Energy is Everything
Increasingly we’re all experiencing storms. We’re all leaders all of the time apparently. It was with these two propositions that I began an exploration of leading through storms at the fantastic St. Ethelburga’s. Where I ended up was an unexpected and welcome surprise (if not a neat and tidy set of answers).
Leading Through Storms is a relatively new Community Interest Company “building a community based on mutual learning, cycles of reflection and action to support our work as conscious leaders; active participants in life”. I found myself at an open session they ran in the City of London and, along with twenty-five others, smiling at the powerful at the prescient invocation “there is an emergency, we must slow down”. Taken lovingly through an exploration of our ‘restless energy’ we were led gently but propositionally to an enquiry about our own leadership practice in the face of the storms (literal but mostly metaphorical) we are all increasingly starting to experience.
Inspired by the work of the Deep Adaptation movement, whose work I find essential if gloomy reading and whom I’ve written about before, the facilitators encouraged us to call on our curiosity, generosity and imagination in service of some insight. All was proceeding well and then, in a group of six, Hazel said, with no apparent context, or at least none I spotted, “energy is everything”. It was one of those moments in which the world helpfully stood still for a few seconds while my whole being experienced something of an epiphany.
Energy is everything. The day before I had been listening to a BBC Radio Four program on nutrition, during which I learned two things I struggled to believe:
A calorie is a calorie, regardless of from where it came. A calorie from celery is the same as a calorie from chocolate. The reason chocolate is bad for us is the at it is much easier to eat 200 calories of chocolate than 200 calories of celery. That’s it, as simple as that. (And also most ultra-processed food has chemicals that make us hunger for more – which is downright mean but not relevant to my insight). If you are in doubt, try and eat 200 calories of celery and see if you have the time, perseverance and digestive capability.
The amount of calories we burn over a given period is determined by our gender, age and size, not by the amount of exercise we do. So a man my build and age expends about 2,200 calories a day regardless of what I do. I kid you not, listen to the program. I’m imagining it’s different for extreme athletes, but I’m not one of them and nor are any people I know. So I’m buying the premise. The only thing we have control of is what we choose to expend our energy on. It will get used, whether it be on running, watching TV, dreaming, catastrophising, stressing, laughing, raging, dancing, sleeping.
Energy is everything – back to the workshop. I was asked what I was avoiding – I realised it was hanging out with people who are either avoiding, raging against, or victim of, the climate crisis – read here for more description on that. I think I am afraid my energy will get drained away by them. But by avoiding them I risk losing contact and compassion.
I was then asked what is the future I wish to stand for (the future being a time of my choice). I picked age 70 and a desire to stand for acceptance and gratitude (as well as love and hope but to a lesser extent).
I was asked about what my leadership is and how I can manifest it in service of responding to these damned storms. I discovered/decided my power as a leader is in my optimism, my acceptance, my gratitude, my forgiveness, my hope and my compassion. This is who I am; ergo this is how I lead.
I’d explored all this and still wasn’t sure where I was going and then along came Hazel. ‘Energy is everything’. I remembered the radio four program and re-realised and re-imagined the two insights over again:
Energy is just energy. The energy to be afraid is the same energy to be grateful. The energy to rage is the same as the energy to laugh.
I will spend 2200 calories of energy per day, every day. The only control I have is what I choose to spend it on.
How can I spend more of my energy on the leadership I want to stand for? How can I spend less on avoidance, anger or hopelessness? This is my enquiry. 2200 calories per day, 15,400 calories per week. What will I spend it on? We’re all spending our energy every day. Imagine if we all made some wiser choices about how we did that? What might we cause?
So thank you good people of Leading Through Storms. I am grateful for your leadership and the energy you chose to spend on this activity. As I said at the start, there’s no neat and tidy answers, but for me a really helpful new way of looking at how to make a contribution.
PS The irony is not lost on me that my climate response needs an energy strategy.