Life Alignment: finding direction and overcoming your fear of failure
- Emotionally Unstuck
- Jul 24, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 30, 2025
Doomscrolling through social media feeds deceives all of us into thinking others have their sh*t more together than we do. And if our career, relationship or friendships are not “IG worthy,” we feel that pit in our stomach in a pronounced way. We’re faced with what we don’t have and wonder ‘did I miss my chance?’ ‘Am I falling behind??’ ‘What went wrong with me?!’
You know consciously and unconsciously being able to post something with you smiling or looking beautiful won’t directly address what you feel is missing (even if you do post to at least get Likes and very short-lived relief).
The pang of unfulfilled potential and the haunting fear of failure can lock your spirit in place, unable to get past feeling stuck and doomed. The truth is many of us have these moments, sometimes often. As we go about our routine, it’s easy for days to blur together focusing only on the step in front of us while losing sight of where we're heading.
Life alignment isn’t about finding your ‘yellow brick road.’ There is no perfect path; there is no set way to feel fulfilled.
Just because you see loved ones ‘succeed’ on ‘your timeline’ does not mean that timeline is etched in stone or you should give up on your goals because you’ve ‘fallen behind.’ Or maybe you thought you had goals but the more you move closer to them, you realize they don’t make you feel fulfilled?
To align your life with who you are, let’s workshop together how you can set priorities for yourself, filter the noise and move assuredly towards your goals.
(Tip: if you can embrace humility for just a moment, your steps forward will feel less heavy.)
What is Life Alignment and why it’s important
Life alignment simply means living with purpose. Physically, emotionally and spiritually aligning ourselves with our values and goals.
The more aligned you are, the less your mind feels like a fog and your day-to-day life organizes itself from what may feel chaotic now. Aligning your life can center you with calm and confidence.
Rest assured that for those who survived those early career years and the formative adult phase of their lives, feeling lost or aimless is common. There is no need to be hard on yourself in this moment.
Right now, you may be thinking that you need to come up with some drastically different goal(s) in life so your ‘timeline’ will start to make sense. Or ‘rack up’ successes as fast as you can so you feel like you’re making progress.
But life alignment must be meaningful and realistic.
As you discover more and more about the person inside, you’ll make more and more decisions reflective of your true ambitions. Feeling more aligned makes ‘failures’ feel more like (minor) setbacks, drastically cuts down decision time and makes real life progress feel much more fulfilling.
When you keep putting on a mask or living a role you believe others need/expect of you, you will by definition be misaligned.
Your thinking will drift towards murky and convoluted, your stress levels will elevate and your conscious mind starts to recognize how differently you are living than what you once had hoped for yourself. Realigning yourself will lessen the noise in your life and allow inner truths to set your life priorities.
Recognizing Misalignment
Let’s start with looking at some common red flags to look out for that could indicate that your life is not aligned with your values and goals.
Some are small and recurring so you may even pride yourself on being “strong enough” to not be bothered by them; and others are bigger and you may often ignore them to not be bogged down. Here are the red flags:
Stretched too thin: You constantly have too much on your plate, barely rest and even when you do still feel tired and stressed afterwards.
People please: You don’t mention what you really want or bury it in a heap of suggestions so others can easily overlook and not notice what makes you happy. And many times you say yes to activities you can’t stand doing!
Decision paralysis: What should be a simple choice, like where to go for dinner, frustrates the f*ck out of you! You find a way to second-guess yourself far more often than you care to admit and nag yourself with worry that you let others down or will experience FOMO if you don’t do something you don’t want to do.
Live on autopilot mode: Your days blur together. You have a set routine that begins and ends without you feeling rested, fulfilled or genuinely appreciative of any steps you’ve made towards your life goals.
If these red flags fill your days, take this moment RIGHT NOW to stop what you’re doing and look inward. (Yes it can be scary but this is the moment to stand up for yourself because you deserve it).
Ask yourself the following questions and write down sincere responses:
What activities regularly drain you the most?
At what moments is the stress so much you feel as if you’re all alone and would give anything to feel a little relief?
What choices have you made in the past month to ingratiate yourself with others or to prevent conflict in your life?
Think of your most recent indecision. When you finally chose what to do, whose needs were you trying to fulfill?
In the past two weeks, which specific choices did you make to increase your happiness without worrying about how you should behave?
Read those responses to yourself. If you answered how loved ones think you should respond or what society expects of you, do the exercise again.
When you answer sincerely, you will feel a calm start to peek its head in your heart.
Why feeling directionless is common and not permanent
After we finish school and figure out how to navigate professional life, we naturally develop a routine. And as opportunities present themselves, many of us find ways to add new items to an already full plate by squeezing them into our schedule so we don’t miss out!
At some point, however, a dread can build inside that you have drifted away from your personal goals. You may have walked so far down the road, you are starting to doubt whether you’re on track or if what you do have in life actually fulfills and nurtures you.
We’ve all heard the phrase ‘work-life balance’ and laughed to ourselves at the absurdity. Finding direction is not about manifesting that cliché.
To find your personal direction, you first have to abandon the notion that you fell off course. Life happened. Despite what you see online, everyone else didn’t figure it out while leaving you in the dust.
Every adult knows that when you planned your ‘perfect life,’ you could not have possibly foreseen all the challenges that would present themselves or all the opportunities that did.
We cannot expect ourselves to be clairvoyant and see into the future; we CAN expect ourselves to be present and know who we are in this moment.
To help ground yourself, let’s do the following self check-in exercise with kindness and without judgement:
Self Check-In Exercise:
Find a blank piece of paper and something to write with and write three positive words that describe the real you. (remember, be kind to yourself!)
Then write three words describing your lack, what you wish you had in your life.
Now write down three things you wish you could do right now if you had the chance. (this is not a genie in a bottle question; stay rooted in reality!)
The hardest step: describe the last time you succeeded in your eyes (don’t say never! Push yourself to be honest and fair with the person you need to love most, yourself.)
Last, close your eyes for 5 minutes and forgive yourself for feeling like you let yourself down. In the following exercises you will take action towards being more aligned in life.
The Power of Personal Priorities
Recognizing what matters most to you is the ultimate game changer.
Understanding your top priorities gives you insight into how you spend your time and energy and minimize how much of yourself you give to what you do not value as highly.
Life alignment has to be centered around clear values.
You may value quality time with family, having a creative outlet, a healthy lifestyle, constant learning opportunities, traveling the world, financial wellbeing or achieving career success.
When you prioritize your values, decisions become much easier than they were before. Instead of blindly saying yes or moving through life on autopilot, priorities will empower you to act with confidence and self esteem.
To help set your priorities, do these 5 steps:
With pen and paper, jot down everything that feels deeply important to you. Don’t overthink and don’t judge yourself. Write freely from the heart.
Stop writing when you’ve filled the page or have written at least ten things.
Then read through your word cloud and circle five that resonate the most with you.
This next step will be difficult. Rank them from one to five.
And then the most agonizing step. Write how many hours per month (or days per year) you dedicate to each.
When you have a mirror pointing to the things that you care about the most, you’ll be faced with what’s missing.
And that hurts.
Give yourself a moment to feel that hurt and then with clear eyes identify how to give more time to each of your top five priorities. To feel more fulfilled, you cannot obsess about what is missing in your life; you need to act to give more of yourself to you!
What should also be obvious is how much noise that fills your mind is not directly related to your priorities. Case in point: is doomscrolling your way of spending more time with friends?
By really honing into your values and personal needs, the path in front of you becomes less gloomy and easier terrain to travel.
That’s the core of life alignment and the first meaningful step towards feeling calm within.
What if I fail?
Fear can lurk in every direction.
It often finds its way to obstruct and complicate our way forward. When you see your fear, it takes courage to not freeze in place.
When you see social media posts of friends and family living their best life, the reality of what is missing in your own life pierces you deeply. But when you realize you have to confront your fears in order to get out of your rut, you may instead choose to rationalize your situation by saying your life is actually better than how you feel inside. Why rock the boat?
It’s not that bad.
But if you’re really being honest….you know that’s bullshit.
To be empowered, you need to transform your fear from a boulder blocking your path into a stepping stone towards becoming a stronger you.
Understanding your fear
Fear is a silent killer.
The problem is that fear wins more battles than we care to count.
Our fear of failure manifests itself in many ways but rarely as itself. You may procrastinate so much you may not even start projects and tasks you told yourself to do.
You may keep telling yourself now is not the right time; I’ll start working on that goal when the timing is right without ever setting clear milestones between now and then.
Or you may overthink every possible risk to the point of paralysis, or worse regression.
Adding to this fear are career, family and societal pressures. Witnessing others ‘succeeding’ while you stand still can be overwhelming.
Knowing you are not on your true path is hard enough, but to have to be reminded every time you see others succeed can sow doubt and a negative emotional spiral.
It’s when you feel doubt creep in that you need to jump up (not literally but if that helps, sure).
Fear is an obstacle, not a roadblock.
Fear teaches you something about yourself that stays with you and that makes you stronger every day for confronting it. The biggest issue with fear is that it’s amorphous; it lacks definition so it gets bigger and bigger the more we get stuck in our thoughts.
To get over your fears, you first have to place it in context and see it for what it truly is, we need to give ourselves a reality check. Very often fear is much smaller than our self-doubt imagines it to be.
To demonstrate, do the following reality check exercise:
Using pen and paper, clearly detail a recent “failure.” (not something small, something that struck your core).
Now the fun part. Now write what you could have learned from that fear. Be honest.
Then the painful part. What did you take away from that experience instead? Remember not to beat yourself up needlessly.
To prove to yourself that your fear was larger than you thought, write down how the learning in step 2 would have helped you realize your fear could have helped you navigate that situation better than you did before.
This exercise is not for the faint of heart. Part of personal growth is realizing we all make mistakes on our way to becoming better, more authentic versions of ourselves. It is literally impossible to be born perfect. Stop wasting time thinking you are. No one is.
When you treat ‘failures’ as learning opportunities to help you understand more about yourself and how specifically you can grow and accomplish your life goals, your self worth also grows.
Life alignment lets you walk more freely on the path of your own choosing regardless of what obstacles may present themselves.
So go out and embrace your personal priorities!
An aligned you is your best you.
