Science? Or Voodoo?

For a few years now I’ve been going on about Giftings and Alignment and all such, and one might properly ask if these notions are more than just the ravings of a cranky old retired lawyer in his dotage. Well, yes, they may be that, but there is also some good science behind the concepts.

You’ll recall that the Alignment Principle states that the optimum outcome for both the professional and the client occurs when the unique Giftings of the professional align perfectly with the unique Needs of the client. When the glove fits the hand perfectly, everybody is happy, the client gets great results and tells all their friends, and the professional is well compensated for doing what they love. What’s not to like?

Science? Well, everyone knows about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which in essence starts at the bottom of a pyramid and says that the primal things we worry about and struggle for are the essentials of life – nourishment, sleep, safety, shelter. As these things become less worrisome, we begin to look for social acceptance and companionship, and as we are satisfied with these, we begin to worry about our own self esteem. As these things are taken care of, we turn our minds and spirits toward “self actualization”, which could mean a host of things, but for our purposes let’s accept that it implies your achieving your greatest potential. In other words, each of us really wants to become what we believe we could be, and were meant to be.

That’s not voodoo, that’s just the way we are. Every one of us, consciously or unconsciously, wants to be the best we could be at what we do. The problem mostly is that we have backed ourselves into corners where we don’t belong, we just get a paycheque for putting in the hours. Where each of us really wants to be is at the top of the pyramid, “self-actualizing”, that is, becoming all that we really could be.

It was a Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (chick-sent-me-highly) who introduced us to the concept of “flow”, a state where time seems to stand still, we can’t get enough of the activity in question, and we come out feeling more energized than when we went in. Athletes know about this, musicians know about this, adventurers know about this, but regretfully most of us never experience it, except perhaps on rare occasions. (It’s actually closely related to addictions, but that’s the dark side.)

The best courtroom lawyers know how this feels, as do the realtors who pull together a deal as if it were a symphony, and so does the scientist who resents having to sleep because it keeps her out of the lab. Those who are blessed to live in flow would do it for no compensation, but the irony is that most of them are superbly well compensated because they are so good at what they do.

So, yes, there is science, and good science, behind the Alignment Principle. Like most of the important issues of life, it seems so simple, so obvious, but also so difficult in practice.

Intrigued? Want to talk about it?