How to Build Direction during Stress
Why You Are Missing Your Personal True North
Building a Personal True North
Personal True North
/ˈpərs(ə)n(ə)l tro͞o nôrTH/
noun
A specific statement that integrates core values, aspirational identity, and strategic constraints to guide decision-making amid overload. Rooted in Karl Scotland’s TASTE model, it helps define who an individual aspires to become rather than what they aim to accomplish, serving as a non-negotiable reference point for navigating competing demands.
Key Attributes:
Identity: Unlike traditional goal-setting, it prioritizes being over doing—e.g., “a professional who creates clarity under pressure” over “complete Project X by Q3”.
Challenging Yet Concrete: Articulates an ambitious ideal (e.g., “zero compromises on ethical standards”) while remaining tangible enough to inform daily choices.
Value Hierarchy: Explicitly ranks principles (e.g., “integrity > speed”) to resolve conflicts between urgent tasks and meaningful work.
Boundary Framework: Specifies behavioral limits (e.g., “no weekend work for poor planning”) to prevent self-betrayal under stress.
Collaborative Alignment: Informs how one engages with teams, peers, family, and life balancing autonomy with shared purpose.
Function:
We want to use our True North as a trigger for action, but also as a decision filter, which helps us specifically:
Direct: Reject opportunities misaligned with our aspirational identity
Distinguish: between “acceptable” and “helpful” outcomes
De-escalate: Transform overload from a crisis into a prioritization signal
Why Do I Need True North?
When we are overloaded, stressed, and bouncing between competing demands (you got a minute?), most of us go straight into coping mode. Productivity. Getting tickets done. Crossing things off. Moving on quickly, instead of regrouping and going forward correctly, with direction.
We abandon strategic thinking. We default to our reactive mode. Responding to the loudest voice, the most recent crisis, or whatever feels most urgent.
This is precisely when you need your True North most and it is when we are most likely to abandon it. We forget direction and for many of us, we have been buried in chaos for so long we forget we even need one.
Why We Avoid Our Own True North
When Karl Scotland and I teach strategy visualization, True North consistently emerges as the element people give the least thought to. Not because it's easy, not because they don’t see the value, but because it requires us to think beyond the tactical fire-fighting that consumes our days. Because it seems to be beyond “the problem we are trying to solve.”
We live in what I call "prisons of the tactical mind" trapped by common and natural tendencies (availability heuristics, recency bias, and action bias) that keep us focused on what we can immediately control rather than who we want to become.
Our overload is what keeps us where we are.
The irony is as brutal as it is predictable: when we're most overloaded, we most need strategic clarity, yet overload makes strategic thinking feel impossible. Most people tell themselves they'll figure out their direction "when things calm down." But things don't calm down, they simply cannot. Without a system of calm, they escalate. We need to have a definition of success to succeed, even if that definition changes with learning. We need a destination to start a journey, even if our end point finds a new, better mark along the way. We need a Personal True North.
Your True North isn't a luxury for when life gets easier; it's essential navigation equipment for when life gets harder.
Understanding Your Overload Ecosystem
Before you can chart your True North, you need to appreciate the forces creating your overload. The word appreciate is important. There is too much going on to get a full accounting of the work, types of interruption, and general FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) at any given time. But understanding a bit about how overload works, is critical for you to appreciate that you likely have more stressors in your life than you give yourself credit for.
In our WIP Whisperer working group, we discuss how overload comes from at least four distinct vectors that most people never recognize.
Self-Inflicted: Work you voluntarily take on because you can't say no, want to be helpful, or fear missing opportunities. This includes the projects you start but never finish, the "quick favors" that become ongoing commitments, martyr complexes, and the perfectionist standards that turn simple tasks into endless refinement cycles.
Leadership-Driven: Demands from above that multiply faster than you can complete them. New initiatives, shifting priorities, hidden agendas, and the dreaded "this shouldn't take long" requests that compound into impossible workloads.
Communication-Deficient: Work caused by poor information flow, misunderstandings, and lack of shared visibility.
Structural and Bureaucratic: Organizational systems that create work through poor processes, unclear roles, inadequate tools, or communication breakdowns. This is work created by how your workplace is designed, not by what it's trying to accomplish.
Each of these types of overload, which don’t even include the external demands of family, finances, and current events, require different strategies, different types of responses. Your True North must acknowledge all four if it's going to help you navigate real workplace challenges.
Five Elements of a Practical Personal True North, a Sorta Worksheet
1. Identity Clarity: Who You Want to Be (Not What You Want to Do)
Your True North starts with identity, not activity. Instead of asking "What do I want to accomplish?" ask "Who do I want to be in the midst of this chaos?" This isn't about job titles or career aspirations, it's about the professional identity that remains constant regardless of external circumstances.
Practical Exercise: Complete this statement: "Even when everything is overwhelming, I am someone who..." Your answer should describe character traits, values in action, and ways of being that you can maintain regardless of workload. Examples: "...creates clarity for others," "...maintains quality standards," "...builds trust through honest communication."
2. Value Hierarchy: What Matters Most When Everything Matters
When you're overloaded, everything feels (everything is) urgent and important. Your True North must include a clear hierarchy of values that helps you make decisions when you can't do everything. This isn't about what you value in theory, it's about what to prioritize when forced to choose. Overload cannot be solved by doing everything.
Practical Exercise: List your core values (already not easy), categorize them in three categories. Then put them in a triangle (like the image above). Now imagine take your competing demands and place them in the triangle. You will see that you have trouble placing them, trade offs aren’t always stack ranking or putting things in order. You are seeing the relationships and the tradeoffs of your values and how murky those relationships are. Your True North should make help guide these trade-offs and make future decisions not “correct” but balanced.
3. Boundary Definition: Your Non-Negotiables
Boundaries aren’t exclusion, they are filters for how you can effectively include. These aren't just aspirational. Your boundaries are operational limits that protect your core identity and values. Without clear boundaries, overload will erode your True North through death by a thousand compromises. (And yes, life is compromise, so your compromise count will never be zero).
Practical Exercise: Identify three specific behaviors or situations you will not accept, regardless of pressure. Examples: "I will not commit to deadlines without understanding scope," "I will not work weekends for poor planning," "I will not participate in blame-based problem-solving." Then try this… finish each of those sentences with “, except when….” and again with “, specifically when.”
4. Quality Standards: What "Good Enough" Means to You
Perfectionism is a major source of self-inflicted overload. Your True North needs (you need) to define your relationship with quality. Quality is how you to finish work with satisfaction (your professional satisfaction) and without endless refinement. This requires distinguishing between work that needs excellence and work that needs completion.
Practical Exercise: Define your three levels of quality for your work: minimum, standard professional, and exceptional. Specify what each level requires and when each is appropriate. Then ask yourself when you are able to meet these three levels and how much work has met none of them. Then check your work with members of your team. (Do not ask if your team’s framework of choice (if any) is satisfied, ask if you are satisfied.)
5. Your Relationships: How You Need to Collaborate
Since much of our overload comes from collaborative dysfunction, (we rarely know when we should collaborate until it’s too late, and even then we result to blame more often than “I should have included you.”) Your True North needs to be informed by how you'll work with others and how you work with others needs to be vastly expanded. This covers communication style, conflict approach, response to complexity, response to crisis, and your role in team dynamics.
Practical Exercise: Write a brief "collaboration manifesto" describing how you want to interact with colleagues, how you'll handle disagreements, and what you need from others to do your best work. This becomes your template for all professional relationships. Write it knowing that people will need you, you will need them, and that most interruptions come from people asking for information or approval. Know that you process information and work together, even if you feel your tasks are individual.
What to Do with Your True North
Always On…Make It Visible, Accessible, In Your Face
Your True North is useless if you can't remember it under pressure. Write it down in a format you can reference quickly—a single page, a phone note, or a desktop document. Review it weekly, not just when you're in crisis.
Use It for Decision Filtering
Every significant request, opportunity, or demand should pass through your True North filter. Ask: "Does this align with who I want to be? Does it honor my value hierarchy? Does it respect my boundaries?" If not, you have your answer. Yes, sometimes you will have to violate your True North. Start to find out how much, how often…how bad. Then opportunities to do better. What can be improved to make sure that you and your team are working at their peak professional level.
Practice Small-Stakes Application
Start using your True North for low-risk decisions to build the habit. Choose how to respond to emails, which meetings to attend, or how to structure your day based on your True Nort. This prepares you to use it (or understand why you can’t) when stakes are higher.
Communicate It Strategically
You don't need to announce your True North, but you can communicate its effects. When you decline a request that violates your boundaries, explain your reasoning in terms others can understand. Don’t beat them over the head with sanctimonious drivel, they are dealing with the same overload you are. You are finding a path to better, not building a religious doctrine. When you prioritize one task over another, communicate the shared values driving your decision.
Review and Refine Regularly
Your True North should be stable but not static. You change. Monthly reviews help see external changes that require adjustments. The goal is consistency and flexibility. Your identity and values evolve and grow. Don’t build your own prison of rigid, outdated tactics.
Beyond Survival: Using True North for Strategic Influence
Once you're consistently using your True North for personal navigation, you can extend your influence to your team and organization. Teams with clear, shared True North statements make faster decisions, experience less conflict, and maintain higher performance under pressure. Your personal practice becomes a model for collective strategic thinking.
Your True North won't eliminate overload, but it will transform your relationship with overload from victim to navigator, from reactive to responsive, from scattered to strategic. In a world that profits from your distraction, clarity and self-control become radical acts.
Classes and Community: Modus Institute