Transform Your Life - Just Count Me In
Just Count Me In is a podcast designed to help us navigate and flow with our lives through conscious awareness. When we live with less resistance and more receptivity it is easier to express who we came here to be and enjoy life. We are all walking each other home.
Transform Your Life - Just Count Me In
#74: The Power of the Pause: Hope, Possibility, and the Space Between
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As we approach the Summer Solstice, Father's Day, family celebrations, and the halfway point of the year, many of us find ourselves standing between what has been and what is yet to come. Sari learned through her own life that some of the greatest possibilities arrive long before we have proof they're possible.
In this reflective episode, she explores the power of pausing long enough to recognize how far we've come before rushing toward what's next. Drawing from neuroscience, personal stories, life transitions, and the natural rhythms of the seasons, she invites listeners to take inventory of their growth, honor the people who helped shape them, and reconnect with hope and possibility.
Recorded during a season of family milestones—including a granddaughter's college graduation and a grandson's kindergarten graduation—this episode is a reminder that life unfolds in cycles and that transformation often begins in the quiet moments between chapters.
Whether you're navigating change, seeking clarity, building a business, leading a team, raising a family, or simply wondering what comes next, this conversation will encourage you to slow down, reflect, and remain open to the possibilities still waiting to emerge.
In This Episode We Discuss:
• Why the Summer Solstice offers a powerful opportunity for reflection
• The neuroscience of transitions, uncertainty, and resilience
• How reflection helps transform experience into wisdom
• Honoring fathers, mentors, teachers, coaches, and those who helped build our foundations
• Healthy masculine energy as structure, direction, commitment, and support
• The importance of recognizing life milestones and transitions
• Why hope is more than wishful thinking
• How possibility often appears before certainty
• The connection between personal growth, leadership, and self-awareness
• Questions to help you reset and realign for the second half of the year
Reflection Questions
Take a few moments to journal or reflect on these questions:
✨ What has grown in my life during the first half of this year?
✨ What challenge has strengthened me?
✨ Who has helped shape the person I am becoming?
✨ What am I ready to release?
✨ What possibility am I being called toward?
✨ What would become possible if I trusted myself a little more?
Key Takeaway
Your story is not finished.
No matter where you are today, there is more possibility available than you can currently see.
The Summer Solstice reminds us that light reveals what has been growing beneath the surface. When we pause long enough to acknowledge our progress, honor our journey, and remain open to new possibilities, we create space for the next chapter to unfold.
Connect with Sari Stone
If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review. If you are interested in summer coaching with Sari, or would like to offer your children this gift, please message Sari.
Your support helps us reach more people with messages of hope, growth, resilience, and transformation.
Remember:
Life is always inviting us into the next version of ourselves. It already exists, we just need to align with it.
Just count me in.
Thank you for joining me!
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Beachside Reflections On Transition
SPEAKER_00Welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm writing this actually from the beach. And I'm sitting here listening to the waves. I realize how much transition is actually happening all around me. This week I'm gonna be celebrating my granddaughter graduating from college. My little grandson is graduating from kindergarten. We're getting together with the family. Some of us haven't seen each other in two years. I know. I don't even know how that happened. Father's Day is almost here. And on top of that, we're approaching the summer solstice, the longest and brightest day of the year. Maybe that's why I found myself reflecting a little bit more than usual. I'm not sure. Not because I've got all the answers. It's actually quite the opposite today. I'm kind of finding myself in that space between what has been and what is next. And I've got a feeling that I'm not the only one.
The Midyear Checkpoint And Standards
SPEAKER_00Six months ago, the new year started, the calendar new year started in January, and many people set goals. My clients and I set standards for the year, just talked about what we thought we wanted to see happen this year and the changes that we might be making to make that happen and to allow that to happen, to line up with it. Now we're standing at a halfway point. And before we rush into the second half of the year with all this gung-ho summer energy, I don't know, but I've just been really called to like sit with it this week. And I need a small pause, maybe a stop. This is going to allow me to really think through what is going on. So the solstice is often celebrated as the peak of light, and it was interesting because just last week Max and I were talking about how everything is in cycles. Literally everything. There's your solar return cycle from where you were born. The sun has cycles, seasonal cycles, the moon has cycles, plants have cycles. Before every season shifts, there's actually a pause. Before harvest, there's a change. Before the change, there's always the next chapter that's coming. So is that where many of us are right now?
Solstice Cycles And Healthy Structure
SPEAKER_00I mean, we're in the middle of Father's Day on top of it, and I'm thinking a lot about masculine energy because masculine energy is not about gender to me. It's about the energy that builds, the energy that protects, the energy that provides structure, kind of creates safety, takes action. Every one of us carries masculine and feminine energies. So where has healthy masculine energy supported me this year? I had to give it some thought. And where have I needed more structure? I had a good conversation with Zach about the need for structure as well as the need for flow. And I've been thinking about it more since that conversation. Where have I needed stronger boundaries? The past six months I definitely set some of those myself. And then I think about what foundation really helped me get to where I am. Across cultures and throughout history, humans have always marked transitions. And we've talked about honoring those in the podcast. So they've marked graduations, births, deaths, marriages, solstices, not because the calendar changed, but because we needed a moment to just take a beat and recognize who we were before and who we're actually becoming. Whether you follow astrology or not, there's something really powerful about paying attention to cycles and the cycles in nature. The question is not whether the cycles exist. The question is more are we noticing them? And are we noticing how they affect us? Neuroscience tells us that brains always like to predict. Your brain is always scanning what's next, like what's coming, what's changing, what's safe, what can I count on? It's never quiet up there. And during periods of transition, those predictions become a little less reliable. That's why life's transition can feel exciting and uncomfortable at the same time. A graduation, a move, a new job, a new relationship, a new chapter, even positive change asks our brains to adapt.
Reflection Turns Experience Into Wisdom
SPEAKER_00Here's what I found really interesting. Research shows that reflection actually helps us to integrate experience into wisdom. Not just experience and then life, experience, reflection, wisdom. Because experience alone does not teach us nearly as much as experience examined. And that's where the summer solstice invites us to do this. The long just pause long enough and ask yourself what's grown? What surprised me? What challenged me? What have I learned? What am I carrying that no longer belongs in the next season? This week also is going to bring Father's Day, and I want to take a moment to honor the masculine energy that exists in all of our lives, not masculinity as a stereotype, but masculine as a structure, protection, direction, commitment, boundaries, the energy that says, I'm going to build something that lasts. Some of us receive this from fathers, from husbands, from grandfathers, from mentors, from teachers, from coaches. Some of us get it from friends. And some of us actually learned these lessons through their absence. However, it arrived. That's another episode. Many of us are standing on foundations who were started by someone who came before us.
Father’s Day Legacy And The Ocean
SPEAKER_00And I'm sitting here, and especially this time of year, because my dad actually died right the day after Father's Day, a few years ago, I guess six, six, seven years ago now. I don't know. But as I'm watching one of my grandchildren graduate from college and another graduate from kindergarten, I'm just so touched because I can just feel how real these moments are. Life is about stewardship. What are we passing forward? I've just been thinking like, are we teaching through my example? What legacy am I creating? Or even thinking about it. This is why I ended up at the beach, because the ocean really helps me to see how small I am in this vast horizon that I'm looking at. And it reminds me of life because every single wave looks different, yet the water remains. Every season changes, yet something deeper within us all continues. And maybe that's the invitation of the moment. Not to figure out the entire second half of the year, not to force clarity, not to have a perfect plan right now, but just to take inventory a little bit, just to acknowledge how far you've come. Maybe take a moment and honor those who helped you get here. Celebrate what's growing in your life. And take a moment to trust that what comes next is actually going to reveal itself in time. So whether you follow moon cycles, pay attention to seasons, or just notice the rhythm of your own life, there's a wisdom in recognizing that growth happens in cycles. There are seasons for action, there are seasons for reflection, times for building, seasons for receiving. Perhaps this week is one of those moments. I'm feeling it all at once. This was not the episode that I planned on recording today. I was just so overwhelmed with so many different feelings, and I thought, you know what, this is the episode that I need to be recording today. Maybe this week is one of those times where we've got a chance to pause. Just take a moment to breathe, a chance to notice. And as we move towards, and we'll probably be producing this one on the longest day of the year, my invitation to you is simple. Take a little inventory. What's grown? What's changed? What surprised you? What are you grateful for? What are you ready to bring into the light? What's trying to emerge? What's trying to come through you right now? So until next time, listen to your own wisdom, trust the unfolding, and remember that every meaningful transition begins with an awareness.
Uncertainty As The Start Of Possibility
SPEAKER_00The pause isn't meant to leave you sitting in uncertainty. It's meant to help you recognize that uncertainty is often where possibility is born. And as I'm sitting here watching the ocean, I'm reminded that possibility arrives, rarely looking exactly the way we expected it to. Most of the defining moments in my life didn't begin with certainty. They actually begin with a pull, with a feeling, with a whisper, sometimes with curiosity or a little nudge, a tug towards something that I couldn't fully explain. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's this life can change faster than we think. The relationship we haven't met yet, the opportunity we can't see yet, the healing we haven't experienced yet, the business that hasn't taken off yet, the dream we almost talked ourselves out of.
Blessing For The Second Half
SPEAKER_00As we move into the second half of the year, may you honor what has brought you here. May you celebrate how far you've come. May you thank the people who helped shape your journey, and may you remain open to all the possibilities that are still on their way because your story is just beginning. There's always more possibility available than we can currently see. Thank you so much for joining me. Please download and share this episode if you think it might benefit anyone, and just count me in.