Fractals of Change

Energy

• Mary Schaub • Season 2 • Episode 33

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Energy is the most fundamental pattern running through every living system—and most of us are barely paying attention to it. In this solo episode, Mary Schaub traces the pattern of energy from thermodynamics and cellular biology through psychology, relationships, organizations, and social movements, making the case that energy is not a metaphor or a wellness buzzword—it's a precise, observable, cross-domain force that shapes how we live, work, love, and change. Drawing on her own story of how this show began, a client case study in energy misalignment, and research from neuroscience to elite athletic performance, Mary offers both a framework for reading your energy honestly and three practices for managing it with intention.

✅ Key Topics

  • What energy actually means across physics, biology, psychology, and systems thinking—and why the pattern is the same in all of them (Mary Schaub)
  • Activation energy and the threshold principle: why starting is always harder than sustaining (physics/athletics)
  • Freud's concept of libido as life energy and Jung's psychic energy—why suppression redirects rather than eliminates (Freud, Jung)
  • Prana and pranayama as ancient energy management systems (Ayurvedic and yogic traditions)
  • The brain's energetic cost: why chronic uncertainty is exhausting and clarity is physically restorative (neuroscience)
  • Client case study: Dina, a healthcare executive whose energy misalignment was structural, not personal
  • How this show itself emerged from Mary tracking her own energy
  • Emotional contagion and co-regulation: how nervous systems affect each other's physiological states (research on relational energy)
  • Gottman's "bids for connection" as an energetic exchange model (John Gottman)
  • Losada's research on positive-to-negative interaction ratios in high-performing teams (Marcial Losada)
  • Organizational energy states: from resigned inertia to productive engagement (Heike Bruch & Sumantra Ghoshal, IMD/London Business School)
  • Social movements as activation energy events—and why the trigger is never the cause
  • How algorithmic attention economies harvest and deplete collective energy
  • Three practices: Audit, Boundary as Energy Management, Renewal as Discipline
  • Jim Loehr's research on energy—not time—as the fundamental currency of high performance (Jim Loehr)

 

💡 Takeaways

  • Energy is never created or destroyed—it is converted, transferred, concentrated, and dispersed. This isn't just physics. It's the pattern underlying how people change.
  • The hardest part of any change is crossing the activation energy threshold, not sustaining momentum once it's established.
  • Suppression doesn't eliminate energy—it redirects it. What you don't let yourself feel in one place shows up somewhere else.
  • Chronic uncertainty is energetically expensive. Clarity releases resources the nervous system had locked in open loops.
  • Depletion is not a character flaw. It is structural information about misalignment—and it has structural solutions.
  • The highest performers aren't those who work the most hours. They're those who manage recovery deliberately.
  • A boundary is not a wall. It's a selectively permeable membrane that regulates what flows in and out of your system.
  • The most transformative moments for clients rarely come from adding something new. They come from stopping something that was quietly draining them.
  • Rest is not a reward earned when the work is done. Recovery is where the system actually builds.
  • You cannot give what you don't have. Sustained depletion is not noble—it's a solvable structural problem.

 

🎤 Memorable Quotes

  • "Energy doesn't lie. And once you learn to read it, you realize it's been telling you the truth about yourself—and everyone around you—all along." —Mary Schaub (cold open)
  • "You are, at the most fundamental level, a pattern of energy moving through time." —Mary Schaub (on cellular biology and identity)
  • "The emotion you don't let yourself feel in one context tends to show up somewhere else. In a snapped comment. In a late-night scroll. In a physical symptom. The energy needed an outlet, and it found one." —Mary Schaub (on suppression)
  • "When you start treating energy as a pattern rather than a tank, the question shifts from how do I get more of it to how do I connect my energy to what I value and monitor with skillful awareness." —Mary Schaub (Dina case study)
  • "The trigger is rarely the cause. The cause is the accumulated energy of thousands of people reaching a threshold simultaneously." —Mary Schaub (on social movements)
  • "We are, in a very real sense, harvesting each other's activation energy for purposes that don't serve us." —Mary Schaub (on attention economies)
  • "Depletion is information, not weakness. Aliveness is information, not indulgence." —Mary Schaub (closing)
  • "Where is your energy most alive? Not where it should be. Not where it looks impressive. Not where you've been told it ought to go. Where is it most alive? Start there." —Mary Schaub (closing)

 

🔗 Resources

 

Keywords

energy, pattern of energy, thermodynamics, activation energy, psychic energy, prana, pranayama, nervous system, emotional contagion, co-regulation, energy audit, boundaries, renewal, recovery, high performance, organizational energy, social movements, attention economy, entropy, mitochondria, jim loehr, john gottman, carl jung, fractals of change, leadership, burnout, transformation, inner work

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

SPEAKER_00

You felt it before you had words for it. Walking into a room and feeling something shift. Sitting across from someone and sensing, before a single word is spoken, that this conversation is gonna cost you something, or maybe give you something. That invisible current running between people, between moments, between a life that feels like yours and one that doesn't. Think about water, not still water, moving water. A river doesn't announce where it's going. It doesn't plan the route or consult a map. It simply moves in the direction of least resistance, carving new paths, feeding what it touches, reshaping what it can't move around. Sometimes it's a trickle. Sometimes it floods everything in sight. But it's always, always moving. That's energy. Not the buzzword, not the life coach slogan, the actual fundamental, irreducible pattern underlying every system that has ever lived, grown, stalled, or collapsed. Energy doesn't lie. And once you learn to read it, you realize it's been telling you the truth about yourself and everyone around you all along. So, what do I mean when I talk about energy as a pattern? I don't mean it in a vague, mystical sense. I mean it in the most precise, observable, cross-domain sense possible. Energy is the capacity of a system to do work, to move, to transform. And the pattern of energy is this. Energy's never created or destroyed. It's converted, transferred, concentrated, and dispersed. Always. The first law of thermodynamics tells us energy is conserved. The second law tells us something even more interesting. Energy naturally moves from concentrated to dispersed, from ordered to disordered. Left to itself, a system moves toward entropy, toward equilibrium, toward stillness. The fire burns out, the coffee cools, the charged battery drains. But life, biological, psychological, relational, organizational life, is constantly working against this tendency. Life is a continuous active energy capture and organization against the grain of entropy. That's not metaphorical. That's what living systems actually do. Every cell in your body is an energy conversion machine. Mitochondria, the organelles your biology teacher told you about, are the powerhouse of the cell, constantly transforming chemical energy from food into ATP, the molecule that powers virtually every biological process you have. Your heart beats because of energy conversion. Your thoughts form because of it. You are at the most fundamental level, a pattern of energy moving through time. In physics, there's a concept called activation energy. It's the minimum amount of energy required to initiate a chemical reaction. Think of it as the threshold. You can have all the right ingredients in place, all the necessary elements present, but without that initial push of energy over the activation threshold, nothing happens. The reaction doesn't start. The change doesn't occur. This isn't just chemistry. It's one of the most practically important patterns I know. In athletics, coaches talk about this constantly. The first few steps of a sprint require more energy expenditure per unit of distance than any other part of the race. Getting a body at rest into motion is the hardest part. But once momentum is established, the energy cost per stride drops dramatically. The hardest part isn't sustaining motion, it's initiating it. Psychology recognized energy as a central concept early on. Sigmund Freud used the term libido, which ended up being used synonymously with sex drive, but he meant it as something much broader, the life energy that animates psychological processes, drive, desire, motivation, the energy behind behavior. Carl Jung expanded this further. For Jung, psychic energy, his term for the vitality that moves through the unconscious and conscious mind, seeks expression. If it's blocked in one direction, it finds another. Suppress one impulse and the energy doesn't vanish. It moves sideways. It finds an outlet, often a less conscious one. This is why suppression is such an imperfect strategy. We don't really suppress energy. We just redirect it. The emotion you don't let yourself feel in one context tends to show up somewhere else. In a snapped comment, in a late-night scroll, in a physical symptom. The energy needed an outlet. And it found one. In Aerovedic medicine and yogic traditions, prana performs a similar function. The animating breath, the life force underlying all physical and mental activity. The practice of pranayama, or breath regulation, is fundamentally a practice of energy management. The breath is understood as the most direct interface between the voluntary and involuntary nervous systems. When you slow the breath, you slow the system. This is ancient biohacking. And here's what I find most fascinating. In every domain, physics, biology, ecology, psychology, energy follows the same pattern. It flows toward where it can do the most work. It concentrates when structure is present to hold it. It disperses when that structure breaks down or becomes rigid. And transformation requires a threshold, a point where accumulated energy trips a system into a new state. This isn't just how stars form and rivers run, it's how people change. We talk about energy constantly in everyday life, and yet we rarely examine what we actually mean. I don't have the energy for this. She's got such incredible energy. That meeting completely drained me. I don't know where I find the energy, I just do. These aren't casual metaphors. They're accurate descriptions of a real phenomenon that neuroscience and psychology are only beginning to understand with precision. The brain consumes roughly 20% of your body's total energy budget, despite comprising only 2% of body weight. And it doesn't consume that energy uniformally. Different cognitive states have dramatically different energetic costs. Chronic uncertainty is energetically expensive. When your brain can't resolve a situation, can't predict an outcome, can't create a stable model of what's happening, it keeps running background processes, cycling through possibilities, testing scenarios. This is why ambiguous situations are exhausting, even when nothing physical is happening. You're burning through neural glucose on unresolved computation. This is also why clarity is energizing. When a problem resolves, when a decision is finally made, when confusion becomes understanding, there's often a physical sense of something releasing. Tension you didn't know you were holding. That's not poetic. That's your nervous system reallocating resources that were locked in open processing loops. Here's a scenario you've probably lived. You've been in a job that no longer fits. Maybe it never really fit. You took the salary or the title, or because the timing seemed right and you didn't know what else to do. And you've been making it work. You've been competent, professional, sometimes even excellent. But every Sunday evening, something contracts. You feel the weight of Monday coming. You lie in bed the night before a big presentation, and instead of feeling the productive charge of anticipation, you feel a low, dull dread. You're not lazy, you're not ungrateful, and you're not broken. You're experiencing the energetic signature of misalignment. I worked with a client, I'll call her Dina, who came to me exhausted. She was a senior leader at a healthcare organization, deeply capable, genuinely committed to the people she served. On paper, her life was working. In practice, she felt like she was running on empty all the time. When we mapped her days, something became clear almost immediately. Dina was spending enormous energy on what I came to call energy-expensive interactions, conversations, meetings, and decisions that consistently left her more depleted than when she arrived. And almost none of her time was structured around recovery. She was a morning person, sharp, creative, expansive in the early hours. But she scheduled her most cognitively demanding work for afternoons after back-to-back meetings had flattened her. She was taking her best energy and spending it on the easiest demands. And she was trying to do her real work, the thinking, the strategy, the writing, in the dregs. We didn't change her workload. We changed when and how she engaged with it. We protected her peak hours. We built in short recovery windows between high-demand meetings. We identified which interactions were genuinely energizing, the ones that left her feeling more capable than before, and increased those deliberately. Dina's success was built around always pushing ahead. And it worked. But so much so that spending time just being a human being felt wrong. It made her feel guilty. She'd come to believe that success was predicated on constant activity. Once she uncovered that fallacy and its impact on her thoughts and feelings, her behavior began to shift. Within a few weeks, she described feeling like a different person. The workload hadn't changed, the energy pattern had. When you start treating energy as a pattern rather than a tank, the question shifts from how do I get more of it to how do I connect my energy to what I value and monitor it with skillful awareness. The show you're watching right now, Fractals of Change, emerged from paying attention to my energy. Not ignoring it because it was inconvenient, not pushing through because rest felt like failure, but listening to it. Because energy, when you're able to read it, is among the most honest information systems available to us. The body knows before the mind catches up. Exhaustion is data. Aliveness is data. The question is whether we're willing to take both seriously. Energy doesn't just live inside us, it moves between us. Every relationship has an energetic signature. There are people in your life who leave you feeling more like yourself after time with them. You feel more curious, more capable, more real. And there are people who leave you feeling smaller, flatter, somehow less. Not because anything overtly bad happened, not because they're necessarily bad people, but because of what that interaction does to your system. Psychologist and researcher Marshall Losada spent years studying what distinguished high-performing teams from the low-performing ones. He found that the ratio of positive to negative interactions was a remarkably strong predictor of team function. But more relevant for our purposes, the quality of attention in a room, whether people were genuinely present and curious versus defensive and self-protective, changed what became possible. Attention is a form of energy, and where attention goes, energy follows. John Gottman, who has studied couples for decades at what he calls the love lab, found something similar. He can predict relationship outcomes with striking accuracy by measuring what he calls bids for connection, small, often unconscious attempts one person makes to engage the emotional presence of another. A touch on the shoulder, a question, a reference to a shared joke, and the critical variable is whether those bids are met, turned toward, or ignored, dismissed, and turned away. When bids are consistently met, trust accumulates. The relational system becomes energetically generative. Small deposits compound into deep reserves. When bids are consistently dismissed, something different happens. Not necessarily drama or explosion, often just a quiet withdrawal. A slow, energetic retreat. The system begins conserving rather than generating. I work with a couple, I'll call Sandra and David. They came to me not in crisis, but in what Sandra described as a kind of gray. They weren't fighting, they were functioning. But they'd stopped being curious about each other. Their conversations were logistical. Scheduling, the kids, the house. The warmth still was there somewhere, but it was buried under routine and mutual distraction. What I noticed early on in our work was the pattern of energy in the room. When I asked David about a project he was genuinely excited about, he became alive. His voice changed, his body changed, the quality of his presence shifted. And Sandra, who genuinely loved this man, leaned in. She became more present too. Not because I said anything profound, but because aliveness is contagious. We have more capacity to generate energy in each other than we realize. We also have more capacity to extinguish it. The research on emotional contagion is striking. Human nervous systems are extraordinarily permeable to each other. We regulate each other's physiological states through facial expression, vocal tone, pacing, and physical proximity, often without any awareness that this is happening. A calm presence can genuinely lower another person's cortisol levels. A dysregulated presence can spike them. We're walking energy transmitters, receiving and broadcasting constantly. This matters enormously for how we show up in the relationships that matter to us. And it matters even more for those of us in positions of leadership, because the energetic signature of a leader disperses through a system in ways that can either activate or suppress the people within it. The question isn't whether you affect the people around you energetically, you do. The question is whether you're doing it consciously. Let's scale this up because everything we've said about individual and relational energy applies with amplification to organizations and societies. Organizational energy is real, measurable, and consequential, and it's one of the most underexamined variables in leadership. I've walked into organizations that felt immediately alive, where people were talking in the hallways, where there was a palpable hum of engaged activity, where you could feel something at stake in the work. And I've walked into organizations that felt like they were running on fumes, where the energy was low and flat, where people were polite but not present, where the fluorescent lighting seemed somehow appropriate. These aren't just vibes, they're systemic states, and they have structural causes. Heike, Brooke, and Sumatra, Goshal at IMD and London Business School developed a framework I find genuinely useful. They studied organizational energy across large companies and identified four distinct states, not as permanent characteristics, but as dynamic conditions that could shift. They found that roughly 70% of the companies they studied operated in states of either resigned inertia, meaning low energy, low engagement, just getting through, or corrosive energy, high activity, but driven by fear, internal politics, and anxiety rather than genuine purpose. Only about 30% were in what they called productive energy, high engagement directed toward meaningful, collective goals. 30%. In the majority of organizations, most of the human energy available is either asleep or misdirected. My consulting career offered me opportunities to see the inner workings of companies with the objectivity of an external contractor. I once worked with a mid-sized technology company that had plateaued after a period of exceptional growth. Leadership couldn't understand it. The strategy was sound, the talent was strong, but results had stalled, and attrition was quietly climbing. When I started talking to people across the organization, not in formal sessions, but in casual conversations where truth tends to live, what I heard was a pattern. People had stopped believing their input mattered. Decisions were made at the top and communicated downward. Initiatives were launched and then quietly abandoned when they became complicated. High performers who raised concerns were politely sidelined. The message, never spoken but consistently transmitted, was your energy is welcome here only if it moves in the direction we're already heading. This is what organizational energy depletion actually looks like. Not lazy people, not bad strategy, but a structural pattern that was systematically converting human engagement into resignation. The activation energy required to change something that's deeply embedded is always higher than people expect. This is why so many change initiatives fail. Not because the destination was wrong, but because the energy required to cross the threshold was underestimated, and the system ran out of fuel before the new pattern could consolidate. At the societal level, the energy pattern becomes even more visible and even more consequential. Social movements are essentially activation energy events. For years, decades sometimes, conditions accumulate, grievances, awareness, organizing, small acts of resistance. The energy builds but stays below the threshold of visible transformation. And then, often triggered by a single event that in isolation seems insufficient to explain what follows, the system tips. Montgomery 1955, Stonewall 1969, Tiananmen 1989. The trigger is rarely the cause. The cause is the accumulated energy of thousands of people reaching a threshold simultaneously. The trigger is simply what transforms potential energy into kinetic energy, into motion. What's critical to understand is that the direction energy moves once released is not predetermined. Activated social energy can generate genuine transformation. It can also generate backlash, reaction, and new forms of the same old patterns. The outcome depends enormously on what structures exist to channel and direct the energy constructively. Whether there are visions compelling enough to cohere around, leadership skilled enough to sustain momentum, and institutions resilient enough to metabolize rather than resist the pressure. Also, why the question of attention in democracy is not trivial. In an information ecosystem organized around capturing and monetizing engagement, the energetic incentives of public discourse are heavily skewed toward outrage, fear, and conflict, because these states are energetically activating. They generate attention, they generate clicks, they generate the kind of reflexive sharing that algorithmic systems reward. But sustained fear and outrage are also deeply depleting. They activate the threat response systems of the nervous system and hold them there, chronically. And a population chronically in threat response is a population whose energy for complexity, nuance, creativity, and collaborative problem solving is systematically diminished. We are, in a very real sense, harvesting each other's activation energy for purposes that don't serve us. How do we stop running on automatic and start making more intentional choices about where we direct, replenish, and protect this most essential resource? I offer three practices. These aren't hacks or quick fixes. They're ways of developing a different relationship with energy as a pattern in your life. Practice one, audit. Before you can manage energy, you need to see it clearly. Most of us have a vague background awareness of what depletes and what restores us, but we rarely bring it into focused, honest attention. I'm not talking about a formal spreadsheet exercise, although, true confession, I did do my EmpowerPoint. I'm talking about developing the habit of noticing. After interactions, activities, periods of work, what energetic residue is. Did the conversation leave you more alive or more contracted? Did that project engage something real in you, or did you complete it by willpower alone? After a day that looks successful from the outside, do you feel genuinely replenished or subtly hollowed out? Management researcher Jim Lohr, who's worked extensively with elite athletes and executives, argues that energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Time is finite and equally distributed. Energy is renewable, but only if managed deliberately. His research suggests that the highest performing people across domains aren't those who work the most hours. They're those who've developed clear, consistent practices for recovery, and who've learned to distinguish between activities that drain and activities that restore. The audit is the beginning of this. It's the practice of bringing conscious attention to a system that most of us run on autopilot. Practice two, boundary as energy management. In my episode on boundaries, we explored the concept in depth, but I want to return to it here through this lens, because I think it reframes what boundaries actually are. A boundary isn't a wall. It's not primarily about keeping things out. A boundary is an energetic membrane, a structure that regulates what flows in and what flows out of your system. Like a cell membrane in biology, a healthy boundary is selectively permeable. It lets in what serves the system. It limits what depletes it. When we say yes to something we actually mean no to, we create an energy leak. Not because the activity is inherently bad, but because the gap between what we said and what we meant requires continuous maintenance. We have to keep managing the cognitive dissonance. We have to keep performing alignment we don't actually feel. That's expensive. This is why, as I've observed with clients repeatedly, the most energetically transformed moments in people's lives rarely come from adding something new. They come from stopping something that had been quietly draining them for years. A commitment they never should have made, a relationship they were maintaining out of obligation, a story about themselves they'd inherited from someone else. The practice is this. Identify one thing in your life that is consistently, reliably draining your energy. Not because it's hard, but because it doesn't belong to you. And begin carefully, intentionally to create distance from it. Not recklessly and not all at once. But begin. Practice three, renewal as discipline. In our culture, rest is coded as laziness. Stillness is coded as unproductivity. We've built an entire mythology around the person who never stops, who pushes through exhaustion, treats sleep as an obstacle, and we're paying an enormous collective price for this mythology. The science is unambiguous. Sleep deprivation impairs cognitive function, emotional regulation, immune function, and metabolic health. Chronic overwork reduces the quality of the work itself. The research on recovery in elite athletic performance has completely transformed training science. It's now understood that the adaptation, the actual getting stronger, doesn't happen during the training. It happens during the recovery. The training creates the signal, the recovery is where the system builds. This is true for all of us, not just athletes. The renewal practice asks us to treat recovery not as a reward we earn when the work is done, because the work is never done, but as a non-negotiable structural element of a high-performing life. What restores you, not what should restore you, not what restores other people, what actually, demonstrably, in your specific nervous system, in your specific life, refills the reservoir. For some people, it's movement. For some, it's solitude. For some, it's deep conversation or podcasts. For some, it's being in nature or creative work that has nothing to do with professional output. The content matters less than the commitment. The discipline of renewal is the practice of treating your own restoration as seriously as you treat your obligations to others. Because the truth is the pattern of energy makes undeniable. You cannot give what you don't have. Sustained depletion is not noble. It's not admirable. It's a structural problem with a structural solution. And the solution begins with deciding and genuinely deciding that your energy is worth protecting. Energy was the first language. It's our mother tongue. Before words, before concepts, before any of the elaborate structures of meaning we've built on top of reality, there was this. The pulse and flow and concentration and dispersal of energy moving through systems, through bodies, through time. We were built to read it, to feel it, to track it in ourselves and in each other. And somewhere in the construction of our modern lives, our overscheduled, attention fragmented, always on modern lives, many of us have lost touch with that fluency. What I hope this episode is offered is an invitation to come back to it, to notice what your energy is actually telling you about where you belong, what you're here to do, who is genuinely generative for you, and who isn't. To recognize that depletion is information, not weakness, and that aliveness is information, not indulgence. That the pattern of energy, when you learn to read it, is one of the most precise and honest guides available to you. The question I'll leave you with is simple. It might take years to fully answer, but it's worth beginning. Where is your energy most alive? Not where should it be? Not where does it look impressive, and not where you've been told it ought to go. Where is it most alive? Start there. I'm Mary Schaub, this is Fractals of Change, wishing you curiosity, presence, and flow.

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Mary Schaub

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