Plugging Your Energy Leaks: A Guide to Reclaiming Your Power
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In MTFS Episode 220, "Plug the Leaks," Dr. Christine Li brings powerful insights from her recent workshop that attracted over 100 participants eager to address their energy drains. Drawing from business coach James Wedmore's "leaky bucket" metaphor, Dr. Li guides listeners through identifying where their energy is escaping and, more importantly, why.
The episode reveals common energy leaks such as insufficient sleep, excessive social media use, overcommitment, and people-pleasing behaviors. However, Dr. Li's key revelation is that these issues often stem from a deeper source: lack of self-trust. She explains how building self-trust and following through on commitments can transform energy drains into opportunities for growth and vitality.
Through workshop participant examples and practical guidance, Dr. Li demonstrates how listeners can reclaim their power, make better decisions, and create meaningful changes in their lives. The episode includes information about accessing a free worksheet for personal reflection and details about an upcoming five-day challenge focused on decluttering and energizing your home environment.
Timestamps:
[00:02:23] - Explanation of the metaphor "leaky bucket" as it relates to businesses, schedules, and energy, and the idea of reclaiming energy.
[00:03:40] - Workshop insights: Listing examples of energy leaks such as not getting enough sleep, social media scrolling, and overbooking. Attendees identify overlapping themes.
[00:04:50] - Transition to tracking energy and caring for it better as part of the healing process.
[00:05:21] - Question to attendees: What's blocking you from plugging your energy leak? Responses include procrastination, lack of time or energy, and feeling distracted.
[00:06:57] - Importance of mastering clarity, energy, and purpose to enhance productivity and manage schedule better.
[00:08:54] - Root cause discussion: Dr. Christine Li identifies lack of self-trust as the central reason for energy leaks and explains its effects on behavior.
[00:10:22] - Reflection questions: Where do you need to trust yourself more? And examples of trusting oneself for better outcomes.
[00:13:28] - Benefits of self-trust and making commitments to oneself: Creating clarity, boosting energy, and enhancing accomplishments.
[00:17:23] - Final reflections: Encouragement to explore solutions, embrace self-improvement, and continue personal development.
[00:18:54] - Invitation to worksheets and five-day "Reenergize Your Home" challenge to address energy blocks like clutter.
To get the free worksheet that accompanies this episode, go to: https://maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/leaks
To register for Dr. Li's upcoming 5-Day Challenge (starting March 3rd) called Re-Energize Your Home, click this link: https://maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/spring2025
For more information on the Make Time for Success podcast, visit: https://www.maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com
Gain Access to Dr. Christine Li’s Free Resource Library -- 12 downloadable tools and templates to help you bypass the impulse to procrastinate: https://procrastinationcoach.mykajabi.com/freelibrary
To work with Dr. Li on a weekly basis in her coaching and accountability program, register for The Success Lab here: https://www.procrastinationcoach.com/lab
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Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 220. In this episode, we're going to discuss where your energy has been leaking and why you might be reluctant to plug those energy leaks and the surprising reason why you might be having energy leaks in the first place. This is all gonna be answered in this fun episode, and I'm gonna share also some tools for assessing where your energy has been going and how to make better use of the precious energy that you do currently have. It's a really kind of more in-depth episode. It's one that requires you to think about what is actually happening with your time, your space, and your schedule, and I look forward to sharing this episode with you now. Hi. I'm Dr. Christine Li and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach.
Dr. Christine Li [00:01:03]:
I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body, and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the make time for success podcast. So I called this episode plug the leaks because I have a coach whose name is James Wedmore, who oftentimes uses the metaphor of business and saying that if your business has holes in it, holes in terms of things that you're just not taking care of or you're not paying attention to in the right way, that it's kind of treating your business and having your business run like a leaky bucket. And, of course, none of us wanna have that kind of thing for a business, and we wouldn't want that for our schedule. We wouldn't want that for how we run our homes. We wouldn't want that for our families either.
Dr. Christine Li [00:02:23]:
We wouldn't even want it just for a plain old bucket. So I thought I'd put together some material to help people to help you reclaim any energy that you might be missing right now and that might be leaking out of your energy store or your energy bucket. And what I did a couple of days ago was I, on the fly, decided I was gonna create a workshop about plugging these energy leaks, and lo and behold, more than a hundred people registered for this idea and this live workshop. And the workshop was last night. And I'm very happy to be able to share some of the activity and the questions and the answers that happened last night at the live workshop. And I hope that you will pay close attention to this episode because I think you can get a lot out of just answering the questions that I shared with my attendees last night. The first question I asked was, what is your energy leak? Just plain and simple. Where do you think your energy is leaking from? What is it leaking because of? And I got a very wide and very interesting range of responses as you can imagine.
Dr. Christine Li [00:03:40]:
Some of the answers were things like not getting enough sleep, which you can imagine is a big source of energy loss, I will say. And social media scrolling is yet another source of energy loss. Another person said they had too many responsibilities, and other people said things like they were overbooking, overscheduled. And some other people mentioned that they were caring too much about things. They were people pleasing or not having great boundaries with friends or relatives. So you can see this is a wide range of subject matter and topics. But when I asked the attendees, do you see the overlapping themes in the responses, everyone said yes, because we're all human, because we all share these little buckets of energy that we have to pay attention to every day, every week, every part of our lives. And, yes, some of these require a lot of energy, and some of these areas take a lot of energy from us.
Dr. Christine Li [00:04:50]:
So that was just the setting the stage for the healing process and for the eye opening process of just deciding, I'm going to track where my energy is going, and I'm gonna care for it a little bit better just because I want to. The second question I asked everyone at the workshop was, what is blocking you from plugging that energy leak? And if I may say so, I think just that question itself is a little bit of a healing event because it basically gives people the sense that they have control over what is happening. So often, even with, let's say, social media scrolling, you kind of get carried away, and you lose sight of the fact that you can stop scrolling anytime you want to. We oftentimes do. But then so often, we let hours go by, maybe precious hours, when we could be doing something more fulfilling or more meaningful or more important, and we just let it go by because we've got this leak in our bucket. So I had attendees also respond in the chat what were some of their ideas about what their resistance was to blocking or plugging up their own energy leaks. And those responses were interesting as well. Some of the answers were in the category of procrastination.
Dr. Christine Li [00:06:21]:
I'm just delaying. It's an old habit of mine. Some people said, I feel like I have a lack of time, or I'm really lacking energy. I don't have the motivation to do that. And then other people said things like, I feel so pulled in every direction and distracted that I don't really know what to do. So some confusion elements were in there as well. And, again, attendees noted that there were overlapping themes. Right? We we're not life is not that complicated where we have thousands of themes to go through every day.
Dr. Christine Li [00:06:57]:
No. We're typically dealing with some confusion, some overwhelm, some energy loss. But if we can learn how to master that system of managing our clarity and our energy and our purpose or where we're headed, our direction, the stuff that we want to get done in the course of a day, I think that is a fantastic idea to try and get to, a fantastic state of being. So the thing that I taught at this point in the workshop was that not only do we have control over when we stop and start behaviors and habits and actions, we also have now, because we're attending workshops and trying to get coaching and trying to look at how we're doing things in our lives, we also have the power to transform what is happening within ourselves. So often we're blaming our outside or environment or our circumstances, like how overbooked we are for our problems, for our anxiety, for our sense of disappointment maybe or frustration with how things are going, when I believe we can have a shortcut when it comes to this analysis, and we can turn inward and look at what is happening inside of us. What I did with the attendees was I said, you know, can you guess what are the reasons for your resistance? And they gave a lot of great reasons, but the one I was thinking was the central reason for all the issues was not mentioned. And so I did the big reveal, and I said, you know what? It's not really procrastination, and it's not really Instagram, and it's not really the fact that you're overbooked. Really, what it comes down to is that you're not fully trusting yourself.
Dr. Christine Li [00:08:54]:
So the issue that is causing all the energy leakage that we were discussing, all the different types across different people, was really self trust. So again, I want you to note this for your notes. Self trust is the basic reason why most of us, maybe all of us, have some form of leakage of energy, and I will go on to explain this. Think about it. When you don't fully trust yourself, then you're gonna do things like procrastinate, hesitate, say yes to things that you don't really wanna do, mess up boundaries with other people, give over your time to things like social media because you're gonna be avoiding things that you might otherwise be doing. So it's actually that lack of trust in yourself that causes indecision, that causes feeling like you're just doing the same old same old thing with no better results. Right? You're using the same habits, and you're trying to solve the same problems day after day instead of actually finding effective solutions, the ones that will really work, the ones that might take a little more energy from you, but would actually plug that hole in your bucket. So think for yourself at this moment, dear listener of this podcast.
Dr. Christine Li [00:10:22]:
Where do you need some boosting or some firming up in your self trust? Where do you need to trust yourself more? And the answer might just be your answer to question number one, where am I leaking my energy? You might just say, you know what? I need to trust myself more when it comes to getting enough sleep. I need to trust that I will survive without scrolling in the middle of the night, and I will trust that my problems will get solved in the morning instead of me staying up all night worrying about them all the time and having all my energy dribble away, so I feel fried when I wake up in the morning. We no longer wanna feel fried in the morning. We wanna feel calm, purposeful, like we have a full tank of energy, and that we trust ourselves. That is such an important piece of well-being. And then something beautiful happened in the session. Members started talking about the different scenarios and the different qualities of their particular relationship with self trust. And I think people are connected to the work that I do oftentimes because there is a piece of self trust that is missing, that is maybe there but hasn't been able to be recognized or hasn't been given airtime.
Dr. Christine Li [00:11:52]:
Sometimes people come from families where they aren't respected as autonomous beings, as independent voices, as people with ideas and opinions of their own. And then certainly there are other types of family circumstances and environments where anxiety is the name of the game. So forget self trust. You're feeling like you are working towards survival instead of really knowing yourself and really trusting your opinions and your actions and trusting that everything is going to work out. But that's the benefit of being in midlife and being a full grown adult because you may come with wounds and with different background stories that you may wanna forget or wish were a little bit different. But as an adult, you have this massive power now, this massive power of not only hindsight, but the power to rewrite and rewire how your body and mind work when it comes to new challenges, when it comes to responsibilities, when it comes to, am I gonna scroll social media another half hour, or am I gonna stop now? You really have such a high level of control when you allow that control to be used. Right? It's basically allowing ourselves to develop another skill that's really important. Self trust is one skill.
Dr. Christine Li [00:13:28]:
Another skill that is really important to control your energy and make sure you have enough energy across the day, and that is knowing how to abide by your commitments, knowing how to use your word to decide what you're gonna do, and then you follow-up with that. You actually commit to your word. You commit to the promise you make to yourself, and then you get that thing done. And you know what that is? That is an energy boost. So no longer are we talking about energy loss. We're talking about ways to actually make ourselves stronger, more vibrant, more joyful, more proud of ourselves, more accomplished, and filled with energy, filled with life energy, I would say, this zest for life. Because we know that when we say something, we mean it. When we mean something, we do it.
Dr. Christine Li [00:14:26]:
When we do something, we feel proud of ourselves, and the world is a better place because we've made good on our word, and we've used our creativity in productive ways. And I think this is a really wonderful cycle of energy preservation and nurturing our energy instead of watching it dribble away into TikTok or Instagram. And I love both TikTok and Instagram, so no judgment there. But I would say use Instagram and TikTok for pleasure and joy, not for escaping the fact and the reality that your energy's going out the window. That's my wish for everyone listening. And I hope when you spend time listening to things like this podcast and when you go seek other good input in your life, that it feeds you, that it reminds you that you are so wonderful, so magical, so powerful, and that really all time is precious. So whatever time you can grab for something good for yourself, go grab that time. Don't let that energy leak out because you don't need to do that anymore.
Dr. Christine Li [00:15:39]:
So now we're at the point in this episode where I will ask you to just take a few minutes, maybe now, maybe later in the day today, if you're at work or busy with family or whatever else you're doing, Sometime before the night is over, please do sit with these questions and work something through for yourself. Make a decision to pay some attention to where your energy is going and make some adult decisions that aren't painful, but may require some shifts in energy within you. If you believe in yourself at a deeper level, you're going to be capable of much, much more. So yes, it's going to require some work, but then you're going to get such payback. It's going to be beautiful payback. It's going to be payouts where you're going to feel like, wow, I understand myself a whole lot better. I understand how my childhood might have been not optimal, but now I get to use those lessons and that reality to create new lessons for myself and a better reality. I wish that for all of you listening, and I wish that for myself as well.
Dr. Christine Li [00:16:54]:
As you know, I'm a self improvement and life improvement junkie, so let's do this. So some final thoughts. I just know that my own reflections after running the workshop yesterday was that everyone already knows what's up. Right? You don't have to tell people what they're struggling with. They know. People know. You know. And what I'm here to do is just to remind you that you also have access to solutions.
Dr. Christine Li [00:17:23]:
There really, I think, is no such thing as a dead end when it comes to self improvement. There are always angles. There are always coaches. There are always podcast episodes. There's always another day for you to try something differently, And there's always a new identity that you can step into. You're already that person who has all the things that you know you want. It's just right there. It's just a couple steps away.
Dr. Christine Li [00:17:49]:
I promise. So if you'd like a worksheet to go and do some of this reflective work with, you can get the plug the leaks worksheet that I made for the workshop for yourself by going to maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/leaks. That's l e a k s. Again, that's maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/leaks. And then I want to also invite you to my upcoming five day challenge called reenergize your home, and that will be starting Monday, March 3. And we'll be spending five days together live getting the energy blocks out of your home, and that energy block is in the form of physical clutter. We're gonna get rid of some of that clutter, maybe all of the clutter for those of you who are really energized. And I invite you to join me for that free event by going to procrastinationcoach.com/spring2025.
Dr. Christine Li [00:18:54]:
Again, procrastinationcoach.com/spring2025 to register and get all the details about how to join the challenge. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope it does do a world of good. I'll see you next week. Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website, maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes, and all the resources we mentioned on the show.
Dr. Christine Li [00:19:33]:
Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. Talk to you soon.