One of the most common challenges facing my coaching clients is a good old-fashioned lack of capacity. They just don’t have the time and energy they need to fulfill all their professional, creative, and personal aspirations.
Often, I encourage them to let go of their kinda important commitments so they can devote themselves to the most important ones. Other times, we look at mindfulness practices as a path to more spaciousness. Other times, we look at sleep and physical movement as a path to greater vitality.
But what I usually find most impactful is something else entirely.
In the 2001 Pixar classic Monsters Inc., the energy grid for Monstropolis is powered by “scream.” The monsters go into children’s bedrooms, scare them (I’m sure causing lifetimes’ worth of emotional scarring in the process), and harvest the scream which then powers the monsters’ homes and industries. But… (SPOILER ALERT!) by the end of the movie, they discover that “laugh” is actually a much more powerful and efficient energy source. So instead of scaring children, they learn to make them laugh.
For me, this serves as an apt metaphor for how we humans try to motivate ourselves. So often, we motivate through fear-based energies – shame, blame, criticism, comparison, judgment, not-enoughness, etc. We believe that if we can create a sense of scarcity or impending threat, then we will naturally push ourselves forward. Honestly, so many folks I talk to seem utterly convinced that this is the only way to power their lives. If they didn’t do this, they’d lose all sense of inspiration, drive, or commitment, they seem to believe.
So for anyone out there who needs to hear this, I wanted to take a few moments today just to declare definitively that that is absolute horses**t! In fact, I am willing to promise you this. Every single one of us can absolutely cultivate all the energy we could ever need to sustain our lives and careers through joy-and-love-based energies (e.g., passion, purpose, curiosity, service, learning, etc.). And when we do so, we cultivate a much greater sense of joy, grace, and ease (and inflict much less emotional scarring on ourselves).
What would it look like for you, even just for a few days, to try this out? What would it look like to just let yourself see what happens when you quit it with all the fear and scarcity and let yourself be energized by whatever you truly love?
