Why Energy is Everything with Simon Alexander Ong

So you are the author of this incredible book, “Energise”, you are a life coach; you’ve quit the day job to now appear at big companies doing their annual events and big talks, you’ve been on BBC and Sky News, so you’re kind of living the dream now, right? Was this the end goal, like a book and to have this type of career?

It’s interesting, Kira, because when I set out to leave the corporate world and begin on the entrepreneurship path, all I wanted to do was to just build a thriving coaching practice, right? What I realised is that as we begin doing the things that we’re passionate about, suddenly it opens a lot more doors. I started to do a lot more speaking, I started doing media work. I have now written a book. I’m looking at doing some more exciting projects later this year and so a lot of these things weren’t in the plan. But as I’ve grown wiser and older, what I’ve realised is that my key goal is just to be better than who I was yesterday and be open to what comes my way.

Right, that’s one of the most powerful things. So let’s take it back for people that maybe haven’t come across the book yet or don’t know much about you.. Take me back to life before being a life coach, because you’ve got some really good stories in this book about what that turning point was, but we’d love to know more about that.

Yes. So I grew up to two Malaysian Chinese parents here in the UK, and it was a very stereotypically strict household. It was the expectation that the children would grow up and they would do well academically, they would go to a good university, they would get a job as a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant.

And so when I graduated from university, I entered the world of finance at what was probably the worst possible time. It was the middle of 2007, a year before the global financial crisis and just to make things a little more interesting, the company that I started with was Lehman Brothers, which collapsed four months after I joined. So while it was a painful and challenging moment to go through redundancy, to see that the industry that you had worked hard to get into was now no longer the place it once was, it was very tough. But at the same time, I look back at it as a blessing in disguise because it kickstarted for me the longest journey that we as humans make, which are the inches from our heads to our hearts. Never an easy journey, but the most fulfilling and exciting that we will ever embark on and that got me thinking about what else there was outside of the world of finance, because for so long I was in this bubble.

Exactly, there’s this illusion that once you’re in that you’re good, you’re set, that’s it, nothing’s going to change and that’s your constant. So I completely understand that. Was there a day, a moment, an event that was finally for you, the pivot, where you thought, something’s got to change?

It isn’t easy. So the first hint of a pivot came in the job after Lehman Brothers. So after Lehman Brothers, I went into a hedge fund and on the outside, it looks like that was a very successful role. But the reality was, being the most junior in the team, I wasn’t actually doing very glamorous work. I was doing the photocopying, I was getting tea for everyone, I was getting people’s lunches, I was in the earliest, I was out the latest, and it was killing my physical and mental health. I remember there was a moment one Christmas when I was out at a client entertainment event and I texted my girlfriend at the time and I said to her, “I’m going to be back by the last tube. I’m going to last tube home and I’ll be back about an hour after that”. Now, of course, she didn’t hear from me once I entered the club and I somehow stumbled outside midmorning, caught a taxi, got back home and tried to sneak in and lie in the bathtub so she wouldn’t notice that I was back home.

The next thing I knew when I came to a bit of soberness was that she was there, in tears, kind of thinking, “what happened? I was worried sick. No matter where you were, I couldn’t contact you, you didn’t answer your phone”. That for me was the first realisation that if what I was doing was going to cost me my mental and physical health, it simply wasn’t worth it. So I deliberately switched jobs. So I resigned from that job, stayed within finance because that is all I knew at the time. I moved into something that was much kinder on the hour, so I moved into a research role, which was nine to five. It meant I could come home and focus on my physical health, my mental health, and that began to give me a good baseline of energy to then go on to explore what I really wanted to do. I tried different things, but ultimately I came back to the fact that I really enjoyed helping people. I had friends of mine that would come to me when they had a problem or they had a big decision to make, or they were going for a challenge. I thought it was just being a good friend. I never knew I could get paid.

You talked about something interesting there, which was that you had to firstly get a few things in order in your life, such as looking after your mental and physical health. And you refer to that in the book as the pillars. For me, that feels like a really actionable way to just start feeling better day to day. It doesn’t mean you have to quit your job, but it’s just some things that they can start to implement. Can we talk about those pillars? Because you refer to three, so what are these pillars that you believe everybody needs to just be grounded in?

Sure. So the three pillars are first, sleep, second, movement, and the third is nutrition. The reason I began with health as the very first chapter of my book is, simply put, without your health, you can’t do much. To the healthy individual, they will have lots of hopes, wishes and dreams, but to the sick, they only have one. And if there’s anything that we learn through the COVID pandemic, it is the fact that we must stop making our health a side hustle. We’ve got to create a good foundation of strong health where we’re getting sufficient rest and sleep. We are moving our body on a regular basis and we are feeding our body right. Because we got that in place, we’ve got a fantastic springboard to then move towards the goals that we have in our life.

Exactly. Without that, you can’t function. I think a lot of people in their minds think it’s nothing or it’s everything such as saying “Okay, I’m going to become an exercise freak. I’m going six days a week” and I always tell my clients to scale it back, because you don’t have to exercise six days a week. You can just do general movement, such as walking. What would be your optimal recommendations for the number of hours people should sleep, how they should exercise, and how they can start to look after their nutrition?

First of all, you have people that say you should get six, you should get seven, you should get 8 hours of sleep. Now the true answer may lie somewhere in between, and I think it is different for all of us. The best measure to understand if you need more sleep is when you wake up in the morning, do you feel exhausted or do you feel energised? Now if you’re always feeling exhausted when you wake up, that is a telltale sign that you need more sleep. I would aim for six to eight hours a night. But what you really want to start doing is to make your bedroom a sanctuary. Make it a place that you want to go into to rest and get some good sleep. When you go to a hotel, when you’re on holiday, we all love sleeping in a hotel because it’s primed for good rest. Now, if we’re spending over a third of our lives sleeping, it makes sense to invest in the place that we’re going to rest. So I always say to people, start with the room that you’re spending your most time sleeping in. Make it a sanctuary, make it somewhere you want to go into.

Then escort all the digital devices out when you go to sleep. That is key, so that you’re not distracted by all of these things that demand your attention. One of the things I advocate is consistency over intensity. A lot of people, when they start the New Year’s resolution, say, I’m going to go to the gym, I’m going to get fit. You want to start small and even if it’s just ten minutes a day, ten minutes a day is doable for all of us. The way that I like to think about it is that even if it’s just 1 hour a day, when you look at 24 hours, that’s less than 5% of your day. Now, I think we can all find less than 5% of our day to move our body. When we think about exercise, most of us some days will say, I don’t feel motivated to exercise. But I guarantee you that once you move your body, you never regret it.

Like doing it, but by the time you’ve done it, you never regret it. Because what you’ve done by exercising is you’ve elevated your energetic state. And when you do it first finger today, whatever, the day throws you away, you’re in a much better position to handle those challenges and those issues on nutrition. I think a great way to think about it is if I reference the Arsen Venger story, which I talk about in the book. Arsen Venger spent time as a manager in Japan before moving to England to manage Arsenal. One of the things that shocked him was the difference in what the football players ate in Japan. They had a balanced diet. They were eating rice, meat, fish and vegetables. Very balanced, very much in moderation. He came to the United Kingdom and he noticed that football players had three course meals, they had big desserts. And he said in a press interview, if you are eating sticky toffee pudding on a regular basis, you are going to play like one. And so he transformed their diet in the process, created one of the leanest, fittest Arsenal teams that there has ever been.

It’s crazy. We’re stressed, so we drink more coffee, we have more sugar, and then we’re more stressed and then we reach and it’s just vicious. It is a cycle, isn’t it? It is that conscious thinking before you even pick it up “that’s not going to make me feel better” and just being able to become really hyper aware of the things that you’re putting in your body.

I think what helps this is a great tip for all of us, is we want to design an environment around us that makes it impossible not to succeed. So when it comes to nutrition, if you’ve got junk food hiding in your cupboards, if you’ve got leftover, takeaways in your fridge, guess what? When you’re hungry, you’re going to grab the first thing that you can. But if you eliminate those things and replace your snacks with, say, healthier options of fruit or nuts, water, no sort of fizzy drinks in the fridge, then what happens is when you are hungry or you’re thirsty, you’ve got healthy options available, of course. And I think that can have a profound impact on our energy levels.

I couldn’t agree more. So you talked a little bit in the book about being on autopilot, and I would say probably a scary number of us are on autopilot. Let’s break down what autopilot means, because it’s not a good thing, is it, to be on autopilot? Whereas many of us think, oh, everything’s on autopilot, I’m functioning, I’m comfortable, it’s good. But what would your definition of autopilot be? And why is it potentially quite dangerous to just be living life like that?

Sure, the reason autopilot is dangerous is because what happens is you get so conditioned to a particular routine that the longer you are on autopilot, the scarier it is to change where you are. And what happens is that you begin living as if you are never going to die and then die having never really lived. And so that is why it’s important for us to awaken. Now, to awaken means to be self aware. If you have no self awareness, well, you cannot change the fact that you’re on autopilot. You’ve got to first know you are on autopilot before you can course correct. And that’s why you cannot have self development without self awareness.

So once we’re aware we’re on autopilot, the question then is, how am I going to live with intention? How am I going to live each day, each week, each month with intention? And the process of doing that begins with the end in mind. So a simple question we can ask ourselves is when we start the day, how will I know that today will have been a productive day for me? Not for my boss, not for my manager, not for my company, but for me alone? How will I know that today will have been a productive day? And that sets you with some focus, some clarity as to how you’re going to proceed.

You seem very busy because you must recognise sometimes in your private clients that they are living in a routine, that maybe they’re not very happy, that they’re just very comfortable. Is it by asking questions that you start to get to the route? Is that the starting place for trying to make change?

There’s a saying that goes, “if you want better answers, ask better questions”. The reason questions are powerful is because it creates space. It creates space for exploration. And part of being a good coach is being curious. So when somebody comes to me and they say, “I feel a little lost or I don’t know what I want out of life”, I just get curious, “what makes you feel like you’re lost”? That just opens up a beautiful space to explore. It’s kind of like if you imagine this analogy of Sherlock Holmes sitting on his armchair asking the person who’s come with this new crime that has happened? And Sherlock is just asking questions so he can piece together what has happened and kind of see how he can start the journey to find the answer. It’s the same way as coaching. We ask questions in order to understand somebody’s landscape. We all have different landscapes in our mind, and questions help us to understand who someone is, what’s important to them, and how we can guide them forward.

What’s interesting about that is you ask the questions because the person already has the answers, right? But we think we’re coming to a life coach to be given the answers. Okay, how do I get to the next stage in my career? My life coach is going to tell me, actually no, you’re just going to ask the questions because the person already internally, we all know.

I think sometimes we have to discover the courage to take the next step. We all know what that next step is. We just very often lack the courage to take that step.

Do we all know what the next step is? That’s another interesting one, because very often we do.

I think that when we are born, we are gifted with certain talents, skills, and abilities. If we look back at our childhood or even our teenage years, there would have been certain things that we would do naturally that to others. They would look at us and say, how did you do that? Why are you always so good at this? Why are you always so good at that? But as we grow older, we suppress those talents because we feel we have to conform to a certain path. So now it’s like we have to meet certain targets in order to feel successful.

Now what happens is we’re following somebody else’s definition of success and not our own. And I think that’s what creates this feeling of exhaustion. We are exhausted, not because we are physically doing too much, but because, one, we’re doing too little of the things that bring us joy, and two, because we are running someone else’s race. So simply pausing, taking a step back and asking ourselves, “what does success mean to me alone? My definition, my definition alone, what does it mean to me? Also, what impact do I want to have in the world”? I think once we start answering those questions, our challenge is to then build a life around those answers.

You may have answered my next questions, as it’s about people listening, watching this going, okay, “well, great, you guys have got to figure it out. You’re running a company. Simon’s now a life coach flying around delivering these speeches like, good for you, but I can’t. I can’t because I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got children, I’ve got responsibilities” . You’ve mentioned it is a really nice place to start, just answering some simple questions for yourself. What other things can they do to start to reposition that type of thinking? Because we all started there. I mean, I started there, thinking how could I possibly give up this career?. So for people that are feeling utterly helpless and going, nope, you’re on one side of the table, I’m on the other, how can we start to bridge that gap a little bit?

Well, the first thing I will say is that I don’t have it all sorted out altogether.

But it’s an illusion, I guess, that they see.

I think it’s important to understand that first. Whoever we admire, whoever we look up to, every one of us, regardless of where you are on the spectrum, we are all winging it to some point. Now, it might look different depending where you are on that spectrum, but every time you move up a level, you still have challenges. The challenge just may change. When I first started my business, my challenge was, how do I get clients? How do I make this a sustainable business? And then as I grew, my next challenge became, how do I hire the right people? And then the next challenge is, well, how do I manage my time? Who do I outsource work to so I can go and do the things I enjoy? So you still have challenges, they just evolve as you evolve. Now, if you’re in a position where you think that that that’s great, but I’ve got these restrictions of I’m a parent or I’m a single parent, or I’ve got this obligation, I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got this, that’s controlling what I can do and what I can’t do. The first thing we can do is to shift our focus away from what we can’t control to what we can now.

Within each of our lives, there will be things that you can’t control and things that you can. Most of us spend too much time focusing on the things we can’t control and that paralyses us with overthinking. So during COVID as an example, many of us were just watching the news every single day, focusing on the one thing we can’t control, which is, how long is lockdown going to last? When are we going to come out? What can I do? What can I do? Well, we can’t control that directly, but what we can control is our response. How am I going to respond to the constraints that I have around me, I can’t change that, but what can I control? And I guarantee those listeners that there is always something that you can control, however small. There is always something that you can control, however small. Start there and start expanding your circle of influence. As you do one thing, you realise, actually, I can control this as well. I can control that. And if it’s important enough to you, you will find the time and energy to do so.

That is the shift in energy right there, isn’t it? It’s the focusing on the things we can control, which means you start doing those things, which means your energy lifts a little bit and then you do the next thing and then there’s a bit more feedback. I would love you to give us a tip on how to get out of a bad mood quickly, because all of us have been in this position. Is there an exercise we can do that will flip?

The fastest way to get out of a bad mood, and as you said, we all are going to have them at some point. Is breath counting as simple as that? When you get overwhelmed by an unexpected event, you’ve missed a train, you’ve missed a meeting, you’ve had to cancel something, pause and just count to 20 breaths. Full breaths. And what that does is it grounds you in the present. It reminds you that actually, there are still things that are good in my life and maybe this could be a good thing.

It reminds me of the Tower story about this old Chinese farmer. One day, his horse escaped from his farm and the villagers came together and they said to the farmer, what bad luck. The farmer said, Maybe, maybe not. The next day, the horse returns with four wild horses and the villagers rejoice. They say what? Great luck. Do your horses return and you’ve got four additional horses. The farmer again says, Maybe, maybe not. The next day, the farmer’s son tends to one of these wild horses, breaks his leg in the process. And the villagers say, what bad fortune that your son has broken his leg? Farmer says maybe not. And on the final day, the army moves through the village, recruiting all able bodied soldiers, all able bodied men to fight in the Great War. Except the farmer’s son. Farmer again replies, Maybe not, when the villagers rejoice in what great fortune.

Now, what we can learn from this story is that many of us are like the villagers. We’re quick to react, we’re quick to judge, we’re quick to be consumed by the event. But what if we were to respond in the same way as that Chinese farmer? To pause, to just ground ourselves and realise that we can choose our response because it’s not what happens to us that matters, but how we choose to respond to what happens to us. That is the real trick. That is the real trick to bending reality to work for you and not against you.

What you’ve just said there as well, it’s what we can control and what we can’t control. Now, let’s talk about a bigger scenario. So somebody is not just in a bad mood for a short period of time. They’re looking to make a very major life change, and they recognise that they’re not happy. We’ve talked about exercise and better sleep, but are there any other exercises that you would really choose for them to take on?

If you’re going through a particularly bad period at the moment and you want to elevate your energetic state, the fastest way to feel elements of happiness and joy is to do an exercise that I call Gratitude with Intention. It’s three steps.

The first step is to write down the first person that comes into your mind who you can be grateful for. So it could be a colleague, it could be a close friend, a family member, even your partner.

The second step is to write down why. Why did you choose this person in as much detail as you can? What have they done for you? How have they supported you? How have they been there when you needed them?

The third step, this is where the magic happens. Pick up the phone, call that person and tell them exactly what you wrote in step two. Now, if the person doing this is not comfortable calling them, at a minimum, what you want to be doing is to drop a voice note at a minimum, because when we express our appreciation through voice, we share our energy. The person receiving it can feel their energy. If we simply type it, the recipient has to make up the emotion that came with those words. But when a voice carries that message, it just hits completely different. Studies have shown that if someone is not going for a particularly good time, it can have a profound impact on their level of happiness.

I love that exercise. It’s like, why don’t we do that more often anyway? Why aren’t we just calling one another more just to say I really appreciate you. Going back to just what I was saying about being in a bad mood and people may be going through a bad time in their life, are negative thoughts always going to be present? Do you have bad days, Simon?

Yes, we all do. We are human, so by our very nature we will have bad days. We are humans living an energetic experience in the sense that we go through the full spectrum of emotion. There’ll be days when you feel happy and joyful. There’ll be days when you feel sad and down and like you just don’t want to do anything. That’s just part of living the human experience. Now the question is not whether you can eliminate negative thoughts because we’re all going to have them at some point. The question is how are you going to deal with them? This speaks more to our relationship with those thoughts.

I think when we understand that we are not our faults, but we are merely to observe them, what we can do is understand that at any given moment we can choose a new fault. I think that is a very powerful realisation for any of us, because we like to think there’s one reality. So when something happens, we think, oh, everybody must feel sad or everybody must feel happy. But actually there are customised realities. So when an experience you go through occurs, the way you interpret it might be very different to the way your friend does. What that informs us is that we are simply living the feeling of our thinking moment to moment to moment. If we can choose a new thought, we can change the fabric of our reality. If we’re aware of that, what it means is that, yes, when you have that negative emotion, feel it, embrace it, that’s just part of the human experience. Then choose how you want to respond to it.

There’s a term that I share in a book called Pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. Paranoia is this belief that people around you are trying to sabotage your progress, whether it is a colleague of work that for whatever reason, is trying to stop you getting promoted or people are trying to screw you over. That’s what we call feeling paranoid. Pronoya is the belief that the universe is conspiring in your favour, that life is working for you and not against you. I think when we view the world through that lens, then we seek the lessons from every experience that we go through. But it does require an element of humility. A lot of us let ego take over, and ego is thinking things such as, I know everything. Why me? Why didn’t I get this? Why didn’t I get that I should be there? This is coming from a place of ego and it means you’re not willing to learn. Whereas if we operate from a place of humility, which is, “what can I take from this experience? What is this trying to teach me?”  Then what happens is you’ve turned that negative experience into a potential positive because it now becomes fuel for your journey ahead.

We’re always going to have ego, aren’t we? So we’ve always got to be on a journey of learning, right? From what you’ve just said, the bad days help you recognise the good ones.

For any of us, if we look back at our life, there will always be dark moments, personal, professional. But what we come to realise is that those dark moments, those challenging times, those setbacks and failures, they equipped us with the wisdom and the insights to create the most beautiful moments of our life. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t know how strong and resilient we really are and we wouldn’t have got the lessons we now had because of them.

There’s a really scary statistic in the book that says that we have 60,000 thoughts per day (which just in itself is like, wow) and 80% of them are negative. So powering them, just getting control of your mind is really everything from the basis of that statistic. So all of these exercises can really start to shift in your favour, right?

It’s all about rewiring the way that our mind works, because the person that we speak to the most in our lifetime is ourselves. So even if you might say to someone, this is the year I am going to do ABC, that doesn’t matter. If you then go away into your own space, your mind, and say, Actually, can I do that? Which is often what we say to ourselves. We might say something externally, but what we say to ourselves is different. That’s why managing how we speak to ourselves is so important. We have all of these thoughts in our heads. How do we start to focus on the more empowering thoughts? The thoughts allow us to take action. Otherwise, what happens is we have no step to take forward, we have no progress made, and we just keep going around in circles.

I think, again, this is great, because just being able to switch out one word for another, the power of that. I actually just read a quote this week about how women are more likely to put the word ‘just’ into emails and the author said, take the word ‘just’ out. I think if we did this, it would be better, as it’s a more powerful statement.

Yeah, words are powerful because what happens is words can affect us emotionally. So the one that I gave in the book as an example is a lot of us say to ourselves, I should do something or I need to do something. The reality is, if you say those words to yourself, there’s a very low probability you will take any action. Many of us need to sleep more, many of us need to work out more, many of us need to eat better. Do we? Probably not. Until the should and the need becomes a must. I must eat better, I must exercise more regularly. I must do this. The difference is, when you use the word must, it has a more definitive feeling to it. It’s like you telling your subconscious that we have made a decision.

There’s a conviction, isn’t it?

There’s a conviction. And what happens is your mind jumps to step two. Step two is a place of action. Because you first have to make a decision before you can take action, and a path only emerges when you’ve made a decision. So once you say to yourself, I must do this, your brain then jumps to “how are we going to do it”? Now you’re in a place of action. Then your subconscious starts to look around, “Oh, there’s a new gym class just opened up. There’s something that I can do. I can go to a friend. My friend told me they’re going to this workshop or this class”. But if you are using the words ‘need’ and ‘should’, you haven’t yet got past step one of making the decision, and that’s where words can be very powerful. So change ‘should’ and ‘need’ to ‘must’. The example you shared with taking out ‘just’, it’s really to understand “what are my words conveying and how can I edit that and be aware of what I’m saying? So that actually they empower me and energise me to take some action”.

Another one that we often say to ourselves is, “I can’t do something”. Now, just adding the word ‘yet’ can be very powerful, “I can’t do this yet”. What that means is that we can do it at some point, but maybe not just at this point. Whereas when we say, “I can’t do this”, it’s definitive and we stop our progress. Whereas if I say, “I can’t do this certain activity yet”, then it still opens a door for me to learn how to do it. So we’ve got to be very careful of how we talk to ourselves. Another example that I want to share is that we often complain about our days where we say, “I’ve got to go to work, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to go to these meetings”. It feels like a chore when we say that. But imagine again, if we change just very simply, the word ‘got’ to ‘I get’. “I get to go to work, I get to spend time with my family, I get to do this, I get to travel”. That comes from a place of gratitude. “I get to spend time with my audience at the event. I get to engage with a lot of people through my work. Now, it comes from a place of joy where I got to do something”.

Talking about language, which is a tool that we all have, most of us have, also brings me on to writing, another form of communication and tool. You’ve got some really nice excerpts in the book that talk about the power of putting pen to paper. Such a simple thing, but what it does to your unconscious and what comes out is powerful. Can you just touch on that briefly as well?

It’s interesting because when I talk about journaling, I’m often assignment. “Can I do it on my phone? Can I do it on a laptop, on iPad or an app? Or do I just have to do pen and paper?” I always suggest pen and paper because if you do it on a digital device, chances are you’re going to get distracted, because often we don’t just have one thing on our devices, we have multiple things. We have different tabs, we have different things that are open at the same time. We’ve got notifications coming in. When you have a pen and paper ready, what happens is you have to slow down in order to process your thoughts. What you’re writing onto paper, you’re connecting your mind with the physical reality of words onto a blank page. That means you’re processing your thoughts and you’re creating some clarity and you need that space. I often say that silence is far from empty. It is full of the answers and the insights and wisdom that we seek. We can only connect with that if we’re downloading those thoughts onto paper. Otherwise those things will get lost very quickly or we get overwhelmed by them.

I remember Richard Branson was asked a question where somebody put the question, what is the best tip you can give to entrepreneurs just starting out? And he reached into his suit jacket in his inner pocket, he pulled out a notepad and pen and he said, make sure you always carry a notepad and pen because you never know when you are struck with an insight when an idea has come across from a conversation you’ve had. Or you just need to write down some thoughts so your mind is clearer when you download all of those things onto paper. One, your mind feels lighter, but two, you’ve now got some reference point that you can build ideas and steps from.

Another thing that I think is so powerful, pen to paper, like on a digital device, you can just delete it, thinking “oh, I didn’t like that sentence. Let me write it again”. But actually the power is in just letting it flow and then rereading it back. Let’s go to energy now, because obviously the book is called “Energise” and energy is everything. It’s the final chapter of the book. I’d love you to give your definition of why our energy is absolutely everything.

Our energy is everything because, as you said, how we show up influences what happens in our world. Now, we’ve touched on faults a number of times in this conversation. Faults are nothing but energy. You can have positively charged faults. You can have negatively charged faults. Now, when you have a positive charge fault, what happens is that it sends a particular charge down your body. It energises your body, it inspires you to want to take action. And when you show up with a certain level of energy, you start to attract things.

Here’s how it works in practice. You might go to a networking event and there will be two people that are coming towards you who want to introduce themselves to you. Now, imagine one person for a moment, not particularly looking confident, not particularly looking sure of him or herself. The other person, a bit more confident, and it feels that there’s some good energy coming out. Who are you more likely to speak with? Chances are it’s a second person. They haven’t said a word yet. But what happens is they tap into the fact that energy introduces you before you even speak and how you show up.

People feel that when I’m on stage, for example, I’m talking to the audience. Yes, they might remember some of the things I said, but more likely they will remember my energy. I think it was Maya Angelou that said, people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. And that’s all to do with energy. When you show up in a certain way, you start to attract things into your life because you’re vibrating at a much higher level than you were before. When I think about energy, it’s important to divide them into four sections. So in the book, I talk about physical energy, mental energy, emotional energy and spiritual energy.

For most of us, we tend to only focus on physical energy because it’s the obvious one. “I need to get more rest. I need to move my body. I need to feed myself”. The mental energy is about our ability to focus, understanding our mind, and also accessing our creative energy. Emotional energy is how we relate to ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we respond when things don’t always go away. Then spiritual energy is simply about, are we doing the things that are important to us? Are we doing something that allows us to express who we are?

Now, if you are filling your buckets in all of these areas, then naturally you’re going to go into the world full of energy. And that’s why energy is everything. Because when we start to work with our body and with our mind not against it, what happens is that anything becomes possible.

I love it. I feel like we’ve actually tapped on each of those buckets in this conversation in one way or another. My only hope was that we give people listening at least one task that they can take away and use in their day to day life.

This book is just so actionable, and that’s what I loved about it. It wasn’t a lot of big ideas with no clear path. There’s so many activities and little things that you can start to just introduce into your life. I loved reading it and loved this conversation. Thank you so much for being my guest.

You can watch the full interview here

You can listen to the full interview here