An Energy Life Audit: Taking Stock of Where Your Energy Goes

This is an article about how your state of energy affects your everyday life. It introduces you to the concept of energy management. It includes some suggestions about how to manage where you are expending yours (and recharging it) to promote quality of life improvement. Work with the grounded energy audit included in the article to understand where your energy goes, reduce drain, and build sustainable self-management.

Intro

This is one for the people out there who are inspired to adjust their lifestyles to create something that is: more comfortable, meaningful, where they feel grounded, engaged and are able to meet their goals. It is an encouragement to think about where you distribute your ‘energy’ in the form of effort, emotion, and focus. It is also to encourage you to think about how you are ‘spending’ and ‘recharging’ yours. Applying the concept of ‘energy’ in this format helps one become more aware of the different layers of input and output that they are experiencing and expending each day is like having a life hack secret weapon.

For this article, the concept ‘energy’ is being used to encapsulate your state of biological repair, the ‘stamina’ and patience that you have to bring to a day, and how you feel as you go about living your life. It is the amount of ‘effort’ and ‘focus’ that you are putting in. For those who believe to make the link to spirituality – it also has to do with your overall wellbeing as a soul.

Energy is Everywhere: Manage Your Inputs and Outputs

Energy is everywhere. Although invisible, it is the currency of life. In one layer, it is like fuel defining how much ‘you’ that you have to give in a day. Your energy level is your ability to perform, be present, take care of your obligations, and to do care activities on yourself. It is also your ability to stay calm, grounded, and feeling well.

• A person who has their energy managed tends to be able to show up for (most) days feeling inspired, excited, in the flow, and clear headed. When irritations show up, they have the resilience to move through them and find their own proactive solutions. They are able to be strong for themselves and the people around them (without taking that mental hit for longer than a short moment if at all).

Sometimes we are ‘low energy’ it is because we have given what we had to give (or more than we have refueled for) and/or we are caryr

• Feeling consistently sad, dull, overwhelmed, always worrying about the ‘past’ or the ‘future’, being unable to ‘wind down’, feeling anxious, thinking about our clients, and not being able to be present and enjoy our ‘now’ moment (or not even having room for those at all) are all signs that our energy management strategy could use a little booster.

Where does energy show up in our lives? Everywhere! A person who works with patients, clients, or who is in close proximity (or in-depth interaction) with people all day long, or who works in a busy space tends to be exposed to (and expend) a high volume of energy. People who live in cities, who attend large events like festivals or concerts, or who are in classrooms or office spaces also tend to be exposed to high amounts of ‘energy’ (that they pick up in their own fields). It is common for people to not take account of this unseen dimension to feel depleted after expending their own in these environments.

Energy management is the process by which you identify what you are inputting-outputting in a day, what your goals are, and what your ideal state of being is as you go about achieving it. Once you know where you are thriving, where you are being less efficient, and where you need little tweaks you bring in ‘life hacks’ to keep it streamlined and flowing in the right direction.

Identifying Where Energy Management Can Benefit Your Life

One of the best ways to make a life improvement is to first, do a life assessment. Once you identify the spaces where you could use a little help, it is a matter of finding practices that fit into your schedule and take care of your specific needs. This is a short list of how to go about doing that. *Do not get overwhelmed – the thought here is to gradually make life adjustments that enhance wellbeing. Not to upend everything and shift it all at once!*

Perform a life audit

A life audit is a process by which you go through all of the things that you are doing in your life, determine which ones are providing you with what you need (or where you feel fulfilled), analyze how much time you are putting into things, and identify what you are getting out of them. It also takes into account which activities you are doing to recharge, repair, and to release or balance for the hardship or energetic heavy lifting that you encounter during work or life.

• What is your daily energy expenditure like? Where are you spending your energy (focus, attention, emotions?)
  • Do you care for clients, children, act as a police officer? Are you in school, doing research, or taking care of the planet?

• What is your daily recharge or repair routine? (Do you hit the gym, a glass of wine, or do your own grounding and release exercise?)

• Take account of your life for a week. Where are you feeling your most overwhelmed?
  • Looking at your week: is there a pattern to when you feel overwhelmed, such as going into crash mode at the end of a certain task?
    
    
• Which tasks, obligations or ‘relaxation activities’ are making you feel ‘drained’?
  • Do you have to keep working on that project? Is spending time drinking alcohol with that group of friends really ‘helping’? Are they necessary to continue? If yes, then it is time to figure out an energy management life hack that will help you adjust feeling tired and overwhelmed to being able to handle it more comfortably
    
    
• Take account of your life for a week. Where are you feeling your best?
  • What activities in your life make you feel the best? which activities make you feel recharged and inspired?
    
    
• Which work tasks, life tasks, relaxation activities or obligations ‘fill your cup’?
  • Where are you feeling loved, appreciated or thanked? What makes you feel alive and excited? What do you feel the best doing? Where do you feel fulfilled? Make sure that you are putting these activities into your life.
    
• What are your goals? What are your dreams?
  • Where are you making space for you to achieve what is important for you? Do you desire to get in better shape? Have you set aside a few windows for more excercise each week? Alternatively, do you strive to know yourself or the Universe better? Are you doing activities that help you get there?

Once you have identified what you are doing and had an objective look at your patterns, you are able to see things like a glaring lack of ‘you’ time where you are doing things that fill your cup. You are also able to help make things more obvious for yourself. For example, when you stop and think about your job or life from an energy perspective it is easier to figure out those ‘missing’ links:

• “I hear people talk about their problems all day – that is them ‘releasing’ their energy. I likely just picked that up in my energy field. I am not doing anything to release that. That is why I feel edgy and I cannot stop thinking about them.”
  
• “I am an empath. I also work as a nurse. I feel tired when I leave work and have nightmares all the time. I am likely carrying the energy of their illness with me in my field, that is why I feel so downtrodden.”

On the other hand, you may find that you are doing really well in life right now and you may just like to work with energy management to do even better.

• “I work with creative tasks. I am seeking a way to learn to hone my spiritual power so that I am lining up with all of myself to put my best foot forward.”

Create a daily (weekly, monthly) energy management strategy

Now that you have performed your life audit, you know where your major energy outputs are, which energy weights you are carrying each day, what your goals are, and how you are recharging and orienting toward them. This is where you start to get creative with it!

In general, I encourage people to look at energy management as a part of their everyday life

Energy management is something that we do on an ongoing basis. Ranging from that 20-minute walk before work to your daily energy clearing to your restorative time with friends, the moments that you take to release your load, fill your cup and rejuvenate are important to leading a high-quality life. It should be something fun that you feel good after. Are there some moments where you go into your energy management practice where you cry or curse? Absolutely – in fact, having those moments to feel and then expel is incredibly healthy.

As noted, I recommend that people do something to manage their energy each day. An energy pillar meditation (like I teach) or a moment of touching in with your soul and ensuring you are right with yourself becomes a power point of your day. Tools that  I highly recommend are

• auric field repair (where you cut cords from whatever you picked up during work or life and build up your auric shell that helps shield you from the world)
• energy alignment + self-connection activity (daily goal setting, energy body clearing)
• tune up activities where you replenish and focus

Each of these are core components in training and coursework at IndiCrow Academy.

The more emotion, danger, or ‘energy’ that they deal with in their regular lives, the more they need an energy management protocol! As anyone in a high stress or helping profession can tell you: working with other people can get heavy. So too can living in a big city or going to a crowded school. Taking time to let go of what you picked up from other people, to leave tasks, meetings and problems ‘at work’ allows you to be present. It also helps you not feel that slow process of mental breakdown that so many people who take on a lot often eventually work themselves to.

Working with small adjustments consistently brings big results

One of the most common statements that I get from people who know this is important but do feel overwhelmed at the very thought of it is that:

“I know I have to make changes, but I do not have a lot of time.”

To those people I say: This is not about making an entire drastic overhaul at once. It is about how to work with your knowledge of energy to make gradual adjustments that will enhance your quality of life. By implementing small, well placed techniques, you are able to get yourself into a more comfortable state of being. It may take a little moment to get things sorted out at first. If you are able to get over your own resistance hump and take an honest, slow approach, things will pay off. In fact, you will find you have ‘more time’ because overall, once you proactively manage your energy, you will find you have less breakdowns, exhaustions, and blow ups.

Energy Management Changes Lives

Taking account of this invisible little factor called energy has the power to change our lives drastically. Even if we are already aware of ‘it’ and doing things to manage it, a simple life audit and personal check in can go a long way. Am I creating space to feel well? Am I honouring my authentic life path? Am I engaging in balanced relationships? Am I taking account of how much I take on in my work each day?

Once you bring on board little changes and life hacks to help yourself manage this unseen dimension it becomes just like that exercise routine we once avoided. We wonder, “How did I ever live without that?”

So is the case for energy management.

Come back for more great energy management posts, this season!

Subscribe to my email list at the bottom of this article for more useful tips like this to your inbox