When the Battery Runs Dry
I once sat with an executive who had just completed a 14-hour day, preparing to do the same tomorrow, and the day after that. She looked at me with exhausted eyes and said, “I feel like I’m running on fumes, but I can’t figure out where the leak is.”
This wasn’t burnout – or not only burnout. It was something more fundamental: a complete disconnection from the natural rhythms that sustain life. She had become, as so many of us have, a machine running a program that never included an “off” switch.
In my 26+ years of coaching, I have witnessed a curious and sad epidemic. Brilliant, capable leaders who can optimize complex systems, manage multi-million-dollar portfolios, and orchestrate global teams – yet who have utterly forgotten how to rest. Not “rest” as in collapse on the couch with a movie (though that has its place), but rest as a generative, nourishing state that actually replenishes rather than merely distracts.
The theme of energy and balance feels both timely and ancient. Timely because we are collectively depleted in ways that our productivity tools and wellness apps have failed to address. Ancient because every wisdom tradition has grappled with these questions, and arrived at surprisingly similar answers that our modern world has systematically ignored.
The Myth of Energy Management
Here is a confession: I used to teach “energy management” as if energy were a bank account – deposits and withdrawals, budgets and investments. Eat well, exercise, get your eight hours, and voilà! Balance achieved. Check the box. It was tidy. It was rational. It was also, I have come to realize, spectacularly incomplete.
The problem with treating energy as a resource to be managed is that it keeps us in the same mechanistic paradigm that exhausted us in the first place. We optimize our rest. We hack our sleep. We schedule our recovery like another meeting. And somehow, despite all this careful management, we remain fundamentally depleted.
What if energy isn’t something we manage at all? What if it is something we participate in, like a living exchange between ourselves and the world that requires different ways of being, rather than better strategies?
Through my work in somatic coaching, I have observed something that neuroscience is only beginning to explain: energy moves through the body in ways that cognition cannot control. You cannot think yourself into vitality. But you can learn to sense when your body is open to receiving it, and when it has clamped shut against a world that feels overwhelming.
The Somatic Truth About Balancing
Here is where I need to make a crucial distinction – one that has transformed both my coaching and my own life. We tend to speak of “balance” as a noun, as something we either have or don’t have, like a possession we have misplaced somewhere between the morning commute and the evening emails. “I need to find my balance,” we say, as if it were hiding under the couch cushions.
Balance is not a destination. It is a verb. It is something we do, moment by moment, breath by breath. Watch a dancer, a surfer, a tree in the wind, a dog. They are not in balance. They are constantly, actively balancing. The moment they stop making those micro-adjustments, they fall.
This shift from noun to verb changed everything, both for me and my clients. When balance is a state to achieve, we feel like failures every time we wobble. When balancing is a practice to engage, the wobble becomes information, like feedback from life about what this particular moment requires.
I worked recently with a leader who complained of chronic fatigue despite impeccable sleep hygiene and a gym membership he actually used. Through somatic exploration, we discovered something fascinating: his breath never traveled below his solar plexus. Years of stress had literally taught his body to breathe in half-measures, as if full breath was too risky, too much aliveness for a world that demanded constant vigilance.
When I invited him to simply notice his breath, as a neutral and curious observer, something shifted. He felt the restriction for the first time. And in that noticing, the breath began to deepen on its own. Not through effort. “Simply” through awareness.
“I have been holding my breath for what feels like forever,” he said, tears unexpected on his face. “I didn’t even know I was doing it.”
This is the somatic truth about energy: we cannot receive what we are braced against. And most of us are bracing against far more than we realize – against vulnerability (I am intimately familiar with this one), against stillness, against the terrifying possibility that if we slow down, everything might fall apart. Or worse, that we might discover there is nothing holding us together except the motion itself.
The Enneagram Lens: Nine Ways to Exhaust Yourself
One of the gifts of the Enneagram is its precision in revealing how each of us uniquely depletes ourselves. It is like having a personalized map to your own particular flavor of self-sabotage, which sounds depressing until you realize that knowing the pattern is the first step to freedom.
Type One exhausts themselves through relentless perfectionism, forever correcting a world that refuses to be corrected. Type Two gives until there is nothing left, then feels resentful that no one noticed their emptiness. Three achieves and achieves, running ever faster on a treadmill that promises worth but never delivers it.
As a Type Eight myself, I know intimately the particular drain of refusing to show vulnerability. The energy it takes to maintain that protective armour! For years (decades, truth be told), I wore exhaustion like a badge of honour, proof of my capacity to handle anything. What I didn’t realize was that my insistence on handling everything was precisely what was draining me. Strength without softness becomes a siege against life itself. One of the more potent wake-up calls (I tend to be a slow learner and so need them periodically) for me came through colon cancer, which showed me in a profoundly experiential way what I have been doing, and what I have been neglecting.
Each type has its own relationship with energy, and its own way of forgetting how to balance. But here is what makes the Enneagram so valuable: it doesn’t simply describe our patterns and then says, “Have a nice life with it.” It points toward their dissolution. Every type has access to healthy energy when they stop performing their habitual dance. Ones find energy in acceptance. Twos, in receiving. Threes, in being rather than doing. And so on, around the circle – nine paths back to the same essential aliveness that was never actually lost, only obscured.
Nature as Teacher: The Original Energy System
After completing my Ph.D. in Applied Eco-Psychology, I began taking clients outdoors – though, admittedly – sometimes with hesitation, wondering if corporate leaders would find it too “woo-woo.” What I discovered was startling. In nature, energy conversations change entirely.
Sit someone depleted by fluorescent meetings and email avalanches next to a stream, and something happens that no amount of life-hacking can replicate. The nervous system begins to remember what it knew before cubicles and commutes: that we are part of a larger living system, and that system is constantly offering us energy – through sunlight, through birdsong, through the simple rhythm of waves or wind.
I facilitated a session once with an exhausted team leader in a forest during late autumn. He watched the trees releasing their leaves without drama, without resistance. “They are not tired from letting go,” he observed quietly. “They are lighter.”
That single insight, that release creates energy rather than depleting it, transformed his leadership. He started dropping responsibilities that weren’t truly his to carry. He stopped meeting every problem with more effort and began asking what could simply be allowed to fall away.
Nature doesn’t seek “balance” as a fixed state. It balances constantly, dynamically, through cycles. Day and night. Growth and rest. Expansion and contraction. Seasons. The rhythm is built into the very structure of existence. And we, despite our smartphones and schedules, are still part of that existence, still invited to participate in its dance, whether we accept the invitation or not.
The Discourse Shift: From Performance to Presence
Something has been shifting in coaching conversations. I feel it in my own practice and hear it echoed by colleagues worldwide. The old language of performance optimization is giving way to deeper questions. Not “How can I do more?” but “Why am I doing what I am doing?” Not “How do I increase my energy?” but “What am I spending myself on, and is it worthy of my life?”
These questions can feel threatening in organizational contexts still addicted to growth at any cost. But they are also, I would argue, the most important questions for our time. Because the energy crisis isn’t just personal. It is both collective and planetary. We have organized our societies around extraction: of resources, of labor, of attention. And that model is showing its cracks everywhere we look.
In supervision conversations, I have noticed supervisees increasingly bringing questions about their own sustainability, and not just their clients’. How do we hold space for others’ despair without drowning in it? How do we stay open-hearted in a profession that constantly exposes us to struggle? How do we practice balancing when the systems we work within are profoundly imbalanced?
These are not technical questions. They are existential ones, and they deserve existential answers which need to draw on ancient wisdom as much as modern science, that honour the body as much as the mind, that recognize we are not separate from the world we are trying to help.
Practical Alchemy: What Actually Helps
So what does work? After decades of exploration – through my own burnout and recovery, through thousands of coaching hours, through study of traditions ancient and modern – I offer these thoughts as invitations to experiment with:
Learn to read your nervous system before your to-do list. Each morning, before opening email, take thirty seconds to actually sense your body. Are you braced? Collapsed? Somewhere in between? The state you start in will colour everything that follows. Thus, adjusting it before the day begins is far easier than managing its consequences later.
Practice micro-transitions. The space between activities is where energy either renews or hemorrhages. A single conscious breath between meetings. A moment of stillness before picking up the phone (friends who call me know that I pick after 3 rings). These tiny pauses are not luxuries; they are opportunities to actively balance before the next demand arrives.
Find your particular drain. Use whatever framework speaks to you – the Enneagram, somatic exploration, self-inquiry, or any other contemplative practice – to discover the specific way you lose energy. Generic advice rarely helps because depletion is personal. The perfectionist needs different medicine than the people-pleaser.
Go outside. Regularly. Without agenda. I know this sounds simple to the point of insult. But research on shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) confirms what poets have always known: nature restores capacities that nothing else quite reaches. And it works best when we are not trying to “use” nature for productivity gains; it is when we simply let ourselves be part of it. And, sorry – going for a walk or a run with several podcasts to “catch up on” does not count as presence.
Question the stories that justify your exhaustion. “I have no choice.” “This is temporary.” “Other people depend on me.” These may be true. They may also be prisons we have built from half-truths. A good coach or supervisor can help distinguish between genuine constraints and self-imposed ones.
The Ecology of Enough
As I write this, I sit outdoors, feeling the brief afternoon sun warm my shoulders. A hummingbird visits the feeder nearby, with all that furious energy in a creature weighing less than a nickel. Yet even hummingbirds rest, entering a state called torpor each night where their metabolism drops to a fraction of its daytime rate. They seem to understand something we have forgotten: sustainability requires rhythm. They don’t achieve balance; they balance, over and over, wingbeat by wingbeat, rest by rest.
The question that haunts me these days isn’t “How do we find more energy?” but “What would it mean to have enough?” Enough energy. Enough accomplishment. Enough productivity. The very question feels almost subversive in a culture that has made “more” its unofficial religion.
Yet that is the inquiry I believe coaching must hold, both for ourselves and for our clients. Not endless optimization but genuine sustainability. Not higher performance but deeper presence. Not the illusion of permanent balance but the living practice of balancing, where we are able to respond to what each moment actually asks of us from grounded and aware presence.
Balancing, in the end, may be less about achieving equilibrium and more about practicing trust – trust that we can rest without falling apart, that we can receive without having earned it, that the universe is not fundamentally hostile to our thriving. It is an active trust, renewed each time we wobble and choose to adjust rather than brace.
Indigenous wisdom traditions have carried this understanding for millennia: that we are held by something larger than ourselves, that reciprocity is the law of life, that taking and giving must remain in dynamic relationship. These are not primitive ideas to be transcended. They are sophisticated truths we are being invited to remember and practice.
The work of coaching, in this age of tilting horizons, may be less about helping people achieve their goals and more about helping them question whether their goals are worth their lives. Less about energy management and more about energy communion. Less about balance as a problem to be solved and more about balancing as a dance to be joined, again and again, with each new breath.
May we find the courage to rest before we collapse. May we learn to receive as readily as we give. And may we trust that in the ecology of existence, the invitation to balance is always available, as a practice we can begin, right now, in this very moment.