THE ALIGNMENT EXPERIENCE
The first step to re-envision and design your best life, business, work, or environment.
WHO IS IT FOR?
Individuals & Couples – Entrepreneurs & Business Partners – Community Leaders
who need to quickly create and communicate a new vision that supports your true purpose, mission, and direction, with the road map and strategy to achieve it, without wasting precious resources of time and money
“An amazing process. I am now moving in the direction towards what I want to do with my business and my life.”
Marilyn W.
“Others have tried to fit what I do, into their model. You’re ability to see the holistic aspects of who I am and what I bring has made all the difference in my ability to move forward towards my own goals. This means I haven’t lost motivation moving towards them each day-cos they’re mine!”
“After doing the Alignment process yesterday, my brain is working overtime – it’s brilliant! Many amazing and cool ideas have already arisen this morning.”
Sue S.
Beth B.
“The best process I have found to architect change in such a compelling and practical way.”
David C. CEO
“Creating a clear vision, understanding why, and aligning a transformative design process to it is the alchemy of pure magic.”
Suzanne C.
Shirley P.
“I cannot say enough about how powerful I think this is on your own or in partnership situations. But having done it twice now, on two different ideas/dreams. I just think it’s, it’s amazing.”
Chris B. work transition and creating dream home.
“When I could see what I believed, and realised my own capabilities and talents, it was a no-brainer what my vision was! It is what I am all about, and what I am here to do. Motivation became easy, the steps and mapping made the rest plain sailing.”
Berry C, Refinding my purpose. Life/work transition.
“You can’t find yourself looking in someone else’s mirror. With the alignment process you start with the experiences you are seeking to create. The choices I made post-alignment process felt much easier because I had a roadmap guided by own inner knowing.”
Tami A, Life transition/ new home to support new life
“This is a protected thinking space we rarely have, a process which creates the conditions of possibility for something to emerge. It turns out to be staggeringly transformational. It was really about shifting the lens on my life.”
Dr Suzanne Reagan
“Often with new spaces-come transformational places in your life. It’s often true there’s more than one transformation at a time. This is a good time for this process, so you don’t get lost in the negative, but focus on opportunities and re-evaluate and realign to what you really want.”
Neela B
“I feel like I dreamed my dream, achieved it and now live and work in a different space with my new perspective, which I would never have seen without doing this” “I just love it….what a great journey…”
“Creating our vision for the future, reidentifying our mission and purpose in it, and creating the maps and plans to get to a new place within it has been an absolute gift to us all, and the direction of the organisation and our work.”
Elaine C and the Board.
“Aligning your life to your purpose, empowers you to make inspired change.”
Katy B.
Reconnect to your passion and purpose
The Alignment Experience was designed to solve a common challenge: clients navigating life or business transitions often struggled to clearly see and communicate their vision and their “why.” Without that clarity, decisions felt confusing, and progress was harder to make.
This guided process helps release outdated patterns, making space for new possibilities. Clients learn to fully envision what they want, articulate why it matters, and co-create a blueprint to align their strategy and achieve their outcome with greater ease, flow, and effectiveness.
By aligning vision with skills, values, passions, and purpose, they step into their role as the architect of their future. The bonus: a deeper glimpse of what they are truly here to do — with energy freed to bring that vision to life.
“When I saw, felt, and tasted the future I wanted, I couldn’t help but want to run towards it and take the clear steps to get there.”
J.D. career transition client
If you’re here
- In a life transition
- Stuck
- At a crossroad
- Lost direction
- Unclear what you want next
- Feeling misaligned
- Need a new direction
- Don’t know where to start
- Need more life balance
And want to be here
- Have clarity and a way forward
- Know where you are going
- Realigned to your true self
- Reignited your passion and purpose
- Re-envisioned your life, work or project
- Explored possible futures
- Created aligned change
- Found your balance
- On your new path
NAVIGATE LIFE & WORK TRANSITIONS
- Find your True North: your compass for life and career decisions.
- Re-envision your life & goals from here.
- Create a map to get from where you are to where you're going.
- Eliminate wasted energies pursing things that aren't aligned with your goals.
- Access your untapped knowledge, strengths, and wisdom.
- Create your action plan
CREATE DREAM HOMES & SPACES
- Create the dream and ensure that those inolved (partner, architects, etc.) hold aligned visions from the start
- Repurpose or redesign new or existing environments to support your changing needs and life transitions
- Design a new build to create environments that suit your unique needs
- Improve work environments for better ease, flow, and outcomes by aligning with the bigger picture.
- Prioritize what truly matters when preparing to buy a new home or business.
INSPIRE BUSINESS CLARITY & DIRECTION
- An MOT for your business or project. Helping you to find improved direction and identify priorities and needs.
- Clarify your vision, strategy and the next steps to get there.
- Re-define tangible goals, aligned with what truly matters.
- Virtually explore options for a change of direction or transition.
- Communicate with clarity to engage essential support (teams, funders, partners, investors).
- Solve problems by taking specific step-wise actions.
The Alignment Experience
ABOUT THe process
The Alignment Experience is an emergent, holistic & transformative
visioning, coaching, and design process in one
Are you personally or professionally in transition? Does your life or business need a re-design?
We guide individuals, entrepreneurs, business and community leaders to re-envision the future you want: reimagining what’s possible, exploring opportunities, and solving problems along the way through our unique half-day or full-day Alignment Experience.
The process follows powerful and holistic levels of inner and outer alignment to imagine what’s possible. It helps us to realise who we are in the world and understand what we uniquely do or bring. The multiple levels of alignment support integration of our whole self to recognise and support our mission or goal, and our relationship to it.
It also helps us view challenges, things that may stop us from achieving our true life goals. It helps identify and name these, allowing new perspectives to explore and design new or better ways of overcoming them.
With your Alignment Experience as your clarity and foundation for change, energy is released, holistic pathways, steps, systems, and relationships emerge and fall into place. All can now align to support the task, goal, or project to completion.
”We are often stuck, because we aren’t 100% sure what it is that we really want or why. I think the crux of the Alignment Experience is that when we find what we want most and why, we’re in the logical and strongest place to begin. As our vision is now in alignment with ourselves, it is so powerful energetically that it just can’t be stopped. How you integrate that vision back into your life or work is just a matter of design.”
Nicola
Steps
The Alignment Experience is an emergent, holistic & transformative
coaching and design process to re-envision your future.
Explore or discover your vision aligned with your true North passion and purpose.
STEP 1 It all starts here.
EXPLORATORY CALL: As this process is unique, I offer a complementary exploratory call to discuss your current transition, what brought you to us, and see if the Alignment Experience might be a good fit for you moving forward. Plan on 30-40 minutes. No charge. No commitment.
STEP 2
Should you choose to proceed, we schedule your Alignment Experience. This initial and key coaching process usually takes place in a supporting environment of your choice, and a date and time that we identify and choose before your 1:1 session.
Having discussed the outcomes you would like to get from the day, the process uses a series of steps:
- I invite you to bring some items of importance to you in relation to your outcome before the process takes place.
- We take time to set up the space at the start of the process, and we use the physical environment to lay out a series of life, business or project coaching areas to explore.
- It is an emergent process. It does not come from your mind or thinking alone. You need do nothing but follow the process. It is always an opportunity for your wisdom and “knowing” to emerge, creating a holistic future view of your life, home, business idea or project.
The process offers up opportunities to take on new perspectives to solve some of the problems or blocks you may be experiencing. It is a kind of unfolding of your ideas.
STEP 3
After your Alignment Experience notes are completed and returned to you for review:
- A coaching call is set up for your feedback and the next steps. This allows you to digest and consider the information discovered in the process Step 1 to literally “click in.”
- This is followed quickly by a rearrangement of your notes formatted into the start of your plan. (Often people are so excited to get going, they may have already started to see progress.)
- Together we then choose best way forward.
- This is the Big Kahoona where all your key discoveries are made, ready to begin designing a blueprint or plan.
Develop and design your blueprint and plans.
STEP 4
- We now create your designs, structured from your Alignment Experience notes.
- Iteration. We begin to design your blueprint and plans for:
- Life & Work transitions : A plan for the vision that you want to create and work towards.
- Homes & other environments: Initial Plans and drawings of the vision.
- Entrepeneurs, Business & Community Leaders : Initial design blueprint for your organisational vision, direction, and other projects.
STEP 5
- Review. We then send your blueprint/plans and meet with you for a review of ideas, incorporating suggestions, feedback and solidifying next steps.
- Once agreed, we return with the final plans. These continue to be your master plan that we can update or review as information is collected throughout the ‘create’ part of the process.
Map your strategy, taking into account the context of where you are now and the steps to achieve your vision from here.
From your masterplan/ design blueprint, we map your strategy, plans, and work out next steps based on your abilities and resources.
We look at gaps and actions needed to deliver and/or phases to meet your goals.
And set any other coaching plans for help and support, if needed.
- Life & work transitions – map the resources to support your transition, and create and refine the plan and next steps
- Homes & other environments – creating the map, identifying resources and refining next steps (eg. finding the people/ team to move the project forward based on ideas and drawings)
- Entrepeneurs, Business & Community Leaders, Systems, Organisational direction & other projects-Mapping specific steps, strategy, gaps and resources, with a plan to move forward, leaving room to iterate as needed.
We then send you a copy of your Aligned Map.
Create! Like any good design process, you continue to iterate, define, and refine your plan to deliver on your vision in real-time.
Beyond your Alignment Experience, we are here to continue to support you as needed as your dream becomes your reality.
STEP 7 ACTUALISATION
This is it. With your aligned vision, master plan/designed blueprint, & mapped resources you have clear steps, to empower and drive you to deliver on your vision.
- Life & work transitions: Taking action in alignment with your unique resources and research to actualise your goal.
- Homes & other environments: Taking the action using the resources, ability, and planning from previous steps, making decisions on bids, purchasing, suppliers, and witnessing the build of the vision.
- Business, Entrepreneurs,Systems, Taking actions and making the fundamental moves to communicate and build the new organisational direction and other projects, while seeing results in processes and outcomes.
BEYOND ALIGNMENT
Many clients realise they have received what they’d wanted from this process, and refer back to their Blueprint and Map for years to come.
Additional support if desired:
- Some clients call on a monthly basis to review progress, ensure on-going alignment, and consider any questions or challenges that arise in implementation, which we will then re-work with them using consulting or creative techniques aligned with their outcome.
- Others request a quarterly or annual review and/or re-alignment as new ideas or transitions emerge.
- Some clients request design consultation or references to other services to implement their vision, which we can discuss on a case-by-case basis.
History and sources of the work
The Alignment Experience was developed in the UK between 2003-2010 under Matthiessen-Rudge Solutions under the ‘design for success’ programme. It was a melding of design thinking and coaching tools to support clients to turn their business dreams into reality and prepare them to step into the future, and create sustainable and holistic solutions for their business.
The success of the process grew and was developed into the Design Alignment in 2008, where it was used more widely in the hospitality sector to help build hospitality businesses literally and figuratively.
With clients’ success impacting more than their business goals, the process was further refined to support participants to vision, explore and redesign their lives and business aligned with their true purpose and passion, their “true North”.
Blended with Nicola’s extensive design and coaching background and unique capacity to guide clients, the Alignment Experience has now been tried and tested over 20 years in practical applications with individuals redesigning their lives or work, before or after life transitions, with entrepeneurs seeking clarity for their business, to support teams or funding pitches, with not-for-profit leaders and organisations seeking alignment in redesigning services, and communities innovating projects and ideas, creating systems and practices, exploring future possibilities, and creating and testing their ideas.
It builds upon a unique combination of work created from a range of sources and references including:
- Logical Levels of learning and change Gregory Bateson, based on the work of Bertrand Russell logic and mathematics
- Adapted by Robert Dilts in mid mid-1980s and refers to a hierarchy of levels and process within an individual or group, as taught at NLPU as part of the practitioner certification course.
- The Disney Process. Disney’s creative strategy.
- Perceptual Positions, originally formulated by John Grinder and Judith Delozier (198 7 as operational extensions of earlier concepts of referential index
- Gregory Bateson’s concepts of double and triple description.
- Robert Dilts and Todd Epstein later made further refinements relating to the distinction between third position Meta position and observer position, company position, and fourth or system position.
- The notion of perceptual positions in NLP has its roots in the concept of referential indices. (The structure of magic volume 1, 1975)
Client Journeys and Case Studies
In process – available upon request…
Your guide
In 2001, as an accomplished and experienced multidisciplinary designer internationally, after decades of working on a broad spectrum of design projects across many different sectors and geographies, and developing my skills in design thinking to solve more complex problems, I completed a series of coaching qualifications culminating in my coaching master’s.
Why?
I realised clients came to me from all walks of life and that they were frustrated by the idea of ‘design’ or ‘designers’, not giving them what they wanted.
It was obvious that their lives, businesses, or organisations often needed a lot more than a coat of paint or a new interior. They required a more holistic look at the who, what, where, when, or why of what they were doing. What was needed was a review of where they were in their life, but more importantly where they wanted to go, and why.
So I started working with them from the perspective of where they wanted to go.
With coaching techniques, they could envision a holistic view of the end goal from the start. Then take a look back from the dream, to where they were today. I then helped them realise that with the right steps, they weren’t that far from where they wanted to be if approached in a focused and stepwise process. The results and the response of my clients speak for themselves. They could finally build their dreams from the practical road map and strategies they employed, based on their unique vision, strengths, and wisdom. It was remarkable for them, and for me.
“Nicola is is an incredibly good guide. I felt like I had the deepest conversations with myself that I’ve ever had. She is transparent to the process, and that’s unbelievably rare. I know that because of the work that I do and how hard it is to do that.”
Suzanne R. (Organisational Behaviour Consultant)
“An amazing, deep- seated, core process of an alignment of self that leaves you with a whole new feeling and perspective on your life and what you can achieve. Nicola guides you expertly through the steps to get there.”
David B, CEO.
PACKAGES
Coming soon…