Your Energy Is an Asset
When you’re uncertain, your mind goes hunting for information. It wants safety. But there’s a point where more input costs you. Your energy drops, both the amount you have and the quality of it.
Energy is the most important thing you own. It’s what allows you to be present and see clearly. It shapes how you think, how you feel, and how you lead.
By energy, I mean your physical vitality and the emotional frequency you’re emitting. Some states strengthen you and others drain you. Confidence feels much better than doubt. Appreciation feels better than anger. Curiosity, better than overwhelm.
Consciously choosing where and how to direct your energy increases your agency and your influence. It shapes both your experience of life and how others experience you.
Concern, Influence, and Control
Steven Covey introduced me to the “Circle of Concern” over 30 years ago. It’s the full range of things your energy can get pulled toward: your business, your health, your family, the economy, world events, other people’s opinions, etc.
Within your circle of concern there are some areas you have very little influence over and others where you have more. Successful leaders put their energy where they have influence.
This type of influence isn’t about status or persuasion. I mean practical influence, where your choices and actions change outcomes. It’s the capacity to act where you have real agency, such as within your business or your community.
When you spend energy on things you can’t influence, your energy decreases and your effectiveness diminishes.
When you put your energy where you have influence, you can make progress. That progress in turn expands your influence.
Your presence shapes how your team, your customers, and your partners experience you and respond to you. That ripple effect grows your business.
But the most direct lever is the one you actually control: your thoughts, feelings, and actions. That’s where your decisions come from, and that’s what drives your results.
Some things you can’t directly influence will affect you, like world events or the economy. You may even have strong feelings about them. The question is whether you’ll allow your energy to be depleted by them.
I’ve watched smart, well-intentioned people get emotionally hijacked and not notice the cost. Their energy drops. Their vision narrows as they slide into tunnel vision. It’s happened to me.
We’ll think the situation is the reason we feel so bad, but it’s actually a combination of what we’re making it mean, and the belief there’s nothing we can do.
There is always something you can do. You can steward your energy and take action where you have agency.
How to Steward Energy
I’m making a new agreement with myself: to focus on what I can actually influence, not just what I can react to. To track how I feel, and when my energy starts to drop, to breathe and re-center.
Start paying attention to how you feel. When you sense your energy dropping, ask, “Where’s my focus?” If it’s outside your influence or control, name it as a concern, and return your focus to an area you can influence.
This doesn’t mean you don’t care about the bigger picture. Where you have influence, take action. Where you don’t, choose presence and be a good steward of your energy. Stabilize your own state, because over time, that’s how your influence will expand.
Every period of upheaval asks the same question: Do you orient from inside, or do you let the external world control how you feel?
A strong inner orientation may not immediately change the world, but it does make you more centered inside it. And from there, better choices are available. Not because the future is clear, but because you are.
