Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:

We can spend so much time asking where our work is taking us that we forget to pay attention to how we are actually living it. Perhaps progress is less about proving that we are getting somewhere and more about building a practice we are willing to keep showing up for, while allowing the road ahead to reveal itself through participation.

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Jason Leister wrote recently about his years as a professional classical musician and how, in music, there is never really an end. You achieve one level and another appears. You become capable of something you once wanted desperately to be able to do and almost immediately your attention moves towards the next thing.

Business can work the same way.

There is always another level of revenue, another client, another opportunity, another audience, another version of the business we think we should have built by now.

His point was that if we are doing all of this in order to finally get somewhere, we may be setting ourselves up for a fairly miserable experience.

I understood what he meant because I think I have spent a lot of my life measuring movement through outcomes. There is a certain comfort in that. Outcomes give us something to point towards. Build this. Earn that. Reach this number. Get these clients. Become known for this thing. We can construct plans around outcomes. We can create timelines and milestones and spend considerable amounts of time measuring the distance between where we are and where we have decided we should be.

The difficulty is that life rarely behaves with that level of cooperation.

And perhaps an even bigger difficulty is that once we have decided where we are supposed to be going, almost everything happening now gets evaluated according to whether it appears to be taking us there fast enough.

I recognise that tendency in myself.

There are days when I read. Think. Take care of something that needs doing. Have a conversation. Rest. Write later in the day.

Sometimes I look at a day like that and wonder what exactly I am doing with my life?

There is no great burst of visible productivity. No dramatic evidence of progress. Nothing I can hold up and say, there, see, I am getting somewhere.

I am becoming more comfortable with a different pace and at the same time recognising how tired I have become from years of giving too much of myself away. There is something I am learning about allowing my days to have space in them without immediately assuming that space means I am wasting my life.

Still, the question remains.

If I am no longer organising everything around getting somewhere, what am I organising it around?

I think the answer may be practice.

A practice is something you live repeatedly. It is a way of engaging with the work rather than a promise about what the work will eventually give you.

My own practice is becoming clearer to me.

I see. I make sense of what I see. I try to articulate it in a way that helps someone else see it too. I share it. And sometimes I sit with another person and help them understand something they have been struggling to understand for themselves.

That is the practice. The business grows from there.

I find this surprisingly liberating because it changes the question I have to answer each day. I do not have to know exactly where all of this is going. I do not have to decide what the final version of my work will look like. I do not have to know which conversation, piece of writing, relationship or idea will eventually open a door I cannot currently see.

I do, however, have to live the practice and that distinction matters.

Living a practice does not mean drifting around waiting for the Universe to arrange my affairs. There is still responsibility involved. If one part of my practice is sharing what I see, then I cannot spend all of my time clarifying and very little time amplifying. At some point the thinking has to leave my notebook, and my writing and ideas have to encounter other people.

That is something I am paying attention to now.

I have spent a great deal of time clarifying. Clarifying the work. Clarifying what I believe. Clarifying how I want to help. Clarifying what I no longer want to do. Clarifying what I seem particularly equipped to see.

There will always be more clarity available. There also comes a point when clarity has to become visible.

Perhaps that is where practice becomes useful again.

I do not need to suddenly become louder, busier or more prolific. I simply need to make amplification part of the practice. See something. Explore it. Articulate it. Put it somewhere another human being can encounter it.

Then pay attention, because something happens when the work leaves us: People respond.

Certain ideas create conversations. Certain questions keep appearing. Someone sees themselves in something we have written. Someone asks for help. Someone introduces us to someone else. An opportunity appears that we could never have placed on a five-year plan because we did not know it existed.

The road reveals itself through participation.

This is the part of the journey I may have misunderstood.

I have often wanted to know where I was going so I could feel confident that what I was doing mattered. Maybe what matters is that I keep developing a closer relationship with the practice itself.

That means my days do not have to prove that my life is progressing.

Some days will contain more work than others. Some will contain more thought. Some will require rest. Some will produce a piece of writing. Some will produce a question I will still be thinking about three weeks later.

The individual day may tell me very little. Over time, however, something should be becoming visible.

• Am I seeing more clearly?
• Am I articulating what I see more precisely?
• Am I allowing more people to encounter my thinking?
• Am I having conversations where what I can see is useful?
• Am I building a body of work that increasingly reflects what I believe I am here to contribute?

Those questions give me something very different from a destination. Maybe we do not need to know exactly where the practice will take us.

Maybe our responsibility is simply to keep doing the work without demanding that we know where it will take us.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

What is your practice?

If you temporarily removed the outcome you are trying to achieve, what are the few things you would still want to keep doing because they represent the work, contribution or way of living that matters to you?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with an inaccurate understanding of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson – writer and Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor. Most advisors offer solutions before carefully diagnosing the situation. I diagnose first — looking for what isn’t completely visible yet. Once we identify that, everything else becomes clearer, and confident, right action can follow.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations, helping leaders make sense of complexity before committing significant time, money, or resources.

What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?