#60: Alignment First, Applause Later

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Episode Summary

Dedicated to Isaac. 

What happens when we continue doing something meaningful even after the audience disappears?

In this episode, we explore a story about recovery, cooking, and an unexpected dinner that illustrates a deeper principle: intrinsic motivation.

Drawing from psychology, leadership science, and behavioral research, we examine how acting from alignment — rather than approval — builds stronger teams, more resilient families, and healthier teens.

Sometimes the most important work happens when the room is empty.

Some of the inventions that we value most happened because someone stuck with it even when no one was in the room Because it felt right. Wayne Dyer said, "Some people do things right. "No limits" people do the right thing.

And sometimes… that’s exactly when the right people show up.

Key Takeaways

• Intrinsic motivation leads to sustained growth and resilience
 • Alignment produces better leadership than approval-seeking
 • Parents can model internal motivation for their children
 • Teens benefit from learning to follow values rather than crowds
 • Environment and identity play a major role in behavior change

Reflection Questions

1. What do you continue doing even when no one is watching?
2. Where in your life are you waiting for approval before acting?
3. What small action this week would align with the person you want to become?

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Thank you for joining me!

If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend who needs a little inspiration today!

Transcript

Mission And Promise Of The Show

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Just Count Me In, a podcast designed to help you break free from your limitations and step into the life that you actually were meant to live. I'm Sari Stone and I'm a holistic coach with a background in education. For the past six years, I've been guiding people to transform their lives from the inside out. My journey, to be honest with you, was not always clear. For years, I actually felt like I was living someone else's life, checking all the right boxes, but never feeling quite truly fulfilled. That all changed when I experienced a few miracles, met some incredible teachers, and had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. Wayne Dyer once said, When you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change, and that is exactly what this podcast is about. Helping you see your life in a new way so that you can start living with authenticity, purpose, and passion. Each week, I'm going to bring you 30-minute episodes filled with insights, practical strategies, and inspiring interviews to help you uncover what truly lights you up and identify what's been holding you back. Eventually, this is going to ignite your motivation and create real change. Are you ready to step into the life you were meant to live? Then just count me in. Hit subscribe and join me on this journey. If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend who needs a little inspiration today. Let's do this together. Welcome back to Just Count Me In. This week something happened with one of my clients, and I was just so inspired. I told him I you just inspired this episode. And I'm going to share it with you because it ties into what we've been talking about. Sometimes we start something because we think other people are going to show up, like a project or a conversation, or we have a new idea, or a dinner, maybe. And when those people disappear, something in us wonders if we should stop too. What happens when we keep going anyway? So a client of mine shared a story this week, and he's actually reinvented himself this past year, and it was agonizingly beautiful work at the same time, and worked really, really hard to create a new identity and make a whole new start. And his story really captured something important about alignment and motivation and identity and the quiet way that life sometimes meets us when we stay with what feels right, even when it doesn't look like it's going to get recognition. So here's the story. Recently, he's always enjoyed cooking, but recently he started really, really cooking. And one night he decided to make homemade pot stickers completely from scratch, like dough, filling, folding them by hand. He had never done this before, the whole process. It took him hours. Everyone in the house initially was pretty excited, and they went out, they shopped the food, and they they were like, You do it, and we're we're in on it. So they were planning to eat together. Then plans changed, which happens, and the family decided to go out and do something else. He knew that it wouldn't be the right move for him to go. It wouldn't be in alignment right now with who he is, and plus he was really excited to cook. So for a moment he did think about stopping. There were hours of cooking, there was a lot of prep, and now there's not even going to be anybody to eat with, like another night eating by myself. But then something shifted in him, and he thought, I actually really enjoy making these. I'm going to keep going. He finished cooking and he plated his food, he sat down to eat, and almost as if it was the ending to a kid's book, it was perfect timing, which life always is. The doorbell rang and his cousins showed up. They had heard that he was making dinner and they wanted to come and eat with him. So, like, how perfect is that? God makes all your appointments. So the dinner still happened. Not quite the way he expected, but the dinner still happened. And I just froze when we were having this conversation because there's so many lessons here. He didn't finish cooking because somebody was watching. He finished because the act itself really mattered to him. In psychology, we call this intrinsic motivation, doing something because it actually itself is meaningful, not so much because of the reward. And researchers like Edward D. C. and Richard Ryan have shown that intrinsic motivation is one of the strongest drivers of sustained behavior change through the self-determination theory. But outside of the research, the lesson is simple. In plain English, alignment comes first. Period. Applause may come later or it may not. Sometimes the applause doesn't come at all. But the right people show up after we start doing the things that feel true to us. This is a perfect example of intrinsic motivation. Because even after the social reward disappeared and my client chose to keep going with the pod stickers, the original motivation was communal, like everybody's going to eat together. When that changed, he pivoted, which is awesome, to intrinsic motivation. This concept comes from the research about the self-determination theory. So there's autonomy, which is choosing the action freely, competence, which means developing mastery, which he was in the process of doing, and then relatedness, which was connection to others. So my client chose to keep cooking, and that was the autonomy. He practiced a skill that he enjoyed, he's gaining competence in this, and then unexpectedly people showed up, and that's relatedness. That's powerful. There was also something else that really stood out because another important layer that he reinforced is a new identity. Instead of I'm the guy who's not worth making dinner for, or I'm the guy who's going to go out just because everybody else does. He enacted, I'm someone who cooks, creates, and hosts. And behavioral research shows identity change happens through repeated aligned action. Just like we talked about influence happening through repeated aligned actions. Good leadership. You lead yourself first. A useful reference here is James Clear's framework in Atomic Habits. It was one of my favorite books for a while there. And identity is built by votes cast through your behavior. That moment was a vote where he voted for himself. Also, he enjoyed every single step. And I know because I've known this client for many years, he gets into a real flow when he's cooking and creating. That's a concept developed by Mahale Sizanamahala. Excuse me if I did not say your name correctly. And flow happens when skill meets challenge, your attention is fully absorbed, and the activity itself gets really, really rewarding. Cooking from scratch, and I like to do this myself, I like to bake from scratch. My husband cooks from scratch. Flow states because it involves sequencing and creativity and then sensory feedback. So the real gift was never the dinner guests. The gift was that he stayed with the experience. He kept cooking because it felt aligned. Many people operate backwards, and I used to be this way too. Think of the outcome. Get validated, take action. Aligned people operate in a different way. Alignment and then action and outcome, and maybe not the outcome you planned. Stop outsourcing motivation to the reaction of other people. Leaders actually burn out if they rely solely on applause, approval, recognition, and immediate results. The most aligned leaders keep building even when the room is empty, because eventually the room will fill and it will fill with the right people. As leaders, we often make a mistake when we start believing we read the room and we might only keep going with an idea or put energy into something when the team is excited. And I'm not saying that it's not important to read the room and be sensitive to your audience, but I'm also saying to pursue something that you are really passionate about, that does not have guaranteed results, has paid off for many before you. The best leaders don't wait for the room to fill. They don't wait for people to be coming in sitting at their dinner tables. They actually start the work when the room is empty. Because leadership is not sustained by applause. That's outsourcing your power and it's too risky. It's sustained by alignment, staying aligned with yourself, staying aligned with what you're creating or co-creating with other people. When a leader is deeply aligned with their work, people feel that authenticity and they come to the table. Parents see this all the time with kids and teenagers. Like a kid might quit a hobby the minute that they don't win. A teenager may stop trying if their friends stop doing it or if they don't get the recognition that they think they should get. But one of the greatest lessons that we can model is this. You don't only do things when someone is watching. You do them because they matter to you. When kids learn that, something pretty powerful happens, and their motivation moves from a need from external approval to the drive and the getting in touch with their internal direction. And that shift builds resilience. Now I'm not knocking external approval. We all enjoy it, and we know brain research says that that's one of the things that we do like is to be part of everything, and that's a survival instinct. But liking it and needing it are two different things. If you're spending your life chasing the gold star and not as focused on learning, whether you get recognition or not, you're the one who's gonna lose ultimately because you're gonna miss out on some things that maybe you really wanted to do with all your heart. As far as teenagers goes, this lesson might be the most important. It's really easy to follow the crowd. We know that. But sometimes the healthiest decision is exactly doing what my client did. He didn't follow everybody when they went out. He stayed home and he just kept cooking. He chose the environment that supported the person he's becoming. He chose the activity that is part of his identity now. And in doing that, like look what happened. He actually created a new kind of gathering. So here's three simple ways to practice the idea this week. Think about something you do with no audience. Maybe write something, maybe cook something, maybe create something. Not for social media, not even for your family, not for any kind of recognition. This was a hard one for me, just because it feels aligned. And then notice when you're waiting for permission. And I thought I broke this rule already. Many of us pause our ideas until somebody else validates them. But maybe try this question. If no one saw this, would it still be worth doing? And when I asked myself that, the answer was absolutely yes. I feel like I want to honor this person's story and I want to get it out there. And five years from now, if somebody stumbles across this podcast, who knows? You know, if anybody listens to it and gets anything out of it, it's been worth it. Also, protect the environments that support who you're becoming. My client didn't go out, even though that would have been easier. He stayed where he could build something healthier for himself. Our environment shapes behavior so much more than motivation ever could. What I love most about this story is that the dinner still actually happened. Thank God it was a happy ending. And I think he still would have enjoyed eating by himself, but I also feel like it was the universe giving him a big thumbs up that his cousins just dropped by. It just didn't happen with the people he expected. And that's that's life. That's how alignment works. When we stay with the things that matter to us, even when the room is empty, life has a way of bringing the right people to the table. What does this really have to do with leaders? How does this benefit leaders? And when I was asked that, I thought, you know, the environments where I really flowed in and flourished in were where I could show more ownership and where I was allowed to pursue a project. Maybe the school didn't have the money, so they said, go write a grant for it. I did to teach yoga and ended up having a really successful yoga club before school. And my principal supported it as long as I was aligned and I was willing to do the work. And it really, really fueled me. And I think in my classroom, I tried to do this with passion projects. People don't only work for rewards. Honestly, they're connected to purpose. And when parents encourage effort rather than constant approval, children seem to develop more internal confidence. I work a lot with kids on that because we're very, very externally driven. But their resilience gets so different. Their resilience is huge, and kids learn to pursue their interests without getting awards all the time. Adolescents struggle with external validation, possibly more than anybody else. I don't know that to be a fact, but I know that it's a it's a really hard age, and with the social media situation that we have, it's really hard to ask them, do you really value this? Or are you just doing it because people are going to like it or approve it? But I know that the more we support this, it supports their independent decision makings and healthier boundaries with their friends and a much stronger identity development, which is exactly what they should be doing right now. In my opinion, alignment is doing the work even when the room is going to be empty and trusting the right people are going to find their way to your dinner table. I checked out some famous people who demonstrated this and look, Thomas Edison, he's so famous. And he he failed. Investors and competitors like doubted his project. The process took so many years of trial and error. And what did he say? He said, I've not failed. I just found 10,000 ways that won't work. He continued because he believed in the problem he was solving, not because his success was guaranteed. Before the powered flight existed, most experts believed that sustained human flight was absolutely impossible. But the Wright brothers, they experimented strange experiments in a bicycle shop, and this worked eventually produced the Wright Flyer and the historic first powered flight at Kitty Hawk. What's remarkable about their story is that they weren't funded by scientists or engineered. And that's kind of what I like about podcasts. You can do this without somebody approving it initially. You can just put it out there and then see how it lands with people. The post-it note is one of my favorite stories about innovation. And that was a scientist, I think Spencer Silver, yes, created a weak adhesive that didn't seem useful. And most companies would have just thrown it out. But Silver was like, I'm gonna see what we can do with it. And then Art Fry, one of his friends, realized it could be used as a bookmark that wouldn't fall out of his choir book. That is how the post-it got born. Look at Steve Jobs and the iPhone. Many leaders believed that touch screens would not work. Early prototypes failed, failed, and failed. The team continued because they believed there'd be a new way that people could interact with technology. And after that launched in 2007, it reshaped the entire smartphone industry. The pattern that all these stories share, because I'm always looking for patterns, it's my math nerd in me, is that they all have curiosity or alignment, they all had private experimentation, they all were perseverant, they had persistence even though they weren't being recognized, they broke through, and then there was adoption, whether it was a small, a small group of people or a large group of people. But just remember, many of the inventions that shaped our world today began the same way my client finished those pot stickers. Someone kept working on something meaningful before anyone else showed up. My absolute favorite part about this story is the happy ending. I'm a person who really loves happy endings. And what I love most is that I feel like the right thing happened. Just not with the people he expected, and that almost makes it better. And that's how alignment works. When we stay with the things that matter to us, even when the room is empty, life always has a way of eventually bringing the right people to the table. Thank you so much for joining me today. If this episode spoke to you, I'd really love to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram or on my Facebook page, just count me in. And if someone came to mind while you were listening, please share this episode with them. Sometimes one conversation can change everything. Thank you for being here, for choosing growth, and for doing the inner work. I look forward to being with you again next time. Remember, we're all in this together. Hit that subscribe button. Just count me in the