🌀 Feeling Aligned: Success Beyond Metrics in Business and Life – with Amelia Hruby

Giada Centofanti [00:00:04]:
Hey there. Welcome to Inner Impact, a podcast about taking aligned action. I’m your host, Giada Centofanti, coach and founder of Care to Impact. On this show, you will get tools, inspiration, and space to take online action and create a business that brings joy and positive change to your lives and the world. Hey there. Welcome to Inner Impact. In today’s episode, we are going to explore what it means to build a business that feels good and aligned with our core selves. And we are going to do it together with the one and only Amelia Hruby, a generous human being, a fantastic creative business owner, and a dear business friend. Let me introduce her to you. Amelia Hruby is a feminist writer, podcaster, and producer with a PhD in philosophy. She is the founder of Software Sounds, a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives, and she is the host of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing of your clients. On the show, she interviews business leaders and former influencers and shares stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. Welcome, Amelia. Thank you so much for being here.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:30]:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure.

Giada Centofanti [00:01:33]:
Okay. This is gonna be great. And now I’m just fangirling. Okay. So Okay. So, I would say let’s start with some helpful definitions. So to set the scene, I would love to explore what alignment and taking aligned action mean to you.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:56]:
Yeah. You know, I think there are so many lenses or frameworks or methodologies we could think about alignment through, but I’ve been reflecting on, like, what is the simplest approach? How do I really think about these things? And for me, alignment is about finding this I I just wanna say, like, alignment, but, like, finding the sort of common ground where my desires, my needs, my feelings, my beliefs, and my actions can all kind of coalesce, can be incongruence. So I think there’s something within alignment that’s like you have to know who you are, what you want, and what you stand for. That’s a piece a big piece of it is that sort of self discovery. And then you have to understand what is it you’re really working toward and how are you going to get there. And all of these things have to sort of align up to use the alignment language. And I think that alignment is something that in theory is very simple, but in practice can be really challenging. And both because it requires that self discovery process, but also because we can find these, like, blocks or obstacles in the external world that keep us out of alignment. And there are actually a lot of systems and structures in place that I think are designed to do so. You know, the way capitalism traps us in a nine to five workday or, you know, on a factory floor with shift hours. You know, there are so many ways that, like, that is not in alignment with the human body and its rhythms, but we have to do that. And so we, like, can get caught up or find ourselves out of alignment for many reasons, some which are our own reasons and some which are obstacles from the world. And taking aligned action, I think, is when you’re able to do things coming from that place of, like, deep understanding of why you’re doing this and what you hope to get from it. And so that’s sort of the why, the how, and the to what end are all aligned, and and I think that’s where alignment happens. Mhmm. And, also, I think I have to say alignment is a feeling. Yeah. Like, I I always talk about feeling aligned. Like, I don’t think it’s necessarily like, that’s how I measure it. Like, does it feel like, what does alignment feel like if I’m not saying it feels like alignment? I think it feels like, I mean, peace to some degree. It feels like I’m doing what’s right for me and I can trust myself in that. And I feel this sort of sense of ease and calm and purpose that all come through, and that’s what I call feeling aligned.

Giada Centofanti [00:04:48]:
Mhmm. Okay. This reminds me, a conversation I had, a few days ago with Theresa Behan, for the Sensitive Professional podcast. And we talked about how alignment feels in our bodies. And we both mentioned this sensation of flow, like flowing without, you know, blocks, without feeling that you are walking in the mud, but you are flowing in alignment. So, yes, that’s definitely a feeling. And I tend lately, I’ve been, you know, uniting the this, you know, feeling aligned with feeling good because ultimately it’s what we want for ourselves and our, our businesses and how we want to feel when we run our businesses. So, a lot of elements here. So Yeah. A big thing, a huge thing is self discovery. So you talked about desires, needs, wants, beliefs, decisions. So having a group good grasp of all these things, and also allowing yourself to make decisions that may not feel aligned to what external systems would want from you and from us all, actually. And you talk about also the why, the, you know, to what end I am doing this. So to taking action and moving toward something intentionally and per purposefully. I know I didn’t have to say that word. So, yes, the first step, of course, is self discovery. And and then it’s probably coming to terms with the fact that what you are going to discover is not meant to be working in the systems that we are living in. So we previously talked in our previous chats about unlearning. You know? So, something that I feel it’s key to alignment because it’s about, peeling all those layer of external conditioning to discover our true selves. So what does unlearning mean to you? So a definition again, and how did it impact your journey toward alignment?

Amelia Hruby [00:07:27]:
You know, I think of all of this as a sort of deconditioning or deprogramming process that we have to go through. I think that part of the work of growing up and being raised in a community is that you are taught how things are, quote, unquote, supposed to work and how you are, quote, unquote, supposed to be. And so we spend our formative years being kind of, like, trained and conditioned into the systems around us. Right? For most of us, this looks like going to school, being disciplined, being sort of funneled into certain educational opportunities or jobs or degrees or careers. Like, there are a lot of people and places telling us what we should do and how we should be. And for me, the first part of unlearning really was beginning to see those systems because part of the work of the system is to kind of it’s not that it makes itself invisible, but it makes the work invisible. So you don’t question, like, of course I have to get a job. Like, of course I’m gonna do that. Of course I’m gonna go to school every day. Of course, like, these are just the quote, unquote facts of life. And once you start to realize that those facts have all been made up by other people and they’re just kind of shared agreements that we sort of live by, consciously or unconsciously, you can start to, I think, have a lot more agency over how you’re maneuvering through your days and through the world. And, again, that doesn’t mean you just get to do whatever you want necessarily. Right? Like, we live in countries that have laws and that dictate how we can do things or things we can and can’t do. They have tax systems that determine, you know, take portions of the money that we make. They do all of this. And so but it’s important, I think, to see those systems and to understand them. And for me personally, this really came through a sort of feminist education that I got when I went to grad school and also started working with different activist and grassroots organizations in Chicago where I was living and going to school. And I had this really beautiful, I feel very lucky to have had this experience where I was, like, learning in classrooms about systems of oppression, about gender based discrimination and oppression, about equity, about liberation. And then I was also meeting people who were creating beautiful art projects around these things. They were protesting. They were have create, like, organizing actions. And I was able to see both the more, like, intellectual piece of, like, okay, what is patriarchy as a system that I had never heard of until I’m, like, stepping into these classrooms? And then also, like, the lived experience of, okay, when I feel like I got passed over for an opportunity and one of my peers, who is a man, was chosen for that even though they seemingly had less experience, less skills, etcetera, than me. I can recognize, oh, this may be an actual, like, lived experience I’m having that’s an effect of patriarchy. So I have this ability then to, like, understand the system and bridge how it actually showed up in my life. And at first, that was very painful because I had also been raised, as I think many people are, being told, you can do anything you want. You could be anything you wanna be. And I kept hitting these walls that were the realities of, like, the systems of oppression that I was operating in. Like, no. Actually, I can’t do that because people won’t give me the opportunity. They won’t notice the work that I’m doing. They won’t acknowledge the experience that I have, etcetera, etcetera. And for anyone who has any marginalized identity. I mean, I’m a, I will say, relatively privileged person. I was, like, in a PhD program. I’m white. I grew up middle or even upper middle class. Like, I had a lot of privilege coming into this. I think it’s why it took me so long, like, into my twenties even to hit those walls and recognize those systems. But recognizing the systems was the first part, seeing them clearly, feeling how they impacted me, and then I was able to start to decondition, start to refuse to accept. Some of the things I was told were just facts of life or facts of society. I was able to step out of the academic system entirely. I left academia after I finished my degree because I wasn’t interested in the institutionalized structure there. And all of it was really a process of, like, finding my agency again, because I think without agency, we can’t have alignment. That’s part of the self discovery process. It’s like not just discovering things about ourselves, but discovering our selfhood often for the first time and what that truly means and what it means to feel like sovereign in yourself, to have agency, to feel like you can make choices that are not predetermined, and to understand, like, how that meets the world. So that was a long answer. I’m curious what resonated for you or came up for you and all of that.

Giada Centofanti [00:12:25]:
So first of all, the thing that I can see from and I can hear from what you’re saying is that, again, it’s about awareness to be able to see things. So if we were talking about alignment earlier, you mentioned self discovery, so inner awareness. And now we are talking about unlearning, but to unlearn something, you need to know and see and be aware of what you want to unlearn. So there’s that element of awareness, and then there’s the lived experience. And then again, there’s the feeling the feeling of misalignment in this case. And then just the third element that you added, like, agency. So finding, your agency and selfhood, again, to be able to feel aligned and to take aligned action, provided that we both know that alignment is not one and done. It’s not something that you achieve. It’s something that you work towards every day. Right?

Amelia Hruby [00:13:35]:
Mhmm. Yeah. You never, like, get fully aligned and you’re finished with aligning. It’s a lifelong path that we’re all on.

Giada Centofanti [00:13:43]:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And you mentioned refusing, refusing the this, you know, academic word and started the conditioning and started the programming. So I’m wondering how this transferred in your business and business building processes. So what I can see and feel right now is a business that really looks like you and sounds like you and feels like you. So I’ve been wondering if that’s something that you you know, how did it start? Is that something that you decided to do? I want to build something that finally feels aligned with me. Or you just started as I, for example, did, and I made a mess, and it felt misaligned, and I started to make changes. Right? Yeah.

Amelia Hruby [00:14:44]:
Oh, I love this these different approaches to finding alignment in our work that you’re mentioning. Like, you can start with intention. You can find yourself in the middle of the mess and reorganize with intention. Like, how do we approach this? You know, I think for me, I love that you kind of pulled out what I said about refusal earlier because I definitely think that, like, refusal is political praxis in many instances. It’s a different form of a boycott or a strike or civil disobedience even. And, you know, I’m not currently those to me are like act community actions or group actions. I think my practice of refusal tends to be more personal, just there are things that I’m not willing to do. And I spend a lot of time questioning the things people tell me I have to do in my business particularly, and then really trying to figure out if I have to do them. Is this required, or can I refuse to do this and still find a path forward? And what I love about business is the, like, creative, generative thinking and decision making and, you know, it’s really a process of invention. We’re all making it up in our businesses. And that works really well for me. So in the sense that I like doing it. Like, it it not in the sense that, like, everything I make up works, but in the sense of, like, I like inventing. I like creating. I like finding a path through the woods where it seems like there’s no path there. Like, that is something I enjoy even when it’s challenging and something that I think shows up in my business in a lot of interesting ways. So for me, I would say, like, I’ve had both the approaches you mentioned in my business, like the messiness and the intentionalness. The way I ended up editing podcasts was very messy. It was not intentional at all. I was volunteering for a community radio station because I loved music, and I wanted to meet other people who loved music, and I liked the idea of having a couple hours of DJ time each week. And the people at that station taught me how to make podcasts, And this was almost a decade ago now. I was just listening yesterday to my very first ever podcast interview and episode I put together, and it is so embarrassing. It was so messy. I was trying to sound so cool. My voice is so different than it is now. Like every single thing about it was unrecognizable to me, except I remember doing it. And, you know, I did interviews and episodes for the station for years, and then eventually, like, I took some freelance editing clients because people started asking me if I would edit audio for them. And I was doing that while I was still in grad school, and I kept doing that over time. And then it really hit a point kind of in 2020 or 2021 where I was just really struggling with working for other people. I think what ended up happening is, like, I realized that having other people kind of tell me what to do and how to do it and then decide if I had done it well enough was which is how jobs work. Like, let’s be honest. That’s what the job is. It just really wasn’t working for me. It felt so misaligned. I was unhappy. Even with basic requests, It was just a personal issue I was having around it. And I was like, I think I wanna be my own boss. I wanna be in charge of my own business. And so from there, I started softer sounds very intentionally. So there was a whole lot of mess that led to that point, but when I launched the studio, it was a very intentional process. And I brought with me that, like, practice of refusal. I refused to be on social media to launch the company. I refused to set my rates super high, even though people told me that’s what I should do to make the most money. I refused to work with big corporate clients. I had a couple opportunities and pitched some work in the beginning, and I was like, this is so not for me. I cannot do this. And through a combination of, like, following what felt good and refusing to do the things that felt bad, like, in the simplest way, that is how I’ve ended up with this very this business that’s very aligned with me and my values and my desires. And luckily, the, like, values and desires of some wonderful people around me

Giada Centofanti [00:19:10]:
as well. Okay. So, I love how you bring together the practice of refusal and the following what feels good to you as a way, as a a guiding light for you to make decisions. And I also love that you, you know, touched upon this thing of, you know, the practice of refusal as political praxis because we often forget how much our businesses can create change and can be and actually are political because every action and every decision we make is political. And, I mean, our businesses can be drivers for good even though we are not in the business of, I don’t know, organizing or doing some kind of activism or, you know, climate staff. Even though what we do as a or what we offer as a service or product is unrelated to a cause, we can make a change.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:22]:
Mhmm. Yeah. I would completely agree. I feel like often, you know, politics is considered its own sphere and activism is considered to be only things that, like, work directly on specific political issues. And I thought that way for a long time. You know, I and it really what it led to is I felt like I was never doing enough and that my work was all wrong and I was wrong because I wasn’t contributing in these specific ways, you know, by donating to nonprofits or by giving up my life to, you know, climate consciousness or to an organization that was protesting all the time. I think we have a lot of narratives around what that’s supposed to look like. And what I’ve learned in doing business the way that I do is that I’m having so much more of an impact than I ever did when I was doing those things I thought I was supposed to be doing or the things that I thought were supposed to be political. And it’s very humbling, honestly, to hear from the people who are like, I’ve radically changed my business because of the way you talk about things. I’ve, like, freed myself from social media because I’ve listened to your podcast episodes. And I take that really seriously in its own way. Like, I appreciate it so much, and I I think it is both, like, an honor and a responsibility to to be kind of sharing and guiding and leading in those ways. And I have to stand in my belief that our businesses can change the world, and they can, I want to believe, I do believe, like, unravel capitalism while we work within it? That that’s really, like, the deepest work I think I’m trying to do in my business, at least.

Giada Centofanti [00:22:11]:
Mhmm. Yeah. And I guess that, you know, what you just said is, like, a confirmation of how much when we are conveying some kind of message, we can be role models even if we want to be or not. And so we I mean, it’s a responsibility as you said, but it’s also a way to allow people to feel heard and represented in different ways than than usual. Mhmm. And it comes to mind that episode that you made about, setting and defining your measure of success, for example

Amelia Hruby [00:22:56]:
Mhmm. Mhmm.

Giada Centofanti [00:22:57]:
Which resonated with me a lot, and I guess it was it had a huge impact on your listeners too.

Amelia Hruby [00:23:05]:
Mhmm. Yeah. I think that redefining success success itself is such a laden like, a values laden, conditioning laden concept because I think that so much of our lives, we are trained to work toward these external measures of success. Or I was never taught that success could be a feeling, that success could be something I find within myself. I was always told that success was something I had to achieve and that had to really be kind of like approved by other people. Like other people had to see it and call me a success. It’s not something I could just call myself. The benchmarks for success were decided by people other than me, and whether I achieved them was determined by people other than me. And I think that one of the real, like, initiation moments as a business owner is that there’s nobody standing there giving you benchmarks for success. Like, there’s nobody standing next to you while you’re working being, like, here’s the thing that will make you a success. Like and we can look to there are plenty of people who want to tell us that. Right? We can look to online business coaches. We can look to, some of our peers. Like there are lots of ways that we can import those things, even if there’s nobody right there making it clear for us. But for me as a business owner, the real invitation was to be like, well, what does success mean to me? Like if no one if I’m making all the rules now, what does success look like? And it really helped me step back and think differently about what success was when there were no, like, predetermined milestones. And I’m glad to hear it, like, supported you in rethinking that and recentering in yourself as well, and I I do hope that many other listeners have that experience.

Giada Centofanti [00:25:02]:
Mhmm. Okay. Now, I want to, you know, share an observation because I once again, the element of feeling came out. So again, success is a feeling for you.

Amelia Hruby [00:25:16]:
Mhmm.

Giada Centofanti [00:25:16]:
As alignment is a feeling as the misalignment experience was felt and experienced like in your body as a physical sensation. So that’s interesting how this theme is coming again. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think the reason I emphasize that is because I, quote, unquote, succeeded at a lot of things that when I achieved

Amelia Hruby [00:25:45]:
them felt like nothing, or I just felt exa I felt bad. And that’s what taught me that, like, I was putting success outside of myself. So for instance, like to make this concrete, when I got my PhD, I defended my dissertation from my kitchen table during the peak of the pandemic. And after I finished, I just felt exhausted and miserable. I did not feel elated. I did not feel proud of myself. I did not feel anything other than a little bit relieved and really, really tired. And I thought that achieving that moment was gonna bring me this, like, sense of satisfaction or this, like, I don’t know, something I wanted, but all I was left with was, like, a bad feeling and then eventually a piece of paper that said I got my PhD. And it really made me question what I thought success was. And, honestly, success is a feeling, but because of that, like, I’m not really working towards success anymore. It’s really radically changed how I operate in my business. Like, I don’t actually have specific goals that I set in the ways that I used to. I’m much less metric oriented than I used to be because I’m really just looking to how I feel day to day to tell me if the business is a success. And of course, there’s like a certain amount of money it needs to make. There are some like logistical concerns there. I’m not saying I just ignore that stuff. But, yeah, I really have made success like entirely a feeling and that means it’s been really liberatory and also it means I really have to stay in touch with myself and I really have to be clear about, okay, well, work feels really bad today, but is that a business thing? Is that a body thing? Is that a me thing? Is that a personal life thing? Like, it’s actually really brought me into a deeper practice, I think, of connecting with and sorting out and articulating my feelings better. And what I would say now is, like, none of those feelings is called success. Like, success is the proxy for a bunch of other ways I want to feel similar to alignment maybe.

Giada Centofanti [00:27:54]:
Okay. That’s interesting. Okay.

Amelia Hruby [00:27:57]:
The philosopher in me is really coming out.

Giada Centofanti [00:28:02]:
Okay. We are on the theme of success. And one thing that we don’t need to succeed as business owners is to be on social media, which is one of your core messages. And of course, something you, you, value you live by because you mentioned already that it’s one of your refusals. You refuse to be on social media for this I iteration of your business. So how leaving social media is for you an expression of alignment?

Amelia Hruby [00:28:38]:
Yeah. I think that when I decided to leave social media, it was misaligned in two ways. One was on the feelings level. Like, I felt bad when I was on social media. And I recognized that I had this sort of pattern of behavior that I had learned in therapy was codependency and anxious attachment. And, like, I the the emotional pattern I was going through with social media, I realized was the same pattern that I’d been through in relationships that my therapist and I had worked through and worked to heal and move beyond. So there was this like level of emotional misalignment that I could feel. Like, it felt bad in my body, in my spirit, in my psyche. Like, it just felt bad. The other level was more intellectual. There was a clear values misalignment. So the year before I decided to leave social media, Shoshana Zuboff’s book, Surveillance Capitalism, had come out. I think it has I can’t remember if that’s exactly the name, but that was the con major concept in the book. I had learned a lot more about how social media apps were tracking user behavior and how good advertisers were getting at creating like paid content that would convince people to buy things. And I was feeling that in my own behavior. I was spending more money when I was on Instagram, buying things that were being, you know, promoted to me by ads or by influencers. And so I started to see more clearly, once again, it’s like when I read that book and read more news around this and then Meta changed their terms and conditions toward the end of twenty twenty, I believe, and was, like, reading about what that was gonna entail and sort of had this moment where I realized that all of my values around getting free from this type of coercion were just being were totally misaligned with what was happening on social media. And so I recognized that misalignment as well. And I think it’s important, like, both pieces were really important for me because the sort of intellectual values misalignment mattered, but I don’t know if it would have really made me act if I didn’t also feel the emotional misalignment of my behavior there. It’s like the combination of the two. Like, knowing knowing this is not allow aligned with my values and feeling how awful I felt when I was really active and engaged on Instagram is what led me to leave. It was kind of like the marriage of those two things.

Giada Centofanti [00:31:08]:
Mhmm. And that’s interesting because I’m wondering if once again is the systems that we are in, the conditioning that we are under that makes us say, I am willing to frustrate my values because I believe that being here or doing this will help me succeed.

Amelia Hruby [00:31:30]:
Mhmm. Absolutely. I think that we often make compromises around values

Giada Centofanti [00:31:37]:
Mhmm.

Amelia Hruby [00:31:37]:
In order to get something we want more. Right? Like, we have competing priorities, and we make those decisions. You know, for instance, I put money in a retirement fund in the stock market because I want some sense of safety for the future. Even though I know my values are not aligned with the stock market, and honestly, I’m not even sure it will actually provide that safety for the future, but it’s like this action I keep taking because for now, that imperfect action feels like it’s aligned with one value I have, like future security, even if it’s misaligned with another value I have, which is like putting my money with businesses that I think do good in the world and not bad in the world. Right? So, like, we’re always negotiating these things. There is no people are always saying, like, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, and I think they say that often as, like, a cop out to do whatever they want. And I don’t mean it that way, but it’s, like, to me, the act of being aware and, like, inactive negotiation with the values and always kind of keeping your finger on the pulse of, like, okay, making this exchange here, this choice here, it’s about these values here and those here. Like, that’s just the work of alignment. It’s like a live alignment that you’re doing right there, and you’re never gonna get it perfect. Like, there’s no perfectly aligned life. That’s a myth.

Giada Centofanti [00:33:07]:
Yeah. I was just thinking it’s not about, you know, perfection. So being perfectly aligned or, being perfectly at least aligned with our values as it I mean, perfection doesn’t exist in the natural world, so it cannot exist for ourselves too. Right?

Amelia Hruby [00:33:26]:
Yeah. Exactly. Like, I think of, like, there is no perfection. Like, there is no transcendence, like total transcendence. And to me, the whole point of being human is the messiness. It’s about the ways that we have to and get to do this work. Like, alignment wouldn’t be satisfying if there wasn’t a lot of misalignment. Right? Like like, that’s the whole stage. That’s that’s the ground that we’re working with. That’s that’s the process. That’s what life is. And of course, I’m always trying to find moments of alignment. I’m always working and reshaping my life to feel that sense of alignment. But again, the only way I really know that I feel aligned are the moments when I don’t feel aligned. The same way that, like, we regulate our nervous systems so that when we are dysregulated, we can move through those moments with more ease and grace. It’s not to avoid dysregulation altogether. Like, that’s no fun. I don’t know. You know? Like, there are moments of dysregulation that are good for us. Right? Like a peak experience where you’re, like, in love with everything. Like, that’s also dysregulation, but in a positive sense. And so I think sometimes when people talk about alignment, it’s like they’re thinking of this, like, smooth, placid, calm everything. But it to me, it’s not that. It’s like the ability to really ride the waves and handle the modulation with flow, as you said, and fun for me.

Giada Centofanti [00:34:50]:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I guess yeah. I mean, what came to mind is how I don’t like the concept of work life balance for the same exact reason and some additional elements too. But the idea of balance, it’s like perfection. It doesn’t exist. It exists. It can exist for a tiny moment. And then there’s that. But you need to be unbalanced in some ways to experience the wholeness of life. So I wanted to touch upon, living social media. So, of course, you have a whole podcast library about that. And I wanted to explore a a a thing if we can do that, in this container, which is, okay, you chose to refuse. You chose to, stop doing what was feeling bad in your body and for your mental well-being. You chose to don’t use social media and leave social media, don’t use them for your business. Did you know that he would have worked, or was that a leap of faith?

Amelia Hruby [00:36:10]:
It was definitely a leap of faith. And, also, I think that I had evidence it wasn’t really working for me. So it didn’t feel like I was leaving behind, like, some robust marketing or community platform where all my needs were being met and I was, like, leaving it anyway. It felt like part of the clarity I got. Maybe the third piece, I mentioned those two pieces earlier, like the emotional misalignment and the values misalignment. The third piece is that I just didn’t think it was effective for the things I was trying to do there. It wasn’t working. So before I left social media, I was I went through a period where I was promoting and selling a book that I had written and published with a publisher called Andrews McMeall. And I put a lot, a lot, a lot of time, money, and energy into my Instagram presence, into trying to grow an Instagram platform and sell my book there. And it just was wasn’t that effective. Like, the book sold okay, but didn’t do great. My numbers grew okay, but weren’t overwhelming. And I was really tired of fighting that uphill battle. So when I decided to leave, you know, I didn’t know if I could make it work without social media, but I also it wasn’t really working on social media, so that made it possible to try a different way. It didn’t feel like I was sacrificing a whole lot to try something else, but also, yeah, I mean, a lot of people told me that I could not have a business if I got off all of these platforms, And I did it anyway, and, you know, four years later, that has worked out. Mhmm.

Giada Centofanti [00:37:53]:
And we are all very happy about that because you are modeling for us. And we are all leaving social media more or less or using them less and less. And, so I love how, again, it was like, yes, this thing doesn’t feel good. This thing is not working. It doesn’t feel values aligned. Why the hell am I keeping doing it? Right.

Amelia Hruby [00:38:21]:
Yeah, exactly. It’s like, what is it offering to me at all? The pros and cons, just like those lists, started to be all cons.

Giada Centofanti [00:38:30]:
Yeah. And I also want to mention that probably, sometimes we tend to keep doing stuff Because we don’t get ourselves space to ask ourselves, how does this feel? How does is this working or not? So Mhmm. As human beings and as been business owners, I guess, it’s really important to have an open conversation with ourselves. So we can have that kind of self discovery that you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, which is the first step to move to the I will make an aligned decision phase. Mhmm.

Amelia Hruby [00:39:20]:
Yeah. Absolutely. We have to be willing to ask questions about the things that we’re doing or the ways that we are or the stories we’re telling about ourselves or the things we’re doing. And I think that that is really brave, vulnerable work. I think the reason so many people stay in the preordained, predetermined paths offered by society is that they were never taught to ask these questions or they don’t desire to because it feels way too hard to look at what the answers to them might be. And I mean, let me tell you, I have pulled the wool over my own eyes so many times in my life. So I’m not here to say, like, not here to pass a judgment on that. Of course, there are so many things I didn’t that weren’t working in my life at times that I didn’t wanna look at. I remember dating someone, in grad school, and I knew we were breaking up. Like, it was obvious. And I remember saying to them, can we just wait to break up until after I finish finals? And we did, which was really silly. But, like, I was like, I just I need two more weeks to, like, just pretend that this is fine, and we can just, like, keep doing what we’re doing in the evenings and whatever. And then we could, like, deal with breaking up once I finish these other things. Like, I think a lot of us are doing that in our lives in some way or to some degree. And I do think that it has a utility, but it also keeps us from that sense of, like, deeper, real alignment. And so it’s helpful to be aware if you are kind of not looking at something or not interrogating something to know that and to know why you’re doing that. And then also maybe to start the process of doing that on your own or with a supportive therapist or a coach or someone else like that.

Giada Centofanti [00:41:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. And absolutely, I want to say that we are not taught to ask ourselves questions. It’s not useful for the system. Because when we start to ask questions, then we start to refuse. So it’s not useful for them. So and and then, I mean, we want to feel safe and that’s important too. Because change doesn’t feel safe and there are moments of our life that we just want to feel safe like you, you know. I need two weeks. I need to get over this stuff. And for this Yeah. Weeks, so let’s make me feel safe. Please.

Amelia Hruby [00:41:53]:
Yeah. Exactly. Like, there is psych there are very real emotional, psychological, and neurological reasons that we don’t wanna change things because we do wanna hold on to that felt sense of safety. And I also think a thing that can happen here that, like, keeps people from that self discovery process asking those questions is, like, sometimes we’re just really stuck in, like, the muck of, like, everything feels bad, and I don’t know what it is. Right? Like, in my example, I knew it was that relationship. I knew that was a problem. Right? But what if, like, I didn’t know? What if I was like, I just feel awful. Is it my relationship? Is it school? Is it my apartment? Is it my cat? Like, you know, I think often we we really don’t know where to look. We don’t know where to begin asking those questions. And, again, I think that’s where, like, working with a coach or therapist whose, like, whole job is to ask you questions is how you start to figure out, like, what is it that’s so misaligned? Why do I feel so bad, just not good? And that is, like, we have to do that work before we figure out what to change or what to shift to feel better.

Giada Centofanti [00:43:07]:
Yes. And as, I guess, as social animals, we don’t need to do that alone. I mean, yes. In situation like that one, you need someone to just to say out loud what you have in your mind. Mhmm. And also have someone who reflects that back to you. Mhmm. And sometimes you need more than a friend because friends can be I mean, it’s not their job to help you figure out what’s what is wrong. They may be helpful because they’re great at it, because they’re talented at it, but you may need some professional. Okay. I wanna circle back to something that you mentioned earlier. You mentioned that, specifically, when Instagram wasn’t working for you was for a promotion for a book. So you were promoting a book, and you were trying to use Instagram and you’re not writing a new book. And we are supposing that you are not you you will not use Instagram or any kind of social media to promote it. But, I want to talk a bit about it, if we can, if you can give us some, you know Yeah, of course. Okay. So, is the working title or the title is gonna be your attention is sacred? And it is Yeah. Your critique to the whole concept of attention economy. And I am wondering if you see it somehow connected to the concept of alignment. You know, the the way that you that you think about how attention is sacred, so we how we can care for it and protect it.

Amelia Hruby [00:44:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking. I’m still, like, very early in my book writing process, or maybe that’s not true. I’m in the middle of my book writing process. I’ve written a first draft. I’ve shared it with a few people for feedback. It still needs a lot of work. I’m still figuring out all of the ideas. But, yes, the book, I believe will be called Your Attention is Sacred. I think the subtitle or second half of the title is going to be Accept on Social Media. And, you know, at the essence of the book, there are kind of three chapters that I’ve been working through. The first one is a critique of the attention economy. The second chapter is about algorithms and how to break up with, quote unquote, the algorithm. And then the third chapter is more about, I’m thinking of it as, like, from attention economy to attention ecology. And I think that your question, like, is alignment one of the core concepts of the book? I’d be so fascinated to go to my manuscript and, like, search and see if I use the word alignment much. I’d say that the concepts I’m really working with are attention and agency. And I think that within that, like, a lot of what I’m arguing for is, like, how do we align our agency and our attention? So how can it be that we’re, like, choosing the things that we give our attention to? And I think that is an act, that is an aligned action, and trying to kind of tease that out. And one of the things I rely on in the book that I learned from my partner who is also a philosophy PhD student, is a sort of from the philosophy of action in an analytic tradition. The sort of sense of an action can be intentional, but have unintentional effects. So, like, I can do something, for instance, scroll on social media because I want to see cat videos. And like I see the cat videos and that was successful. But while I’m doing that, I’m also making money for Instagram or for Meta. Right? Like it’s having this sort of unintentional action simultaneously. And I think that is also a place that alignment shows up, like misalignment particularly shows up. And what does that mean? And that was sort of more of the values misalignment I was talking to about my experience of leaving Instagram is like a lot of the unintentional things that are happening while I’m scrolling are also a part of the problem and and they can start to add up. Like, I I can start to notice them more and if that can start to contribute to my sense of misalignment. So, yeah, I’ll have to look back and and forward when the manuscript’s done and see how much alignment comes through. But I do think it is kind of triangulated in some of the other concepts I’m really working with in the book so far.

Giada Centofanti [00:47:42]:
Okay. I’m I’m so curious and you know that I’m curious above all about the attention ecology concepts. So I’m really looking forward to it.

Amelia Hruby [00:47:54]:
Right now, it’s just a chapter about gardening, essentially. That’s really what I’ve written as a sort of sense of like, how do we study our own attention habits and patterns, what we give attention to, and then how do we more clearly again, like, do that intentionally. And so I I use the metaphor gardening to kind of talk about different lessons I’ve learned from gardening in ways I think we can quite literally garden our attention or build a garden of our attention. That’s what it is so far. We’ll see with a heavy dose of Robin Wall Kimmerer and braiding sweetgrass in there as well. So we’ll we’ll see how the final version ends up. But I too am curious about what attention ecology really can be. Mhmm.

Giada Centofanti [00:48:39]:
I mean, and still I can learn a lot about gardening because I’m a terrible gardener.

Amelia Hruby [00:48:46]:
I hear you. I hear you.

Giada Centofanti [00:48:48]:
Okay. So we are coming to a close, but before you go, I want to ask you first, what is your next aligned action or next aligned action you’re planning to take?

Amelia Hruby [00:49:03]:
I mean, my, like, literal next aligned action I’m planning to take is to get some water after I finish this this interview because I can tell my mouth is dry, and I’m trying to better align, like, what I do with what my body needs. Mhmm. That’s like a literal one. But I think that on a much bigger scale, like, for me, I feel like I tend to be working on alignment on, like, a bigger picture level. So, this year, what I’m really trying to figure out is, like, what exactly does my business look like such that it feels the most aligned? Like, do I like having a team? Do I prefer to work by myself now that I’ve tried out having a team for a while? Just some different questions I have around, like, what’s the relationship between softer sounds, my podcast studio, and off the grid, my podcast, and all the offerings around it. I feel like there’s been some like, the energy is a little off. I can tell I don’t feel quite as comfortable moving between all the things I’m juggling right now. So I’m on a journey of alignment with that, and there will be probably many, many actions that go into figuring that out. But for me, personally, I found that it helps with alignment, it helps me to stay at a bigger picture level. Because if I get super granular about, like, is every single action I’m taking aligned, then I can slip into that perfectionism. I can slip into that sort of, like, hypervigilance around every single thing I’m doing. And then all of a sudden, I can’t even, like, reply to an email or, you know, send a proposal without feeling like I I don’t know if it’s aligned. So, yeah. So aligning with my body’s needs, that’s something I’m doing on a moment by moment, day by day level. But I’d say in my business, it’s like a much bigger picture process.

Giada Centofanti [00:50:54]:
Love that. And I love to I love the opportunity to sit with that and think about that for myself too, but I will do that when we finish recording. So before, one thing that is really important, what’s the best way for people to connect with you?

Amelia Hruby [00:51:15]:
Yeah. So you can find me on the Internet, even though you will not find me on social media. If you’re interested in all of my work around leaving social media, you will find that at offthegrid.fun, and you can find my podcast Off the Grid anywhere that you listen to podcasts. And if you’re interested in podcasting together, you can find the studio at softersounds.studio. Or if you’re just more curious about all of the random things I’m up to, I have a personal website at ameliafruby.com.

Giada Centofanti [00:51:43]:
Yeah. And plea please follow all of the random things she does. Above all, pleasure reading podcast.

Amelia Hruby [00:51:51]:
Thank you. That’s my my favorite passion project right now.

Giada Centofanti [00:51:55]:
Okay. So before we part ways, I want to invite you, listeners, to reflect on two questions. What are your main takeaways and insights from this conversation? And how can you apply them to take a light action this week? Okay. That’s it for today. You can find the show notes, the links, and the transcript at caretoimpact.com/podcast. And while you are there, don’t forget to sign up for the next free inner impact session. So thanks for listening, bye for now, and keep sparking your inner impact.