Newsletter #17

The Invisible Forces That Drain Your Energy

Hi there,

Do you ever feel like you're playing by rules that someone else wrote for a game you didn't even choose to play?

It’s an intriguing question, isn’t it?

And I have to say it sums up exactly how I felt for years.

Back in 2015 I was running an agency and doing well by most measures. We had good clients. We were growing revenue. We were winning lots of creative and effectiveness awards. From the outside, everything looked positive. And it was from the business’s point of view. But from a personal point of view, I was struggling.

Every morning, I woke up feeling empty. Like I was trying to win a game I didn’t really want to play.

The harder I worked to try and fix this feeling, the more overwhelmed I became by expectations. From work colleagues. From family members. And especially from myself. I really wanted to do well in the ‘successful business leader’ game but nothing I tired seemed to quash that quiet desperation underneath. I just didn’t seem to be able to align myself with the job I was lucky enough to have.

That’s when I turned to alcohol to make the feeling stop. I couldn’t beat it, so I tried to drown it. I obviously knew it wasn’t a great strategy. But it worked for a while - until it didn’t. And then my drinking stopped being a saviour and became an issue.

At the time I thought alcohol was the problem. But as I’ve discovered over the past few years, drinking was my solution. It was my way of trying to quiet that constant background sensation of being misaligned.

The Energy Traps We Can't See

I recently read something that made sense of how this misaligned feeling may have come about. It was a concept called ‘pendulums’. Pendulums are energetic structures that feed on human attention and emotion.

Think of them as overarching stories or belief systems that are held tightly by different groups of people. Essentially ‘groupthink’ on a big scale.

Political movements are pendulums. Corporate cultures are pendulums. Social media debates are pendulums. As are family dynamics, football club supporter groups and our modern view of business success. Some pendulums are relatively positive. Some are highly toxic. But they all exist because we collectively feed them with our attention, thoughts, emotions, and reactions.

There are two very important points to be made about pendulums.

Firstly, they do not come from our authentic selves. They come from outside our own consciousness. They are not always based on truth. And they are never based on our truth. That’s why we must be very vigilant when we sense a strong pendulum influencing our thought processes and life decisions.

Secondly, pendulums actively hunt for participants.

They use hooks. Emotional triggers that snag your attention. A news headline designed to outrage you. An advertising message created to entice you. A new office policy that eats at your thoughts for days. A social media post that makes you question your views about someone.

The pendulum doesn't care if you're for it or against it. Opposition feeds it just as much as support does.

When I look back at the struggles I had in 2015, I see now that a large proportion of my beliefs, motivations and actions at work were all under the influence of the ‘business leadership success’ pendulum celebrated by our modern, hyper competitive, consumer-driven culture. It’s a pendulum of growth, profit maximisation, and very little emotional sentiment.

That’s not to say this pendulum didn’t work for others. It clearly did. And does. It just didn’t work for me. Something inside me couldn’t align with it and I suffered as a result.

And that’s not the only pendulum I’ve unknowingly tustled with.

I've lost count of the times I’ve been hooked by a pendulum that was none of my business. Getting pulled into arguments I never meant to have. Being drawn to acting in ways that I knew weren’t good for me. Defending positions that weren't mine to defend.

When I look back I can see how these pendulums had me marching to their tunes without me realising it.

But now I do realise it. And I now have a name for it too.

The Clever Disguise

What makes these energy traps so dangerous is how they masquerade as important causes. The way things are. The way things should be. The truth. They convince us that engaging in their energy is important. And even meaningful.

But notice how you feel after you’ve engaged in one of these negative pendulums. Especially the ones fuelled by fear or anger. You feel out of kilter. Uneasy. Misaligned.

That's the pendulum sucking away your good energy. It takes your life force and gives back drama, stress, and endless mental chattering. It replaces high vibrational energy with low vibrational energy.

This is why you can be doing all you can to win but feel like you’re running the wrong race. You’ve been hooked by a pendulum that suggests you ‘should’ be working hard to achieve XYZ but inside you don’t really want to achieve that.

It turns out that XYZ is important to the pendulum. But it’s not important to you. And this is why you feel wrong inside.

You're following external guidance. What your boss expects. What society demands. What the media says matters. Meanwhile, your internal compass feels ignored and rejected in its efforts to get you back on course to your true north.

The result is disorientation and confusion. The result is misalignment.

A Midlife Crisis?

I see this problem arising a lot. Especially in people hitting their 40s and 50s. It's not that they’re struggling to cope as much as I did. It's much subtler than that.

It seems that lots of people working hard to do what they're "supposed" to do, what the pendulums suggest they’re supposed to do, but have lost touch with what actually matters to them inside. I see people busying themselves with lots of activity but not finding any of the activity purposeful. I see people being productive but not being fulfilled.

Maybe you know this feeling:

• You're good at your job, but your job doesn’t make you come alive

• You make decisions based on what others expect rather than what feels right inside

• You keep thinking "once I achieve X, then I'll feel more settled" but X keeps morphing in to Y

• There's this quiet voice inside wondering "Is this it?" “Is this what I meant to be doing for the rest of my working days?”

I've talked to people across every walk of life who are all mulling over these conundrums. They describe exactly the same thing; they’re feeling the discomfort of misalignment.

Two Different Guidance Systems

Here’s what I believe is going on. We have two different guidance systems to help us navigate life. But most of us are relying almost entirely on the wrong one.

Firstly, there is our external guidance system. This relies on outside sources. Our external guidance system starts early with us picking up what parents and teachers tell us we should do. As we grow, we're flooded by what others think we should do. Our bosses. Our families. Society's expectations. The media.

This guidance system is primarily geared to keep us safe and secure. It focuses on meeting external standards and expectations. It puts us in constant vigilance. Comparison and competition are its watch words. Our logical, fear-based mind readily accepts these expectations as truth. We focus our efforts on avoiding judgment while trying to achieve success based on other people's criteria. This is exactly how pendulums get their power. Our external guidance system finds them irresistible.

Secondly, there is the internal guidance system that relies on information that comes from within. This system is influenced by the voice of your true self. Your inner authentic wisdom. It listens to your heartfelt values. It plays to your natural strengths. Your genuine interests. When you follow this guidance system, you tend to feel energised rather than drained. Aligned rather than scattered. This is the guidance system that hones in on meaning, connection and purpose.

But here's the problem. We've become so focused on following external guidance and being hooked by pendulums that we've drowned out our inner voice. We’ve lost the art of listening to our quiet inner wisdom. Consequently, we're making life decisions based on what we think we "should" do rather than what feels right.

That's how we end up playing someone else's game using someone else's rules.

Breaking Free

The solution isn't fighting these pendulums. Pendulums aren’t the problem per se. The solution lies in being mindful of which guidance system you are using to make decisions. And consciously choosing where you invest your attention.

This means recognising the hook of a pendulum before it catches you. This means nurturing the underutilised internal guidance system and giving space for the quiet voice within to be heard. This means noticing when your external guidance system and internal guidance system are pulling you in different directions. This means noticing the discomfort of misalignment and figuring out what your two guidance systems are arguing about.

When you stop unconsciously following the pendulum, and start consciously listening to your authentic self, something shifts. Your energy returns to you. You give your high vibration energy a chance to win. You not only feel better about life, you also improve your ability to create from genuine intention rather than unconsciously reacting to every little trigger that comes along.

The Quiet Spaces

Now you’re aware of these pendulums, watch how cunning, powerful and pervasive they are. Most of what feels "important" is usually just noise seeking food. Your authentic path, your path to purpose and fulfilment, lies in the quiet spaces you manage to carve out between the chaos of all those competing pendulums.

When you realign with your internal guidance system, choices become easier because you know what actually matters to you. Work feels less draining because you're motivated by heartfelt desire. You’re operating from your natural strengths. Playing by your rules. Succeeding on your terms.

That restless feeling gets replaced by a sense of being on the right path. That sense of misalignment gets replaced by a sense of freedom, wholeness and fulfilment.

Life changes when you choose the games you want to play.

And the games change when you stop playing by someone else's rules and start playing by your own.

So let’s play the games we were each born to play!

Until next time,

Simon