Good Life Project - What If Your Pain Wasn’t About Weakness?

Episode Date: June 4, 2015

You wake up one day with pain in your lower back. Happens to the best of us.Popular wisdom says, “oh, you’ve got lower back pain, you need to strengthen your abs to support your back and it��ll go away.” Or you need to strengthen this or that or the other muscle, your problem is weakness.A similar thing tends to happen across all parts of life. You've got a problem, it must be caused by some weakness somewhere. Easy fix, find the weak link, strengthen it and build around it.Problem is, there's often something much deeper going on. A level of misalignment and dysfunction that's causing the pain. In your body, and yes, even in your life. And when you try to strengthen into that more fundamental dysfunction, very often you end up making the pain even worse. It actually deepens the dysfunction.So, what do you do instead? That's what this week's short and sweet Good Life Project Riff is all about. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey there, this is Jonathan with another Good Life Project riff. The name of today's riff, Align, Then Build. It's 2007. I'm devouring every fitness and therapeutic certification that I can find. So I stumble upon this thing called the Agoscue Method. It was created by a guy named Pete Agoscue. Most pain, says Pete, is the result of what he calls postural dysfunction. There are eight major load-bearing joints in the body, your ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders. When those

don't stack on top of each other properly, they load the muscles and connective tissue in a way that they were never intended to be loaded, and that puts stress on them. Sometimes immediate and acute, but more often it's this slow, chronic build of that stress. Over time, things start to twist and torque and rise and rotate, all in an attempt to keep you upright and to keep your head looking forward. Now that puts even more strain on muscles and connective tissue that have to work harder and harder in ways never intended. Eventually, this becomes pain. Now here's where it gets interesting. A lot of people will say, oh, you've got lower back pain. You need to strengthen your abs to support your back and

it'll go away. Or you need to strengthen this or that or the other muscle. It's always strengthen this and that and the pain will go away. Problem is, when you strengthen into dysfunction and compensation and pain, very often you end up not only doing nothing to abate the pain, you end up making it even worse. It actually deepens the dysfunction. So Pete and his method take a different approach. Align, then strengthen. And this makes sense to me. If your body is loaded with torque, dysfunction, and compensation, if everything is out of whack, the thing to do isn't strengthen and often deepen these patterns, but to first unwind them, to return the body as close to that model posture

and optimal function as possible, and then begin the process of strengthening around that foundation of optimal function. Better yet, focus on postural alignment and function from the beginning so you never have to end up in pain and go back to rebuild. The thing is, this isn't really about your body and physical pain. I'm going to make a jump here. This is actually much bigger. In fact, it's about your business. It's about your career. It's about your life. And it's especially true for entrepreneurs. An interesting thing happens with entrepreneurs. They focus entirely on these days, what's a sort of really vogue, something called product market fit in the early days, especially aligning what they're making with a well-defined tested need. Now, this is important, really

important. You really need to get it pretty dialed in and they'll understand what their market needs to function optimally, to be out of pain and to have that model posture, and then build and strengthen the business to accommodate the market's demand for delight. And things start to hum, money starts to come in. It's all growing nicely until one day, the entrepreneur realizes that she's in pain. The company she's building, the job she's created has become a cage of her own creation. She hates going into work every day. So what happened? She aligned, strengthened, and built around what the customer wanted, but never did the same for her own needs and wants. Her own personal, pain-free, optimally alive model posture. The one that leads to a great, vibrant, alive, purpose-led, connected venture and life. She learned all about

what the customer wanted and needed, but she never actually asked herself the tough questions about what mattered to her, who she wanted to serve, how she wanted to serve, why she wanted to serve, what she wanted to build, who she wanted to build it with, what her desires, pain, aspirations were, and so many other critical points of self-inquiry. And this is really hard work, and nobody teaches it in business school or beyond. So most people just don't do it because they don't know it exists or matters. Without doing this though, without identifying the key elements of your own fully expressed life, you end up aligning around what you do know and where all the entrepreneurial literature tells you to focus, your customer. Then you start to strengthen around your customer's optimal

posture. Over time, you build something that serves them well, but leads to postural dysfunction, misuse, and compensation patterns in your own life and business. And that inevitably leads to pain. So here's the thing. Entrepreneurship done right is not about building a successful company. It's about building a successful life. I've worked with many entrepreneurs who've arrived at this place of outward success, but internal pain, and they can't complain to anyone else because the outside world says they're just sitting on top of a successful venture and hell, they built it. And if they didn't like it, why they build it that way in the first place?

And the answer, of course, is that nobody teaches you another way. Most entrepreneurs try to strengthen and build their way out of pain only to discover the more they do this, the more they spend, the more they build structure and systems around a foundation of dysfunction and misalignment, the worse the problem gets. Because of course, when you strengthen into dysfunction, the pain only deepens. Until finally you implode physically, emotionally, spiritually, or socially, often all of the above.

You end up walking away, selling or shutting down what's left of a business at that point. And those few who do figure out how to build a venture that's deeply aligned with the fiber of their being almost always get there through a lot of painful trial and error. I raised my hand there in a huge way. Most entrepreneurs honestly never get there. So what do you do about it? How do you fix a venture that's misaligned with who you are on the level of DNA? Can you even fix it? And if you're at that early part of your entrepreneurial journey, how do you ensure that you're building something deeply aligned, not only with what the customer wants and needs, but what you want and need.

So when you move into the strengthen and build stage, you're strengthening and building around something that will be far more likely to serve both you and your market. The process is remarkably similar to my work years ago with the human body. Step one, diagnose. First, take a step back and understand what's really happening, what the true source of pain is. Is it that you don't have enough sales, the right product or brand, the wrong people on the bus? Or is it that you've built something fundamentally misaligned

with the fiber of your being and what you want and need in both the way you contribute to the world and the way you want to live your life. Step two, self-discover. Rediscover what matters. All those tough, deeply personal questions, you know, you skirted in the early days in the name of serving the customer, all the avatar exercises and profiling and experimenting and processes of research and inquiry you've done to get into the head of your customer, do that to yourself. If you need, find somebody who can help. This is actually the starting point of the Good Left Project immersion and the labs that we do.

I only learned through a parade of missteps and mistakes. Business is personal, always, no matter what you've been told. Know your customer, but know yourself better. Step three, align, then build. So if you're just starting out, be sure that the decisions you're making are well aligned with not just who you want to serve, but with what you need to get out of your venture as well. It's so much easier to build upon deep alignment and optimal function from day one than it is to deconstruct and rebuild down the road. And if you're ready or if you're already into a venture and you're feeling the pain of having

strengthened and built around your customers' needs but not yours, the process can often be a lot more involved. It doesn't mean it can't be done. It's just that how much you'll have to do to get back to optimal function and remove the pain will be unique to your life, venture, needs, wants, and the amount of pain that you're in, as well as your ability to find support for your desire to rebuild around ease and vitality and joy and connection and purpose and that deep sense of sustained aligned action. No matter your path, remember, with rare exception, the answer is not to continue to strengthen and build around misalignment and dysfunction. Step back. Do the work. Peel open your own personal soul onion. Find your way back to that sense of essence and ease, your model entrepreneurial posture.

Then, and only then, strengthen and build. Thanks so much, as always, for listening. I hope you got some value out of this. And if you did, I would so appreciate, as always, if you'd share it around. And if it feels right to you, just jump on over to iTunes and leave a review. As always, wishing you a fantastic rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Thank you.