#209: The Energy Audit

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hello again, my beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. Once again, I am still Melissa Parsons, your favorite general life coach for women and your favorite podcast host.

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And today I wanna talk about something called an energy audit.

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So back when I was first working with my one-on-one coach, Maggie Reyes, she and I went through and did what she called an energy audit.

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And the way that I like to think about this is a real energy audit is a thing that you can actually schedule to have done at your house, where someone comes out with a thermal camera and walks every square inch of your house, and that camera can show them something that you can't catch with your naked eye.

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That is exactly where your heat is leaking out of your house.

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So maybe it's a drafty window you'd stopped noticing because you had lived with it for years, or a gap around your doorframe, or a space where there's some poor insulation in your attic that's been quietly costing you money every single month, but invisible to you the entire time, right up until that moment where someone points the thermal camera at it and says, "Right there, that's where all the heat is leaking out of your house. That's where you're losing energy." I think most of us are walking around with the emotional and energetic version of that drafty window, but we don't have a thermal camera to catch it.

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So little leaks all over our lives, so constant and so familiar that they've become background noise. You probably have stopped noticing the draft after enough winters.

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You've stopped noticing an energy drain after enough years of it just being how things are. So today I want to be your thermal camera.

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We're gonna walk through five common leaks that I see over and over again in my own life and in my clients' lives so that you can start noticing where your own energy has been quietly escaping.

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And if you have other examples that I don't give you today, I would love to hear from you, so send me a message. Okay.

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Leak number one, and often the biggest, is spending time with people who don't give you energy by being around them.

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I have a client, who I love, whose husband does nothing to pour energy back into her or into their relationship. To be fair to him, he brings home a very nice paycheck.

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He also is constantly out in the yard when he's not at work, working on the landscaping, and their yard and their landscape looks amazing. So it's not that he does nothing, period.

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It's that beyond the paycheck and the yard, he's kinda just there, present in the house but not really contributing to the actual running of their life together.

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And unfortunately for my client, he complains often that she isn't doing enough.

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Meanwhile, she does all of the cooking, all of the grocery shopping and meal planning, all of the meal prep, all of the cleaning, all of the childcare, all of their social planning, the invitations, the RSVPs, the birthday parties.

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She does all of the gift buying, all of the permission slip signing. And here's my favorite thing, my favorite little detail, because it says everything.

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If my client doesn't make her husband's coffee and pack his lunch for work, he doesn't have coffee or lunch.

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He goes out and buys it instead because he genuinely does not know how to make the coffee or where to find the ingredients for a frigging sandwich in his own mother effing house.

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So of course my client is exhausted all the time. Living with this man is a complete energy suck, drained up as a decent guy because he brings home money and he puts stripes in the lawn.

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And I wanna name that specifically because this is one of the sneakiest versions of this leak. It's not always an obviously bad person draining you.

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Sometimes it's someone who's doing enough visible, countable things, the paycheck, the yard, that the invisible absence of everything else gets overlooked, including by the person living it.

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This leak isn't limited to marriages or partnerships, by the way. It's any relationship where you consistently leave feeling more depleted than you arrived.

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Be it a friendship, a family member, a work relationship. You don't need a dramatic story or a specific grievance to name it as a drain.

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Simply noticing that you feel worse after time with someone than you did before is definitely enough reason to pay attention. Okay. Let's move on to leak number two.

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Every reluctant yes that you give is a small energy withdrawal you don't feel right away. I've done a whole podcast on this before, and we can link it in the show notes. You know the feeling.

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Someone asks you for something, and there's a flicker, a half second, where your whole body says no, and then all of the sudden your mouth is saying, "Sure, happy to." That gap between the flicker and your mouth is where the leak starts.

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It doesn't cost you anything huge in that exact moment, but it compounds.

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Every yes you didn't mean is a tiny withdrawal from an account you're not tracking, and eventually you look up and you wonder why you feel so tapped out even though nothing catastrophic has happened.

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Nothing catastrophic happened. 100 small reluctant yeses happened. Okay, leak number three, unmade decisions.

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A decision that's just sitting there unmade costs you energy simply by existing, whether or not you're actively thinking about it in any given moment. Should I stay in this job? Should we move?

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Should I finally have that conversation? It sits open in the back of your mind like a browser tab you've never closed, quietly using up processing power you didn't realize you were spending.

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You don't have to be consciously agonizing over the decision every hour for it to be draining you. It just has to be unresolved.

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And if you are consciously agonizing over it every hour, it for sure is draining you very quickly.

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Leak number four, clutter, and I mean literal clutter and digital clutter, which is something that we all are unfortunately dealing with these days.

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The literal version, the junk drawer, the closet you avoid opening because you know what's going to fall out, the desk covered in a paper archeology of the last six months.

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Every time your eye catches it, even for a fraction of a second, it registers as one more unfinished thing. And here's the part people miss.

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It has a digital twin, your desktop covered in files with names like Final Final V2 Actual Final with a little asterisk. A downloads folder you haven't opened in years.

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A camera roll with 14,000 photos and no folders. Same exact drain, just relocated to a screen instead of a shelf.

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Both versions do the same quiet work, a low constant hum of unfinished business every time you're in the room or every time you glance at the folder.

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Okay, leak number five, unopened emails, unanswered texts. That little red notification number isn't neutral.

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Every message sitting there unanswered is a tiny low-grade obligation, whether or not you're consciously thinking about the person on the other end.

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You don't have to be actively worrying about it for it to cost you something. It's just sitting there unresolved the same way the unmade decision is.

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One more loop your mind has to quietly keep track of, even in the background, even while you're doing something else entirely. Okay, so let's talk about how to actually run an audit. How do you actually use this? A real energy audit doesn't end with the thermal camera.

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It ends with somebody who has come and done the audit handing you a list of all of the leaks and you deciding what's actually worth fixing.

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So I want you to start by just noticing without immediately trying to solve anything. For a day, catch yourself in each of these five categories.

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Who did I spend time with today that left me more depleted than when I started? Where did I say yes when I meant no? What decision have I been sitting on?

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What clutter did my eyes catch and flinch away from? What's sitting unanswered that I'm quietly carrying? You don't have to fix anything yet. You're just running the camera over every room.

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Then I want you to pick one leak, just one. Please do not try to do all five at once. That's how audits turn into overwhelm instead of small changes.

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Maybe it's finally saying no to one recurring commitment you've been dreading every time it comes back around. Maybe it's answering the three texts that have been sitting there for two weeks.

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Maybe it's tackling just one drawer in your bathroom. The point isn't a total life renovation by Friday. The point is closing one leak you can actually feel a difference from.

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Here's what I would love you to take from this. None of these five leaks are dramatic on their own. Nobody's rushing to the ER over an unanswered text or a junk drawer.

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That's exactly why it's so easy to live with these for years.

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They're not big enough to force a crisis, so they just quietly, continuously drain you as they compound, and you adjust to the draft instead of ever fixing the window.

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You don't have to wait for a crisis to be allowed to fix a leak. You're allowed to notice you're depleted and go looking for why, even when nothing is technically wrong.

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You're allowed to close one loop this week, just one, and see how much lighter that alone makes you feel.

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And if you're listening to this realizing you don't even know where to start, if naming your own leaks feels harder than it sounds, or you know something's draining you but you can't quite get underneath it on your own, I would love to be the person to help you.

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That's exactly the kind of work we do together in coaching. All right. Thank you guys so much. I love you for listening. I'll see you all next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!