Last week, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins had me in for new student orientation: a room full of musicians, dancers, and performing artists, classical, jazz, music technology, all starting something new at once. After working through their values and Energy Leadership™, we opened the room up to Q&A. Three questions stuck with me, and they’re worth sharing here because they’re life lessons for everyone, not just students.
1. Cultivate curiosity instead of assumptions
The first question came from a student who shared their value of authenticity and wanted to know how to show up as themselves in a brand-new year. That first day is awkward for everyone. So is the first week on any new team.
In an unfamiliar room, your inner critic gets loud and starts telling stories: who belongs here, who doesn’t, how you measure up. Left alone, those stories harden into assumptions and bias, about others and about yourself.
Cultivating curiosity is one of my Energetic Success Principles and is a powerful tool. When you lead with curiosity, you actually want to learn about the person in front of you, and they can feel it. It opens a conversation instead of closing one, and gives the other person permission to open up right back. Assumptions build walls. Curiosity builds relationships.
2. You always have a choice
A student shared something a lot of us know. When someone else is footing the bill, a parent, a board, an investor, it stops feeling like your path belongs to you. That feeling is real, and the choice is still yours. Funding your own direction costs energy up front. Following a path that was never yours can cost energy on the back end.
So weigh both costs, the energy and the money, side by side. Energy has its own ROI, every bit as real as the number on a loan statement. That’s exactly why the Energy Leadership Index Assessment exists: a data-driven read on where your energy is going and what it’s costing you, so you decide with real numbers on both sides.
Harvard Business Review put it plainly in a piece on rumination: “Dwelling on stress compounds the uncomfortable feelings that stress brings” (Jenny Taitz, “How to Stop Dwelling on Your Stress,” HBR, January 2024). That’s the tax on avoiding the hard choice, and it only gets quieter and more expensive.
3. Start with the end goal, then decide
A student asked about the moment an idea hits at 11pm and won’t let go. Your brain lights up, sleep disappears, and pushing through feels like the only option because the idea might be gone by morning. Anyone who builds anything knows this. Recital or board meeting, doesn’t matter.
Always start with the end goal in mind. Where will this actually serve you energetically? Once you know that, you get to choose. That’s the power of choice.
As an artist, that spark still pulls at me, and some nights staying up a few hours and shifting the next morning is the right call. But when tomorrow needs me sharp, the idea goes into a note on my phone and the sleep gets protected. Decide the goal first. The schedule follows.
Every one of these questions came back to the power of choice: where your energy goes, and who decides.
So where is your energy going right now, and did you choose it?