✱A Note from 2025: When I first wrote this piece in November 2007, it was under the banner of the Find Your Voice™ Process — the earliest expression of what has now evolved into The Hudson Alignment Framework™.

Back then, I was still giving language to what I sensed intuitively: that lasting transformation begins when we return to ourselves and lead from that place of truth. The “voice” was never just about speaking — it was about remembering.

I no longer call it Find Your Voice™ because it was never just about finding; it was always about remembering who you are beneath the noise, and aligning your life and leadership with that truth. That remembering is what The Hudson Alignment Framework™ now systematizes — helping people and organizations return to clarity, rhythm, and purpose.✱

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So many times we think we know ourselves but do we? In the hustle and bustle of the world we are constantly in motion. In fact we actually think it a “sin” if we find ourselves with nothing to do. It’s no wonder we feel disconnected, fragmented and no doubt weary that we never sit still and get acquainted with our true selves.

Finding your voice is about helping you find the way back to yourself. For until you know who you are and what your purpose is, it means that you will continue to fight instead of flow with life.

You Can Change

Step into the future or settle for the past.

Pain persists till something changes. Pain increases the longer it’s tolerated.

1.   What if the hardest thing to imagine is not that the business could change, but that YOU were one of the people who had the courage to step up and make it happen?

2.   What if your department was one small part of this transformation, and this was the year you could finally look back on and say that was when it all really changed?

The Past…

The last 50 years have been spent adding “features”. Over that time, the sources of competitive advantage have shifted, as Stuart Rosenfeld noted:

• The 1960s & 1970s were about making things cheaper. Advantages came from things like mass production, Cost, and Functionality
• The 1980s & 1990s were about making things better. Advantages came from quality, Total Quality Management (TQM), Just in Time (JIT) Manufacturing, and automation.
• The 2000s were also about making better things. The advantages however now came from aesthetics and originality.

✱Nearly two decades later, I’ve added this note — not to change the original, but to extend it. The past didn’t stop at the 2000s; it kept evolving, reshaping what alignment and leadership now mean.

• The 2010s: From Originality to Connection & Ecosystems
  By the 2010s, originality alone was no longer enough. The advantage moved toward connection — the ability to create trust, tell a story, and build belonging. Ecosystems replaced silos; collaboration replaced competition. Businesses began to thrive not because they made the best things, but because they cultivated the strongest relationships. Alignment became adaptive — a living process instead of a static goal.
• The 2020s: From Connection to Consciousness
  Then the world shifted again. The 2020s demanded more than connection — they demanded consciousness. Leaders now face complexity, unpredictability, and collective transformation. The real edge lies in purpose, resilience, and responsibility. Organizations must know why they exist and how they contribute beyond profit. Alignment has matured into a rhythm — a continuous practice of sensing, adjusting, and leading with integrity.

Your advantage today isn’t in how much you do, but in how aligned you stay — within yourself, your team, and your purpose.

The Future…

Success in the coming decade has no single road-map but it will depend heavily on creating meaning – not just in what your customer’s experience but in what your employee’s experience as well.  In the preceding years it was easy to follow “best practices” but “best practices” are useless when it comes to creating meaning because copying someone else’s approach does not come across as authentic and genuine, two important factors to make something meaningful.

It is therefore up to you to design your own road-map and way forward – to rethink how you’re leading.

Your greatest challenge will be to follow your anxiety and go where the pain is.

Anxiety is the experience of growth. In any endeavor – how do you feel when you go from one stage to the next? That’s right…You feel ANXIOUS. If we deny anxiety we will feel ill at ease. If we confront it however it will convert into joy, security, strength, centeredness and character.

The most challenging changes are inside you.

Ever notice how easy it is to focus on changing others? It’s incredibly easy to know what others should do and it’s the place most leaders begin when they want to effect change.  But it is NOT the most effective place to start because blame exacerbates pain. When you take responsibility however you begin to addresses the causes.

Focus on changing you more than changing others. Pain changes when you change. You can either change or your:

• Organizational stresses WILL worsen.
• Interpersonal conflicts WILL escalate.
• And internal struggles WILL intensify.

The big question is – How do you create lasting change?

Here’s How

Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors: competence (your specialty, your skills, your know-how) and authenticity (your identity, your character, your attitude).

When companies and people get stuck, they tend to apply more competence to what got them in trouble in the first place. “If I try harder I’ll be more successful” or “If we exert more control, we’ll get the results we need.” I’m sure you’ve tried both approaches without the desired results.

The problem is when you’re stuck you’re not likely to make progress by using competence as your tool.

Instead progress requires a commitment to two things:

• First you need to dedicate yourself to understanding yourself better
• Second you need to change your habits of thought: how you think, what you value, how you work, how you connect with people, how you learn, what you expect from life and how you manage frustration.

Changing those habits means changing your way of being intelligent. It means moving from a non leadership mind to a leadership mind. The leadership mind is spacious. It has ample room for the ambiguities of the world for conflicting feelings and for contradictory ideas.

This is what the Find Your Voice™ Process is all about

Thousands of scientists, gurus, authors and experts have studied the formation and operation of the mind, how we establish habits and what it takes to change.

No one, however, has studied your change process.

Others have developed general plans based on some general ideas and principles.

But you need a specific plan, specific to you. You need to be the scientist who studies you (the subject) to discover the best plan for your own change journey and I will show you how.

I will be your teacher and guide and show you how to be the subject and the scientist, discovering what works best for you.

The Find Your Voice™ Process Journey

The following graphic is taken from Karen Martin’s book, The Outstanding Organization (p. 115), which by the way is an excellent book which illustrates the nature of progressive learning from gaining awareness about a topic/skill to achieving mastery – a process that typically takes 10 years (10,000 hours of deliberate practice).

I have used Karen’s model in structuring the Find Your Voice™ Process journey so that your learning would be progressive and realistic.

The second step in this journey is a mandatory classroom session that digs a little deeper into the material covered initially in the first general awareness step – reading the e-guide How to Get into the Rhythm of Consistent and Profitable Results™ 

We will begin customizing and applying the information from the e-guide into your own life by having you answer questions such as:

1. What frustrates you?
2. What drains your energy?
3. What wastes time?
4. What produces small returns?
5. Which customers should be sent to competitors?
6. Is it time to stop petting a pet project?
7. What distracts from leveraging strengths?
8. What has low impact?
9. What can be stopped?

Combining all of this information from your investigations you will create your own blueprint for:

1. Being authentic
2. Building relationships
3. Creating a lifestyle that gives you maximum energy
4. Organizing your day around your own physical and mental energy levels
5. Setting fewer priorities
6. Turning down  things that are inconsistent with priorities
7. Setting aside time for focused effort
8. Building solid processes

In general you will stop doing ANYTHING that is no longer worthwhile.

All other stages are customized based on your specific needs and the needs of your business. This will usually involve a combination of on-site workshop sessions and on-site coaching. It is designed this way because expecting high degrees of proficiency after classroom training–especially without engaging a coach to deepen learning–sets a learner up for failure.

I understand everything that you’re saying but this might not work…

Seth Godin tells us that at some level, “this might not work” is at the heart of all important projects, of everything new and worth doing. And it can paralyze us into inaction, into watering down who we are, what we have to offer and cause us to play a very small game.

Perhaps it’s time to go out on a limb and play beyond safety, outside of whatever is making you comfortable at the moment!

“This might not work” is either a curse, something that you labor under, or it’s a blessing, a chance to fly and do work you never thought possible – the choice is yours!

Breakthroughs Happen When…

• Frustration outweighs satisfaction.
• Someone believes in you more than you believe in yourself.
• Fresh eyes observe stale attitudes.
• Someone courageously names the elephant in the room.
• New faces cross your path.

✱From Find Your Voice™ to The Hudson Alignment Framework™

The essence of this process remains the same — helping you return to alignment with who you truly are. What began as a personal journey toward self-awareness has grown into a full framework for aligning people, purpose, and process. Whether in life or business, clarity still comes first. Alignment always follows.

Strategic Alignment Prompt

If you’re mega frustrated and ready for a BREAKTHROUGH ask yourself the following:

1. How can you make today more meaningful than yesterday was?
2. How can you bring more of yourself to your work and improve the lives of those around you?

If you want to book an on-site workshop and introduce these concepts to your business/organization and jump-start new thinking around authenticity and its relationship to profitability click here.

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.