The Self Lens - Chapter 1
Ever stared up at the night sky, the vastness of stars scattered across the darkness, and felt suddenly small? Not just physically small, but existentially so—wondering what the hell you're doing here on this spinning rock? What's the point of the alarm clock, the commute, the deadlines, the relationships that soar and crash, the dreams that keep you up at night?
You're not alone in that moment of cosmic vertigo. Not by a long shot.
I've spent more nights than I care to admit sitting on my back porch in Maine, looking up at those same stars, asking those same questions. Sometimes with a beer in hand, sometimes with nothing but silence and the weight of wondering. The faces change across centuries and cultures, but the questions remain stubbornly consistent: Why am I here? What matters? How do I live a life that means something?
Some find their answers in the structure of faith—the rituals, communities, and ancient wisdom of religion. Others look to science, finding profound meaning in understanding the mechanics of existence. Artists discover purpose in creation, activists in justice, parents in raising children, friends in connection. And many of us—maybe most of us—are still searching, still figuring it out as we go.
This book doesn't claim to have THE answer. I'm suspicious of anyone who says they do. What I offer instead is a framework—a way of thinking about yourself and your life that might help you find your own answers. I call it Poia, short for the "Point Of It All." Not because I'm particularly fond of acronyms (though God knows the publishing industry is), but because it captures what we're really after: understanding what matters most in this brief, beautiful, bewildering experience of being alive.
Here's what I've learned after decades of writing, teaching, and my own stumbling attempts to live well: meaning emerges when who you are inside aligns with how you live outside. When there's harmony between your core self and your daily actions. When what you believe and value is reflected in what you do and create.
And conversely, life starts feeling hollow when that alignment breaks down. You might be climbing the ladder of success only to realize it's leaning against the wrong wall. Or you might have crystal clarity about what truly matters to you but find yourself unable to honor it in your everyday choices. Either way, you're living with a gap—a disconnect between inner truth and outer life.
Psychologists have a term for this: cognitive dissonance. It's the mental discomfort that comes from trying to hold contradictory beliefs or when your actions contradict your values. But I prefer simpler language: it's the feeling that something's off. That nagging sense that you're playing a part in someone else's story rather than living authentically in your own.
I felt it acutely in my twenties when I was trying to be a "serious literary novelist" because that's what I thought real writers did. I was miserable, constipated with pretension, producing work I didn't even like. It wasn't until I embraced my love for horror and suspense—genres I'd been taught were somehow lesser—that I found my voice. The gap closed. The static cleared. I was finally writing as myself.
That alignment—that congruence between inner and outer—is what Poia is designed to help you find.
To explore and cultivate this alignment, we'll look through four distinct perspectives—four "lenses"—on your life:
Inner Self: This is the basement level, the foundation—who you truly are beneath the surface. Your values, beliefs, and authentic identity. The stuff that remains when no one's watching and nothing's at stake. Getting clear on this isn't easy; we're experts at lying to ourselves. But it's essential work, because without knowing your inner self, you can't possibly align your life with it.
Outer Self: This is how you live and connect with the world around you—your relationships, environment, and social roles. It's the visible expression of who you are, the ripples you create in the pond of existence. When your outer self reflects your inner truth, there's a sense of integrity and wholeness. When it doesn't, life feels fragmented and false.
Resources: These are the strengths, supports, and assets you have to draw upon—your skills, talents, community connections, and material resources. Understanding what you have to work with is crucial; it grounds your aspirations in reality and helps you leverage what's available rather than lamenting what isn't.
Agency: This is how you take action, make choices, and learn from your experiences—your capacity to initiate change and adapt to circumstances. Agency isn't just about control (which is often an illusion anyway); it's about response. How do you meet what life brings? How do you learn and grow from both success and failure?
By examining your life through all four of these lenses, you can begin to bring them into alignment. Not perfect alignment—life is too messy and dynamic for that—but enough alignment that you feel more whole, more alive, more yourself.
This isn't about quick fixes or one-size-fits-all solutions. There's no seven-step program here, no miracle morning routine that will suddenly make everything click. It's an ongoing practice of becoming more aware and making choices that reflect your deepest values. In short, it's about finding your own point to it all, and living it out day by day with clarity and integrity.
I believe we're living in an age of unprecedented disconnection—from ourselves, from each other, from meaning. The constant noise of social media, the relentless pace of work, the fractured attention spans, the commodification of everything including our identities... it all makes it harder to hear that quiet voice inside that knows what matters.
At the same time, many traditional sources of meaning have lost their hold. Religious participation has declined sharply in many parts of the world. Community ties have weakened. Extended families are scattered. Political institutions seem increasingly dysfunctional. The old roadmaps to a meaningful life have faded, and we're left to draw our own.
That's both terrifying and liberating. Terrifying because we have to figure it out largely on our own. Liberating because we get to figure it out largely on our own.
I wrote this book because I needed it myself. Because I've spent too many years feeling that gap between who I am and how I live. Because I've watched friends and family members achieve everything they thought they wanted only to find themselves wondering, "Is this it?" Because I believe that a life aligned—while never perfect or free from suffering—contains a depth of satisfaction that no amount of external success can match.
Before we go further, let me be clear about what this book is not:
It's not a self-help book promising to fix your life in five easy steps.
It's not a spiritual text claiming to have discovered the one true path to enlightenment.
It's not a scientific treatise with neat, empirical answers to life's messiest questions.
And it's certainly not a collection of platitudes about following your bliss or manifesting abundance or finding your purpose through positive thinking.
What it is, I hope, is a thoughtful companion for your own exploration—a framework that might help you see more clearly, choose more wisely, and live more fully. I've tried to distill what I've learned from decades of reading, writing, teaching, failing, and occasionally getting things right into something useful. Something that respects your intelligence while remaining accessible. Something honest about life's complexity without drowning in it.
Let me tell you about three people I know. Their names and details have been changed, but their situations are real.
Mark is what most would consider successful. He's a senior executive at a tech company, makes well into six figures, lives in a beautiful home. He's also profoundly unhappy. At forty-five, he realizes he's spent twenty years building a career he never actually wanted. He chose his path based on what would impress others and provide financial security, not what genuinely interested him. Now he feels trapped by golden handcuffs, too committed to his lifestyle to change course. When we talked over drinks recently, he confessed, "I feel like I'm living someone else's life."
Then there's Sarah. Unlike Mark, she knows exactly what matters to her: creativity, connection, and making a difference through her art. She's clear on her values but struggles to honor them in her daily life. Between her day job, family obligations, and the constant pull of social media, she rarely finds time for her painting. "I know what would make me happy," she told me, "but I can't seem to actually do it." Her clarity about her inner self makes the gap to her outer life all the more painful.
Finally, there's David. He retired five years ago after a successful career as an attorney. He had big plans for retirement—travel, volunteering, reconnecting with old friends. But he's done almost none of it. Without the structure of work, he feels adrift. He spends most days watching TV and reading news online, growing increasingly isolated and depressed. "I don't know who I am without my job," he admitted. His identity was so wrapped up in his professional role that when it ended, he lost his sense of self.
Mark, Sarah, and David are all experiencing different forms of misalignment. Mark's outer life contradicts his inner truth. Sarah can't translate her inner clarity into outer action. David has lost connection with his inner self entirely.
They're not unusual. In fact, I'd argue they represent the norm. Most of us live with some degree of misalignment between who we are and how we live. We make compromises. We follow paths laid out by others. We get busy and distracted. We forget to ask the big questions until some crisis forces us to confront them.
The cost of this misalignment isn't just unhappiness, though that's certainly part of it. It's also wasted potential. It's the novels unwritten, the connections unmade, the contributions ungiven. It's the unique gifts each person has that never find expression. When multiplied across millions of lives, this represents an incalculable loss—not just to individuals but to our collective human experience.
How do we end up so disconnected from ourselves? It doesn't happen overnight. It's a gradual process, often beginning in childhood and continuing throughout our lives. Here are some of the most common culprits:
Social Conditioning: From an early age, we're taught to value certain things (achievement, wealth, status) and dismiss others (play, rest, non-productive creativity). We learn what "success" looks like according to our culture, family, and peer group. These messages sink deep into our psyche, often becoming so familiar we mistake them for our own values.
Fear: Making choices aligned with our true selves often involves risk—financial risk, social risk, the risk of failure or rejection. Fear pushes us toward safer paths, even when those paths don't reflect who we really are.
Lack of Self-Knowledge: Many of us simply don't know ourselves very well. We haven't taken the time to examine our values, preferences, and authentic desires. Without this self-knowledge, alignment is impossible.
External Pressures: Practical realities like paying bills, supporting families, and meeting obligations can force compromises. Sometimes misalignment isn't a failure of courage or clarity but a necessary response to genuine constraints.
Inertia: Once we're on a particular path, changing direction requires energy. It's easier to continue what we've been doing, even if it doesn't feel right, than to make significant changes.
Digital Distraction: The constant pull of screens and notifications makes it harder than ever to hear our own inner voice. We're so busy responding to external stimuli that we rarely create the quiet space needed for self-reflection.
Understanding these forces doesn't immediately free us from them, but it does help us see our situation more clearly. Awareness is always the first step toward change.
Let's take a look at each of the four lenses that make up the Poia framework. These aren't separate compartments of your life; they're interconnected perspectives, different angles from which to view the same whole.
Your inner self is your core—your values, beliefs, desires, and authentic identity. It's who you are beneath the roles you play and the masks you wear. Some aspects of your inner self might be immediately apparent to you; others might be buried under layers of conditioning and habit.
The inner self includes:
Values: What matters most to you? Not what should matter according to others, but what genuinely resonates at a deep level. Is it creativity? Connection? Learning? Contribution? Security? Adventure? We all value many things, but usually a handful of core values stand out as particularly important.
Beliefs: What do you believe about yourself, others, and the world? These aren't just conscious opinions but deeper convictions that shape how you interpret experiences. Some beliefs empower you; others limit you. Many operate below the level of awareness.
Desires: What do you truly want? Again, not what you think you should want or what others want for you, but what you authentically desire. This includes both material desires and less tangible ones—experiences, feelings, ways of being.
Identity: How do you define yourself? What aspects of your self-concept feel most authentic and enduring? Your identity includes but goes beyond your social roles (parent, professional, partner). It's your sense of who you are at a fundamental level.
Clarifying your inner self isn't a one-time task but an ongoing process of discovery and rediscovery. We evolve throughout our lives, and our inner landscape evolves with us. What mattered deeply at twenty-five might matter less at fifty, and vice versa. The goal isn't to pin down your inner self once and for all, but to maintain an ongoing dialogue with it.
Your outer self is how you express and embody your inner self in the world. It's the visible manifestation of who you are through your relationships, environment, and actions. The outer self includes:
Relationships: Who do you spend time with? How do you show up in those relationships? Do your connections with others reflect your values and authentic identity, or do they pull you away from yourself?
Environment: Where and how do you live? Does your physical space support who you are and what matters to you? This includes your home, workplace, and the broader community and natural environment you inhabit.
Roles and Responsibilities: What parts do you play in various contexts—professional, familial, social? Do these roles allow expression of your authentic self, or do they require you to suppress important aspects of who you are?
Actions and Habits: What do you actually do day to day? How do you spend your time, energy, and attention? These daily patterns often reveal more about your priorities than any statement of values could.
Creative Expression: How do you create and contribute? This might be through formal artistic endeavors, but it also includes how you solve problems, communicate ideas, or bring your unique perspective to situations.
Alignment occurs when your outer self authentically expresses your inner self—when how you live reflects who you are. This doesn't mean perfect consistency in all situations (we all adapt to different contexts), but it does mean overall congruence between inner and outer.
Your resources are the assets, strengths, and supports you have to draw upon as you work toward greater alignment. These include:
Personal Strengths: What are you naturally good at? What skills have you developed? Your strengths are tools for expressing your inner self in the world.
Knowledge and Experience: What do you know? What have you learned through education and life experience? This accumulated wisdom is a significant resource.
Social Support: Who supports and encourages you? This includes family, friends, mentors, and communities that validate and assist you.
Material Resources: What financial and physical resources do you have access to? While money isn't everything, having certain material resources can create space and opportunity for alignment.
Time and Energy: How much discretionary time and physical/emotional energy do you have? These are perhaps your most fundamental resources.
Resilience and Adaptability: How well do you bounce back from setbacks? How effectively do you adapt to change? These meta-resources help you navigate challenges on the path to alignment.
Understanding your resource landscape helps you work with what you have rather than focusing on what you lack. It grounds your aspirations in reality while highlighting assets you might be underutilizing.
Your agency is your capacity to act, choose, and influence your life's direction. It's not about controlling everything (which is impossible) but about responding effectively to what life brings. Agency includes:
Decision-Making: How do you make choices, big and small? Are your decisions aligned with your values and authentic self, or are they primarily reactive?
Action and Initiative: How effectively do you move from intention to action? Do you initiate changes when needed, or tend to remain passive?
Learning and Growth: How do you learn from experience? Do you use both successes and failures as opportunities for development?
Boundaries: How well do you establish and maintain healthy limits? Can you say no to what doesn't serve you and yes to what does?
Flexibility and Adaptation: How do you respond when things don't go as planned? Can you adjust course while staying true to your core self?
Agency isn't an all-or-nothing quality but exists on a spectrum that varies across different areas of life. You might have strong agency in your professional decisions but struggle with it in personal relationships, or vice versa. The goal is to strengthen your overall sense of agency while recognizing its natural limits.
Bringing these four lenses into alignment is both simple and challenging. Simple in concept, challenging in execution. Here's a basic outline of the process:
Self-Discovery: Use the Inner Self lens to clarify your values, beliefs, desires, and authentic identity. This often involves questioning assumptions, exploring different perspectives, and distinguishing your own voice from internalized messages of others.
Reality Assessment: Use the Resources lens to honestly evaluate what you have to work with. What strengths, supports, and assets can you leverage? What constraints must you acknowledge?
Alignment Planning: Identify specific areas where your outer life doesn't reflect your inner truth. Develop concrete plans to bring them into greater alignment, working within your resource reality.
Aligned Action: Use your Agency to implement these plans, making choices and taking steps that honor your authentic self. Start small if necessary, building momentum through consistent action.
Reflection and Adjustment: Regularly assess how aligned you feel and what's working or not working. Adjust your approach based on this feedback, recognizing that alignment is a dynamic process, not a static achievement.
This isn't a linear path but a cycle you'll move through repeatedly throughout your life. As you grow and change, as circumstances shift, you'll need to revisit each step. The goal isn't perfect, permanent alignment (which isn't possible in our complex, changing world) but an ongoing practice of realignment—a commitment to continually closing the gap between who you are and how you live.
The path to alignment isn't always smooth. Here are some common obstacles you might encounter, along with strategies for addressing them:
Self-Deception: We're remarkably good at lying to ourselves, especially about what we truly value and desire. We confuse social conditioning with authentic preference, or rationalize choices that don't actually serve us.
Strategy: Cultivate radical honesty with yourself. Notice when you're using phrases like "I should" or "I have to" as these often signal external rather than internal motivation. Ask trusted friends for feedback about when you seem most authentic versus when you seem to be playing a role.
Competing Values: Sometimes different aspects of your authentic self seem to conflict. You value both security and adventure, both connection and solitude, both achievement and ease. These tensions can make alignment feel impossible.
Strategy: Recognize that values exist in a hierarchy that may shift across contexts. In any given situation, some values will take precedence over others. The key is making these priorities conscious rather than arbitrary. Also, look for creative ways to honor seemingly competing values simultaneously.
External Resistance: When you begin to align your outer life with your inner truth, you may face resistance from others who are invested in you staying the same. Change in you can feel threatening to those around you.
Strategy: Communicate openly about your process when appropriate, but also accept that not everyone will understand or support your changes. Be prepared to set boundaries and, in some cases, to let certain relationships evolve or end.
Resource Limitations: Real-world constraints can limit your ability to align your life with your values. Financial necessities, health issues, family obligations, and other factors may require compromises.
Strategy: Focus on what you can control. Look for small ways to honor your values within existing constraints. Sometimes full alignment isn't immediately possible, but partial alignment is still valuable. Also, be creative about finding resources you may have overlooked.
Perfectionism: The pursuit of perfect alignment can become another form of self-tyranny. If you expect flawless congruence between inner and outer, you'll inevitably feel like you're failing.
Strategy: Embrace "good enough" alignment. Recognize that some misalignment is part of being human in a complex world. Focus on progress rather than perfection, celebrating small shifts toward greater authenticity.
Fear of the Unknown: Even when current misalignment feels painful, the prospect of change can be frightening. The familiar, even if uncomfortable, often feels safer than the unknown.
Strategy: Take small steps rather than making dramatic changes all at once. Each successful step builds confidence for the next. Also, connect with others who have made similar changes to see living examples of what's possible.
Remember that obstacles aren't failures but opportunities for deeper understanding. Each challenge you encounter on the path to alignment contains valuable information about yourself and your world.
In the chapters that follow, we'll explore each of the four lenses in depth. We'll look at how they interact and how bringing them into alignment creates that sense of meaning we're all after.
We'll start with the Inner Self, because that's the foundation. Without knowing who you are and what matters to you, the rest is just rearranging furniture in a house you don't want to live in. We'll explore practical ways to cut through self-deception and cultural conditioning to discover your authentic values and identity.
Then we'll turn to the Outer Self, examining how your relationships, environment, and social roles either reflect or contradict your inner truth. We'll look at practical ways to bring your external life into greater alignment with your core self.
Next, we'll assess your Resources—not just material resources, but your skills, talents, knowledge, relationships, and other assets that can help you bridge the gap between inner and outer. We'll explore how to leverage what you have rather than focusing on what you lack.
Finally, we'll tackle Agency—how you take action, make choices, and learn from experience. We'll look at practical ways to strengthen your capacity for effective action while accepting the limits of control in an unpredictable world.
Throughout, I'll share stories—some from my own life, some from people I've known or studied—that illustrate these principles in action. Not because my experience is particularly special, but because concrete examples often illuminate abstract concepts better than any explanation could.
I'll also offer reflections and exercises at the end of each chapter—not homework, but invitations to explore these ideas in your own life. Take what's useful, leave what isn't. There's no test at the end.
Before we dive into the four lenses, let's consider what's at stake. What does it cost us—individually and collectively—when we live out of alignment with our true selves?
At an individual level, the costs are clear: dissatisfaction, stress, a nagging sense of emptiness or inauthenticity. Research in psychology consistently shows that people who live in accordance with their intrinsic values report greater well-being than those whose lives are driven primarily by extrinsic motivations. This makes intuitive sense. When you're living someone else's version of a good life rather than your own, no amount of success will feel satisfying.
But the costs go beyond personal unhappiness. Misalignment often leads to:
Physical Health Problems: Chronic stress from living against your grain can contribute to everything from headaches and digestive issues to heart disease and compromised immunity.
Mental Health Struggles: Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse often have roots in the gap between authentic self and lived experience.
Relationship Difficulties: When you're not being true to yourself, your connections with others tend to suffer. You may become resentful, withdrawn, or prone to conflict.
Reduced Creativity and Productivity: It's hard to access your full creative potential when you're channeling energy into maintaining a false self or suppressing your true desires.
Existential Distress: At its most profound, misalignment can trigger a crisis of meaning—a deep questioning of whether your life has value or purpose.
The collective costs are equally significant. Imagine a world where most people are living out of alignment with their authentic selves—pursuing careers they don't care about, maintaining relationships that don't nourish them, suppressing their unique gifts and perspectives. That world would be characterized by:
Wasted Human Potential: How many scientific breakthroughs, artistic masterpieces, social innovations, and acts of compassion never happen because the people capable of them are busy doing what they think they should do rather than what they're uniquely suited to do?
Environmental Degradation: Much of our excessive consumption stems from attempts to fill the void created by misalignment. When life feels empty, we often try to fill it with stuff.
Social Fragmentation: Communities thrive when people bring their authentic gifts and engage from a place of genuine care. Misalignment breeds disengagement and cynicism.
Perpetuation of Harmful Systems: When we don't question the paths laid out for us, we often end up supporting systems that damage both people and planet.
This isn't meant to be depressing but clarifying. Understanding what's at stake can motivate the sometimes challenging work of alignment. The good news is that even small shifts toward greater alignment can yield significant benefits—for you and for the wider world.
I should confess that I come to this topic not as an expert who has it all figured out, but as a fellow traveler who has spent a lot of time thinking about these questions. I've made plenty of mistakes along the way—pursued goals that weren't really mine, ignored my own values when it was convenient, failed to practice what I preach more times than I care to admit.
But I've also experienced those moments of alignment—when who I am inside and how I live outside come together in a way that feels right and true. Those moments have convinced me that this framework, imperfect as it is, points toward something real and valuable.
I remember sitting at my desk at 5:30 in the morning, working on a story that terrified and excited me in equal measure. The house was quiet. The coffee was hot. The words were flowing not easily, but truthfully. And I had this sudden, overwhelming sense that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was meant to do. Not because writing is some exalted calling, but because in that moment, my inner and outer selves were perfectly aligned. I was living my values, using my strengths, making choices that reflected my deepest sense of who I am.
Those moments don't come every day. They can't. Life is too complicated, too full of compromise and constraint. But they come often enough to convince me that alignment is possible, and that it's worth pursuing.
So that's what this book is about: helping you find your own moments of alignment, your own sense of meaning, your own point to it all. Not by following my path or anyone else's, but by seeing your life more clearly through these four lenses and making choices that bring them into greater harmony.
Let's begin.
As we close this introductory chapter, here are some questions to consider. You might want to reflect on them privately, discuss them with someone you trust, or write about them in a journal:
-When have you felt most aligned in your life—when your outer actions and circumstances most reflected your inner truth? What was that experience like?
-Where do you currently feel misalignment between who you are and how you live? What specific aspects of your life feel out of sync with your authentic self?
-Which of the four lenses (Inner Self, Outer Self, Resources, Agency) seems most challenging for you to see clearly? Why might that be?
-What one small step could you take today toward greater alignment between your inner and outer selves?
Remember, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. They're simply invitations to begin thinking about your own life through the Poia framework. We'll explore each lens in much greater depth in the chapters ahead.
You ever try on someone else's glasses? Not sunglasses, but prescription lenses. Everything goes blurry, right? Your brain can't make sense of what your eyes are seeing. Now imagine wearing a pair where the left lens is red and the right lens is blue. Not just different prescriptions—completely different colors filtering reality. You'd get a headache within minutes. Your brain would struggle to reconcile these conflicting versions of the world. You might even feel sick to your stomach.
That's exactly what happens when your inner self and outer life don't match up.
I'm not talking about some airy philosophical concept. I mean the concrete, day-to-day experience of living against your own grain. When what you truly value differs from how you actually spend your days. When who you are deep down conflicts with who you pretend to be for others. When your authentic self and your public self are strangers to each other.
This misalignment creates a specific kind of mental static—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. It's that uncomfortable tension that builds when your actions contradict your beliefs or values. That nagging sense that something's off, even when you can't quite put your finger on what.
Let me tell you about Maya.
On paper, Maya's killing it. She's a talented architect with a corner office at a prestigious firm in Chicago. She designs high-end commercial properties and luxury condos. Her salary has six figures, her condo has floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan, and her resume has all the right credentials. By conventional standards, she's made it.
But Maya's miserable. She drags herself to work each morning. She stares at her computer screen and feels nothing for the gleaming glass towers she's designing. At night, she has trouble sleeping. On weekends, she's too exhausted to do much of anything. Her friends think she's depressed, and maybe she is, but antidepressants haven't helped. Something deeper is wrong.
Here's what's happening: Maya's outer life—her career, her daily activities, her social role as "successful architect"—is completely disconnected from her inner self. Deep down, what Maya truly values is creativity and community. When she was in architecture school, she dreamed of designing affordable, beautiful spaces that bring people together—community centers, innovative public housing, mixed-use developments that foster connection rather than isolation. She wanted to use design to solve social problems, not to create exclusive spaces for the wealthy.
But somewhere along the way, Maya got sidetracked. Maybe it was student loans, or pressure from mentors, or the allure of prestige. Whatever the reason, she ended up on a path that looks successful from the outside but feels empty from within. Her daily work—chasing lucrative contracts for luxury high-rises—has nothing to do with her core values of creativity and community service.
Maya's wearing those mismatched glasses every day of her life. No wonder she has a perpetual headache.
This kind of misalignment isn't just psychologically uncomfortable—it has physical effects too. Research in neuroscience shows that when your actions align with your values, your brain's reward system activates. It releases dopamine and other neurotransmitters that make you feel satisfied and motivated. That's why Maya might feel a genuine spark of joy on the rare occasions when she volunteers for a community design project or sketches ideas for affordable housing in her free time.
But when you consistently live against your values, those neural reward circuits stay quiet. Instead, your brain's stress response kicks in. Your body produces cortisol and other stress hormones. Over time, this chronic stress can impair cognitive functions like memory and decision-making. It can weaken your immune system. It can even change the structure of your brain.
In other words, misalignment doesn't just feel bad—it is bad for you, physically and mentally.
The flip side is also true. When your inner and outer selves do align, you're more likely to experience what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called "flow"—that state of complete absorption and fulfillment where you lose track of time. You know those moments when work doesn't feel like work? When you're so engaged in what you're doing that hours pass like minutes? That's flow, and it happens most often when your activities match your authentic interests and values.
If Maya were designing that community arts center she once dreamed about, she might find herself in flow states regularly. She'd still face challenges and frustrations, of course—that's part of any meaningful work—but she wouldn't feel that soul-crushing emptiness that comes from living someone else's version of success.
Alignment also builds resilience. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, observed that "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how'." When your daily actions connect to a deeper purpose or core value, you can endure difficulties that might otherwise break you. If Maya reconnected with her "why"—serving community through design—even stressful workdays would take on new meaning. They wouldn't be pointless struggles but challenges undertaken for a purpose that matters to her.
Perhaps most importantly, alignment creates an upward spiral. Small steps taken in harmony with your true self generate positive feelings—pride, relief, satisfaction—which make it easier to take the next positive step. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls this the "broaden-and-build" effect: positive emotions broaden your mindset and help you build lasting resources like skills, relationships, and resilience.
Each time you make a choice that honors your values, you get a little boost of confidence or happiness, which fuels further positive changes. It's like climbing a spiral staircase—you might circle around to similar challenges, but each time at a higher level of understanding and capability.
I've experienced this in my own writing life. For years, I tried to write what I thought I should write—literary fiction full of symbolism and meaningful silences. I was miserable, and the work was terrible. When I finally embraced my love for horror and suspense, everything changed. Writing became joyful again. Each story built my confidence. Each novel taught me something new. The work got better because I was no longer fighting myself. I was aligned.
That's what I want for you. Not to write horror novels (unless that's your thing), but to experience the freedom and power that comes from alignment—from living a life that reflects who you truly are.
So how do we get there? How do we bring our inner and outer selves into greater harmony?
This is where the four lenses of Poia come in. Think of your life as a complex, multidimensional reality. No single perspective can capture it completely. You need multiple angles, multiple lenses, to see it clearly.
The four lenses—Inner Self, Outer Self, Resources, and Agency—are like different vantage points from which to view your life. Each reveals something important that the others might miss. By regularly looking through all four, you become more aware of where things line up nicely and where there's dissonance. You can then adjust your choices and perspective accordingly.
In the following sections, we'll explore each lens in turn. We'll examine what it means, why it matters, and how to apply it to your own life. Along the way, we'll draw on insights from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and real-world examples to deepen our understanding.
The goal isn't to achieve perfect alignment—that's not realistic in our complex, messy world. Rather, it's to reduce the gap between who you are and how you live. To create enough alignment that you feel authentic, purposeful, and alive rather than fragmented, confused, or numb.
Let's start at the foundation: your Inner Self.
The Inner Self Lens
Your inner self is your core—the values, beliefs, desires, and authentic identity that make you who you are beneath all the roles you play and masks you wear. It's what remains when no one's watching and nothing's at stake. Your inner self isn't always easy to access; we're remarkably good at hiding the truth from ourselves. But connecting with it is essential, because without knowing your inner self, you can't possibly align your life with it.
Think of your inner self as the foundation of a house. If it's solid and true, you can build something stable and lasting upon it. If it's cracked or built on shifting sand, whatever structure you create will eventually develop problems—no matter how impressive it looks from the outside.
Maya's inner self—her core values of creativity and community service—was solid. The problem wasn't with her foundation but with the structure she built on top of it. Her outer life (luxury condo design) had no connection to her inner truth. It was like building a nightclub on the foundation for a library—a fundamental mismatch that created instability throughout the whole system.
So how do you get clear about your inner self? How do you distinguish your authentic values and desires from those you've absorbed from family, culture, and society?
This isn't easy work. We're social creatures, deeply influenced by the people and systems around us. From early childhood, we internalize messages about what's important, what success looks like, what we should want and value. These messages come from parents, teachers, friends, media, religion, and countless other sources. They shape us in ways we often don't recognize.
I remember when my son Owen was about five years old. He came home from kindergarten one day and announced that he didn't like writing stories anymore because "stories are for girls." Somewhere—from a classmate, a TV show, who knows—he'd picked up this toxic little idea that creativity was somehow feminine and therefore (in his five-year-old boy logic) something to avoid. It took months of gentle conversation and counterexamples to dislodge that notion.
Adults aren't immune to this kind of social programming; we're just better at disguising it from ourselves. We think we're making free choices when often we're following scripts written by others—pursuing careers our parents would approve of, buying homes that impress our peers, adopting hobbies that signal the right social status.
To clarify your inner self, you need to question these scripts. You need to distinguish between intrinsic values (what matters to you) and extrinsic values (what others say should matter). You need to separate your authentic desires from those implanted by marketing, social media, and cultural expectations.
This isn't about rejecting all external influences—that would be impossible and undesirable. We're inherently social beings, shaped by our relationships and communities. The goal isn't to become some isolated "true self" free from all outside input. Rather, it's to become more conscious about which influences you accept and which you resist. It's about making deliberate choices rather than unconsciously absorbing whatever values your environment happens to promote.
Let's look at four key components of the inner self: values, beliefs, desires, and identity.
Values: What Truly Matters to You
Your values are your core principles—the things that matter most to you, that give your life meaning and direction. They're not goals to achieve but ongoing priorities that guide your choices. Common values include things like creativity, connection, learning, contribution, security, adventure, autonomy, and many others.
Values aren't right or wrong; they're deeply personal. What matters is whether they're authentic to you or adopted from others without reflection.
How can you identify your true values? One approach is to look at when you've felt most alive, engaged, and fulfilled. What were you doing in those moments? What mattered to you then? Another is to consider what you'd regret not having more of in your life if you were looking back from old age. Would you wish you'd spent more time creating, connecting with others, exploring the world, building security, or something else?
For Maya, those moments of aliveness came when she was designing spaces that fostered community and creative expression—like the community center she helped design during a college internship, or the temporary public installation she created for a local arts festival. When she imagined looking back on her life, she knew she'd regret not using her architectural skills to make beautiful, accessible spaces for people who are typically excluded from good design.
Your values might be completely different from Maya's, and that's as it should be. The important thing is that they're genuinely yours—not borrowed from parents, peers, or society without conscious choice.
Beliefs: Your Core Convictions
Your beliefs are your fundamental convictions about yourself, others, and the world. Some are conscious and explicit; others operate below the surface, shaping your perceptions and choices without your awareness.
Beliefs include ideas like: "People are generally trustworthy" or "I'm not creative" or "The world is fundamentally fair/unfair." These aren't just abstract thoughts; they're lenses through which you interpret experiences and make decisions.
Some beliefs empower you; others limit you. The key is becoming aware of what you truly believe, especially those unconscious convictions that might be holding you back.
Maya, for instance, held the limiting belief that "real architects design impressive buildings, not community spaces." This belief, absorbed from her prestigious architecture school and reinforced by her firm's culture, led her away from her authentic values. Once she recognized this belief as an external imposition rather than her own truth, she could begin to question and ultimately replace it.
Your desires are what you authentically want—not what you think you should want or what others want for you. Like beliefs, desires can operate at different levels of awareness. Surface desires (I want a new car) often mask deeper desires (I want respect, freedom, or security).
Getting clear about your true desires requires looking beneath the surface wants to the underlying needs and values they represent. That new car might really be about a desire for status, autonomy, or even just the simple pleasure of driving something responsive and well-designed.
Maya thought she wanted prestige and financial success—that's why she pursued high-end commercial projects. But her deeper desire was to create spaces that foster human connection and creative expression. The prestige she sought was actually a substitute for the genuine satisfaction of doing work aligned with her values.
Identity: Your Authentic Self-Concept
Your identity is how you define yourself—your sense of who you are at a fundamental level. It includes but goes beyond your social roles (parent, professional, partner). It encompasses your core traits, values, and self-perception.
Identity isn't fixed; it evolves throughout life. But at any given time, some aspects of your self-concept feel more authentic and central than others. These core identity elements are key to alignment.
For Maya, being a creative problem-solver and community contributor were central to her authentic identity. Her role as a "successful commercial architect" felt like an ill-fitting costume rather than a true expression of self.
When your outer life doesn't match your inner identity, you experience what psychologists call "identity incongruence"—a sense of falseness or inauthenticity that undermines well-being. Conversely, when your life reflects your authentic identity, you experience what Carl Rogers called "congruence"—a state of wholeness and integrity that fosters psychological health.
So how do you get clear about these aspects of your inner self? How do you distinguish authentic values, beliefs, desires, and identity from those you've absorbed without question?
Here are some approaches that can help:
Reflect on peak experiences. Think about times when you felt most alive, engaged, and fulfilled. What were you doing? What mattered to you in those moments? These peak experiences often reveal your authentic values and desires.
Notice energy and resistance. Pay attention to what energizes you versus what drains you. What activities do you look forward to? What do you procrastinate on or dread? Energy often signals alignment with your inner self; resistance often signals misalignment.
Examine your regrets. Consider what you might regret not having more of in your life if you were looking back from old age. Would you wish you'd spent more time creating, connecting with others, exploring the world, building security, or something else? These potential regrets can reveal your true values.
Question your "shoulds." When you catch yourself thinking "I should do X" or "I should want Y," ask where that "should" comes from. Is it based on your authentic values, or on external expectations you've internalized? Shoulds often reveal conflicts between your inner self and social conditioning.
Explore your reactions. Notice what triggers strong emotional reactions in you—both positive and negative. What makes you angry, sad, joyful, or inspired? These reactions can point to core values and beliefs.
Seek quiet reflection. Create space for solitude and silence. Meditation, journaling, walking in nature, or any practice that quiets the external noise can help you hear your own inner voice more clearly.
Get feedback from trusted others. Sometimes friends or family see aspects of our authentic selves that we miss. Ask people who know you well when they think you seem most like yourself, or what they see as your core values and strengths.
This work of clarifying your inner self isn't a one-time task but an ongoing process. We evolve throughout our lives, and our inner landscape evolves with us. What mattered deeply at twenty-five might matter less at fifty, and vice versa. The goal isn't to pin down your inner self once and for all, but to maintain an ongoing dialogue with it.
For Maya, this process might involve reflecting on when she's felt most fulfilled in her architectural work, questioning the "shoulds" that led her into commercial design, noticing what kinds of projects energize rather than drain her, and creating quiet space to reconnect with her original passion for community-centered spaces.
As she clarifies her inner self, Maya will be better equipped to make choices that align with her authentic values, beliefs, desires, and identity. She'll have a solid foundation on which to rebuild her outer life.
In the next section, we'll explore the Outer Self lens—how you express and embody your inner self in the world through your relationships, environment, and actions. We'll see how Maya might begin to bring her outer life into greater alignment with her newly clarified inner truth.
But first, let's pause for a moment of reflection. Consider your own inner self:
-When have you felt most alive, engaged, and fulfilled? What were you doing in those moments? What mattered to you then?
-What "shoulds" do you often hear in your own mind? Where do they come from? Do they reflect your authentic values or external expectations?
-What might you regret not having more of in your life if you were looking back from old age?
-What energizes you? What drains you? What patterns do you notice in your answers?
These questions don't have right or wrong answers. They're invitations to begin exploring your inner landscape—to start clearing away the accumulated debris of social conditioning and external expectations so you can see your authentic self more clearly.
Because here's the truth: You can't align your life with your inner self until you know what that inner self actually values, believes, desires, and identifies with. Clarity comes first; alignment follows.
The Outer Self Lens
Your outer self is how you express and embody your inner self in the world. It's the visible manifestation of who you are through your relationships, environment, and actions. While your inner self is private and internal, your outer self is public and external—it's how you show up in the world and interact with others.
Think of your outer self as the structure built upon the foundation of your inner self. Ideally, this structure authentically expresses what's below—like how a well-designed house reflects the needs and values of its inhabitants. When your outer self genuinely reflects your inner truth, there's a sense of integrity and wholeness. When it doesn't, life feels fragmented and false.
Maya's outer self—her career in commercial architecture, her luxury condo, her professional identity as a designer of high-end spaces—was completely disconnected from her inner values of creativity and community service. It was like she'd built a sleek modern skyscraper on the foundation for a cozy community center—a fundamental mismatch that created instability throughout her life.
The outer self includes several key dimensions:
Relationships: Your Connections with Others
Your relationships are perhaps the most significant aspect of your outer self. They include family ties, friendships, romantic partnerships, professional connections, and community involvement. These relationships both express and shape who you are.
When your relationships reflect your authentic values and identity, they feel nourishing and supportive. When they don't, they become sources of stress and disconnection.
For Maya, her professional relationships were mostly transactional—focused on securing contracts and pleasing wealthy clients. She had few connections with people who shared her deeper values around community and creative problem-solving. Even her friendships had become superficial, centered on career networking or surface-level socializing rather than meaningful exchange.
To align her outer self with her inner truth, Maya might need to cultivate new relationships with people who share her passion for community-centered design. She might join organizations focused on affordable housing or public space innovation. She might reconnect with classmates who went into community development or public interest design. These new connections would both reflect and reinforce her authentic values.
Environment: Your Physical and Social Context
Your environment includes your physical spaces (home, workplace, neighborhood) and the broader social and cultural context you inhabit. These environments powerfully shape your daily experience and either support or hinder your authentic expression.
When your environment aligns with your inner self, it feels like home—comfortable, supportive, energizing. When it doesn't, it feels constraining or alienating.
Maya's sleek downtown condo and prestigious firm office were environments designed to impress others rather than nourish her authentic self. They reflected external markers of success but did nothing to support her core values of creativity and community. In fact, they actively reinforced her misalignment by constantly reminding her of the path she'd chosen.
To create greater alignment, Maya might redesign her living space to better reflect her values—perhaps incorporating more creative elements, making it more welcoming for community gatherings, or moving to a neighborhood with stronger community ties. She might seek out workspaces that inspire her true architectural vision rather than reinforce conventional notions of success.
Roles and Responsibilities: The Parts You Play
Your roles are the various parts you play in different contexts—professional, familial, social. These roles come with expectations and responsibilities that shape your behavior and how others perceive you.
When your roles allow authentic expression of your inner self, they feel natural and energizing. When they require you to suppress important aspects of who you are, they become sources of stress and disconnection.
Maya's role as a commercial architect at a prestigious firm required her to prioritize profit and prestige over her authentic values of creativity and community impact. This role had become a straitjacket, constraining her true expression rather than enabling it.
To align her outer self with her inner truth, Maya might need to redefine her professional role—perhaps by shifting to a firm that focuses on community projects, starting her own practice with a different emphasis, or finding ways to incorporate community-centered work into her current position. She might also need to reconsider other roles in her life that reinforce misalignment.
Actions and Habits: What You Actually Do
Your actions and habits—how you spend your time, energy, and attention day to day—are perhaps the most concrete expression of your outer self. These daily patterns often reveal more about your priorities than any statement of values could.
When your actions align with your authentic values and identity, they feel meaningful and energizing. When they don't, they feel empty or draining.
Maya's daily actions—designing luxury spaces, pursuing high-end clients, focusing on profit margins—had little connection to her core values. No wonder she felt drained and empty; her daily activities were actively contradicting what mattered most to her.
To create alignment, Maya would need to shift her daily actions to better reflect her authentic values. This might mean dedicating time to pro bono community projects, researching affordable housing innovations, or finding ways to incorporate community-building elements into her current work. Even small changes in how she spends her time could begin to bridge the gap between her inner and outer selves.
Creative Expression: How You Create and Contribute
Your creative expression is how you bring your unique perspective and gifts into the world. This might be through formal artistic endeavors, but it also includes how you solve problems, communicate ideas, or approach challenges in any area of life.
When your creative expression reflects your authentic self, it feels fulfilling and generative. When it's constrained or misdirected, it becomes a source of frustration or stagnation.
Maya's architectural work had become a form of creative expression that betrayed rather than honored her authentic vision. She was using her design skills to create exclusive spaces for the wealthy rather than innovative solutions for communities.
To align her creative expression with her inner truth, Maya would need to redirect her architectural talents toward projects that reflect her values. This might mean designing affordable housing with beautiful, community-building features, or creating public spaces that foster connection and creativity among diverse groups.
So how do you bring your outer self into greater alignment with your inner truth? How do you build a life that authentically expresses who you are?
Here are some approaches that can help:
Audit your current alignment. Take an honest inventory of how well your relationships, environment, roles, actions, and creative expression currently reflect your authentic values, beliefs, desires, and identity. Where are the biggest gaps? Where are the opportunities for greater alignment?
Start with small shifts. You don't have to overhaul your entire life at once. Look for small, manageable ways to bring more alignment to your daily activities. Even minor changes can reduce cognitive dissonance and create momentum for larger shifts.
Experiment and iterate. Try new approaches to expressing your authentic self, notice what works and what doesn't, and adjust accordingly. Alignment is an ongoing process of experimentation and refinement, not a one-time achievement.
Set boundaries. Learn to say no to activities, relationships, and obligations that pull you away from your authentic path. Setting clear boundaries protects the space you need for aligned living.
Seek supportive environments. Surround yourself with people, places, and communities that reinforce rather than undermine your authentic values and identity. These supportive contexts make alignment much easier to maintain.
Build new habits. Create daily routines and practices that reflect your core values. Over time, these aligned habits become automatic, reducing the effort required to live authentically.
Communicate your authentic self. Share your true values, desires, and identity with others in your life. This transparency makes it easier to build relationships and environments that support your alignment.
For Maya, this process might begin with small steps—perhaps volunteering a few hours a week at a community design center, or starting a side project focused on affordable housing innovations. She might join a professional group for socially responsible architects, or begin conversations with colleagues who share her interest in community-centered design.
As she makes these small shifts, Maya might notice increased energy and engagement—signs that she's moving toward greater alignment. These positive experiences would create momentum for larger changes, perhaps eventually leading to a significant career shift or the launch of her own community-focused practice.
The key is to start somewhere, anywhere, that brings her outer life into greater harmony with her inner truth. Each step toward alignment reduces cognitive dissonance and creates space for authentic expression.
In the next section, we'll explore the Resources lens—the strengths, supports, and assets you have to draw upon as you work toward greater alignment. We'll see how Maya might leverage her existing resources to bridge the gap between her inner and outer selves.
But first, let's pause for another moment of reflection. Consider your own outer self:
-How well do your current relationships reflect and support your authentic values and identity?
-Does your physical environment (home, workplace, neighborhood) nourish or constrain your true self?
-Which of your roles and responsibilities feel most aligned with who you really are? Which feel most misaligned?
-How do you spend most of your time and energy day to day? Do these activities reflect what truly matters to you?
-How does your creative expression—how you solve problems, communicate ideas, or create in any form—reflect or contradict your authentic self?
Again, these questions don't have right or wrong answers. They're invitations to assess the current alignment between your inner and outer selves—to identify where you're already living authentically and where there might be opportunities for greater congruence.
Because here's another truth: Alignment isn't an all-or-nothing state. It exists on a spectrum, and even small shifts toward greater congruence between inner and outer can significantly reduce cognitive dissonance and increase well-being.
The Resources Lens
Your resources are the strengths, supports, and assets you have to draw upon as you work toward greater alignment. These include not just material resources like money and physical possessions, but also personal strengths, knowledge, relationships, time, energy, and other less tangible assets.
Think of your resources as the tools and materials available for building the structure of your outer life upon the foundation of your inner self. The more clearly you understand what you have to work with, the more effectively you can create alignment between inner and outer.
Maya, for instance, has significant resources she could leverage to bridge the gap between her inner values and her outer life: her architectural training and skills, her professional reputation, her network of contacts in the field, her financial stability from years of high-paying work, and her creative problem-solving abilities. Recognizing these resources would help her see possibilities for change that might otherwise remain hidden.
Let's explore the key categories of resources that can support your alignment:
Personal Strengths: Your Innate and Developed Capabilities
Your personal strengths include both innate talents and skills you've developed through education and experience. These strengths are tools for expressing your authentic self in the world.
When you leverage your strengths in service of your core values, you experience what positive psychologists call "signature strength engagement"—a particularly fulfilling form of activity that feels both energizing and natural.
Maya's strengths include her spatial visualization abilities, her technical knowledge of architectural principles, her aesthetic sensibility, and her skill at translating client needs into physical designs. These strengths would serve her just as well in community-centered architecture as they do in commercial projects—perhaps even better, since she'd be applying them to work that truly matters to her.
To leverage your strengths for greater alignment, first identify what you're naturally good at and what skills you've developed. Then consider how these capabilities could be applied to activities that reflect your authentic values and identity. Often, the same strengths that have helped you succeed in misaligned pursuits can be redirected toward more authentic expressions.
Knowledge and Experience: What You've Learned and Lived
Your knowledge and experience—what you've learned through formal education, self-study, and lived experience—are significant resources for creating alignment. This accumulated wisdom helps you navigate challenges and recognize opportunities on your path.
Maya's knowledge of architectural principles, building codes, design software, project management, and client relations represents years of learning and practice. This knowledge wouldn't be wasted if she shifted toward community-centered work; it would simply be applied in a new context that better reflects her values.
To leverage your knowledge and experience for greater alignment, consider how what you already know could be applied to pursuits that better reflect your authentic self. Look for transferable skills and insights that could ease a transition to more aligned activities.
Social Support: Your Relationships and Communities
Your social support includes the people and communities who can help you on your path to alignment—family members, friends, mentors, colleagues, and various communities you belong to. These relationships provide emotional support, practical assistance, information, and accountability.
Maya might have colleagues who share her interest in community-centered design, former classmates who went into public interest architecture, or friends who could provide emotional support during a career transition. She might also find new communities of like-minded professionals through organizations focused on social impact design.
To leverage your social support for greater alignment, identify people in your life who understand and encourage your authentic self. Seek out communities that share your core values. Be willing to build new relationships that support your alignment, even as you might need to loosen ties with those who reinforce misalignment.
Material Resources: Your Financial and Physical Assets
Your material resources include financial assets (income, savings, investments) and physical possessions (home, car, tools, equipment). While money and stuff aren't everything, having certain material resources can create space and opportunity for alignment.
Maya's financial stability from years of high-paying work gives her options that someone living paycheck to paycheck might not have. She could potentially take a pay cut to work at a firm more aligned with her values, invest in starting her own practice, or even take time off to volunteer or study community-centered design approaches.
To leverage your material resources for greater alignment, consider how your financial situation and physical assets could support shifts toward more authentic living. This might mean using savings to fund a transition period, repurposing physical space to better reflect your values, or simplifying your material needs to create more freedom for aligned choices.
Time and Energy: Your Most Fundamental Resources
Your time and energy—how much discretionary time you have and how much physical, mental, and emotional energy you can devote to various pursuits—are perhaps your most fundamental resources. Without sufficient time and energy, other resources may remain untapped.
Maya might have limited free time due to her demanding job, but she could start by dedicating even a few hours a week to more aligned activities. She might also notice that as she engages in work that reflects her values, her energy actually increases—a common experience when moving toward greater alignment.
To leverage your time and energy for greater alignment, look for ways to allocate these precious resources more intentionally. This might mean setting boundaries around time-consuming but misaligned activities, finding ways to replenish your energy more effectively, or noticing which activities drain versus energize you.
Resilience and Adaptability: Your Meta-Resources
Your resilience (ability to bounce back from setbacks) and adaptability (capacity to adjust to changing circumstances) are meta-resources that help you navigate the challenges of creating greater alignment. These qualities support you through the inevitable ups and downs of any significant life change.
Maya's resilience might come from past experiences of overcoming obstacles in her education and career. Her adaptability might be evident in how she's handled changing client needs or industry trends. These same qualities would serve her well in transitioning toward more aligned work.
To leverage your resilience and adaptability for greater alignment, reflect on times you've successfully navigated challenges or changes in the past. What strategies helped you then? How might you apply those same approaches to the process of creating greater alignment now?
Assessing and Leveraging Your Resource Landscape
Understanding your resource landscape helps you work with what you have rather than focusing on what you lack. It grounds your aspirations in reality while highlighting assets you might be underutilizing.
Here are some approaches to assessing and leveraging your resources for greater alignment:
Take inventory of your resources. Make a comprehensive list of your strengths, knowledge, social support, material resources, time, energy, and meta-resources. Be thorough; we often overlook resources we take for granted.
Identify underutilized resources. Which of your resources could be better leveraged to support alignment? Are there strengths you're not fully using, knowledge you're not applying, relationships you're not drawing upon, or other assets you're overlooking?
Look for resource synergies. How might different resources work together to support your alignment? For instance, could your social connections help you apply your strengths in new contexts? Could your material resources create space for better using your time and energy?
Address resource gaps. Where do you need to develop or acquire new resources to support your alignment? This might mean learning new skills, building new relationships, or finding ways to increase your time, energy, or financial flexibility.
Start with resource-rich areas. Begin your alignment efforts in areas where you have abundant resources to draw upon. Early successes in these areas can build momentum and confidence for tackling more challenging aspects of alignment.
Practice resource stewardship. Treat your resources—especially time and energy—as precious and limited. Invest them intentionally in activities that support your alignment rather than depleting them on misaligned pursuits.
For Maya, this process might involve recognizing that her architectural expertise, professional reputation, and financial stability are significant resources for creating change. She might identify colleagues who share her interest in community design as an underutilized social resource. She might see that her technical skills and creative problem-solving abilities could be directly applied to affordable housing challenges. And she might realize that even her current position, despite its misalignment, provides resources (income, connections, credibility) that could support her transition to more aligned work.
With this clear-eyed assessment of her resources, Maya could develop a practical plan for bridging the gap between her inner values and her outer life—not all at once, but step by step, leveraging what she already has to create what she truly wants.
In the next section, we'll explore the Agency lens—how you take action, make choices, and learn from your experiences. We'll see how Maya might strengthen her capacity for effective action as she works toward greater alignment.
But first, let's pause for another moment of reflection. Consider your own resources:
-What personal strengths and skills do you have that could support greater alignment in your life?
-What knowledge and experience have you accumulated that might be applied to more authentic pursuits?
-Who in your life understands and supports your authentic self? What communities share your core values?
-How might your material resources (financial and physical) create space or opportunity for more aligned choices?
-How are you currently allocating your time and energy? Which activities drain you, and which energize you?
-When have you shown resilience and adaptability in the past? How might these qualities support your alignment now?
These questions invite you to recognize the resources you already have for creating greater alignment—to see possibilities that might otherwise remain hidden behind a focus on constraints or limitations.
Because here's another truth: While external circumstances do create real constraints, most of us have more resources for alignment than we initially recognize. Seeing these resources clearly is the first step toward leveraging them effectively.
The Agency Lens
Your agency is your capacity to act, choose, and influence your life's direction. It's not about controlling everything (which is impossible) but about responding effectively to what life brings. Agency is your ability to be an author of your life rather than merely a character in someone else's story.
Think of agency as how you use the tools and materials (your resources) to build the structure of your outer life upon the foundation of your inner self. Without agency, resources remain potential rather than actual—tools gathering dust rather than building something meaningful.
Maya, despite her misalignment, has demonstrated significant agency in her life. She successfully completed a demanding education, built a respected career, and achieved financial stability. These same capacities for effective action could be redirected toward creating greater alignment between her inner values and outer life.
Let's explore the key dimensions of agency that can support your alignment:
Decision-Making: How You Make Choices
Your decision-making is how you evaluate options and choose directions, both in major life decisions and everyday choices. Effective decision-making aligns your choices with your authentic values and identity rather than defaulting to external expectations or short-term convenience.
Maya's decision to pursue commercial architecture was shaped more by external factors (prestige, income, others' expectations) than by her authentic values. To strengthen her agency, she would need to develop more value-aligned decision-making processes—perhaps by explicitly considering how potential choices reflect her core values of creativity and community impact.
To strengthen your decision-making for greater alignment, practice connecting choices to your authentic values. Before making significant decisions, ask: "How does this option reflect what truly matters to me? How might it move me toward or away from greater alignment?" Even small choices can be opportunities to practice value-aligned decision-making.
Action and Initiative: Moving from Intention to Reality
Your action and initiative involve your ability to move from intention to reality—to actually do what you've decided is important rather than remaining stuck in planning or contemplation. This capacity for effective action translates your inner values and desires into outer reality.
Maya might have occasionally thought about pursuing more community-centered work but never taken concrete steps in that direction. To strengthen her agency, she would need to develop her capacity for aligned action—perhaps by setting specific, manageable goals and holding herself accountable for progress.
To strengthen your action and initiative for greater alignment, practice breaking down larger aspirations into concrete next steps. Focus on progress rather than perfection. Build momentum through consistent small actions rather than waiting for the perfect moment for a major change.
Learning and Growth: Developing Through Experience
Your learning and growth involve how you develop through experience—how you extract insights from both successes and failures and apply those lessons to future situations. This capacity for ongoing development allows you to continuously refine your approach to alignment.
Maya has likely learned valuable lessons throughout her education and career—about architecture, about working with clients, about managing projects. To strengthen her agency, she would need to apply this same capacity for learning to her alignment path—reflecting on what works and what doesn't as she experiments with more authentic expressions of her values.
To strengthen your learning and growth for greater alignment, practice reflective awareness about your experiences. Notice what happens when you take steps toward greater alignment. What supports your authentic expression? What hinders it? How might you adjust your approach based on these observations?
Boundaries: Protecting Your Authentic Path
Your boundaries involve your ability to establish and maintain healthy limits—to say no to what doesn't serve your authentic path and yes to what does. Clear boundaries protect the space and energy you need for aligned living.
Maya might struggle with setting boundaries around her work commitments, allowing her demanding job to consume time and energy that could be directed toward more aligned activities. To strengthen her agency, she would need to develop clearer boundaries—perhaps by limiting overtime, declining certain projects, or carving out protected time for exploring community-centered design.
To strengthen your boundaries for greater alignment, practice identifying and communicating your limits. Notice when you feel resentful, drained, or compromised—these feelings often signal boundary violations. Learn to say no to requests or obligations that pull you away from your authentic path, even when doing so is uncomfortable.
Flexibility and Adaptation: Responding to Life's Complexity
Your flexibility and adaptation involve your ability to adjust course when circumstances change or initial plans don't work out. This capacity for responsive adjustment allows you to maintain alignment even as life's complexities and uncertainties unfold.
Maya might initially plan to transition immediately to a community-focused firm, only to discover that such positions are scarce in her city. To strengthen her agency, she would need to develop flexible approaches—perhaps by finding ways to incorporate community projects into her current role, starting a side initiative, or considering relocation options.
To strengthen your flexibility and adaptation for greater alignment, practice holding your specific plans lightly while remaining committed to your core values. When obstacles arise, ask: "What's another way to honor what matters most to me in this situation? How might I adapt my approach while staying true to my authentic path?"
Agency isn't an all-or-nothing quality but exists on a spectrum that varies across different areas of life. You might have strong agency in your professional decisions but struggle with it in personal relationships, or vice versa. The goal is to strengthen your overall sense of agency while recognizing its natural limits.
Here are some approaches to strengthening your agency for greater alignment:
Start with awareness. Notice where you already exercise agency effectively and where you tend to feel stuck or powerless. This awareness helps you leverage existing strengths while identifying areas for growth.
Take responsibility without blame. Acknowledge your role in creating your current situation without harsh self-judgment. Taking responsibility empowers change; self-blame often paralyzes it.
Practice incremental stretching. Like building physical strength, developing agency happens gradually through consistent practice. Look for opportunities to stretch your capacity for aligned action in small, manageable ways.
Develop self-efficacy beliefs. Self-efficacy—your belief in your ability to accomplish specific tasks—strongly influences your actual capacity for effective action. Notice and challenge limiting beliefs about what you can or cannot do.
Build supportive structures. Create systems, routines, and accountability mechanisms that support your aligned actions. These external structures can compensate for fluctuations in internal motivation or focus.
Learn from role models. Identify people who demonstrate strong agency in areas where you want to grow. Observe how they make decisions, take action, learn from experience, set boundaries, and adapt to changing circumstances.
Celebrate agency moments. Acknowledge and appreciate times when you effectively exercise your agency in service of alignment. These celebrations reinforce your capacity for aligned action.
For Maya, strengthening her agency might involve first recognizing where she already demonstrates effective action—perhaps in her technical work or client relationships. She might take responsibility for her career choices without harsh self-judgment, acknowledging that she made the best decisions she could with the awareness she had at the time.
She could practice incremental stretching by taking small steps toward more aligned work—perhaps volunteering a few hours a month at a community design organization or proposing a pro bono project at her firm. She might challenge limiting beliefs about her options ("I'm too established to change directions" or "Community design isn't real architecture") that undermine her sense of agency.
To support her aligned actions, Maya could create structures like dedicated time blocks for exploring community design opportunities, accountability partnerships with like-minded colleagues, or specific goals with deadlines and metrics. She might seek out role models—architects who successfully balance commercial work with community impact or who have transitioned to more aligned practices.
And importantly, she would need to celebrate her agency moments—acknowledging when she takes even small steps toward greater alignment between her inner values and outer life. These celebrations would reinforce her capacity for continued aligned action.
Bringing The Lenses Together: The Self Lens
We've explored four distinct lenses—Inner Self, Outer Self, Resources, and Agency—each offering a different perspective on your life and the path to alignment. Now it's time to bring these lenses together into what we might call the Self Lens: a unified way of seeing yourself and your path.
The Self Lens isn't just the sum of the four individual lenses; it's what emerges when they work together in dynamic interaction. It's a holistic view that recognizes how your inner truth, outer expression, available resources, and capacity for action all influence and shape each other.
Think of it like this: Your inner self (values, beliefs, desires, identity) provides the foundation and direction for alignment. Your outer self (relationships, environment, roles, actions, creative expression) is where alignment becomes visible and tangible. Your resources (strengths, knowledge, support, materials, time, energy) are what you have to work with in creating alignment. And your agency (decision-making, action, learning, boundaries, adaptation) is how you actively bridge the gap between inner and outer using your available resources.
When all four lenses are clear and working together, you have what psychologists call "self-concordance"—a state where your goals and actions feel personally meaningful and freely chosen rather than imposed or obligatory. Research shows that self-concordant goals are pursued with greater persistence and ultimately lead to greater well-being than goals driven by external pressure or internal conflict.
For Maya, the Self Lens would help her see how her inner values (creativity and community impact), outer circumstances (commercial architecture career), available resources (skills, reputation, financial stability), and capacity for action (decision-making, initiative, learning) all interact to create her current experience of misalignment—and how adjustments across all four dimensions could create greater harmony.
The Alignment Process Through the Self Lens
Through the Self Lens, alignment becomes an ongoing, dynamic process rather than a static achievement. It involves continuous interplay between clarifying your inner truth, adjusting your outer expression, leveraging your resources, and exercising your agency.
Here's how this process might unfold:
Self-Discovery: Using the Inner Self lens, you clarify your authentic values, beliefs, desires, and identity. This often involves questioning assumptions, exploring different perspectives, and distinguishing your own voice from internalized messages of others.
Reality Assessment: Using the Resources lens, you honestly evaluate what you have to work with. What strengths, supports, and assets can you leverage? What constraints must you acknowledge?
Alignment Planning: Looking through both the Inner Self and Outer Self lenses, you identify specific areas where your outer life doesn't reflect your inner truth. Then, considering your Resources and Agency, you develop concrete plans to bring them into greater alignment.
Aligned Action: Using your Agency, you implement these plans, making choices and taking steps that honor your authentic self. You work with your available resources while gradually developing new ones that support your alignment.
Reflection and Adjustment: Regularly assessing all four dimensions, you notice what's working and what isn't. You adjust your approach based on this feedback, recognizing that alignment is a dynamic process that requires ongoing attention and refinement.
This isn't a linear path but a cycle you'll move through repeatedly throughout your life. As you grow and change, as circumstances shift, you'll need to revisit each step. The goal isn't perfect, permanent alignment (which isn't possible in our complex, changing world) but an ongoing practice of realignment—a commitment to continually closing the gap between who you are and how you live.
For Maya, this process might begin with deeper self-discovery—reflecting on what truly matters to her in architecture and design, beyond the prestige and income she's been pursuing. She might realize that her core values include not just creativity and community impact but also environmental sustainability and educational opportunity through thoughtful spaces.
Her reality assessment would acknowledge both constraints (financial obligations, limited job openings in community design) and assets (technical skills, professional network, financial cushion from years of high-paying work). This honest evaluation would help her develop realistic alignment plans rather than fantasy scenarios.
Based on this assessment, Maya might create an alignment plan with both short-term and long-term elements. In the short term, she could volunteer with a community design organization, propose pro bono projects at her current firm, or start a blog about inclusive architecture. Longer-term, she might explore positions at firms with stronger community focus, consider starting her own practice, or even look into teaching architecture with an emphasis on social impact.
As she takes aligned action—starting with small, manageable steps—Maya would pay attention to how these changes affect her sense of fulfillment and energy. She might notice that even modest shifts toward more aligned work reduce her feelings of emptiness and increase her engagement. These positive experiences would create momentum for further changes.
Through ongoing reflection and adjustment, Maya would refine her approach over time. She might discover that certain types of community projects energize her more than others, or that she needs to maintain some commercial work for financial stability while gradually increasing her community-focused practice. The key is that she would be actively engaged in the process of alignment rather than passively accepting misalignment.
Common Obstacles and How to Address Them
The path to alignment isn't always smooth. Here are some common obstacles you might encounter, along with strategies for addressing them through the Self Lens:
Self-Deception: We're remarkably good at lying to ourselves, especially about what we truly value and desire. We confuse social conditioning with authentic preference, or rationalize choices that don't actually serve us.
Strategy: Use all four lenses to cross-check your self-understanding. Notice discrepancies between what you say you value (Inner Self) and how you actually spend your time and energy (Outer Self). Pay attention to what genuinely energizes versus drains you (Resources). Observe patterns in your choices and actions (Agency).
Competing Values: Sometimes different aspects of your authentic self seem to conflict. You value both security and adventure, both connection and solitude, both achievement and ease. These tensions can make alignment feel impossible.
Strategy: Recognize that values exist in a hierarchy that may shift across contexts. Use the Self Lens to identify creative ways to honor multiple values simultaneously or to make conscious trade-offs based on your current priorities and resources.
External Resistance: When you begin to align your outer life with your inner truth, you may face resistance from others who are invested in you staying the same. Change in you can feel threatening to those around you.
Strategy: Use the Resources lens to identify supportive relationships and communities that can buffer against resistance. Use the Agency lens to develop clear boundaries and communication strategies. Remember that others' resistance often reflects their own fears rather than any problem with your alignment.
Resource Limitations: Real-world constraints can limit your ability to align your life with your values. Financial necessities, health issues, family obligations, and other factors may require compromises.
Strategy: Use the Self Lens to find creative ways to honor your values within existing constraints. Look for small alignment opportunities that require minimal resources. Focus on gradually building resources that support greater alignment over time.
Perfectionism: The pursuit of perfect alignment can become another form of self-tyranny. If you expect flawless congruence between inner and outer, you'll inevitably feel like you're failing.
Strategy: Use the Self Lens to embrace "good enough" alignment. Recognize that some misalignment is part of being human in a complex world. Focus on progress rather than perfection, celebrating small shifts toward greater authenticity.
Fear of the Unknown: Even when current misalignment feels painful, the prospect of change can be frightening. The familiar, even if uncomfortable, often feels safer than the unknown.
Strategy: Use the Resources lens to identify strengths and supports that can help you navigate change. Use the Agency lens to break big changes into smaller, less intimidating steps. Remember that alignment itself provides energy and resilience that can help you face uncertainty.
Remember that obstacles aren't failures but opportunities for deeper understanding. Each challenge you encounter on the path to alignment contains valuable information about yourself and your world.
Conclusion: Living The Question
We began this exploration with big questions: Why are you here? What's the point of all this? What does it mean to live a meaningful life?
I don't have definitive answers to these questions. No one does, really. What I've offered instead is a framework—the Poia or "Point Of It All" approach—that can help you find your own answers through the practice of alignment.
The core insight of this framework is simple but profound: meaning emerges when who you are inside aligns with how you live outside. When there's harmony between your authentic self and your daily actions. When what you believe and value is reflected in what you do and create.
Through the four lenses—Inner Self, Outer Self, Resources, and Agency—you can see your life more clearly and make choices that bring these dimensions into greater harmony. Not perfect harmony (that's not realistic in our complex, messy world) but enough harmony that you feel whole rather than fragmented, authentic rather than false, alive rather than numb.
This isn't a one-time achievement but an ongoing practice—a commitment to continually closing the gap between who you are and how you live. It's a process that unfolds over a lifetime, through countless small choices and occasional big ones, through moments of clarity and periods of confusion, through successes and failures and everything in between.
In his poem "Letters to a Young Poet," Rainer Maria Rilke offers this advice: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
That's what the Poia framework invites you to do: to live the questions. To engage actively with the search for meaning rather than expecting it to be delivered in a neat package. To trust that as you bring your inner and outer selves into greater alignment—as you live more and more from your authentic core—the answers that matter most to you will gradually reveal themselves.
For Maya, living the questions might mean exploring different expressions of her architectural gifts, noticing what brings her alive, adjusting course based on what she discovers. It might mean accepting that her path won't be linear or perfect but can still be meaningful. It might mean finding ways to honor both her values and her practical needs, creating a life that's authentically hers rather than one that merely looks successful from the outside.
The same is true for you. Your path to alignment will be uniquely yours, shaped by your particular values, circumstances, resources, and choices. There's no formula I or anyone else can give you that will guarantee a meaningful life. But by looking through these four lenses—by seeing yourself and your life more clearly—you can make choices that bring you closer to that elusive sense of rightness, of being fully yourself in the world.
And perhaps that's the point of it all: not to arrive at some final state of perfect alignment, but to engage wholeheartedly in the ongoing process of becoming more fully yourself. To live with awareness and intention. To create a life that, whatever its external circumstances, feels like yours—an authentic expression of who you truly are.
As you continue this exploration in the chapters ahead, remember that alignment isn't about achieving some ideal life that's free from struggle or contradiction. It's about reducing unnecessary suffering—the particular kind of pain that comes from living against your own grain. It's about creating enough congruence between inner and outer that you can face life's inevitable challenges from a place of wholeness rather than fragmentation.
Because here's one last truth: A meaningful life isn't necessarily an easy one. It will still contain disappointment, loss, confusion, and pain. But when you're living in alignment with your authentic self, you face these difficulties with a sense of purpose and integrity that makes them bearable—even, sometimes, transformative.
So let's begin this practice of alignment together. In the chapters that follow, we'll explore each lens in greater depth, with practical approaches for applying them to your own life. We'll look at how to clarify your inner self, adjust your outer expression, leverage your resources, and strengthen your agency—all in service of creating a life that feels like yours, a life worth living.
The point of it all? That's for you to discover. But my hope is that this framework helps you find it—not once and for all, but day by day, choice by choice, in the ongoing practice of aligned living.