#61: Alignment is a Leadership Advantage, Not a Luxury

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Alignment Is a Leadership Advantage (Not a Luxury)

Summary:
In this episode, we explore alignment as a measurable driver of leadership, mindful parenting,  effectiveness, decision-making clarity, and long-term performance. Drawing from real-life reflection, behavioral science, and leadership research, this conversation reframes alignment from a personal concept into a strategic advantage.

Key Topics:

• The hidden cost of misalignment in leadership and life
• Cognitive dissonance and its impact on performance
• Stress, identity, and decision-making research
• Leadership presence and team response
• Parenting through modeling vs. control
• Innovation and the “Zone of Genius”
• Identity renewal and seasonal recalibration

Research References:

• Harvard University – Adult development, well-being, and relational health
• Stanford University – Stress mindset and performance research
• Heart-brain coherence and autonomic regulation studies

Reflection Questions:

• Where am I out of alignment right now?
• What am I maintaining that no longer fits?
• Where am I leading from pressure instead of clarity?
• What would change if I trusted my internal signals more?

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Transcript

Welcome And The Podcast Promise

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. It can look like success, it can look like productivity, it can even look like progress. Underneath, there's like a gap between who you actually are and how you're operating. That gap actually affects everything. I was reminded of this recently in a very real way. I just came back from spending time with my grandbabies and my daughter's family, and there's something about being around little kids, and the my daughter and her husband are very aligned people that makes things very clear. They're not performing, they're not second-guessing. There's no disconnect between who they are and how they show up, and they're fully, fully present. They also respond instantly to whether you are present. Not what you say, but your presence, your attention, your consistency. And it made me realize this is exactly where so many adults and especially leaders start to drift. Because somewhere along the way, we learn to like override the internal signal. We learn to meet expectations. Like go kiss grandma, whether you want to or not. So when you tell your kids that, which I did used to tell my kids that, and I'm apologizing right now, I'm a much more conscious grandmother than I was mother. Um, I was basically telling them, even if you don't want to, it's important that you do this because your job is to make a grandma happy, right? And we're almost taught to meet expectations, please other people, manage perception, and just push through. Over time, that creates a real split between what we say matters and how we're actually operating. Here's why this matters more than most people think. That split isn't just uncomfortable, it's actually costly, it's expensive. It shows up as slower decisions, unclear communication with people. There's like a low-level stress, like a hum, like background noise that just doesn't go away. And eventually people may call it burnout, but a lot of what we call burnout is actually just misalignment. Whether you're aligned or not makes all the difference. You think more clearly, you decide faster, it's easier, and you stop that constant second guessing, you know, that overthinking, that circle that you go in before you make a decision like that just stops. So, this episode, I want to break this down in a really practical way. What alignment actually is and what it's not, and why it might be possibly the most overlooked performance advantage in leadership right now. When you're with little kids, there's no pretending, they're fully themselves. There's no split, there's no performance, there's no second guessing. What stood out to me is how quickly they also respond to who you are, not what you say. And this is what makes it so refreshing to be around little children. They move towards presence and they naturally resist disconnection. It really made me think somewhere along the way, we learn to override that internal alignment and we learn to perform and outsource our reason for being here to make other people happy or to please other people. We learn to tamper it down, we learn to change it up, we learn to modify ourselves, just looking for a reaction, the right reaction. And I say that in quotes because it's actually the wrong reaction if it means that you outsourced yourself. So here's what I see, and I actually saw it in leadership, I see it in education, and I've seen it in families. There's often a split. There's like a split between what we say matters and how we're actually showing up. There's a split between who I am and who I think I need to be. In psychology, this shows up as cognitive dissonance, and it's not just uncomfortable, it really drains energy, it really clouds our ability to make decisions, and it in turn that slows down innovation. Over time, it leads to what many people call burnout, but burnout is not always about workload. Very often it's misalignment. When I was out there visiting, um, one of the dads got a really disturbing text, and apparently a big he's a project manager, and there was a big project he had been working on, and his leader is very misaligned. And due to the misalignment of his leader, some decisions were made that were going to cost people a lot of people. This is a multi-multi-million dollar project, a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of redoing. And this was already in process, and the leader apparently had not read the email all the way the first time when he approved things. I'm not sure of the exact details because he didn't want to go into it, but I watched it and I watched the ripple effect and I watched how much it affected him, and then we could just feel it. It was so sad that somebody that was in a supervisory position had done this because it was going to cost probably 20, 30 people a lot of time and energy, and then I think it's not just them, it's their partners, it's their friends, it's their kids that they go home to. When we're not aligned, and who we are affects so many people, it's really important. It's something that's overlooked, and we're not trained. I have a degree in public administration. There was nothing about getting in touch with yourself. There was nothing about making aligned decisions. This is just something that we're realizing now, although it's the way we all come into the world. Research consistently shows us that chronic stress is amplified when we are operating out of our alignment with our values and with our identity. Workout of Harvard has even shown that well-being and long-term health are really deeply tied to meaningful connection and living in alignment with what actually matters. There's research from Stanford that highlights how we interpret and relate to our experiences, like our internal alignment, directly affects our body's stress response and our performance. There's also built leading evidence that the heart and the brain are in constant communication through the vagus nerve. When that system is regulated, what researchers often call coherence, people think more clearly. When we're coherent, we respond more effectively when we're under pressure because it's like we're plugged into a source, like we're plugged in and we've got the electricity, we've got the energy flowing. So when we're talking about alignment, we're not talking about something abstract. We're talking about clarity, regulation, performance capacity. What makes a better leader than somebody who's got all this? What makes a better parent or teacher than someone who's got all this in place? This matters because actually, talk about scaling, alignment really scales. Teams don't follow instructions, they respond to consistency. If a leader's misaligned, they feel it because there's mixed mixed signals, there's hesitation, there's poor direction, there's like a lack of trust that developed. But when leaders are aligned, decisions are clearer, communication is cleaner, and the culture stabilizes. In parenting, we all know children do not do what we say, they pick up on what we model. Your presence regulates them more than your words ever will. We talk a lot about performance and results. The big word is innovation. Here's a question I keep coming back to. What are the best ideas in your organization right now? Where are they? Are they being suppressed? Not by lack of talent, but by misalignment? Because people don't even access their best thinking when they're in a state of performance. They don't. They access it when they're aligned. This connects to uh Gay Hendricks and he talks about the zone of genius. Most people operate in competence. Some people reach excellence, but real innovation, breakthrough thinking, this comes from alignment. And this is the kind of thinking, my friends, that we need to be doing right now. This is why we're here. There are natural points in the year where people pause and reassess, and I think this is one of them. Spring has always been a time for new beginnings. It's a transition point. It's a point where people start asking, is this still working? Is this still who I am? So instead of just asking, what are my goals, the real question is more like, what identity has expired? Because alignment does not really require adding more, taking another class, doing another training. It requires releasing what no longer fits. And this is what I do a lot of in my coaching with people. Spending time with my grandbabies reminded me of something really, really simple and basic. And it's like a no-brainer, but it becomes so easy to forget. Clarity is not something we force. It's not something that we even have to learn. It's something that we allow. It shows up when we stop overriding ourselves, when we stop censoring ourselves. And if we trusted, if we really, really trusted that things were gonna work out, how differently would we lead? How differently would we parent? How differently would we show up in our work? So I'll leave you with this. Answer honestly. Where do you find yourself performing instead of being aligned? What would change if you were brave enough to take that step and leap from that place instead? How much better would you feel inside? Because alignment isn't soft, it's actually where your strongest leadership begins. Your alignment with yourself is actually your superpower. Until next time, just count me in. 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.