Episode 3: When Insight Doesn’t Turn Into Alignment
Hello, and thank you for being here with me today. I hope you've been having a great day so far. For today's episode, what we're going to talk about is something that I know I had a hard time with when I was in the midst of some of my personal growth and development journey — really trying to understand why my insights weren't translating into lived experience. And I think that's one piece that often goes overlooked in this space.
We can know ourselves very well. We can understand our patterns, our beliefs, and all these different things. But the understanding alone doesn't translate into action — or maybe more accurately, into the right action. Knowing ourselves doesn't actually mean that we're going to start living in alignment. So there is that gap between self-awareness and lived behavior, and we're going to spend some time examining that in more detail today.
So maybe you've already noticed this, or you're already living into this in some sort of way — in the sense where you have a good understanding of who you are, you've done the work, you understand yourself, your patterns, your beliefs, what you want, all these different things. Or maybe you're at the point where you've developed a lot of insights into how you act, why you behave and do these different things. You understand your patterns and all these things. But yet life doesn't change. And that's completely normal. That happens for all of us. And in my opinion, whether or not we bridge this gap that I'm about to speak on is really whether we do start to live in alignment or not — because this is one of the big pieces that I think goes unsaid, but it's very integral in our own development as a whole.
So if you have a lot of insights, if you're very aware of yourself, if you've been spending a lot of time on this work but it hasn't translated into the alignment you're looking for — that's completely fine. There's nothing wrong with that. I just want to share that knowing yourself doesn't automatically mean that you trust yourself. And that's very important here.
Because what happens is when we're going through this journey and we're growing, and we start to try to live in alignment, we start to think — oh, maybe I just need more courage. Or maybe I need more motivation. Or maybe I'm procrastinating. And we are focused on ourselves, which is good, but we're focusing on ourselves in maybe not a positive way. Maybe the way I'll look at it for today is that we're kind of putting ourselves down in a sense, or feeling like we need to do more. But that's not exactly it.
It's more a matter of — when we take action, what action needs to be taken at certain times? Because what I see in the many people I've coached and worked with, and even in my own life, is that when we are in the moment of making a decision and we don't trust ourselves yet, we're automatically going to defer to an externalized source. And this is something that the majority of us have learned throughout life. It's kind of how we've been conditioned and programmed. At a young age we start to develop these ways in which we respond and behave. And so as we go throughout life this just kind of becomes an automatic pathway. It's kind of like the highway we drive down. So someone says hey, you want to go for dinner — we're going down that highway to answer the question, rather than flexing our own internal muscles, listening to ourselves, and that sort of thing.
So what happens throughout the course of life is really that our decision-making tends to become externalized — through family, friends, society — more than through ourselves. And so there's that disconnect in really trusting ourselves in our decision-making when we are faced with a decision from an external source.
So as an example, say a friend asks — hey, do you want to go bowling this weekend? You feel pressure to respond. You feel the pressure of the social dynamics. You feel pressure to be appealing to your friend. You don't want to break the friendship, so you say yes. That's natural. That's just kind of how it goes when we're letting decisions be externalized rather than internalized — just to give an idea.
So it's not a lack of insight. It's really just misplaced authority. And when we're in that moment, there are a variety of factors that can happen that can influence us to defer the authority to the external. And there's nothing wrong with that right now — we're developing awareness, we're figuring it out as we go. And so when we have that moment where we do that, that's where in the next little while we can start to decide if we want to make a different decision or not.
And so while we're in that moment — maybe you had a stressful day, so it's easier to say yes. Or maybe you're already kind of burned out, already in that mode where it's been a long day and it's easier just to say yes. There are a variety of different things that can come in to make that decision easier — to follow the known path rather than choose what's new for us in that alignment piece. So there is a fair amount that kind of goes on under the surface here. There could potentially also be shame or guilt, or the fear of uncertainty, the fear of loss — maybe you know it's going to impact your social standing — all these variety of things that can come in that moment and may influence us to make a decision where, as I'm saying, the authority is not our own.
So just remember here that as we are growing through this process, it's not a lack of insight — it's misplaced authority. And so what happens over time as we develop this highway of decision-making — and if we step back for a second and think about our neural pathways and that sort of thing — it's basically that the actions we take repeatedly develop more neuronal robustness. That's kind of the path of least resistance. So to get off that path takes effort, takes a bit of consciousness, takes a bit of awareness to really break away and develop a new highway for our operating and our decision-making. And so over time, what is really happening is we're losing our ability to trust our inner knowing — if we ever had it at all.
And so that's really important — once we already have the insights, the knowledge, we know who we are, the next challenge is to actually start to trust that. And for me, it took a bit of time to really start to lean in and trust it. I made some experiments. I started to figure it out. But that's kind of where the playground is — starting to play in that space. Figuring out how you start to learn and trust yourself, and listen to yourself. And also figuring out — what is the voice? How does the voice speak to you? Is it an internal, instantaneous kind of thing? Is it a bodily sensation? Do you need to talk it out? There are a variety of different ways that people can come to their own conclusions. But if we're not honoring those, then we may not be honoring ourselves in that moment.
So in that situation it's really the loss of the ability to hear how we communicate with ourselves. And sometimes this actually comes across in — I think it's a Japanese proverb — where they say we wear three masks. I'm not going to go right into it, but just for the sake of argument here — you wear one mask when you're by yourself, and another mask in your social situations. So sometimes when we've had that external mask developed, we want to maintain that mask, and so we don't want to deviate or cause anything to erode it. And so we'll wear that mask. But over time, that's going to lead, as I mentioned, to an erosion of your self-trust. It might lead to shame, guilt, disconnection — you may not feel connected with yourself anymore. And this is going to lead you to being in a stressed state, and then eventually it's going to lead to health problems. I'm not a doctor, just sharing what I've seen and what I understand about the body and how things work. So acting out of alignment can have more drastic consequences than we really realize. And I just want to remind you — this is nothing you've done wrong. It's something we're learning and getting better at.
So what I want to really reframe here is that it's not that you lack insight or anything like that. It's misplaced authority. So really, what that comes down to is — when you don't trust your inner knowing, alignment isn't missing. It's just quiet. And so that's the gap. That's the gap between knowing who we are and living in alignment — it's learning to trust ourselves in that moment and know that what we're hearing is real and worth following.
And so one of the problems I kind of see with this is that when we're not honoring that, we're just not trusting ourselves, and we're looking at it as more of an us thing. Because what happens a lot of the time is we act in a way to avoid unpleasant feelings. And I'm here to tell you — feelings are neutral. Feelings are signals. That's how I look at feelings. They're signaling whether something is a little bit off, or whether we need to listen and do something different. Emotions are signal points for us. But a lot of times what people will do is they'll start to feel unsatisfied or not feel good, and rather than listen to the feeling, they try to take action to remove the feeling. And usually the action they take is not the one that's going to help them remove the feeling in the long term. It's all about short-term satisfaction in these moments. So it might be a variety of things — food, distractions, little things — just to kind of say, hey, I know I'm not feeling great because I'm not living the life I want, but I'm just going to do this really quick and it's going to make things okay for right now. So it's really just masking the situation that you're currently living in. And I'm here to tell you that if you want to live in alignment, that's not the approach to take. We need to be willing to listen to those feelings. We need to be willing to allow them to be there. We need to allow the emotion to persist in order to really be able to synthesize it, learn what it's trying to tell us, and then move on. The more that we listen to our emotions, the more in tune we're going to become with them, with our body, our decision-making, and we're going to start to be better at knowing what's best for us.
But it all starts with having the courage to explore that emotion, allow the emotion to sit, and to not be in a rush to make the emotion leave. That's very key.
So bringing it back here — when you don't trust your inner knowing, the alignment isn't missing. It's just quiet. It's not gone. It's not unavailable. It's just inaudible. You're just not able to hear it yet. And that's the missing piece — if you're struggling with knowing yourself but not acting fully in alignment yet, it's the trust in the self, learning how to listen to the self. And as you do that, the alignment is going to start coming as you start to make decisions in alignment with what's best for you and how you want to live your life.
So just to kind of reflect on the loop that happens — we've got the insights, but we don't have the trust in ourselves yet. So really what that leads to is no embodied action. It leads to understanding yourself but making decisions that aren't in alignment. And then afterwards maybe some shame, some guilt, because you didn't make the choice that you felt or thought you should have made in that moment. But remember — there's the pressure from the external sources. If we are externalizing our authority, then at the end of the day they are the ones that are kind of leading the authority and the decision-making in the moment. So understand that loop. And that's nothing negative about you — that's just how we get programmed and conditioned.
And the more that we do this, the more we erode our own trust in ourselves. So that's kind of the loop. That's why the longer we go without acting in alignment, the harder it gets — because it's harder without that trust in ourselves yet. And it takes a lot of courage, willingness, and boldness — and trust in yourself, ironically — to start to make these small actions. And until we start taking those small actions, listening to ourselves, building that self-trust, the knowing of ourselves stays intellectual. It's all in our head. It's not embodied. It's not lived yet.
And so that's what I'm sharing with you here — when we start to trust our inner knowing, when we can really start to live in an embodied way and feel our way through life, that's one of the missing pieces I see with a lot of people right now. So I just want to remind you that it's not a matter of why you can't act or anything of that nature. It's a matter of just noticing who you're listening to in the moment, and allowing that to shift for yourself.
So for now, as we've been discussing lately — if something resonated, amazing. Just sit with it. We don't need to act right now. Right now we're working on the awareness piece and getting an understanding of where the disconnect may be, where the gap is.
If something in this episode landed and you've been sitting with your Human Design for a while but still find it hard to actually live it — a Human Design Integration Session might be the next right step. It's not another layer of learning. It's a conversation about how your design is already showing up in your life, and what's getting in the way of living from it. I hope you have an amazing day.