Living in Energetic Balance: What That Means for My Calendar, Career, and Choices

Source Feed: The Future of HR: Holistic Regeneration

Published: 2025-06-03 22:33:35

Content Type ID: 3

I used to think balance meant color-coding my calendar, staying ahead of every deadline, and finally checking off every box on my to-do list. That if I could just get the right system, the right habits, the right morning routine I’d feel whole, calm, fulfilled. But the truth is, I was mistaking structure for alignment.

What I’ve learned is that real balance isn’t something you schedule. It’s something you sense. It’s not about squeezing more into your day—it’s about learning to listen to your day. To your body. To your energy. To the quiet voice inside that knows when to push and when to pause. In a world that glorifies hustle and logic, I’ve found that the real power lives in rhythm, receptivity, and the kind of inner alignment no productivity app or to-do list can offer.

1. Honoring Rhythms: My Menstrual Cycle as a Leadership Tool

I used to push through my low-energy days with the same intensity I brought to my high-energy ones, wondering why some meetings felt magnetic and others left me completely drained. It wasn’t until I started tuning into the rhythm of my menstrual cycle that I realized my energy wasn’t the problem. My calendar was.

Our bodies aren’t machines. They’re wise, cyclical, deeply intuitive ecosystems. And for those of us who menstruate, each phase of the cycle brings its own energetic signature. Once I started tracking mine, not just for fertility or health, but for leadership, everything shifted.

Here’s how I now approach my month, not as a flat line of hustle, but as a cycle of energy:

• Menstrual Phase – This is when my energy is at its lowest, so I give myself permission to rest, reflect, and avoid high-stakes conversations or performance-heavy tasks. I use this time to journal, recalibrate, and envision the month ahead.

• Follicular Phase – As my energy begins to rise, I move into ideation mode. This is when I schedule strategy sessions, creative planning, and solo deep work that excites me.

• Ovulatory Phase – This is my creative peak. I feel confident, magnetic, and verbal. I plan key meetings and networking during this window. It’s my most outward-facing time.

• Luteal Phase – Things start to turn inward here. I wrap up tasks, review progress, and gently wind things down. I also try to minimize overcommitment during this phase because my patience and bandwidth are usually lower. A good mantra for this phase is: “What serves me, serves me. What doesn’t, I let go.”

Letting my body lead has softened the way I work and deepened the way I connect to what I create. I don’t fight my energy anymore. I partner with it. And that’s made me not just more effective, but more whole.

Understanding that energy is cyclical, not constant, helps me avoid burnout, plan more strategically, and show up more fully, without forcing myself to be in a season I’m not in.

2. Strategic Surrender: Freezing Eggs Out of Balanced Faith in Science and My Body

In March 2025, I made the decision to freeze my eggs. Not because I was afraid, and not because I lacked a partner. I did it because it felt like the most energetically aligned, spiritually attuned choice I could make at the time.

This wasn’t just a fertility decision; it was a soul decision.

Part of what led me to freeze eggs instead of embryos was a question I still sit with often: When does the soul enter the body? Is it at conception? At birth? Somewhere in between? Because I don’t yet have a clear answer (and because I hold deep reverence for the spiritual mystery of life) I chose the path that allowed me to preserve potential without prematurely creating something I wasn’t prepared to carry forward.

This decision was rooted in self-trust, not panic. It was my way of holding open the door to future possibility while honoring the unknown. I didn’t want to rush into parenthood or deny its importance; I wanted to be intentional with how I stewarded that sacred threshold. And right now, that looks like spaciousness.

In today’s professional landscape, this kind of decision is becoming more common. Over 29,000 egg-freezing cycles were completed in 2022, a 30% increase from the year before (Cofertility, 2024). Behind those numbers are women – many of them in leadership, entrepreneurship, and service – choosing to align their biological timelines with their soul’s timing.

Freezing my eggs gave me more than reproductive freedom. It gave me energetic freedom – to create my life, business, and relationships from presence, not pressure. It’s one of the most spiritually and practically aligned choices I’ve ever made.

3. The Discipline of Returning: Cultivating Reflective Practice in a High-Performance World

I’ll be the first to admit: staying connected to my creativity, intuition, or spiritual center isn’t something I’ve mastered. Some days I light a candle, journal, pull an oracle card, and feel completely aligned. Other days I wake up already behind, scroll through emails before getting out of bed, and spend hours moving from task to task without ever checking in with myself.

Living in a high-performance world that values speed and output makes it incredibly easy to forget what I value: presence, truth, wholeness.

And yet, I keep coming back. To the page. To the pause. To the small practices that make me feel like me.

For a long time, I believed “discipline” had to look like waking up at 5 a.m., meditating for 30 minutes, doing yoga, drinking a green smoothie, and journaling all before 8. But I’ve since learned that for me, discipline isn’t about perfection—it’s about devotion. It’s not about rigid routines, but about remembering. Returning.

It’s the breath I take before a meeting. The sentence I scribble between calls. The song I play while making dinner. It’s the moment I choose to ask myself, “What do I need right now to feel connected?” instead of powering through another deadline from a place of depletion.

Research shows that even short reflective practices, like five minutes of journaling or mindful breathing, can improve emotional regulation and decision-making under pressure (Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, 2021).

But more than anything, these practices remind me that I am not just what I produce. I am a living, breathing being with rhythms, insights, and emotions that matter. And when I make space for them (however imperfectly) I lead and live with more clarity, compassion, and creativity.

4. Trusting My Inner Compass: Leveraging Intuition in Decision-Making

There’s this moment right before a big decision when I used to immediately go to Google, spreadsheets, or a friend for advice. I’ve learned not to skip the step that comes first: asking me.

For me, intuition isn’t about magic. It’s about data…just a different kind. It’s the body tensing before a “yes.” It’s the pattern I keep dreaming about. It’s the goosebumps I get when I write something true. The more I listen, the more I realize that my inner guidance system is speaking all the time. I just have to create quiet enough to hear it.

Journaling is my go-to tool for tuning in. When I’m facing a decision, whether it’s launching a new offering, taking a contract, or stepping away from something, I’ll often free-write the question at the top of a page and see what comes through. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s clear. But it always reveals more than I expected.

Other days, I pull an oracle card. Not to give my power away to the card itself, but because the image or message helps surface something I hadn’t put into words yet. It reflects my inner state and brings clarity, like holding up a mirror to my subconscious.

And speaking of the body, I’ve stopped ignoring what mine tries to tell me. That gut drop before a “yes.” That contraction in my chest after a “maybe.” I’ve learned that my body is one of the most honest voices I have. It doesn’t lie, and it doesn’t need to justify itself.

One of the best decisions I’ve made in my professional life, leaving a job that didn’t align with my values, was made not from logic, but from an unexpected and shocking dream. Everything looked good on the outside. I was taking on more responsibility after the COO’s departure and I was convinced a promotion was near. But I felt exhausted. Under-appreciated. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t forget the observations that signaled to me the CEO was not to be trusted. The moment I gave myself permission to trust that feeling and walk away, opportunities that did align began to show up. My energy came back. So did my clarity.

These practices aren’t about being “woo.” They’re about working with all the data we have – head, heart, and gut. In a world that often over-values external metrics, I’ve found that listening inward is one of the most strategic things I can do.

What If Balance Looked Like This?

What if balance isn’t about doing more with less time but about doing the right things with the right energy?

For me, living in energetic alignment isn’t about achieving some perfect, peaceful equilibrium every day. It’s not about nailing the morning routine or becoming the most optimized version of myself. It’s about slowing down enough to hear my own inner rhythm AND respecting it.

It’s about asking: Is this decision coming from love or from fear? Am I honoring what my body knows, or overriding it to keep up with expectations that don’t belong to me?

This way of living isn’t about optimizing my time to meet the demands of life. It’s about greeting the demands with integrity. From a place of presence, not performance. From alignment, not hustle.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What would change if you listened to your energy first?

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Check out some of my earlier musings on the intersection of business and the Divine Feminine:

• Love, Fear, and Technology. State of Formation. June 17, 2019.

• A Call for Spiritual Creatives. State of Formation. July 2, 2019.

• Reinventing Organizations 2: Emerging Shift Toward Violet. Substack. Dec 8, 2023.

• Dear MBA Student. Substack. Jan 8, 2024.

• The Simple Life. Substack. April 11, 2024.

Interested in learning more about energetically balanced leadership with a community of other women?

The Love & Liberation (virtual) Book Club is launching as soon as the 7 spots available fill up. Email me ASAP so I can answer your questions and reserve your spot!