As men pursuing lives of significance, we often focus on the big-picture goals: success in our careers, strong families, financial stability, and spiritual growth. Yet, even when we achieve many of these goals, we can sometimes feel stuck, frustrated, or “off.” Why? One key reason may be that we’re not living in congruence.
Congruence is not a word you hear every day, but it plays a crucial role in living an intentional life. Simply put, congruence means that your thoughts, words, and actions are in agreement with your values, beliefs, and desires. It’s living in alignment with the man you know you’re called to be.
According to the dictionary, congruence means "agreement" or "harmony." But when I talk about congruence in coaching and in life, I mean something deeper: are you consistently living in a way that reflects your core values and beliefs?
When your thoughts, words, and actions are in harmony, you’ll feel more authentic, genuine, and intentional. You’ll feel more confident and empowered to live out your mission in life. As Brendon Burchard puts it, congruence is "living in alignment with what you know is the best of you—consistently."
I recently coached a client who was outwardly very successful. He had the career, the family, the house, the car—all the trappings of a life that most people would envy. But when he reached out to me, he felt something was missing. He wasn’t as engaged or excited about life as he thought he should be.
As we dug deeper, we realized he was out of alignment in several key areas. He prided himself on being a high achiever but had coasted at work without any meaningful challenges. He valued being a present father but was too busy and tired to fully engage with his kids. He loved the outdoors, yet he hadn’t been on an adventure in ages.
The problem wasn’t that he lacked success—it was that his actions weren’t aligned with his values. He wasn’t living in congruence.
When we started to work on bringing his life back into alignment, something amazing happened: his passion returned. His energy came back. He felt alive again. And that’s the power of congruence.
When you’re out of alignment with your core values, several things can happen:
Low Self-Esteem: Your brain is always keeping score. If you believe yourself to be a hardworking person but consistently blow off responsibilities, your brain logs that behavior and casts doubt on your identity.
Lack of Confidence: Over time, a lack of follow-through erodes your confidence. You stop trusting yourself, and that leads to passivity and hesitation in pursuing new challenges.
Loss of Passion: When you’re not living in line with your values, you lose energy. The enthusiasm and passion you once had for life slowly fades away because deep down, you know you’re not showing up as the person you want to be.
I like to think of congruence as a bank account. Every time your thoughts, words, and actions align with your values, you make a deposit. Each time you act out of alignment, you make a withdrawal. If you’re consistently making withdrawals, you’ll feel drained, discouraged, and disconnected. But if you’re consistently making deposits, you’ll feel empowered, confident, and full of energy.
Living in congruence also impacts your relationships with others. As men, we often crave respect, trust, and admiration. But the fastest way to lose respect is by failing to live up to our commitments—especially the ones we make to ourselves.
It’s important to remember that deposits in our relationships often need to be much larger than withdrawals. One great vacation with your family won’t make up for missing your child’s soccer game. A thoughtful gift won’t heal the wound of a broken promise. That’s why it’s so important to be proactive about making deposits into your most important relationships.
Here’s the good news: congruence isn’t about perfection—it’s about consistency. If you’ve been making too many withdrawals, you can start making deposits today. Here are some practical steps to help you live more intentionally:
Start with Reflection: Think about the man you want to be. What values are most important to you? How do you want others to describe you? Write down three words that define your best self and remind yourself of them throughout the day.
Keep Your Commitments: Pay attention to the commitments you make to yourself. If you tell yourself you’re going to wake up early to work out, follow through. Each time you stick to your word, you’re making a deposit in your self-confidence account.
Be Proactive in Relationships: Make intentional deposits in your relationships with your spouse, children, and friends. Schedule date nights, family outings, and time to connect with the people you love. Small, consistent actions will show them they matter to you.
Align Your Actions with Your Values: Identify areas where your life may be out of alignment. Are you prioritizing work over family? Are you neglecting your health or spiritual growth? Take small, actionable steps to bring your actions back in line with your values.
When you live in alignment with your values, beliefs, and desires, something incredible happens: you become a man who is not only proud of what he does, but who he is. You’ll feel more passionate, more engaged, and more confident because you know you’re showing up as the best version of yourself.
So, ask yourself: Are there areas of your life where your thoughts, words, and actions aren’t aligned with who you truly want to be? If so, what’s one step you can take today to bring your life back into congruence?
Remember, living intentionally doesn’t happen by accident. It requires deliberate effort, but the reward is a life of significance, integrity, and true fulfillment.
Thanks for reading. If this post encouraged or challenged you, share it with someone who might benefit from it—and start making deposits today!
Go live a life you’re proud of by living intentionally.
In the Intentional Man Membership, we work together as a community to develop 6 habits of intentionally living. Today, I want to talk to you about one of those 6 habits. It’s an idea you don’t hear much about, but it dictates so much of your life and that is Congruency
The word congruence in the dictionary simply means Agreement or Harmony
So what I mean by congruence is that “Your thoughts, words, and actions are in agreement with your values, beliefs, and desires.”
When your thoughts, words, and actions are truly in agreement with or in harmony with your values and your beliefs, you will feel like you are living in congruence…you will feel like you are being authentic. You are going to feel like you are being genuine. You are going to feel like you are being intentional.
Brendon Burchard also gives a good definition. He says congruence is “Living in alignment with what you know is the best of you…consistently.”
Are you consistently living as the best version of yourself? Are you consistently treating others as your best self? Are you consistently living in alignment with Scripture? With what God says of you? With how he views you?
I recently had a client who went through my 12 week individual coaching program. This guy was very successful in his career, had a great family, great house, new car…if you looked at his life from the outside, he was the epitome of success…yet he reached out to me because he felt something was off.
He reached out because he felt stuck. He felt frustrated. He had achieved what he wanted to achieve but wasn’t feeling like he thought he would.
As we really started digging in and going deeper, we came to realize that the reason he was feeling stuck, frustrated, and “off” was because he was not living in alignment with who he wanted to be.
Yes, he had the stuff and the accolades and the career, but he was out of alignment in a bunch of different areas.
He viewed himself as a high achiever and a go-getter, but now he had been coasting in a job and he didn’t have any sort of meaningful challenge or pursuit that was chasing. He had stopped growing. He had stopped bettering himself and adding new skills.
He viewed himself as a good dad, but when we dug into it, he knew he wasn’t giving his kids the time or attention they deserved. He was working too many hours and missing too many of their activities. Then when he was with them, he was usually tired and so he wasn’t engaged.
It was very important to him to be a great husband, but they had a ton of different projects around the house and he was spending all of his extra time on those and he wasn’t connecting to his wife.
He also viewed himself as an adventurer. He loved the mountains. He said that’s where he felt alive and peaceful, but when I asked him the last time he had been to the mountains, he couldn’t remember.
His thoughts, words, and actions were not in alignment with what he said was the most valuable to him and so he was out of congruence.
As we did the hard work to get those things back in alignment, he felt his passion come back. He felt his energy come back. He felt alive again. He felt engaged again.
Think about your life right now, are there areas where your thoughts, words, and actions are not in alignment with your deepest values, beliefs, and priorities on a consistent basis?
If so, then you might be feeling some of things that my client felt.
So what are the negative consequences of misalignment?
Internal Consequences
This happens because of how the brain works. Your brain is always keeping score. Your brain is logging your activities.
If you believe yourself to be a hard-working person, but you are consistently distracted at work, blowing off responsibilities at home, spending too much time on your phone or on TV, then your brain is going to log that activity. It is a vote against that identity that you want to have.
If you believe yourself to be a healthy person, but continuously skip your workouts and eat junk food all the time, your brain is logging that incongruent behavior.
When you know you are supposed to be doing something or acting a certain way, and continue to do the opposite, you are not building your self-esteem…you are hurting it. Typically a lack of follow through leads to a lot of negative self-talk.
As you have a lower view of yourself because of your lack of follow through or commitment, then you start to lose confidence in your abilities.
As you lose confidence in your abilities, you don’t try new things, you don’t take on new challenges, you revert to passivity mode and when you are in that zone, you typically lose your passion for life and that energy.
The best way to think about this is like a bank account.
Every thought, word, or action that you take is either a deposit or a withdrawal into your congruence bank account.
If you believe yourself to be a kind and caring person - your thoughts, words, and actions will either give you deposits or withdrawals
When you purposely encourage someone, you make a deposit
When you do something around the house to serve your wife, you make a deposit
When you turn off the TV to spend time with your kids, you make a deposit
When you blow someone off, you make a withdrawal
When you get mad and talk bad about someone, you make a withdrawal
Incongruence Zone
Too many withdrawals and you are going to start to lose confidence. Too many withdrawals and you are going to have a lower view of yourself. Too many withdrawals and you are going to start to lose your passion.
Congruence Zone
But if you have more deposits than withdrawals, the opposite happens. You start to build confidence. You start to believe in yourself. You start to boost your self-esteem. You start to live with more passion, joy, and energy because you know you’re living in alignment with what is important to you!
That’s the key here too. This is not about perfection. None of us will ever do this perfectly. But you must have more deposits in your life than withdrawals. You must be way more consistent on this side than on this side.
You must have the proof to yourself that this is who you are and this is what you do instead of this.
If you have been making too many withdrawals out of the bank account, it is time to put some deposits back in.
This is why sticking to the commitments you make to yourself is so important. Every time you make a commitment and then you don’t stick to it, you are making a withdrawal. You are casting a vote to your brain saying that you are not a committed person. Or you are not a hardworking person.
We are typically pretty good at keeping our commitments to others, but horrible at keeping the commitments we make to ourselves. If you want to build your self-esteem, if you want to build your confidence, if you want to live with more energy and passion, you must start consistently keeping the commitments that you make to yourself.
Think about those days where you tell yourself you’re going to wake up early and go to the gym. The morning comes and you feel tired and are tempted to go back to bed. Do you feel better about yourself later that day if you stayed in bed and went back to sleep? Or when you got up and stuck to your commitment? It’s hard to get out of bed and go, but every time, you will feel more confident and you will boost your self-esteem by sticking to your commitment.
Many people are bankrupt in confidence because they are void of congruence
Some of the External Consequence
This same bank account analogy applies when we are talking about being congruent in your thoughts, words, and actions toward others.
It is built into the DNA of every man that we want to be respected. That we want to be trusted. That we want others to believe that we will come through when we are needed.
The greatest way to make sure you are getting those things is to be a man of your word. A man that sticks to your commitments. A man that follows through with your promises.
We honestly live in a world that is becoming increasingly flaky. It doesn’t feel like many people are committing to anything. If you can be a man that commits and stands by that commitment, you will earn others trust and respect
The unfortunate reality when it comes to others, is withdrawals are usually way more costly than deposits.
You might take your family on a fun vacation and make a deposit, but if you blow off your kids important soccer game, that withdrawal is going to be bigger than that one deposit.
So the key here is to be proactively making deposit after deposit in your most important relationships, so that when you do make a mistake, which we all will, there is still a positive balance in the account.
The key there is being proactive. Being intentional. Creating opportunities to make those deposits that show them they are important to you. To show them you love them. To show them you care. If you leave that to chance, chances are you will not consistently make the right deposits.
My client that I mentioned earlier started getting intentional about the commitments he was making and the deposits he was making and saw his energy and passion for life come back. He started to live in congruence with the man he wanted to be and the man God had called him to be.
For the summer, he proactively put together a list of fun activities that they could do as a family, and he would put one of those activities on the calendar each week
With his wife, he designated one night a week as a date night and came up with fun date ideas and questions he could ask his wife that would grow their emotional connection.
He started small and decided he was going to work out 3 days a week and he stuck to that commitment with consistency
He decided he was going to grow again and picked out some books he always wanted to read and devoted time in the morning to read and challenge his mind.
He planned a trip to the mountains with some friends and made time for it in his calendar
Congruency can either work for or against you. If you are more consistently in misalignment, you will not feel like you are living life to the fullest. But if you are more consistently in alignment with your values and priorities, you will experience great passion, joy, and energy in your life.
There are a lot of ways to build congruence in your life, but I want to leave you today with one easy exercise you can do immediately.
I want you to think about yourself, who you are, who you want to be, how you want to treat others, how you want others to feel when they are around you…then come up with three words that would describe your best self.
If people could describe you in three words, what would you want those words to be? Once you got those words, put them in your phone as an alarm or reminder that goes off throughout the day. Each time that alarm goes off, read the three words and think about how you can live into those three words in your current moment.
Oftentimes, it’s not massive changes that dictate your life, it is consistently showing up as the man you desire to be. Doing this exercise has helped me to feel more consistently in alignment with my mission, vision, and values. I know it will make a huge difference in your life if you do it consistently, day in and day out.
Thanks for joining today! If this was helpful and encouraging to you, please share it with someone else that might find it useful.
Go live a life you are proud of by living intentionally.
