Repair Your Energetic Leaks

I’ve written before about energetic leaks and drains, and how to identify them in our creative lives. Now I’d like to begin looking at ways we can repair those leaks, so we have more juice available for the projects and states of being that we love and that give us opportunities to make meaning.

Once we’ve started noticing the leaks (here’s a refresher – it’s been a couple of months!) we can start by asking a new question.

What Can I Replace?

This question is open-ended. Here are some examples of answers to that question. Do you see something that might be adaptable to your needs?

• I can replace my sense of helplessness around that difficult challenge by reminding myself of hard things I have done in the past that are now no big deal. Like the time I …. (Fill in that blank from your own experience.)
• I can replace my fear by choosing a small task that I know I can do well, without much effort, as a reminder that I am a capable person.
• I can replace the chair that starts causing me pain after fifteen minutes with a desk chair that I can work in comfortably.
• I can replace looking at the news first thing in the morning with a new habit of quiet contemplation / journaling / stretching / breathing / yoga.
• I can replace my volunteer commitment to an organization whose mission I no longer support with either more time for my creative work, or something else.

An Elevated Moment

Another approach to repairing energy leaks takes a longer look: Think back to a moment when everything felt connected and humming with life, when you were at your best. A peak experience. Jot down the highlights. Then analyze the moment. What about it made it so wonderful? What aspects of yourself were in the forefront? Which parts of yourself were in the background (and content to be there)? What feelings were you experiencing? Write down words to describe your answers to these questions.

You may have been at the beach when you saw the world with clarity. You may have been performing. You may have been chopping vegetables. You may have been painting a breakthrough work of art. You may have been meditating. You may have been connecting with a dear friend over coffee. You may have been in the shower.

Play back that movie frame by frame and focus to understand everything about that moment. Draw or write as much as you want about it. Describe in detail the experience, the sensory elements (touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing) while you are there in your memory and imagination, and the emotions that pass through you.

How can you cultivate more experiences that feature those sensory elements and those emotions? Start small. What is a little change you might make to your mornings? How might you add 30 seconds of ritual to the start of your next creative work session? What minor alteration in your practice as you close out a work session might bring you some of that sensory input?

Looking outside of work time, how do you spend your first half hour awake? When you’re going to sleep? Is there a change to how you begin a meal that might bring you a flavor of the feeling from a peak experience? What incremental changes might you make to everyday routines to enrich them for you?

Talking with yourself
Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay

How Do You Talk with Yourself?

Another source of many energy leaks for creative people is our own private monologue. In a feedback loop, we effectively choose how the world appears to us by telling ourselves what is happening. This has profound effects on our lives. Accordingly, our self-talk has a big influence on our experience.

Makes sense, then, to pay attention. When we start to notice the things we say to ourselves – silently, or sotto voce, or yelling – we can learn a lot. Here’s a basic example: I was driving a friend down a back road in Pennsylvania, many years ago. We had missed a turn or something and I was on edge. In fact, we were on rural byways and fixing the problem was simple to do. (It’s not like we’d passed the only exit off a superhighway for the next fifty miles.) But my self-talk engine was in full-out freaked mode. “Anne, you #$%&* idiot!” I muttered, as I glared out the windshield and gripped the steering wheel.

My friend noticed, and pointed out that I wouldn’t have spoken like that to anyone else, and that if she’d heard someone saying that to me, she’d have risen up in outrage. It was a good lesson. I needed to keep learning it for years, but that moment gave me a valuable guidepost for the future.

What do you say to yourself? How do you describe situations that carry a charge? Do you foresee the future with a gimlet eye? Here are some alternative ways of saying similar things. See if anything in the list resonates for you.

Might some of the words in the second column support you better?

Let Go of Burdens

As we’re discovering, many energetic leaks can be healed by unloading burdens. Letting go is often the most direct way to resolve a leak. Rather than believing that we must do more, try harder, achieve better, or act faster, it turns out we can take direct action through releasing what we already are carrying. It can seem too simple a solution – and its simplicity is part of its power. By letting go, you can consolidate your key resources, gather your essential energies, drop wastefulness, and commit to your vision.

What can you just let go? Imagine a future without that burden. Can you feel it? Does the sun shine brighter and food taste a little better?

More to Come

I’ll write more in the future about other ways to repair energetic leaks. Are you interested in experimenting a bit with the ways we’ve looked at here? I’d love to know. Drop me a line.