Hi Reader,
She leaned over and whispered, "I hate to bother you, but what are you working on? You seem so happy."
I was at my favorite coffee shop, pen in hand, drafting that week's newsletter. I love writing longhand. The pen glides across the paper and the words spill out of my head into something visible. There's a creative flow to it, and apparently it showed on my face.
We ended up talking for a while. She had so many questions about energy and mindset, and on the drive home, I kept thinking about her. So many of the small daily practices that feel like second nature to me now are the very things that make the biggest difference.
That conversation is where this week's letter began.
A positive outlook can help increase satisfaction and a feeling of well-being, but it isn’t about putting a smile on when things are going sideways or pretending that everything is great when it’s not. That just causes more stress, resistance, and at some point, it catches up with you. A true positive mindset is about building resilience so when things do go sideways, you have the capacity to navigate the tough spots with greater ease and grace.
In energy medicine, we talk about the way our energy tends to seek a match. When your own frequency increases, you naturally find yourself drawn toward people, places, and experiences that resonate with it. It's an invisible piece of the picture, and a meaningful one.
Here are a few of my favorite energy shifters. Think of them as a menu. Sprinkle a few into your week and notice what happens. There's no right or wrong way to do this, and you may be surprised by how quickly they shift things.
Affirmations
Think of an affirmation as a quick vote of confidence, a positive statement you offer yourself. When you tell yourself something encouraging, your brain begins looking for evidence to support it, and that evidence reinforces the belief. Brain imaging research shows that self-affirmation activates the brain's reward and self-related processing regions (Cascio et al., 2016).
I write mine in my journal each morning, and I keep one close for stressful moments. I know you're wondering, so here it is:
You can do hard things. You can say no. You can ask for help.
Play
When you feel yourself spiraling, take a few minutes to do something that feels good. Step away from where you are (or if you can't move, close your eyes and imagine it) and give yourself over to something you love, reading, dancing, drawing, a favorite song. Even a few minutes of shifting your focus interrupts the old pattern and opens room for a new one.
And here's the bonus: this is lovely self-care, and when we care for ourselves, we tend to be more productive too.
Shift Your Environment
Sometimes it's the energy of the people around us that tugs at us. Simply noticing the energy in the room gives you the power to respond to it. Spend a little time with an upbeat friend or coworker, step outside into nature, find something beautiful to appreciate, or slip on your headphones and let the music become a buffer.
Show Your Pearly Whites
Yes, really. Smile, turn up the corners of your mouth and show your teeth, for no reason at all. Our brains link the physical act of smiling with positive emotion, and a review of nearly 50 years of research found that facial expressions gently nudge how we feel (Coles, Larsen & Lench, 2019).
It feels a little silly (like the laughter yoga I wrote about a couple months ago). It works anyway.
Help Someone
Kindness toward others lifts our own mood. A 2018 meta-analysis found that acts of kindness increase the well-being of the person doing them (Curry et al., 2018). Turning your attention outward offers a break from your own worries and sometimes gives you the space to see what's going right in your own life. It also strengthens empathy, which makes it a little easier to be kind to yourself.
Keep a "Done Well" List
At the end of the day, set your to-do list aside and jot down two or three things you did well.
We're wired to scan for what went wrong. Psychologists call this the negativity bias, and research shows negative experiences carry more weight in our minds than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001). Your monkey mind will happily chime in about what didn't get done, didn't go perfectly, or took too long. A "done well" list is one way to tame it.
Maybe you kept your promise to walk the dog this morning, or helped a colleague finish a project she'd been struggling with. You get the idea. Bonus points if you share your list with someone and listen to theirs.
When the coffee shop woman asked why I looked so happy, I don't think she was noticing happiness as much as presence. She noticed something on my face, in my energy, and it came from nothing more than a pen, a page, and a practice I love.
The writing was simply the visible part.
What she couldn't see were the hundreds of small choices that came before it. The quiet moments of reflection, the affirmations, the walks, the pauses. The intentional decisions to return my attention to what matters.
That's the quiet power of conscious living. The small shifts show up in real life. Those small choices are available to each of us.
You don't need a perfect life to experience more ease, resilience, or joy. Sometimes it begins with one affirmation, one act of kindness, one moment of play, or one simple acknowledgment of something you did well today.
If these energy shifters speak to you, I've gathered the deeper practices behind them into a new guide, Return to Yourself: Six Practices for Energy Literacy. You'll notice a few of this week's tips already point toward it. Shifting your environment, helping someone, keeping a "done well" list: each one touches a larger practice. The guide walks through all six: self-awareness, environment, relationships, sovereignty, personal growth, and purpose. It comes with companion audios so you can take the practices off the page and into your day.
It's $27, and you can find it here: Return to Yourself →
And whether or not it's the right fit for you right now, try a few of these shifters this week, then hit reply and tell me what worked (or didn't). If you have an energy shifter of your own that isn't on my list, I'd love to hear it.