The Energy Quadrant: Why work feels like a grind

To move out of "grind and hustle" and into flow, it isn't necessarily what you're doing that needs to change.

It's the energy you're doing it from.

Most people never hear that, because everyone is busy telling you to change the work you're doing. Change your business model, change your schedule, change your offer. Sometimes that's true, but this is the important piece that comes first.

There's masculine energy and there's feminine energy, and both of them live inside all of us. This has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. Each one can be in a disempowered expression or an empowered one, which gives you four places you can be operating from at any moment.

The grind sits in the bottom left.

It looks like hustle. Needing to prove yourself. Needing to prove your value. Always being on and never being able to stop. A rocky relationship with rest. Feeling guilty when you do stop. Overall, a scarce energy driving everything you do.

The trap is you may still get a lot of results from down there. It works, in a sense but it's a finite fuel source (I've been there). It will never feel like enough no matter what you produce, and it will burn you out quite rapidly.

Move up the left column and the same energy changes shape completely. It becomes clear and decisive. It works in harmony with what I call divine will. God's will. An empowering force moving through you, so that you are not the one carrying everything on your shoulders. It becomes co-creation. You and the divine, here in this physical world, building more of what you actually want.

The right column runs the same way.

Down at the bottom it's passivity. No clear boundaries. People walk all over you. Waiting, rather than allowing.

Up at the top it's surrender. Flow. The ability to let go, detach from the outcome, and just be in the moment. Present, without needing to know how it all resolves.

An important note on the word "Surrender"

Surrender often gets misinterpreted. When you hear the word, you probably think only of that top right box or more of a feminine energy. Letting go, receiving, allowing.

That's part of it, and we need it. Especially as men, we need to be able to rest and have a good relationship with rest, because that's how we receive the intuitive guidance that's coming to us, whether you believe in that or not. It's what puts us back in tune with nature.

But surrender is the whole top row.

The other half of it is what happens when the stillness is done for now and you receive an action that's there to be done. That's where you move with clear decisiveness.

Thy will be done.

One side is allowing and devotion. The other side is decisive action. They look completely different, and they're the same thing.

It's worth being clear that none of this is about how many hours you work.

In the top left you could absolutely be working twelve to fifteen hours a day. But it won't feel like work. It'll feel like devotion to something bigger than yourself. It'll feel like joy. It'll feel like excitement. It'll feel like the thing you were meant to do, done in the way you were meant to do it.

When you're in alignment with how you're uniquely wired, and you feel yourself as part of something bigger than you, that moves through your body and gives you all the energy you need to do whatever is necessary.

In the bottom left you could work the exact same twelve to fifteen hours and it feels terrible. Everything is a push. You're forcing yourself to be someone.

And none of that is right or wrong. The feeling you have when doing the work is the signal.

A signal that you're in a disempowering energy. That you're carrying something. Or that you're stuck in patterns that are asking to be dissolved but work is being done to avoid them.

Stay with the top row long enough and the two boxes stop being boxes.

They start to overlap.

The line between them goes. What's left is a single space where the two meet.

That overlap is flow.

Not attached to the outcome. Okay with stillness. Able to enjoy rest. Present in the moment. And then when the time comes to move forward with complete conviction, courageous in your action, moving toward something in a way you never have before, you step into that decisive energy and you go.

You move between the two, again and again, and the middle is where you live.

From my own experience, this is where you actually begin the journey of bringing into reality what is meant for you, through you.

Getting there means looking honestly at your patterns, your behaviours, your subconscious beliefs. How you relate to action. How you relate to rest. What you make surrender mean.

It means removing noise. Other people's opinions. Old patterns that are no longer part of who you're becoming.

When you step up into that, you begin to free yourself from all of it and you're surrendered to the flow that's happening to and through you, letting yourself fully receive what is meant for you.