You Sure about that? The Power of “Absolutely Not.”
EPISODE 1
In this kickoff episode, Kaitlin shares the origin of The Alignment Engine and what it means to shift from pressure to power, from hustle to harmony. Through stories of art, intuition, strategic clarity, and brand-building, you’ll hear how “absolutely not” moments often become the turning points that bring you into alignment with your higher signal.
Whether you’re a founder, creative, consultant, or recovering overachiever, this episode offers a grounded invitation to reconnect with your internal compass and start building the systems that support real, soul-led momentum.
RUN THE DIAGNOSTIC
We’ve wrapped all this goodness up in a bow for you. The 5 Precision Prompts is a chance for you to run a self diagnostic. Take a peek under the hood and see what surfaces.
NERD OUT WITH ME
I’m a nerd. You’re a nerd. We’re all nerds. Ok. Ok. No, we’re not. BUT if you would like to jump in and go deeper into some of what we mentioned in this episode, here you go.:
Lime Iron. Cold Brew + Limeade. Absolutely Not in action. I dare you!
TRANSCRIPT
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. Today we are going to kick things off talking about what alignment actually is, share how we got here, and get into how we're sure about it.
Let's start with alignment. You've probably heard the word alignment used a lot. Sometimes it's a values match or a communication style, aligning expectations. Or just a general feeling and vibe.
But you probably have felt it before. You know those rare moments when everything just clicks and feels so deeply, right? Yep. That's it.
But here's the deal. We're gonna talk about how to build it on purpose to make sure that it's more than a fleeting moment, something that sticks with you and pulls you forward.
Something that you build intentionally, your instincts, your energy, your execution, all pulling in the same direction. Chef's kiss beauty right there.
When you get that deeper level of alignment, everything changes. You stop moving from pressure, from proving or subconsciously doing things for all the wrong reasons, you know, we've all done it.
And you start moving from truth, from being who you actually are and doing the things that you came here to do. The world opens up in a whole new way.
And the cool thing about it, there are levels and layers to this. Drive down the road long enough and you're sure to find another point at which it's time to align again and step it up to the next level.
Truthfully, I'm at that point right now when I paused and I looked at what I was best at, what lights me up, up, what fills me with energy and clarity and purpose, I realized it was time to recalibrate --yet again.
I love the crossroad of systems and soul. I love toggling between business and intuitive clarity and creativity.
At the risk of rattling off my whole resume, let's set the stage on how I've worked behind the scenes to translate complexity and into clarity.
I have worked in research. I've worked in real estate. I've created courses. I've gotten targeted with marketing and copywriting. I've contributed to bestselling books through concept vetting and strategic work. I've built brand frameworks for seven plus figure businesses. Led research for coaching companies, and worked with a prop tech startup backed by Big Wall Street investors, and I'm also an artist. My visual work explores what's buried beneath the surface and in many ways, so has the rest of my career whether I'm pulling apart a broken funnel or helping someone pinpoint the real reason that they're stuck, or tracking the energetic root of misalignment. My focus is the same, helping high capacity humans get back in sync with themselves, their work and their bigger vision that they're here to build. The Alignment Engine brings all of that together. It's where precision meets intuition and strategy starts from the soul up.
When I started applying this to myself, I had to look at my art career. I've been a professional artist for a long time. When I first started, it just kind of took off in the best way possible when I moved to Dallas over seven years ago now, which blows my mind on a regular basis, does not feel that long ago at all.
But anyhow, I started rebuilding all of that from scratch. I love creating, I love bringing ideas to life. I love the conceptual work that sits beneath the surface of what I do. Literally with a neon.
If you're not familiar with my work, I use tape and layers of paint to hide and reveal. I start with neon, I add tape, and then I paint on top of it. At the end, I remove the tape and there's this bright, vibrant version of us underneath it all, and through that process of removing those layers, as I'm peeling the tape off, I'm revealing that authentic self. That deeper self, that core, what I would now call higher self.
Pulling the tape off has always been my favorite part of the process. I will spend hours and months. Painting, working on these big, huge canvases and when it comes time to pull the tape off, I have no idea what's gonna happen.
Did the seal hold, did the paint seep under? Will the lines be clean? And how is it actually gonna look once this bright neon pops through and starts interacting with all the other colors around it? I have no idea. It's such a fun experience of just letting go of control and trusting the process.
I usually get one of two responses:
One -- "What the heck did you just do? You ruined a perfectly good painting. Who would want neon in their house anyways?" and
Two-- "That is amazing. You just took a pretty picture and turned it into contemporary art."
My vote's for the second one, but that's beside the point right now.
What I know is that underneath was the real message. The lines I laid down were the very first ones that mattered the most. And that became the metaphor for everything else, but I started to feel some resistance. I started to feel resentful, thinking about walking into the studio, I started dragging my feet. I just didn't want to do it. Not because I didn't enjoy it, but because I have been working so gosh darn hard. And it wasn't working the way it used to. It wasn't selling the same, and it wasn't connecting with people and I realized maaaaybe this wasn't the most powerful vehicle for that message anymore.
Funny enough, as I came to that realization, it started hitting home with more people. Sales and commission requests started pouring in. But that doesn't change the fact that it just doesn't feel aligned anymore.
So, I stepped back and I looked at where I nerd out (because y'all, I'm a super nerd), what I research, (even though that's not part of my job anymore, I still do plenty of that), what I obsess over (Oh yeah. Hi, hyper-focused over here, for sure.) And y'all, I gotta tell you, painting didn't make the list.
It was the concepts, it was the ideas, the spiritual pieces, the business systems, the human patterns.
I listen to podcasts. I devour books. I go deep on how business models work, and I dissect marketing systems. I follow artists, not just for their work, but to understand how they're creating impact. I'll spend thousands of dollars just to study someone's launch sequence and y'all, it's worth it. I dive into what makes people tick. Why they do what they do, how they make their decisions. That's the stuff that lights me up. It pulls me in and it keeps me captivated.
This one time I followed this artist for months, years, really, because I wanted to understand the entire marketing engine that was behind her success, the language she used, the customer journey she created, the way her authenticity was strategically layered into every offer. It was beautiful. I bought her course, I bought it to peek behind the scenes at the ecosystem of what quickly became a seven figure business.
And for those of you who don't wanna do the math, that is a million dollars or more from an artist, before she even picked up a paintbrush.
That's the kind of thinking that people started coming to me for. One part, intuitive clarity, one part structural diagnosis.
Eventually I realized my intuition. Wasn't just a hunch, it was consistent. And so I started learning how to turn that knowing into something that was repeatable, something that I could trust every time and something other people could trust too.
We call it scientifically precise intuition, and that is at the core of what I do now.
I started seeing these patterns in the business world, watching the creators, the small businesses. The authors run the same playbooks, seeing what worked and why and realizing that the people with the mic don't always have the cleanest, clearest message.
Sometimes they just have the loudest strategy.
I never planned to have a podcast. I never wanted a platform. "Absolutely not," is what I would've said if you had asked me.
But the signals kept getting louder, and I kept getting nudged and then shoved and then full on, kicked in the butt.
When I was working on a book project, I was in charge of researching and verifying these concepts that the book is based on. It was pretty cool. I kept seeing the same study quoted across a dozen other books and blogs. It was all over the place. It was all over the internet.
I felt this intuitive need to dig into it. I kept looking for the original study, couldn't find it. I called the institute that it's credited to. It turns out the study doesn't exist.
The quotes are fake. The claims are empty. Y'all, this study is in multiple best selling books. There's a lot of junk out there. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's not. But either way, people are making decisions based on broken inputs, and that drives me bonkers.
You deserve better.
So here I am, finally.
Funny enough, every time I have said absolutely not, life has handed me that exact opportunity on a silver platter and said: "You sure about that?"
Let me give you a couple of quick examples.
Okay. First off, writing. Sometimes my thoughts ping pong around like a kid in a candy store. Ooh, this, look at this. I want that. Oh no. That over here shiny. My brain moves fast. I listen to everything on two times speed or sometimes. More, more, more give it to me faster.
If I have to stop and listen to something on one time speed, I just might pass on it all together. To be perfectly honest. I skip words when I write, you know when you write that text message and send it to somebody and you think you said exactly what you wanted to write, and then you go back and find out you're missing words left and right.
Yeah, that's me. I had this script running in my mind. "I'm not a good writer. I'm not a good writer. I'm not a good writer." Writing? Me? "Absolutely not."
“You sure about that?”
I got asked to help on a project that moved from researching about a class, to writing some of the scripts for the class, and then to writing the whole class.
And then I did a few magazine articles and that turned into another opportunity where I was writing email copy and press releases and a brand campaign. And now one of my core roles is writing copy for a billion dollar company and I am damn good at it.
Another example, a silly one, but a delicious one. Coffee. I was at a coffee shop. I love coffee. I started drinking coffee in middle school. A handful of the guys in my grade were kind enough to let me crash coffee club for a while, and we'd sit around. I said, oh, I don't know. Seventh graders, eighth graders, maybe drinking coffee with one of the teachers, Miss G.
So anyways, coffee has been a true love of mine for a very long time, and I'm at this coffee shop just kind of exploring the menu. I stopped drinking milk about six months ago for inflammation and it's been really good, but a lattes have always been my go-to. So now I'm like, okay, well I'm not having a latte, so am I gonna try something with almond milk? Am I gonna try something with oat milk? Are we gonna go straight up espresso? We do straight up espresso sometimes. Well, let's just re-explore the world of coffee and see what's out there.
So I saw this, what do they call it, they called it a lime iron. It's Limeade with cold brew. I was like, "Oh my gosh, that sounds disgusting. Absolutely not ." And when I heard myself say 'absolutely not' I was like, "ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That is our signal to go ahead and try it." So I asked for a sample and I tried it and I was like, whoa, one, it is a very intense flavor, but two, oh my gosh. I loved it. I was like, "Wow. This is amazing. This is incredible." I'm so glad I didn't shut myself down from exploring this and trying it based on my initial 'absolutely not' reaction.
So here we are on another round of "you sure about that?"
This podcast is gonna walk you through soul systems and strategies. What I mean by each and how they function together.
Sometimes we'll talk about business. Sometimes we'll talk about personal life, usually both, because alignment doesn't stop at your inbox and it doesn't stay within the walls of your home. It runs through everything in all eight areas of life, and eventually I will bring others in to share their stories of finding alignment and what that's meant to them because I love a good interview.
One of the questions I got as I was putting The Alignment Engine together is, are you helping people with personal stuff? Is this just for business? What are you doing here?
Let me sum that up by saying I'm an intuitive energy healer, and part of what I'm doing here is helping people identify and heal the things, stopping them from making everything click in the best way possible for them. I'm helping people to create harmony under the hood instead of grinding their gears. So if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling like you keep pushing on something that's not happening, there's something going on below the surface.
Now that could be my life just imploded and I don't know what to do. Or it could be small level adjustments. Something just feels a bit off. I feel like I should be further along with this. It runs the gamut. It might look like a personal recalibration, like a voice brand breakthrough. It might look like pinpointing a hidden limiting belief and rewiring it.
All of it lives here. Grounded in research, backed by intuition, and built with precision.
I've also been asked about my art and what this means for that moving forward, will I ever stop painting? No, not entirely. Art has given me more gifts than I could possibly count, or let's be real than you probably want to listen to me ramble on about here today.
I'm beyond grateful to have gone down that path and explored. Art as a professional artist, I've stopped taking commissions and I have a studio sale going on to help make physical and metaphorical space for all of the good stuff. I'm gonna bring you here. I'm so excited to dig in and nerd out with y'all.
But before we wrap up, I wanna give you a quick snapshot of what soul systems and strategies mean here.
Soul is your internal compass. It's the part of you that knows even when you can't explain how, it's not a vibe, it's not a guess. It's not some airy fairy woo woo thing or something that's stuck in a religious book. It's your deepest signal, and when you're tuning into it, your decisions get so much easier, so much clearer, and so much faster, and they ring really true.
Systems are the infrastructure that let your soul move. When I talk about systems here, I'm not talking about a tech stack or a project management board or an operations playbook. I'm talking about your energetic rhythm, your recovery cycle, the way you move through life when your system is misaligned., You burn fuel with no progress. When it clicks, momentum becomes natural and your motions actually move you forward.
Strategy. Strategy is the equation that helps your clarity catch fire. It's how you design what comes next. Not in a rigid plan, not a prescriptive A plus B equals C every time, but, a clear, intentional path forward toward your destination.
When you tap into strategy that's built from the soul and supported by systems, you move fast and fluid with true harmony below and above the surface.
Just to give you a little something to walk away with, here's something to think about until next time. What ideas, skills, or experience have you been shutting down with an absolutely not that might just might take you down a totally worthwhile path? Don't need to answer that now. Just notice what pops in when you first hear it. Often the first thing that comes to us is quiet, but it rings pretty darn true.
If you wanna go grab our five precision prompts and dig deeper, head on over to the website, thealignmentengine.com. Scroll to the bottom, we've got it ready there for you.
This is who we are. This is what we're doing. All grounded in research, backed by intuition, built with precision. I am so excited to dig in and nerd out with y'all. This is gonna be fun.
All righty, friends, that's it for today.
Until next time, stay aligned.