Live Your Extraordinary Life With Michelle Rios

Alignment Begins with Authenticity: The Truth About Why Your Life Doesn’t Feel Right

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If your life looks successful but doesn’t feel successful, you’re not broken — you’re out of alignment.

In this foundational episode of the new Live Your Extraordinary Life Podcast, Michelle Rios reveals the deeper reason so many high achievers, leaders, and purpose-driven people feel restless, disconnected, or unfulfilled… even when they’ve “done everything right.”

Michelle takes you back to the moment authenticity was lost in childhood, explains the neuroscience behind identity patterns, and shares how misalignment silently shapes your relationships, success, energy, clarity, and sense of self. Blending personal storytelling, spiritual wisdom, and energetics, she shows you why alignment is impossible without authenticity — and how to return to the deeper truth of who you are.

This episode will help you recognize the signs of misalignment, understand why your life may not feel like it fits you anymore, and begin the journey back home to yourself.
 A powerful, emotional, and deeply grounding start to your extraordinary life.

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If your life looks successful on the outside, but doesn't actually feel successful on the inside, you're most likely out of alignment. And the moment you understand authenticity and alignment, not in an intellectual sense, but in a full embodied return to the truth of who you are, you stop abandoning yourself. And everything in your life begins to shift. And I hope for your life. I want to talk to you about two things that have shaped my entire journey: authenticity and alignment. And I'm going to share something honest, something vulnerable, something I never quite said out loud like this. I don't know that I was ever truly in alignment past age seven until very recently, in the last five years or so. You see, until age seven, I was definitely myself, still instinctive, still intuitive, still guided by my own inner knowing, still connected to my spiritual essence, that spark inside that whispers, this is who you are. But then, like it does for so many of us, life got louder than my intuition. Expectations were set, responsibility settled in early, and achievement became the gold standard. Be a good girl. Work hard. Make us proud. And slowly, almost invisibly, like so many of us do, I traded authenticity for acceptance. I traded truth for performance. And that's the moment alignment slipped away. Not in adulthood, not in my 20s, 30s, or even 40s, in childhood. And here's the thing: this happens to almost everyone. Sometime between the ages of five and seven, the brain develops its first big identity patterns, the beliefs you form about safety, approval, belonging, and who you think you need to be in order to receive love. We don't lose alignment because we're weak. We lose it because we're children, learning to belong, learning how to be safe and how to be loved. So if you're listening today thinking, why am I feeling so disconnected from myself? Why is my life never quite fit me? Or why does everything I work so hard for feel empty? Let me say this clearly. You simply built a life on top of an identity that wasn't authentically yours. So before we go any further, let's just address what you may be thinking. So what? Isn't this just midlife? Doesn't everyone wake up eventually? The answer is yes and no. Yes, most people feel the nudge, the restlessness, the discomfort, the quiet sense of misalignment. But no, most people never act on it. Most people feel the misalignment, that growing gap between who they are on the inside and how they're living on the outside, and then they talk themselves back into the life that was slowly suffocating them. Because here's the truth: most people experience the awakening, but very few take action to realign. They feel the emptiness and call it exhaustion. They feel the longing and call it being ungrateful. They feel the friction and call it, well, that's just how life is. But this moment you're in, this season, is not random. It is not a phase. It is not a crisis. It's an invitation, a psychological, spiritual, and energetic turning point. It's the moment when the identity you built to stay safe and the identity your soul is calling you to grow into can no longer coexist. And this matters because your soul is no longer willing to live in conflict with the life you're performing on the outside. It's demanding your attention. Not later, not when life settles down, not when the timing is perfect. Now, midlife isn't when things fall apart. It's when the truth finally rises to the surface. It's the moment your soul says, I'm done whispering. It's time to tell the truth. So here's the real answer to so what? If you honor this moment, you turn it into the most powerful, aligned, extraordinary chapter of your life. But if you ignore it, you repeat the last 20 years. And the doorway into that next chapter, the one where you can feel your way forward, begins with understanding authenticity. Because the word has watered this word down to mean just be yourself. And authenticity is so much deeper than that. It's alignment between your inner truth and your outer expression. It's the truth beneath the roles you perform and the expectations you try to meet. It's not a personality, it's not a title, it's not achievement, it's definitely not an Enneagram number. Authenticity is your essence, it's your soul signature, the unmasked version of you. And once you understand authenticity as identity, alignment suddenly makes sense. Because alignment is when your thoughts, your emotions, your energy, and your actions all move in the same direction as your truth. It's not a mood, it's not a productivity hack, it's not something you get on a retreat high. It's the lived expression of your authenticity. Authenticity is who you are at your core. Alignment is how you live that truth. You cannot be aligned if you're living from an identity that isn't authentic to you. And you cannot feel fulfilled if the life you're creating was built on someone else's definition of success, not yours. You cannot experience peace if your external life contradicts your internal truth. But to be clear, misalignment isn't failure. It's feedback. It's your soul saying, this version of life is too small for who you've become. I didn't know it then, but that same misalignment would follow me into adulthood quietly, subtly, and persistently. And eventually it caught up with me. Fast forward 20 years, I built a beautiful career, the kind people admire, the kind with awards, titles, and influence. I was advising CEOs, leading teams, shaping global brands. From the outside, it looked extraordinary. But on the inside, something fell off. I was intellectually stimulated and engaged, but I craved more fulfillment on a soul level. And one day I realized the truth. I had climbed all the way to the top of a ladder that was leaning against the wrong wall. That moment didn't feel like failure, though. It felt like an awakening. Because when you realize that you've built your life on top of an identity that isn't fully yours, you're not lost. You finally feel seen. That moment wasn't about misalignment. It was about misauthenticity. I wasn't living as myself. I was living as a version of me I believe the world needed. But here's the good news: you can rebuild, you can reinvent, you can return to yourself. And you don't have to burn your life down to do it. Most people don't even start with a big traumatic move. You start by telling the truth to yourself quietly, honestly, and consistently. And when you do that long enough, the next aligned step becomes very clear. Sometimes it's a small shift inside the life you already have. Sometimes, over time, it becomes a bigger decision. Just as misalignment has a feeling, alignment has a feeling too. And I experienced this contrast most powerfully when I made two decisions that changed everything. First, I told the truth. I admitted to myself that my 25-year executive career no longer fit who I was becoming. That was authenticity demanding to be honored. Then I acted on that truth. I launched this podcast and then my coaching practice and began building a life and a body of work that felt deeply aligned. And I want you to really hear this. That second step didn't come out of nowhere. It was the natural result of a thousand small, quiet, honest choices. Authenticity begins the shift, but alignment completes it. But even when your soul is ready for change, your brain often isn't. And if you don't understand what's happening in your mind, you'll mistake wiring for weakness. And that's where most people get stuck. So let's talk about the neuroscience of why you feel this way. The brain loves familiarity more than it loves fulfillment. It clings to old identity patterns, even when they're outdated, even when they're suffocating you, even when they're built for survival, not expansion. This is why you stay in jobs or relationships long after they fit, or why you try to fit into roles that were never meant for you. And it's also why midlife often feels like emotional whiplash, because your soul is ready for truth while your brain is clinging to a familiar lie. But here's the miracle of it all: neuroplasticity. You can unlearn old identities, you can rewire patterns, and you can reclaim parts of yourself you abandoned long ago. Your wiring is not your destiny. Alignment isn't just psychological, it's energetic. And your energy often tells the truth long before your mind is willing to. When you are out of alignment, your energy collapses inward. It feels heavy, chaotic, contracted, foggy, pressured, disconnected, like you're pushing against yourself. That's because misalignment puts your nervous system into a low-grade survival state. Not enough to shut you down, but enough to keep you from feeling alive, creative, or clear. It's the energetic equivalent of driving with the brakes on. When you're in alignment, everything opens. Your energy expands. You feel open, grounded, clear, creative, magnetic, deeply alive. This isn't imagination. It's coherence. When your desires, truth, and actions line up, your frequency rises, your nervous system softens, you move out of resistance and into flow. Here's the simplest energetic truth I can give you. Contraction is your body's way of saying no. And expansion is your body's way of saying yes. Your energy doesn't lie, it responds to truth instantly. It recognizes alignment before your mind can rationalize it. Alignment feels like resonance, the click, the ease, the internal yes. Whereas misalignment feels like resistance, the drag, the tension, the internal no. And once you start paying attention to your energy, you stop negotiating with your soul. Because here's the truth your energy will show you where you're out of alignment long before your life does. The signs are subtle at first, like a heaviness in your chest or a tightness in your stomach, or a fatigue you can't explain, a sense of being slightly off, even when everything looks great on paper. But energetic misalignment always becomes emotional misalignment. And emotional misalignment always becomes practical misalignment. And that's when the real world symptoms start to show up. Misalignment often looks like this: waking up tired even after you've slept, achieving something big and feeling kind of hollow, feeling restless like in a career that once lit you up, or feeling disconnected in rooms you work so hard to get into, or chasing validation instead of desire, making decisions from obligation instead of authenticity, or a life that looks fine from the outside, but you're not. So if any of this resonates, no, you are not failing. You are awakening. You are becoming aware of that quiet gap between the life you built and the life that actually fits who you are now. So I want you to just take a moment and close your eyes, place a hand on your heart or stomach, and ask yourself gently what part of my life feels contracted? What part feels expansive? What am I pretending not to know? What truth am I finally ready to honor? Because your body knows, your energy knows, your intuition knows, you've simply been trained to override it, but you can always return. Realignment doesn't require a dramatic reinvention. It begins with small, honest choices, and here's where you start. Number one, tell the truth to yourself. What is no longer aligned? Speak it, write it, whisper it if you need to. Number two, recommit to authenticity. Ask yourself, what do I want? Number three, follow the energy, move toward what expands you, step away from what contracts you. And number four, make one aligned decision each day. Tiny choices compound over time. Maybe it's saying no to a meeting you don't really need to be in, or it's ending a draining conversation, or it's choosing rest instead of pushing through exhaustion. These aren't dramatic choices, but they're energetic ones. And every time you honor expansion over contraction, you choose the real you over the conditioned you. Number five, honor the season you're in. Midlife is a calling, not a crisis. Just know that this moment you return to yourself, to your authenticity, to your truth, to the life meant for the real you, not the conditioned you. But here's the next layer. Once you remember who you are, you can no longer get away with shrinking, minimizing, or diminishing your potential. And that's exactly where we're heading next. In the next episode, we're going to explore the subtle, sneaky ways high achievers, just like you, play small in their careers, their relationships, their voice, their confidence in their dreams, and more importantly, how to rise beyond it. Because authenticity awakens you and alignment empowers you. But releasing the ways you're still playing small, that's what transforms you. So take a breath, let this land, and get ready for what comes next. Your extraordinary life isn't something you find, it's something you create. It isn't waiting for someday, it's unfolding now. And I'll walk with you every step of the way.

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Michelle Rios

Host