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The Alignment Engine is where high-capacity humans tune their inner systems, align with what matters most, and move forward with clarity and power. Host Kaitlin Merchant blends soul, systems, and strategy into sharp insights and grounded conversations for founders, creatives, and leaders navigating their next evolution in business and life.
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Alignment Engine where high capacity humans get a glimpse below the hood and explore how soul systems and strategy click into place and accelerate the road ahead. Buckle up. Let's roll. Hey friends. Welcome back. Today we are talking about one of my favorite things in the world, the spillover effect, how one small win in one tiny little corner of your life can quietly start changing everything else.
Last time we talked about action and how taking even the smallest step, lights up the path ahead. Today we are going to dig deeper into what happens after that step, how momentum spreads, how identity shifts, and how sometimes the boost you need comes from the area that you would least expect. And yes, we are going to talk about hobbies, real hobbies, not 'I binged three seasons straight of [00:01:00] Netflix and called it a hobby' hobbies. So let's roll. So before we jump into all of that, I'm going to take you into a season of my own life that sets the stage for what we're talking about today. There was this long stretch of my life where everything got very, very narrow. I now call is 'the single track season'. Everything ran on repeat work, parenting, painting.
That was basically the whole show. I worked one of the eight different jobs I was juggling at the time. I painted, which people assume was my fun, creative outlook. And don't get me wrong, it was fun and it was creative, but because it was paying my bills and I was treating it as a business, it's also work.
And I parented. That was it. That was a whole list. Work, parent. Parent, work. Whenever someone asks, so what's new? My answer, at least in my head, was basically 'emails, spreadsheets, canvases, [00:02:00] paint, brushes, snacks, the park. Rinse, play repeat over and over.' And that season served a really good purpose.
I love being a mom. And I really do enjoy the work that I do, but also real talk: the rest of my life read like a terrible telenovela on steroids at that point. With absolutely zero fun money and a laundry list of food allergies that made even going out to dinner hard, I embraced it, hunkered down, blinders on, dialed in, but after a while, I looked up and realized not only was I bored, but I was also boring. And there's that whole, careful what you wish for thing. I have a tendency to overcommit, to pile on all the things to say yes, because I can. I can freaking do anything. And I had wanted a few years of boring. Well. I got 'em. Not exactly how I thought I would, but there they were.
There was no fresh input, no spark, no expansion, and [00:03:00] absolutely no part of my life that existed purely for me. That was a whole lot of boring, y'all. This season showed me what life feels like when momentum is missing. And the science behind momentum is actually fascinating.
One of my favorite studies, shout out to Andrew Huberman for this one, involves two mice in a tube. It narrows so only one can pass. One mouse has to push through and the other one gets pushed back. The fascinating part - the mouse who wins one single time becomes dramatically more likely to win again in future situations, even if the experimenters hijacked the system and helped the mouse win the first round.
The losing mouse. Yep. You guessed it. More likely to lose again.
But here's the part that I love. In a follow-up experiment, they put the same mice into a cold cage, which they don't like. There was only one warm spot under the heat lamp and who got it first? The [00:04:00] mouse who had won, even if they had some assistance to win because
that first win shifted how their brain was processing stress, specifically by changing activity in the prefrontal cortex,
allowing it to convert the physiological stress response, the adrenaline spike, the agitation, all of that, that gets wired when we go into a state of stress. It translated all of that into more forward movement per unit of time compared to the competitor. The losing mouse took the same stress chemistry and turned it into hesitation.
It moved slower. The winning mouse turned it into fuel and moved faster. One win changed everything for them. And humans, we're not so different.
This is the root of spillover. It's the way that one small win changes our internal system enough that it carries into everything else. When you win, even one tiny time, it shifts you from stuck to moving, and [00:05:00] bit by bit, it shows up throughout the other areas of your life.
If you get a small win in your health, it often spills into your work.
You lose those 10 pounds. You're feeling accomplished, you're feeling capable, you're feeling hot, and that confidence radiates out from your work without a word being said. A win in your creativity can spill into your parenting. Suddenly you're pulling that creative thinking into how to negotiate with a, a terrorist, I mean, toddler, same thing.
A win in your confidence spills into your relationships. You start standing a little taller, holding your boundaries a little firmer. You put yourself out there in ways that you might not otherwise. This is spillover and it's why we are talking about hobbies, because hobbies give you the most controlled, repeatable, low stakes environment for creating those tiny wins that then echo through everything else.
If you want momentum everywhere, it starts somewhere. It doesn't matter where, [00:06:00] but it does matter that it's consistent and that it gives you evidence. And once I understood. The wins that make a huge impact are the low stakes, curiosity driven ones, the breadcrumb wins, not the mountaintop wins. I had to zoom out and ask, where does that curiosity actually live for me right now?
And the honest answer was nowhere. Everything had become practical, responsible, productive, in order to become interesting, not boring, I needed to be interested. I needed something that wasn't work, that wasn't parenting, that wasn't tied to productivity or responsibility or making money. Something just for me just because I was interested.
And one day a year ago, I drove past a gun range, which by the way has historically been one of my biggest ' absolutely not's.' I've lost people I know to [00:07:00] firearms. I didn't love the idea of having them in the house even after a break in, it was just not my thing. But that day I felt this quiet, intuitive tap.
You sure about that? You know the moment when your resistance gets loud enough that it wakes up your curiosity. Yeah. That, and if you remember episode one, 'absolutely not' is often a signal for me. So I tried it and I found a hobby that checked every box I needed, even the ones I didn't know I needed. So once I started doing this regularly, I noticed something.
The things that made this hobby powerful were structural. Many of these things are things that my mentor teaches and practicing them in the real world showed me why they work.
The way we think about hobby is a little different from most people. Specifically in this framework, we call it passion/ hobby, and I actually don't love the word passion in general because [00:08:00] it implies this high pressure, high expectation builds it up to this lofty position I don't think it should have. So just to clear that one up. This isn't passion in a, I found my life's calling sense. It's just curiosity, interest and intrigue. It's something that pulls your attention. Just enough that you want to explore it, to watch videos, to take a class, to try something, to learn something, to improve, follow that thread a little bit further. A real hobby. The kind that creates momentum has five components.
Number one, it is just for you. It's not to fit in with a group. It's not to make new friends, to have social media content. It's not because it'll help you with work. It's not something that you can turn into a side gig later. It is something that you would do if no one else ever knew you did it. And I cannot underscore this enough for you.
If you ignore everything else we talk about today [00:09:00] and have something that you do because it's just for you, that is probably the number one thing. In The Artist Way, Julia Cameron talks about artist dates and how taking yourself out on a solo date on a regular basis is a really powerful activity to connect you with your creative energy. This is along a similar lines, but in a little bit of a different direction.
I've taken exactly one friend with me so far. Julie was interested in exploring this is her passion hobby too. It was so fun to share it and so cool we got to experience it together. She was doing it for her and I was doing it for me.
Number two, it gives you measurable feedback. You can set goals and have something to look back at if you're moving closer or further from a goal. It is some sort of tangible thing that you can track even subtly over time. Maybe it's chapters of a book written. Maybe it's dresses you've sewn and dishes you've [00:10:00] cooked, for me, it's pictures of my targets.
Number three, it challenges you ideally about 10% beyond your current capability. That is where flow happens. I think we've mentioned that before, but the flow state is truly one of the most rewarding beautiful states to be in.
A slight challenge will help push you there faster, and a hobby is a great way to start connecting with flow states.
Number four, it fits into your real life. A weekly rhythm is ideal, something with low friction that is easy to maintain. One of the reasons my hobby has stuck is because it's easy.
The range is about five minutes from my house. It takes me 10, maybe 15 minutes to practice. Some of the guys that work there joke with me that I'm in and out so fast, but the fact that I can be in and out so fast- door to door in under 30 minutes - is the very reason that this hobby has worked so well for [00:11:00] me.
And the behavioral science here is really clear. If you reduce friction, you increase follow through. If it's easy to start. It's easy to stay consistent. A hobby with low friction becomes a hobby that actually happens over and over, and consistency is where momentum lives. If you want more about that, James Clear does a really good job digging into all of that and how to put it into play in Atomic Habits.
And y'all your girl over here is a queen of ADHD. Feeling like I have to follow a routine and a hard schedule is like nails on a chalkboard. Don't you put me in that box. Do I understand why it's great? Yes. Will I do everything I can to wriggle my way out of it? Also, yes. But here's the deal guys. I am sharing things with you that I've learned and experienced and felt not because I've got my stuff all figured out.
Ask me about the time that [00:12:00] someone said that to me, and I'm like, "who me? Surely you must be mistaken. I am the girl that's been doing dishes in her bathtub, her only bathtub, for the last three months because my kitchen renovation has been a dumpster fire." Yeah, I promise I am fumbling around in the dark and figuring it out too.
And number five, it expands your identity. It lets you explore a part of yourself that you don't usually access. This one is a little bit more of an extra credit bonus one, but I've found it totally worth exploring.
And that might be something you did as a child and are coming back to.
And actually The Artist Way talks about how powerful it is for our creative process and our creative energy to reconnect with something like this from our childhood.
But. It could also be something that you don't get to do often in your daily life. My friend Olivia pointed this out and I think she is 100% onto something here. It can be a powerful way to round out a different side of you [00:13:00] from your day-to-day life. Maybe you're an engineer and abstract painting or interpretive dance would be the perfect hobby for you.
Maybe you're an artist and baking, which is very precise, would be a great hobby. Maybe you're generally a pretty calm person and experiencing some risk would help you connect with another side of yourself. Maybe your day-to-day life is all adrenaline and stress and anxiety, and something that draws you inward to calm would be the piece that you need to connect with. For me, it's why my 'absolutely not' makes so much sense here. It's given me an opportunity to experience a different state than I normally would. I've gotten to a point in life where thankfully, high stress situations aren't happening often, but when they do come up,
I usually don't get thrown for a loop. It's like, "okay, buckle in. Let's go. This is wild, but here we are and this is what we're gonna do about it." When you hear a gun firing, especially when [00:14:00] it's not something that you're used to, it sparks this deep primal sense of danger 'cause it is danger. At first when you pull the trigger and you get kick back, it is super uncomfortable and it feels so out of control and fight or flight goes off and you are instantly in this high adrenaline, high stress, very uncomfortable situation.
Your nervous system is not regulated. So this experience has given me the opportunity to regulate in that state and still find my grounding when it's kind of artificially created. The more you do, the more used to it you get and the easier it gets, which I think is true for so much. I could go on and on about how different elements of my hobby are creating really cool inputs and impacts for me.
It's been so fun.
And if you listen to our last episode on taking action, you know I'm always looking for how action interacts with our field, because that is where the magic happens. Once you understand what makes [00:15:00] a hobby powerful, the weekly consistency, the measurable output, the challenge, the part that's just for you.
Now, we can talk about what's happening underneath it. Because the magic is in the identity shift that the hobby creates. And just to be clear, identity here is not talking about identifying with your actual hobby as an artist, a writer, a seamstress, a baker. It's not about belonging to a group or a philosophy that's hobby adjacent.
It's about the building blocks of identity that feel true to you. The 'I can handle stressful situations'. The 'I got this.' We talked about how every action sends a signal. Identity works the same way. Every time you show up for something tiny, even for 10 minutes, you're collecting evidence.
Evidence says I show up for myself. I do interesting things that I'm interested in. I am not boring. And identity expands [00:16:00] fastest when there's evidence. This is spillover on an identity level. The evidence you collect in one place reshapes who you are everywhere else. Your field changes because you change.
So here's where hobbies come in. Most people say, I have a hobby. But when you look at the data, what they actually have is leisure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 94% of Americans engage in leisure activity daily, but more than half of that time is you wanna guess watching tv, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I love a good binge, preferably on a show with fewer than three seasons, so it doesn't derail my entire life for the month. And we do need leisure. Not everything needs to come back to a purpose, but y'all Leisure doesn't create identity. It doesn't create proof, and it doesn't give your system feedback.[00:17:00]
Active hobbies do. Creative hobbies can reduce cortisol levels by 75% even after a short session. A massive 2023 nature medicine study across 16 countries found that having a hobby correlates with better health, higher happiness and greater life satisfaction and y'all, that's just a regular old hobby without all the criteria we've listed here today.
That drop in cortisol is your system saying, 'Hey, that thing you did for 30 minutes. More of that please.' So a few weeks ago I saw this play out in real time. I had what I thought was a horrible session at the range.
And recently something had clicked for me and I had been consistently hitting bullseye in a way that I hadn't been before. But this day, thoughts were looping around in my head way more than they normally do, which is not a good recipe for accuracy. Here's the thing about progress. It is much more directional than it is linear, meaning overall you progress, but it's in waves and [00:18:00] spurts instead of exactly like 3% better each time.
And because I had seen that recent progress, when I perceived myself to be off that day, my inner critic was out in full force, "Kait, seriously, this is terrible. You did so much better last time. You're not hitting the goal you had for this time. Come on, get with it."
which by the way, self-talk is one of the most powerful levers that you have. Way more than we give it credit for. It can make your life beautiful or send all sorts of really fun obstacles your way. And by fun, I mean not fun at all, but that's a conversation for another day.
And then these two girls behind me go, wow, you're really good. And I turn around and I'm like, "me?" Full dishes-in-the-bathtub moment because I definitely don't think of myself as good yet. But I had a nice chat with them for a little bit. And then when I got home, I pulled up my photos because I take pictures each time I have my tangible evidence.
I don't normally go through it on a regular [00:19:00] basis, but I did that day and I compared that day to my first. And the difference was massive. Of course, that's what practice does. But then I also compared it to the day that I was judging myself against. And guess what? That current day was just as good, if not better, than the one that I was benchmarking against. For real. I had this perception in my mind that was just objectively not true, which happens far more than we'd like to think, by the way. That is the power of evidence. Self-criticism kills the momentum, evidence restores it, and progress is never a straight line. It's a wobbly, messy, upward trend. And that is why a hobby with measurable outputs matter. It gives your brain physical proof that you are someone who improves. It gives you something tangible to go back and look at when you're feeling those moments of [00:20:00] self-doubt.
And because you are now broadcasting something different. I grow, I improve, I follow through. Life reflects it back. All matter circumstance, situation, people and events pick up on it. We'll get more into that at some point, but for now, just play around with that idea and see if you can notice it happening.
And that brings me to another way that movement works. It doesn't just shift identity, it literally shifts the way that your brain processes information. EMDR Eye movement, desensitation and reprocessing is a type of therapy that began when a therapist, Francine Shapiro, noticed something on a walk in the late eighties.
She went on a walk to work through something in her mind that she was upset about. When she was walking, and her eyes were naturally moving across the horizon- left to right, right to left- she noticed that the intensity of her distressing thoughts dropped. She could process them more easily. And she noticed that when she took her [00:21:00] therapy sessions from the couch to a walk, something opened up for her clients too, because the physical movement helps move the mind.
And then because walking therapy isn't exactly practical, they dove into the mechanics of why that's happening and found other ways to recreate it, and formed what today is known as EMDR. It has to do with the way your eyes move across the visual horizon as you walk. The same mechanics are at play when you drive or ride a bike outside. But they've found all sorts of ways to replicate that in a therapeutic setting.
Now, in this movement, it works across the board. If you're stuck in work, sometimes the unlocks in your body, if you're stuck emotionally. Sometimes the shift comes from physical emotion or creative play, which we've talked a lot about.
When I'm feeling stuck on something, I creative block, a, uh, a podcast that I've been thinking through for two months, but but haven't quite put the puzzle pieces together in a way that I love yet,
even just a big work project I'm not [00:22:00] sure where to get started on. My number one hack is to go for a walk. Sometimes on a super busy day, it's just around the block and back, but that physical movement really does transfer. It's another form of spillover. Movement in your body becomes movement in your mind.
It is all connected. And since everything in your system is all connected, let's zoom back out to talk about the structure of your life as a whole. We talk a lot about work life balance culturally, right? Most people treat work as half of life. It's not. It's one eighth. Here are the eight.
Family, social, spiritual, financial, career, mental, physical, and passion/ hobby. And here's how I think about it. Imagine a beach ball with eight individual segments each with their own little blow up valve. Instead of one for the whole thing, each section has its own. If only two segments are inflated, like [00:23:00] work and family as one that we talked about at the beginning of this episode, your beach ball is not rolling smoothly. You are basically bouncing down the road on a half deflated orb of chaos because your ball physically can't roll.
Now, imagine momentum, your wins, your energy, your movement is like a thick oil poured across the top of the ball. If all eight segments are inflated, the oil can spread evenly coating the whole thing. But if one segment is totally deflated, like passion/ hobby was for me, the oil just sinks into that section and gets stuck.
Movement can't spread evenly if part of your life has no structure. So add that structure, inflate those sections, and suddenly the whole ball rolls better.
And I get it. Work takes up eight plus hours a day, five plus days a week. We're supposed to sleep eight hours, seven days a week. That leaves us with all of 72 hours for everything else. [00:24:00] To have a ball that's inflated. You don't have to put the same amount of hours into all eight sections to have balance. You just have to have energy and time in them regularly. And different phases of your life, different sections will require more or less as you go through, but the idea is if you're just throughout a week touching on each one of those segments and giving it energy, giving it time that your beach ball will at least relatively be inflated all around.
We've talked a whole lot about action, about movement, momentum, and I just wanna point out that it's not just about that. That is one piece of what is happening here. The same thing is happening with that passion when you have interest and intrigue and curiosity in one area of life. Yep. That spills over too, and you get to step out of being boring.
When you have a heck yeah. Boost of confidence that follows you around too. [00:25:00] I mean, so does that whole beating yourself up thing too. So watch that one. And this transfer shows up for me in flow too because I've learned how to tap into flow in painting so quickly that transfers into all sorts of other activities way faster than it could otherwise.
I can use it strategically. Even with my ADHD, tornado tendencies. Friends will sometimes mention medication and such for that for me and ask me why I don't do it. And don't get me wrong, zero judgment on it. It was super helpful for me years and years ago when I took it, but it made me think I wanted to be an accountant and holy smokes, would I hate my life if I had gone down that path?
No disrespect to our accountants. Oh, we need you. I am just personally not built for it. And then secondly, because I know I can drop into that flow so much faster than average, I know if I challenge myself even with some dumb gamification of I did 10 last time, how many can I this time or [00:26:00] some sort of artificially inflated time pressure, I know I can turn that agitation and discomfort into movement and flow.
I know it's not that far away and flow to me beats any sort of Adderall. And even with all of that flow, identity, hobby magic, there is still.
One more trick up our sleeves. One more button on the dashboard that says A reset or right now that we, that we need to jump into before we're done today, if you have been on a losing streak, if a life has felt heavy or stuck, guess what?
You get to call in a fresh start anytime you want. There's actual behavioral science behind this. It's called the Fresh Start Effect and it was studied by Catherine Milkman at Wharton new year, new month. New week, new house, new season, new decision, new day. Any point can serve as a psychological [00:27:00] reset. So you get to pick one. And the fastest way to take advantage of that reset, give yourself one tiny win. Any win. Just like in that tube study, it does not matter what it's in or how much you hack the system to create the win.
It just matters that you feel it, because one win becomes the next win. And before long. Movement becomes momentum and you're over there in the cold cage feeling all warm and snug under your heat lamp.
And that, friends, is what I've got for you today. If you want some cliff notes for what we talked about today, I've got you covered with the little checklist. Link's in the show notes.
But also before you overthink all of this, let me make it real simple, everything I just explained, the momentum, the identity shift, the neuroscience, the whole beach ball shebang. All of that is just the why. The how is really simple. The only thing that [00:28:00] you actually need to do is to pick something that feels like yours and find a way to create a win with it.
There is no rubric you're being created on. There is no right or wrong. If your brain wants to complicate it, great. That's what brains do. But the hobby that works is the one that you're naturally curious about, the one that you'd try, even if no one ever saw it, the one that makes you lean in a little and go, Hmm, and that you can see some sort of improvement in over time.
So go find something that's just for you, just for your own spark. So take all that science, tuck it in your back pocket, and then let the curiosity do the choosing. And that's it. So until next time, go have some fun, find a win, and stay aligned.