Dr. Derek Suite - The Suite Spot
Synthesizing Science and Soul for High Performance
Hosted by Dr. Derek H. Suite, The Suite Spot blends neuroscience, psychology, and ancient wisdom to unlock elite mental skills, resilience, and momentum. Designed for athletes, executives, and high achievers, each episode delivers practical strategies, evidence-based insights, and affirmations to elevate your mind, body, and spirit.
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Dr. Derek Suite - The Suite Spot
What's in Your Sauce 2/7: Speed Without Direction is a SetUp. Take the Wheel. #TAKEACTIONTUESDAY
Have you ever felt like you're constantly busy but not making meaningful progress? The missing ingredient might be alignment.
Welcome back to the Suite Spot's Secret Sauce series, where we're unlocking the five core ingredients that give your life real flavor: Self-awareness, Alignment, Unapologetic expression, Consistency, and Energy (SAUCE).
Today's episode focuses on alignment—the crucial second ingredient that ensures your actions aren't just movement, but movement with meaning.
This episode offers a practical challenge: identify where you're "grinding but not growing," list your top three core values, and take one small, aligned action today.
Because alignment isn't just about feeling good—it's the difference between burning out and breaking through. When your moves match your mission, your sauce hits every time.
Ready to stop seasoning in midair and start creating a lasting impact? Listen now and discover how alignment can transform your efforts into meaningful progress.
Don't miss tomorrow's episode on resilience, where we'll explore how your worst days might become the foundation for your greatest wins.
STAY AMAZING!
welcome back, beautiful souls, welcome back. You are listening to the sweet spot. It is take action tuesday, and I'm dr sweet, a board certified psychiatrist, high performance coach and flavor specialist. For the soul. I thought I'd add that in today, since we're talking about the secret sauce. Yes, we've been in a series here called the Secret Sauce. We're deep in the kitchen now, midway into our secret sauce series. You know the line juice is temporary but sauce is forever. Juice is the surface.
Speaker 1:The sauce, as we've been seeing, is the soul and we we've been unlocking the five core ingredients that give your life and your impact real flavor Sauce S-A-U-C-E, s self-awareness, as we've talked about, a alignment, u unapologetic expression, c consistency and E energy, particularly your focus and your faith. Energy, particularly your focus and your faith. Yesterday we started with courage, which was the spark, remember. Today we stir in the second ingredient, alignment. Because, my friend, it is not enough to move. You've got to move with the right action in the right direction. And this is Take Action Tuesday, where action is your flavor, but action without alignment the second ingredient here is like seasoning the wrong dish it looks busy action, but it doesn't taste like purpose. When you're aligned, your yes is sacred. Your steps are synced with your spirit and your moves are not random. They're rooted because you are fully aligned. So just like your car sometimes needs to get an alignment so it could drive right, so do you need to check whether or not you're aligned. Behaviors and your actions and the choices and the decisions you're making align with your values and who you really are and what you believe.
Speaker 1:The second ingredient here on Take Action Tuesday is alignment, and here's what we know from the neuroscience when your actions align with your values and your sense of purpose, your brain has this structure called the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum will work with your brain's CEO, the prefrontal cortex, and together these areas will help you stay motivated. When you are aligning your actions with your purpose and your activities. Your ventral striatum and your medial prefrontal cortex these areas are tied into intrinsic motivation, to satisfaction and decision making and believe me when I tell you this, they feel good when you are moving in alignment. But when you're misaligned, the opposite is true. When you're misaligned and you're chasing somebody else's goal, or you're ignoring something you know to be true, you're ignoring your own intuition, or you're grinding in a way, doing something over and over again that you know in your heart drains you and is not right for you. You know what happens.
Speaker 1:The brain is very sharp and smart. It doesn't use the whole ventral striatum thing and prefrontal cortex, it shifts into the default mode network, the DMN. And when the DMN the default mode network in your brain, gets activated because you're not in alignment, you start ruminating, you start doubting, you start feeling anxiety and it's a sense of being stuck. So the brain understands what's going on, which is why we talked last time about acting with your courage even if you feel fear. Now we're saying you've got to align with your values so that you don't let the default mode network part of your brain take over and make you into a basket case of worry and fear and anxiety.
Speaker 1:Alignment doesn't just feel better, my friend. It fires up your brain for better focus, for better follow through and fulfillment. And don't you want that? Don't you want to be more focused? Don't you want to follow through on everything you say you're going to do? And who, which one of us doesn't want to feel fulfilled? Well, the key to this is getting aligned with your values. But I wouldn't be a board certified psychiatrist if I didn't tell you why we fall out of alignment. And these are not all the reasons, but I'm going to give you a couple and if you were sitting with me, I would tell you People-pleasing oh, that's a quick way to fall out of alignment.
Speaker 1:People love it when you please them. They can't get enough of you because all you do is please them. They can't get enough of you because all you do is please them all day long. Saying yes to things that don't fit your mission literally is like the definition of being misaligned. So if you're a people pleaser and God knows, I've definitely been one of those in my life it's super important that you take a step back and start thinking about you and putting you first, because otherwise you're going to be misaligned.
Speaker 1:Here's the second thing overthinking, just getting paralyzed by all the possible outcomes and thinking about all the consequences, and just trading your clarity for delay, just procrastinating, because all you're doing is thinking and thinking, and thinking, and I think Joyce Meyer called it stinking thinking right. After a while it just gets to be too much. That's another way to not be aligned, because you're not using the first ingredient even, which is courage, because overthinking is a way of hiding. The third reason we can be misaligned is comparison. I heard it put this way comparison is the thief that stole joy. When we start comparing, it's the fastest way to lose our alignment with joy Copying someone else's moves instead of trusting our own.
Speaker 1:Well, that automatically misaligns us, right. So it's super important that we find our authentic selves. So it's super important that we find our authentic selves Remember, in SAUCE, s-a-u-c-e-d-u stands for unapologetic expression where we have to be authentic. And we cannot be authentic if we're going to be constantly comparing ourselves to somebody and trying to be that person or do it like that person. So that's a misalignment.
Speaker 1:Another amazing thing that misaligns us is this FOMO You've heard this the fear of missing out, right. So we don't want to miss out on things. So we do too much in too many directions and we're spread thin and, as a result, we're misaligned. It's a very sneaky one, because you actually think you're getting a lot done, but you're probably just doing too much and, as a result, you're divided against yourself and you can't stand in any direction. Youalign. And then the last one is another sneaky one, where an old version of yourself is operating in the present, operating from an outdated goal that no longer reflects who you are using old habits that you know you should break, or you're already broke, but you keep going back to them and this old version of yourself keeps pulling you away from your path. Those are some of the reasons we fall out of alignment, my friend. And when that happens, your sauce, your sauce, your secret sauce, gets thin Because you're moving with noise and not with purpose. You're not aligned, you're sort of not getting to where you should be and you're flipping from one thing to the other and you're closing down things when you should not close them down and you're kind of drifting.
Speaker 1:Jay-z put it this way the genius thing we did was we never gave up. That quote from Jay-Z tells us that aligned action when the action is aligned is sustained action. Aligned action is sustained action. It's not about doing everything. It's about doing the right thing long enough to see it cook. You can't be in the kitchen with 15 different pots going and not focusing on any one pot. That's not the way to get the recipe right.
Speaker 1:And sometimes it takes courage to align your actions, to align your behaviors with your values and to stick by your values. It takes courage to do that. Nina Simone, one of my favorite singers, put it this way You've got to learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served. I'll say it again. I wish I could sing it, but you know that's not happening. You've got to learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served. That's alignment, right there. Knowing when a space, a strategy, a season, a person, a thing no longer feeds your soul, and having the power to pivot, having the courage to cut the connection, that's alignment.
Speaker 1:What does the ancient wisdom tell us? In James 2, verse 17,. I think faith without works is dead. That's alignment too. You know why. You can believe something all you want. You can even believe real big, but if your actions don't match that belief, your works don't match that belief. Your works don't match the belief. You're just seasoning in midair. You're just seasoning in midair. It's not happening. You've got to align your belief with your actions, and your actions and your belief have to line up. So what am I saying to you? Line up. So what am I saying to you? I'm saying that activity without alignment is movement without meaning. Don't confuse it. Don't confuse that you're busy and you're getting things done. If it's not aligned, it'll come back to hurt you and inside you won't feel good, you know, when you're not aligned with your right actions. Check your values. If it doesn't line up, it won't level up. Sometimes things are not working because your values are not being respected and they're not being respected by you.
Speaker 1:To begin with, and here's the other thing, let's keep our kitchen analogy going Purpose is the saucepan, okay, purpose is the pan, alignment, which is our second ingredient, that's the oil. So purpose is the pan, alignment is the oil and action is the heat. All three are needed. You got to have the purpose, your pan, you got to have your alignment, which is the oil, and then you got to take that action, which is the heat. So stop just performing, start aligning. If you're an athlete this is an extremely important insight Don't just perform. Maybe you're a singer, or this is an extremely important insight Don't just perform. Maybe you're a singer or a dancer, I don't know what you are Don't just perform. Align your performance with your values and see how much better you do. If you are in a relationship and things aren't working, check the values. Maybe that's where the issue is, is that your values aren't being respected and maybe you're the one not respecting them. So stop performing. Start aligning, because that's how your flavor is going to flow.
Speaker 1:So what's today's challenge? I have a question when have you been grinding but not growing? Where have you been grinding but not growing? Ask yourself is this goal mine or is it inherited? Is it something I really want or did I just inherit this and I'm just going along with what everybody else thinks I should be doing and ask yourself this does this step reflect who I am or who I think I should be? Ask the questions. Then take one aligned action today Small, clean, honest, a sauce-worthy action that's aligned with your values. And you know.
Speaker 1:The first step is you got to know what your values are. List your top three core values. Yeah, what are your core values? If I were to ask you that right now, what are the three values that you stand for? And then carry it with you and then align them with your actions. Don't just take action, take aligned action. That's the difference between burning out and breaking through, my friend, because when your moves match your mission, the sauce, it hits every time. It hits every single time. And remember, the sauce is permanent because it's rooted in work, not in hype. Let them chase the juice. You perfect your sauce, you get your alignment together.
Speaker 1:Okay, now this is Dr Derek Sweet. You've been listening, oh my goodness, have you been listening to the sweet spot here? On Take Action Tuesday you made your move on Monday with your courage. Now you're aligning with your values. On Take Action Tuesday you made your move on Monday with your courage. Now you're aligning with your values. On Take Action Tuesday Wow, wow.
Speaker 1:Well, with this we're going to move. We're going to move into Wednesday, into Win it All Wednesday, where we're going to turn up the volume as we talk about resilience, that extra heat that turns failure into flavor, we'll explore how the brain builds a bounce back routine for you and why your scars might just be your seasoning and why some of your best wins are born from your worst days. You don't want to miss Winning Law Wednesday, tomorrow, trust me, we're going in Until I see you again. My friends, beautiful souls, stay in the kitchen, keep cooking, bring the heat. This is Dr Sweet. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, and if you know someone who needs to hear this message on the secret sauce, please share Love and blessings.