This Is Why Everything Feels So Hard Right Now
And here's how to fix it.
Maybe We Just Don’t Know What Alignment Is.
I used to abandon things when they got hard. I had this idea that resistance meant that I was on the wrong path. Of course, I now see that I was wrong.
For many years, I chased the elusive, perfect feeling of effortless flow. You know what I’m talking about: the place where everything clicks, the work just feels natural, and you’re not second-guessing yourself every five minutes. The rare, magical days when the universe seems to be on your side instead of against you.
Over the past few years, I have come to learn something that has changed not just how I work, but how I understand what it means to live in a state of integrity with myself:
Alignment isn’t peace without tension. It is finding peace within the tension.
Honestly, this is probably one of the most significant mindset shifts that I’ve experienced in the past few years. And I think understanding it might be the key to why so many of us feel like we’re constantly swimming upstream, even when we’re doing work that really matters.
After spending the last month or so exploring the difference between busy work and life’s work, I have begun thinking about what keeps people from staying connected to their mission even when they do know what it is. Why is it that we can get super clear on what matters most to us and still find ourselves drifting away from it in our daily practice?
The answer, I believe, is that we have fundamentally misunderstood the very nature of alignment.
The False Story: "If it's right, it should feel easy."
We kind of make ease into something romantic. Not that we expect success to be effortless, but we buy into this story that if something is really aligned with our purpose and values, it will feel effortless. The work will flow, the obstacles will make way, we’ll glide through unbothered by the minimal resistance.
Not only is this fiction; it’s a dangerous fiction.
This false belief is why so many people abandon good work the moment it gets challenging. It gets hard, so they assume that they’re doing it wrong.
I have seen this with clients who are actually building something meaningful. They start with clarity and enthusiasm. They define their mission. They create systems to support it. But then the resistance inevitably shows up. Something breaks, someone criticizes, and they get a bad review. Progress slows.
And this is the moment when doubt finds a foothold.
“If this is what I’m meant to be doing, then why is it so hard?”
This question reveals our poor understanding of alignment. We’ve confused it with ease, but they’re actually completely different things.
This false story leads to what I call alignment abandonment. People jump from mission to mission, method to method, relationship to relationship, always chasing the feeling of effortless flow. They don’t stay with anything long enough to experience the depth that comes through faithful engagement with resistance.
Here is what we need to understand: There is absolutely a difference between the healthy resistance that comes with growth and the grinding bone-on-bone friction that comes from true misalignment. But much like discomfort and pain (which I talked about a couple of weeks ago), most people have never learned to tell the difference between the two. So they interpret all resistance as evidence that they’re on the wrong path.
What Alignment Really Looks Like
Alignment is when your effort, your energy and your intention are all pointed in the same direction, even if the wind is against you. If you are to look to my own IDEA framework, alignment happens when your identity guides your daily disciplines, which inform your large choices (execution), which naturally leads you to create structures of accountability to keep you on the right path.
Alignment is what happens when what you do, why you do it and how you show up in doing so agree, even when it’s hard.
Elite athletes are strongly aligned with their mission of excellence in their sport. But that doesn’t mean that training is always fun or that competition is always perfectly fulfilling. It means that they’ve developed the capacity to maintain direction and purpose even when their body wants to quit.
If you are a parent, you can relate to this. Being aligned with the mission of nurturing young humans doesn’t make 3 AM feedings fun or tantrums easy to handle. Alignment doesn’t remove challenge. It gives context and meaning to challenge.
This is what we miss when we expect alignment to feel like comfort or ease. We confuse alignment with arrival.
But alignment is not arriving at some perfect state where everything just works. Instead, it is the ongoing practice of returning to what matters most, especially when circumstances are pulling you away from it.
Love is like this, if you are doing it right (and yes, there is a right and a wrong way to do love, regardless of how uncomfortable that may be). I often tell my young clients that love is not a feeling and it’s not just a commitment. It’s a discipline, in the sense that it is a daily practice of returning to the reason that you entered into the relationship in the first place. My wife and I have now been married for just one month shy of twenty-eight years. In that time, we have had to adapt to a lot of situations. But we have been able to do so because we have maintained clarity on the mission: to be a force for good in the world, together, by bringing out the best in each other. It hasn’t been effortless. It hasn’t been without stress or frustration. But it has always been aligned with what matters most.
That is what real alignment looks like. Not an absence of problems, but a presence of purpose that transcends problems.
The Three Parts of Alignment
When we talk about alignment, we are really talking about three distinct things that need to be in harmony:
Alignment with purpose - Is what I’m doing connected to the person I was designed to become?
Alignment with capacity - Is the way that I’m working sustainable given my current resources?
Alignment with context - Is this the right approach for what’s most important to me right now?
Most of us only focus on the first part, purpose alignment. But even when we can answer that question with a “yes,” we can still be out of alignment if we’re ignoring the other parts.
For example, you could be doing something that is very aligned with your purpose. But if you’re approaching it in a way that drains your energy faster than you can replenish it, you are out of alignment with your capacity.
Maybe you’re in a season of life where something else legitimately needs your focus. A new baby. A sick parent. A career transition. Trying to force the wrong timing in a time like this will create friction, no matter how purpose-aligned your work is. That’s contextual misalignment.
Real alignment requires ongoing attention to all three of these things, as well as constant evaluation and recalibration.
This is why alignment is a discipline and not a destination.
The Power of Aligned Effort
Here is the key insight:
Aligned effort still requires effort. But because it’s aligned, it becomes meaningful.
When you’re really in line, you’re not trying to eliminate resistance. You’re building the capacity to engage with it purposefully. You’re not chasing a perpetual flow state. You are developing the endurance to keep going even when the flow state doesn’t come, because what you’re doing matters.
The net effect of this is actual reliance. Not the absence of difficulty, but the connection to meaning that makes difficulty bearable.
I have watched clients push through incredibly challenging times, not because the work was easy but because they were one hundred percent certain that it was theirs to do. That certainty didn’t make the work less demanding, but it made the demands worth carrying.
This is a life-changing shift. Instead of seeing obstacles as evidence that you’re on the wrong path, you start to see them as a part of the path. Resistance isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s how you develop the strength to carry your mission forward.
Think about it like physical exercise. When you’re building muscle, you cannot avoid resistance. It’s the very thing that creates strength. Mental and emotional growth are no different. The challenge isn’t preventing your progress, it’s creating your progress.
The difference is that when you’re aligned, you can feel yourself growing. Even when you’re tired, even when it’s hard, there is a sense that something meaningful is being built.
What Real Misalignment Actually Feels Like
So how exactly do you learn to know the difference between aligned resistance and misaligned grinding?
Actual misalignment has some distinct tells:
Chronic depletion without recovery. You’re exhausted in a way that rest doesn’t fix. You come back from a vacation, not recharged and excited to get back to work, but dreading your first day back. You wake up tired. You go to bed tired. The work is draining you faster than you can recover.
Values conflict. You find yourself acting against your core beliefs regularly. You’re compromising on things that matter to you, not just once in a while but as a pattern.
Identity erosion. You feel like you’re becoming someone you don’t recognize or respect. When you look in the mirror, you wonder what happened to the person that you used to be.
Persistent emptiness. Even your successes feel hollow. You achieve what you set out to achieve, but it doesn’t bring a sense of satisfaction.
Aligned resistance, on the other hand, is challenging but generative. It’s hard, but it’s building something. You can feel yourself growing through it, even when you’re tired.
The difference is crucial. One is telling you it’s time to change. The other is telling you it’s time to persist.
Alignment as a Daily Discipline
If alignment isn’t something you achieve, but something that you practice, what does that actually look like?
It starts with rejecting the all-or-nothing thinking that says, “I’m either perfectly aligned or I’m completely off track.”
Instead, alignment exists on a spectrum. And your position on that spectrum shifts from day to day based on your choices, your energy and your circumstances.
The goal is to develop the awareness to notice when you’re drifting and the skill to bring yourself back on course.
Most of us think (and we are aided in this, I think, by the larger canon of the self-help literature) that alignment is some big, dramatic thing. Like you wake up one day and all of a sudden everything makes sense and things are easy. But that’s not actually how it plays out.
Real alignment is built through small, daily choices. It’s choosing to show up consistently with your values. It’s choosing to invest your energy in what matters most right now, even when other things are screaming for your attention. It’s choosing to return to your purpose.
The Alignment Reset: A Three-Step Practice
Here's the process I use for myself and my clients:
Step 1: What did I feel out of sync with today? Name the friction. Don't judge it. Just notice it. Was it a conversation that felt off? A task that drained you? A decision that didn't sit right?
Step 2: Where did I act out of alignment with my values, energy, or purpose? Be honest. Were you trying to please everyone? Avoiding conflict? Overextending yourself? Shrinking back when you should have stepped forward?
Step 3: What one thing can I realign tomorrow with my focus, my motivation, or my approach? You don't have to overhaul everything. Just make a micro-adjustment. Maybe it's saying no to one thing that doesn't serve your mission. Maybe it's approaching a conversation differently. Maybe it's protecting your energy better.
Often, the shift isn't what you're doing. It's why and how you're doing it.
This practice only takes five minutes, but it's incredibly powerful. It builds your awareness of when you're drifting and strengthens your ability to course-correct quickly.
Why This Matters Now
The world will keep pulling you toward the easy story. That if something is meant for you, it should be or feel effortless. That resistance means you’re doing it wrong. That alignment should equal comfort.
But you know better now.
You know that your most meaningful work will challenge you. That the mission worth pursuing will stretch you beyond who you are today and into the person that you are meant to become. That true alignment isn’t about finding the path that has no obstacles, but about finding the obstacles that are worth facing.
The Alignment Reset isn’t just a nice exercise. It’s how you build the discernment to know when to push and when to pivot. It’s how you develop trust in yourself to stay the course when things get difficult. It’s how you separate the voices that are telling you to quit from the wisdom that tells you to persist.
Start today. Those three questions, five minutes. Pen to paper. Do it for a week and watch what happens.
Because the person your mission requires you to become is waiting on the other side of truly aligned effort. Not effortless effort, but aligned effort.
Now go be great.
P.S. I'd love to hear what you discover with the Alignment Reset. Hit reply and let me know what patterns emerge for you. Your insights often become the seeds for future conversations in our community.