Personal Alignment & Congruency | The Better Than Rich Show Ep. 14

Personal Alignment & Congruency

There is more to a fulfilling life than a productive and well-run business that produces financial wealth. Congruence helps create a fulfilling life.

Personal Congruence is when a person’s actions and values are aligned. The opposite is hypocrisy, which is when people do or say they will be one way while acting completely differently.

Congruence is the question of who we are when no one is watching. What standard do we hold ourselves to and how often are those standards forgotten or bypassed? What do we do that aligns our beliefs with our everyday actions? What cycle are we creating?

Am I holding the agreements that I’m initially making with myself?

We aren’t one or the other either, at times we will be super congruent and then at others, we can feel like hypocrites, whenever we fall out of routine or don’t uphold those consistent standards, which is completely fine. It is unrealistic to expect 100% out of ourselves at all times, but what matters is how we recover, how quickly we break that pattern to get back to personal congruence.

The art of recovery is what’s most important when personal congruence is low. Having a drop-down menu of recovery is important because when congruence is low the ego is normally in control. The ego might not want to apologize or be reconciled, that is why having the recovery list performed is important. Recovery is useless if the changes we make don’t stick, so when we turn a new leaf we need to keep the course.

The marketplace is built on trust, and there is no better way to build trust than being congruent. No one wants to work with someone who has a realization of their current hypocrisy, says they will change, and ends up acting the same two weeks later. To start building trust we need to be willing to admit faults and places for improvement. This means we should be consistently conditioning our identity so we can catch those faults.

Identity conditioning helps align our identity with our values. Identity is who we believe we are or, knowing what our contribution or life means or is within the collective. We can say that our values are whatever we want, and most people do, but how much are we actually living?

We can say our values are family, health, and religion, but if our calendar doesn’t match up they aren’t true. The goal is to be intentional with our identity.

What could I do today to become Better Than Rich? How can I leave today better than yesterday?

Or, we can choose the opposite which would be ignoring congruence altogether. If we ignore congruence for a few weeks, eventually we won’t be able to recognize the person we become, nor would we like that person.

Sometimes, people aren’t intentionally living outside of their values, it’s that they forget what their values were because they don’t have a constant reminder. We can relate our values to showers, if we don’t shower we stink, and the same goes for if we aren’t reminded of our values.

Keeping Track Of Our Relationship With Ourselves

There are plenty of ways to check in with ourselves, like journaling, meditation, or even contemporary thought. The reason we do these tasks is to develop an intimate relationship with our conscience. We want to analyze our actions, why we do them, and what values are reflected by that action. What did we do that was bad or good and how did we end up with these behaviors?

Taking constant stock of our actions can be convicting, but to build that intimate relationship with our conscience can also be super rewarding and is the only way to live a fulfilled and congruent life. Watching the reactions of our actions is also a great way to keep stock of our actions and self-reflect. If we receive a negative reaction to our action we should assume we did something wrong to ensure we lead with curiosity instead of judgment. We all have insecurities and places to learn and people will appreciate that level of transparency and congruence.

This is one of those situations where we need to decide which hard we want to pick, the difficulty that is involved with the transformation of improving ourselves, or the consequences that come with not putting our best foot forward in living a fulfilling and congruent life.

When we get good at us vs. us we can start reflecting that congruence within our conversation, relationships, and businesses.

Bringing Congruence Into Your Business

Who we are should never change. The way we show up to one thing should be the way we show up to everything. Our values don’t change when we walk into the office space or log in to our program. The roles that we play do change but we shouldn’t act drastically different at different times or with different groups of people.

People should get to experience the most congruent version of us. We can bring our humble, vulnerable, personal growth person to the workplace as well. Think about the original purpose, mission, or vision for starting the enterprise and find a way to include personal growth that ties into the original goal. The business is a vehicle for our personal mission.

We must believe that whatever we are offering to the marketplace adds tremendous value because the marketplace will respond to whatever problem we solve.