The Power of Understanding Yourself

Chapter 3 Alignment From Vine to Bottle

Wine, wit, and wisdom. Wine enough to sharpen wit, Wit enough to give zest to wine, Wisdom enough to “shut down” at the right time.

– Anonymous

These next two chapters are extremely important, closely associated, and more than a little complicated. I will admit that I struggled to clearly articulate both their meaning and their value. The most important outcomes for the next chapters will be to understand how critical it is to have a well-defined and meaningful core ideology and a process for continually evaluating it. The path to each of these outcomes will be explained more fully in what follows, but let’s define what a core ideology and a process for evaluating it mean.

The term ideology has received some negative connotation in recent years. It has been used to express myopic or prejudicial thought. Our usage has no such meaning. For the purposes of extracting Me, core ideology represents our personal beliefs, values, and desires. They are a product of life experiences (inputs) and expectations (outputs). Think of your core ideology as the map that connects your past to your future.

The process for connecting our past to our future is what we use to both discover our core ideology and evaluate its effectiveness. Just like with a map, we would like this connection to be direct, aligned. Aligning who we are with what we want to be provides us a clear path to achieving a desired future state. In industrial psychology, this is known ...