. Then you can tear up and throw away the left side.
5. The right side is your list of what you truly want (your aligned life).

If you’re like most people, that list will feel uncomfortable. It may feel impossible.

But I’m here to tell you that once you get in touch with what’s true for you, and you acknowledge it (by writing it down), then take even tiny steps toward that, it’s going to begin to manifest in your life.

Not because you are an amazing manifester.

Not because I am an amazing manifesting teacher.

But because that list on the righthand side is actually what you came here to do. It’s what your soul wants for you. And so it will begin manifesting it on your behalf because it’s your highest possible destiny.

If you keep doing what you can to honour that list, you will be living in alignment with your very soul.

Alignment carries us toward integrated wholeness—where who you are and what you want most inside matches how you show up outside. No division. No masks for different people or situations. No fakery. No living someone else’s life.

It isn’t easy (as I shared earlier, I have a human inside me, too, who is on her own alignment journey, exploring what feels true with mixed results).

But I can say that it has given me a lot more fulfillment and, especially, relief, to not need to fit into society’s boxes, and to inch toward getting comfortable with being a weird multi-shaped, multi-component being and letting that play out in accordance with what feels genuinely true. And I wish that same relief, peace and fulfillment for you.

[This is only my second post. I’d love to read your reflections and stories in the comments, if you have a minute].