The Energy Project

I see it every December—leaders pushing themselves and their teams to “power through” to reach their year-end goals at all costs. I can't tell you how many clients have told me in the last two weeks that they're running on empty. The finish line is almost there, they tell themselves. It's true, but is it necessary to push to your limits to get there? Conventional wisdom tells us that we should work longer and more continuous hours when demand intensifies. Over decades of work with high performers, I’ve found that this “wisdom” more often leads to resentment, burnout, and turnover than it does to sustainable success. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are 3 practices that can help you and those you lead achieve your goals without sacrificing well-being: 1. Start your day with 60 to 90 designated minutes of uninterrupted focus on your most important and/or challenging work. Turn off your notifications. Close your email. Invest your highest energy and focus on what matters most. You’ll get more done in less time. 2. Take a renewal break at least several times across your day. Your body operates in natural “ultradian” cycles of 90 minutes, during which you move into a physiological trough. When you override these rhythms, your effectiveness plummets. Even a 5-minute walk or a 20-minute nap can be remarkably restorative. 3. Set clear boundaries between work and home. Create a specific transition ritual. If you commute, consider stopping at a certain point along the way at a coffee shop or a park and intentionally let go of the workday. If you work from home, put down your phone for some period of time after you finish your workday. I’ve seen these simple practices transform people’s sense of well-being, and their performance. When they’re working, they’re truly focused. When they’re renewing, they’re truly relaxing. They're all in or all out -- and they stop living in the gray zone in between. It’s an inside job.

I spent years making sure everyone knew how different I was. My identity was built on standing out. I took pride in not belonging to anyone’s crowd. It was exhausting. In college, I joined the newspaper staff—a group that functioned like a fraternity, where everyone did everything together. But what I wanted more urgently was to feel special. Even though I was technically part of the team, I kept myself at a careful distance. I couldn’t bear the thought of being just another member of a group. I wore my outsider status like armor. But underneath that armor, I was lonely. It was the price I paid for constantly defending and announcing my uniqueness. It took me years to realize that true individuality doesn’t require isolation. The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the less need you have to prove how different you are. Eventually, I learned how to hold what I’ve come to call “the paradox of belonging.” It’s the desire to find common ground and connection with others, and also to feel fully seen as an individual. Neither is sufficient by itself. I see this same pattern play out with many senior leaders. They’ve often risen to their positions by standing out, and being exceptional. Their identity gets wrapped up in being different, special, above the fray. Which means standing apart, to one degree or another. But standing apart comes at a cost: to their relationships, their willingness to truly empower those they lead, and their capacity to learn from others. “It’s lonely at the top” is a cliché for a reason. Feeling “less than” or “better than” both create distance from others. Here’s what I’ve learned: The path to greater impact isn’t choosing between belonging or individuality. It’s holding the tension of both needs without choosing up sides between them. It’s about embracing your connection with others, while holding on to who you are in your own right. It’s an inside job.

I've found this to be one of the most challenging paradoxes in leadership and life: With new insight comes both liberation and obligation.  Once you start to see what you weren't seeing, you can no longer hide behind not knowing. This is why many of us unconsciously resist expanding our awareness. It's easier to remain blind than to shoulder the responsibility that comes with seeing more clearly. The cost of not noticing far exceeds the price of taking responsibility. When we choose not to see what’s in front of and inside of us, we diminish not just our leadership but our humanity. What might you be choosing not to see? It's an inside job.

One of the most insidious aspects of privilege is that it can make us insufficiently sensitive to what we have. When I get into my car, I don't worry about being stopped by the police. I don't worry about my safety when I do get stopped. The protection I get simply from the color of my skin is something I long took for granted. I didn’t think about it.  Without recognizing it, I was blithely assuming everyone felt the way I did. It’s something that privilege makes possible. I cringe today when I look back at my obliviousness. I now see that it limited my understanding, my empathy, and even my humanity. My privilege made me smaller.   What privileges might you be taking for granted? What aren't you seeing? What’s the cost? It's an inside job.

Think of your last difficult conversation or conflict in a relationship. What was your immediate impulse? Was it to prove you were right? To withdraw in order to avoid confrontation? To make peace at any cost? In the years I’ve spent working with leaders, I’ve noticed each of these patterns, both in professional and personal relationships: When relationships rupture, we rush to fix things externally before we’ve found our own center. Here’s what I’ve found works better: 1. Before reacting, take time to quiet your nervous system and let your first impulse pass. 2. See if you can intentionally soften your heart. 3. As soon as you’re feeling calmer, ask yourself, “What would I do here at my best?” 4. If you get a clear answer, do it. If you don’t, ask an honest question before making a statement. This simple shift—pausing to restore your own balance before attempting to restore the relationship—can transform a reactive conversation into a genuine reconnection. It’s an inside job.

When your high performers begin to burn out, it’s often because of the way they’ve sought to prove their worth.  Success at work can be intoxicating, and working long hours can help keep doubt and anxiety at bay – in the short term, and to some degree.   If you find yourself working compulsively and seeking constant recognition, the likelihood is that you’re trying to fill some internal sense that you’re not good enough.  No amount of external achievement or kudos can substitute for an internal void. Putting in long, continuous hours – and avoiding reflection on what’s driving you – will eventually result in the same outcome that any addiction does: diminishing returns, including productivity. Building in more time to rest, renew, and take care of yourself can offset the costs to your health, and to your productivity. But the solution that will prove more enduring is self-acceptance: learning to embrace all of who you are, including the parts you wish you didn’t have. It’s recognizing that no single quality defines you, for better or for worse, and that your intrinsic worthiness doesn’t rise or fall based on what you achieve. What might change if you allowed yourself to feel valuable independent of your accomplishments? It's an inside job.

Most leaders still operate from a simple but flawed assumption: working the most hours, the most continuously, leads to greater productivity. During The Energy Project’s work with organizations such as Google, Colgate and Neiman Marcus, we found something very different. When leaders model and support more sustainable ways of working, their teams report being more focused, productive, and engaged. Swipe below to learn more about how leaders shape their team's energy—for better or worse. It's an inside job.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I exchanged emails and notes with a wide range of people in my life for whom I feel gratitude and love. It was deeply nourishing, in large part because there is no previous time in my life when I’ve had such depth and breadth in my relationships, or when my heart felt as open as it does today. I’ve spent the last five decades searching for something that always seemed unattainable: a sense of comfort with who I am, and an unbreakable connection with the most important people in my life. Along the way, I learned a lot about why I was who I was and what held me back. What didn’t change much was my belief that I still fell short, in spite of the confident persona I wore in the world. The hunger to prove myself to others dogged me. I wanted to stand out, and I pursued external accomplishment and affirmation with a vengeance. I had high moments when I reached one milestone or another, but none of them lasted. Self-acceptance was elusive. The opening to a different kind of freedom hit me like a thunderbolt. Out of nowhere one day, it dawned on me that most of the worst things I had said about myself, and that I imagined others said about me, were not only true, they were truer than I could bear to contemplate. But this was the saving grace: they were only one part of what was true. I was much more than the parts of myself that caused pain. The more I could embrace all of who I was – for better and for worse – the less I had to defend. At first, this was more of an idea than a felt experience. But over the last ten years, that’s changed. It began with moving my attention from what I was thinking to what I was feeling, in my body, and my heart, where our deepest experiences and emotions reside. With help, I began to open up space to feel my deepest fears, and the sadness that lay beneath them. I discovered a part of me that could tolerate these feelings, and even feel compassion for them. I felt less need to protect my heart. When I opened up to the most difficult emotions, I also opened up to the most positive ones, including love and joy. These shifts have reshaped nearly everything about my life. I know now that nothing I get from outside myself will make me feel enduringly better on the inside. I feel less compelled to prove anything, and far freer to trust that my intuition – a palpable experience in my body – will lead me where I need to go. I can certainly fall back into old patterns, but I am much quicker to notice and take responsibility for them. The simple truth is that I’ve become a bigger human being, and a better leader for it. The work we do at The Energy Project provides clients with a very detailed guide to navigating the inner world that most of us haven’t spent much time exploring. But I’m also more and more convinced that the most powerful ingredient in our work with leaders is simply seeing so much more in them than they yet see in themselves. It’s an inside job.

Most leaders think of power as binary. You either have it or you don’t. Through decades of working with leaders, I’ve discovered there are actually three distinct forms of power—and understanding them changes everything about how we lead. Internal power flows from our core self, requiring no defense. External power comes from our position and conferred privileges, ranging from wealth to education, to gender and race. Defender power arises when we feel threatened, leading us to try to exert control over others. Most leaders I work with are masterful at accumulating external power while remaining disconnected from their internal power. This is why some of the most “powerful” leaders still feel powerless. What would your leadership look like if you understood all three faces of power—and could choose consciously how to use them? Swipe below to learn more. It’s an inside job.

I spent the first two decades of my career as a journalist, writing about other people whose work interested me. It served me well for many years. But I also had a deeper hunger to be part of the doing, and not just the chronicling. When I began to consider alternatives, I created a simple framework to guide me in the right direction. I looked for the intersection of three elements: • What am I genuinely good at? • What do I most enjoy doing? • Will this work allow me to make a meaningful contribution in the world? Many of us fall into career paths and then stick with them because they’re what we know, even when they’re not satisfying. Over time, that became true for me. My restlessness grew. I wanted all three elements to align. The three questions above led me to the work I do today: helping others tap into their full potential by better understanding what they really want, and what internally stands in their way. Think about your own work. Do you have all three elements – skill, enjoyment, and meaning? What’s stopping you from finding your sweet spot? Finding it can change everything. I know because it happened for me. It’s an inside job.