This is Part 3 in the Project Management as Spiritual Practice series. Read Part 1: Small Steps & The Ripple Effect and Part 2: Building Trust: Action Comes Before Confidence.
One of my favorite personal growth teachers, Jean Houston, shares about the importance of tuning into our unique frequency to awaken to our life’s purpose. Building on concepts in Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle In Time,” both teachers share the power of pursuing what resonates most with our authentic selves.
The analogy states that we’re often so close to being dialed into our specific “station in life,” just slightly off. Perhaps we need a little more support or a little less controlling behavior. The aspects of our life that are too much or too little can create static, like a radio station that’s not tuned into the right channel.
In project management, we call this scoping — determining the right boundaries, priorities, and focus areas for successful outcomes. But what if scoping isn’t just an analytical exercise? What if it’s also about learning to sense when we’re aligned with what wants to emerge?
Moments when you feel completely alive — full body “yes!” — are when you know you’re dialed in, and that’s what we want to see more of.
Dial In: Recognizing Your Signal
Certain activities, groups, or people can help us dial into our best selves, while others can pull us further away. We can recognize this by whether we feel expansive and in a “flow state” or contracted, shrunken to conform to other’s comfort level.
Because finding what fulfills us can seem like a moving target, paying attention to our most affirming experiences becomes essential. In the workplace, this translates to questions like: When have I felt most energized and effective in collaborative work? What conditions supported that? How can I create more of those conditions in future scenarios?
The Call to Explore
Exploration helps us discover what resonates. Whether our constraints are financial, familial, health, or otherwise—there are real barriers that prevent us from being able to explore as much as we’d like to. This is where community matters. We are far more likely to make things happen when we have a chance to see momentum building around us.
Expanding Horizons Through Inner Work
What if there were ways for each of us to expand our horizons, without ever leaving home? Using kinesthetic and visualization exercises can open new worlds within ourselves. If you truly long to experience something, I believe it is possible for you to create aspects of the experience within yourself before it occurs externally.
Living into the reality that we want to experience is what leaders mean when encouraging us to, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” In my experience, this requires two things:
- Align yourself to what you want to become
- Receive the support of a community to sustain the changes you’ve made within
If we do not yet have people supporting us in who we want to become, it is critical that we commit to becoming the person that we want to see before we place expectations on others to support us in this journey.
In project terms, this means doing your inner alignment work first, then engaging collaborators from a place of clarity rather than confusion.
Here’s what we can control: we can find ways to recognize what calls to us, even within our constraints. We can practice tuning into our frequency through small experiments, trusted conversations, and paying attention to what creates those full-body “yes” moments.
Sometimes the most invigorating moments come only in hindsight, after we take a risk and realize that something beautiful came from it. These experiences can be rare, and that’s also what makes them important to notice and share with trustworthy people in our lives.
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