3 Steps to Cultivate Energetic Alignment For Your Tasks

There’s nothing more frustrating than having a clear outcome, a clear understanding of what you need to do, and high motivation to do it, yet still feel unable to take action.

You might feel like you “don’t want to” do the thing you need to do. There’s a voice in your head that might be telling you that you’re lazy, unmotivated, or incapable. That you’re a failure. That you don’t have what it takes.

This heaping of shame only makes the situation worse.

The truth is more complex and nuanced. You might be suffering from burnout, in an energy mismatch, or having resistance to something that is not even about the task at hand.

If you want to get to the root of why you’re struggling to take action, it’s important to understand your energy systems, and investigate your wiring

Read: How to Diagnose a “Motivation” Problem (and Fix the Right Thing).

This is especially important for people with ADHD, because our systems are highly attuned and highly vigilant.

You don’t have to be a victim to unpredictable energy states.

Here are 3 steps to help you take control of the situation and cultivate energetic alignment for your tasks.

(1) Track Your Energy States and Contexts

The better you understand your wiring, the better you can plan your environment and interactions to give you the energy you need for what you want to do.

We are like the protagonist in the “Princess and the Pea” story: even subtle disruptions or energy shifts in our environments or beneath the surface can throw us off our game before we even realize what’s happening.

Some fluctuations are part of our normal daily or monthly rhythms — you don’t have the same energy quality throughout a day or month.

Outside of these rhythmic fluctuations, there are also specific triggers that can influence our energy and bandwidth quality.

Sometimes it’s obvious, like poor sleep or nutrition. But other times it’s more subtle, like being reminded of a painful memory, feeling rejected by someone, or feeling a pang of loneliness.

Reading a single text message or an email can completely shift your state.

Become an investigator of your own experience. Make it a practice to track your energy, emotion, and bandwidth throughout the day. Notice when it peaks and when it dips, and the conditions that are present when it shifts.

Keep a written log of this. A few things to track:

• Shifts in your energy quality and emotional state
• Context: what environments, situations, people, and tasks help improve your energy quality and which ones suddenly zap your energy and desire. I also include music I was listening to.
• Your somatic experience: physical sensations you feel as your energy and emotion changes
• Thoughts that come up in your mind in these moments.

Often, the thoughts are a lagging indicator. Your body will always give you a signal before the thoughts materialize.

(2) Learn How to Cultivate the Energy You Need For a Task

When energy shifts feel random and unpredictable, it can leave us feeling disempowered and lacking control. This makes it hard to plan because you don’t know what kind of energy you’ll have at any given time.

Learning how to cultivate the energy you need for specific tasks will give you a sense of agency, control, and confidence, which itself helps cultivate better energy quality.

Your tracking logs will show you patterns in your energy states: the conditions that help you boost your energy and those that drain it.

Use that information to create experiments in generating the energy you need for different tasks.

You might realize, for example, that you need a specific type of workout before doing creative work, or that a specific playlist helps you sustain your focus and attention for longer.

Maybe you do better on phone calls when you’re walking around, which might be sign to experiment with walking meetings or calls instead of Zoom.

(3) Have a Backup Plan

There are times when, despite our best efforts, we just can’t cultivate the energy we need for a given task. Sometimes you’re in a low energy season, or a high stress situation that is impacting your energy. Other times, the environment you’re in simply doesn’t give you what you need to complete the task, and you’re unable to change the environment.

Aside from liberally dosing with self-compassion, it helps to have a backup plan.

Keep a list of tasks that fit your different energy states and environmental contexts. Instead of banging your head against the wall to try to fight an energy mismatch or an environment that isn’t conducive to your task, switch your task to suit your energy and environment.

As Arthur Ashe said, do what you can, with what you have, where you are.