Congruence Living: Warrior Mind Podcast #208
This Warrior Mind Podcast is based on the post “Congruence and Personal Success.” 
The purpose of this Warrior Mind Podcast is to help you understand the critical role congruence plays in your success.
Congruence means “the state achieved by coming together, the state of agreement”. The Latin congruere means to come together, agree. As an abstract term, congruence means similarity between objects.
I use it when describing communications styles, to build awareness around the importance of the communications messages that your body language and use of voice can add to the words.
As human beings, one of the survival behaviors we have learned is to act as human lie detectors. We scan each other for sincerity, to see if we can trust the messages we are receiving. We know if people aren’t being congruent and therefore treat them with suspicion.
We also know if we are being incongruent ourselves.
We can therefore consider congruence as being in rapport with ourselves and others. When this happens people perceive us as being sincere, genuine, transparent, authentic and real.
However, achieving this degree of internal and external consistency is not easy. It requires us significant amounts of self-awareness, self-acceptance and courage.
Self-awareness to really understand our core values and principles; self-acceptance to be honest enough to accept ourselves for who we are and courage to stand up for our values and beliefs.
So, take some time to think about your core values and consciously choose to be congruent every day.
As Dr Seuss, the highly creative children’ author says “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
Incongruence is where your self-image is “out of alignment” with your ideal-self.
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Loosely speaking, congruence means genuineness. People are congruent when they are not trying to appear to be anything other than what they are. Congruence is the opposite of dissemblance. It is closely related to a number of other terms, some of which will concern us below: honesty, authenticity, transparency, immediacy, spontaneity; yet its meaning does not precisely coincide with any of these.
Within the realms of personal development congruence is concerned with a person’s attempts to achieve harmony in their way of being. We may speak here particularly of harmony between body and mind.
Body, in this statement, refers primarily to behavior, to all the movements and sensations which constitute our experience of our physical being. Mind refers to our sentiments, beliefs, emotions, thoughts and imagery. Sometimes we make this same distinction by talking about a person’s “outer” and “inner” lives.
The term congruence is derived from a Latin word meaning harmony. I am incongruent when I am not in harmony with myself. A person who smiles (body) while actually feeling miserable (mind), is said to be incongruent.
Much psychotherapy, personal growth and spiritual work revolves around the attempt to achieve self-harmony, to eliminate incongruence. Incongruence is one of the most used sign-posts in psychotherapy. When the client manifests signs of incongruence that is where the therapist is likely to focus attention.
Five characteristics of the fully functioning person:
- Open to experience: both positive and negative emotions accepted. Negative feelings are not denied, but worked through (rather than resort to ego defense mechanisms).
- Existential living: in touch with different experiences as they occur in life, avoiding prejudging and preconceptions. Being able to live and fully appreciate the present, not always looking back to the past or forward to the future (i.e. living for the moment).
- Trust feelings: feeling, instincts and gut-reactions are paid attention to and trusted. People’s own decisions are the right ones and we should trust ourselves to make the right choices.
- Creativity: creative thinking and risk taking are features of a person’s life. Person does not play safe all the time. This involves the ability to adjust and change and seek new experiences.
- Fulfilled life: person is happy and satisfied with life, and always looking for new challenges and experiences.
For a person to “grow”, they need an environment that provides them with genuineness (openness and self-disclosure), acceptance (being seen with unconditional positive regard), and empathy (being listened to and understood).
Without these, relationships and healthy personalities will not develop as they should, much like a tree will not grow without sunlight and water.
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