Episode 1 - The Power of Alignment – My Journey to Authentic Living

In the inaugural episode of 'Aligned Ambition,' Kate shares her personal journey of resilience and ambition, exploring the challenges of maintaining authenticity while striving for success. She discusses her experiences in the corporate world, the signs of misalignment she faced and the importance of prioritizing mental and physical health. 

Kate emphasizes that alignment is an ongoing practice and invites listeners to reflect on their own lives to find areas of misalignment. The episode sets the stage for future discussions on personal growth, self-care and achieving success without sacrificing well-being.

💫 Connect with Kate Hanson
🌐 www.katehanson.co
📸 Instagram: @xokatehanson
🎧 Listen to all episodes: katehanson.co/podcast
💌 Subscribe for insights on resilience, alignment, and ambition.

Transcript

Alright, welcome. I am so grateful to have you here with me right now listening to Aligned Ambition, Authentically Kate. This is my very first episode and it is something that I have been wanting to do for so long. To give you a little bit of background about why I started this podcast, I know that there are a lot of people who can relate to these experiences that I've had and

I keep finding that out over and over again. So I thought I definitely want to create a platform where that is something we dig into more and help people feel less alone. So it really started out with me figuring out my resiliency story or my journey of like developing strength and courage through the hardest parts of my life.

I've also been someone who is extremely ambitious in everything that I've wanted to do. I've always wanted to do it to the best of my ability to exceed my own expectations. And I just had this faith in myself that I could do things. But then at the same time, without any like healthy examples that I was looking to or witnessing, there was the burnout that comes afterwards or losing myself, not feeling authentic anymore.

and trying to be something I'm not so that other people would accept me or see me and value what I had to bring to the table. And this was something that just kept coming up in my life over and over from the time I was younger, I can remember, all the way through to the beginning of starting out my professional career in my corporate world, in the corporate world. So my life before really finding this alignment or focusing more on this alignment was...

one that was still full of blessings, lots of great things happening, but I was not intentionally choosing my own goals. So out of university, I was really lucky, had my resume sent in to this large corporation where I live, and I was lucky enough to get called and hired. And this was something that I was really excited about just because I wanted to make money for myself, I wanted to get started.

But then as soon as that was the direction that I kind of fell into, I hadn't even sent out applications or my resume really to any other businesses. If I had taken the time to maybe stop and think, what do I want to do? Who do I want to be? What kind of career path do I want to take? Who knows where I would have gone? So I do believe things happen for a reason. And I do believe that my corporate path was one that I served many purposes, taught me many things.

But by saying yes to that, it was kind of like that was just another checkbox off of my things that you have to do to be considered successful, you know, in my mind at the time. And so I had this corporate career and then pretty early on, I found out that I had this non-cancerous brain tumor that at the time they had said decreased my chances of being able to get pregnant or to have children. So I decided that my job was kind of like my baby.

And so I worked ridiculous hours. I was working all the time. It created all kinds of tension between my husband and I. Even then we were just engaged. There was all kinds of tension because I wanted to work all the time. I wanted to prove myself. I wanted to move up the ladder. I wanted to show everybody what I was capable of. And through that ambition, I was blind to what really matters and to me when I think about what I value.

and what I care about. I was hurting my relationships. I didn't have any real relationships or true friendships because I wasn't working on them or fostering them. I was 100 % focused on work. If I wasn't sleeping or spending time with my husband or my fiance, I was always thinking about work. It was really hurting those relationships. I remember being envious that my sister had Facebook connections with our cousins because she was talking to them and I thought, man, I don't even have connections with them.

And all of sudden, was like all of my boundaries were gone. I was working too much, which set an expectation professionally where people expected me to keep working at that level and not knowing how do I get out of this. And then feeling disconnected from the work itself when it was no longer aligned with my values of, they allowed me to kind of study and research the culture of the company. So I was allowed to interview.

Everyone in the company from the people who greet you at the front door all the way up to the top executives It was a dream job my background being psychology and sociology I thought wow how ever did I luck out but then all of a sudden when it turned into automating jobs and Turning a lot of different positions and departments into more automated positioning It didn't align with me anymore and I told my husband I want to make a change so then I went and I started my own

multi-level marketing business with Arvon. And again, I did the same thing. I went all in. I gave everything I had to it without giving any consideration to what do I really care about, what do I really matter, and making sure that I prioritize those things. Okay, so some of the signs for me of this misalignment that's kind of slowly building through university, this first corporate career, and then into my first real like toe in the water when it came to entrepreneurship or working for myself.

was that all of a sudden I was having physical symptoms, always in pain. There was neck pain, lower back pain, I just, stomach pain, head pain, I was always in pain. And then I didn't have time to make medical appointments because it was just too much going on in my calendar and that was kind of the lowest priority. And knowing that my husband and I were fighting quite a bit, I even felt like I wasn't experiencing much joy. It was like,

all that I was really accomplishing was checklists and getting things done and trying to exceed expectations of how quickly I could get something done and how well I could get something done. And so those were all signs to me that I'm not aligned right now. I'm not who I'm meant to be. And I found that when I got the opportunity to stop and realize that, I was empowered with being able to make so many more decisions for myself.

Alright, so there was like a few turning points or wake up calls that made me realize something had to change. And one of the big ones, if you've heard me speak publicly or if you've ever been on my social media, one of them was that I had a complete breakdown in the middle of a grocery store. Laying on the aisle floor, which I am a germ freak, germaphobe, and I'm laying on the floor, people are walking around me, I'm just sobbing, just sobbing.

That was one of those points in my life where it was like, I can't continue forward another moment. My body literally forced me to stop and deal with it. And so knowing something had to change and really unfortunately getting to that point where I had to be forced to stop and I got straight to my doctor's office and thank gosh I have a...

an incredible doctor who knew how to talk to me and who knew what I was going through and knew how to support me. And really at the beginning just listened. Like I tell a lot of people when I got there, she opened her arms up with a box of Kleenex. That was like no words were exchanged. That's just what happened when she heard where I was and what was happening. OK, so these were really, really big deals to me. And so then after that, I.

Decided I would no longer be a victim and that I would start taking empowered steps forward To see how can I live my best life? How can I get better results for myself? How can I live more aligned? All right, and so that meant slowing down it meant learning what to say no to it meant learning to prioritize my own mental health physical health financial health my marriage my relationship health and

It meant like really defining what does success look like in each of those areas for me? What does it look like for me to feel really proud and feel like I've accomplished something? And that was such a fun exercise. It's something that was really eye opening for me because it's not always about money. It's often about other experiences or relationships or just how you feel, how you feel about yourself and others. now with doing this work for the last

13 so years or so years what alignment feels like to me now is having clarity I Have clarity on what my power is on what I want on where I'm going on How to do that? I? Have this grounded ambition It's not like where I was almost frightened of my own ambition because I knew I had to keep up with it now It's like I am grounded in it. There is a confidence in my ambition

I know how to achieve things without sacrificing myself. And now energy is flowing towards the right things. And like I'm not perfect obviously, I don't want this to sound that way, but I am intentional and so that feels a lot better. And if I make a mistake, I put my energy towards the wrong thing or I focus on the wrong thing, it's an easy pivot for me because now I've learned what my signs are that I'm not aligned so I can make easy adjustments and then things feel better a lot quicker. So,

Alignment is an ongoing practice, not a one-time fix. It's something that I wish was talked about a lot more, especially as I was starting out my career or as I was transitioning from being a corporate professional to a self-employed entrepreneur and a business owner. I wish that I had more examples of what alignment looked like. And even like on a global scale, I feel like a lot of the stories we see about the top successful people, often they're

documentaries or their autobiographies, it's always about losing themselves and having to come back home to themselves, about getting to a level of success that they started to transform into something they didn't recognize anymore, something other people expected and about how they had to come back to themselves. Because I'm telling you, I am a junkie of reading those documentaries or autobiographies, biographies, and I've seen this constant theme.

right? And successful people want other people to be successful. They are leaving clues for us if we need to pick them up and run with them. So this is one of the biggest lessons that I learned that I don't have to be ashamed of or stop my ambition, that I can actually figure out the best way forward by checking in with myself and figuring out if it was possible, how would I do it? And if it was like the way that I'm doing it, what if it was easier?

And I'm constantly checking in with fun ways like that with myself to see how can I achieve this without sacrificing myself? How can I achieve this without compromising my time with my family or my values or the things that really matter to me? And there's always an answer. You just have to ask yourself the right questions. So here's a reflective question for all of you listeners. If it's just you one listener that I'm talking to right now, where in your life do you feel out of alignment right now?

I want you to consider that and I want to invite you to consider taking one small step this week towards finding alignment for yourself, towards figuring out what can you do that will make you feel more aligned, more whole, more energized. Okay, again, this is the purpose of this podcast to really dig into these subjects of building resilience, building your own oxygen mask, if you would, for

surviving ambition and success and when life happens. All of those things are going to happen guaranteed, but are you prepared for them? Have you done the work to take care of your mental health and your physical health, your overall well-being? If not, no worries, we are going to do that together through this podcast. Stay with me. I'm going to give you tips and tricks. I'm going to be interviewing the coolest individuals who have proven success, who have done incredible things, who have overcome

Incredible incredible obstacles and how they found alignment and how they found themselves They got back to themselves and how they can move forward Knowing how to properly take care of themselves so that they are prepared for the success so that they could take full advantage of it All right

Last thing I'm gonna say, please subscribe, please share this podcast, please share each episode, any episode that speaks to you. Let's expand the conversation. Let's connect with one another. I can't wait for you to connect with me and I'm gonna keep this coming. I have some great guests lined up right off the hop. But thank you so much for being here for the number one episode. Take care of yourself, keep the faith everyone.