Stored, and Doing Nothing

Happy Sunday, everyone. Mere here.

It's Labor Day weekend, and I have been in deep thought quite a bit lately. I have a lot of exciting things happening in my life right now. This has been one of the best years of my life, and it has also been one of the hardest. I do not know why those two ride together, but they seem to.

I am not opening this to be gloomy. I am opening it here because it is where my head has been with the topic of todays newsletter. 

Today is the anniversary of my mom's passing, and it has been close to a decade now. As many of you know, I lost my dad this year.

So this weekend has me thinking a lot about energy. About capacity. About time and what we do with it. What am I doing with mine? How do I spend my days? What I am working toward. How much of my time and energy goes into which things? What does my future look like from here based on those answers, and how will any of it need to scale and change as I do? It is honestly, incredibly exciting.

Which brings me to another word on my mind: Potential.

Potential is a compliment that means nothing has happened yet.

Sit with that one for a second.

We say it about children. We say it about ourselves. We say it about athletes, about students, about someone three years into a career, about relationships. We say it about houses. There is so much potential here.

It sounds like an asset. In physics it is one, with a hard limit attached. Potential energy performs no work in its stored state. Zero. A ball at the top of a hill has energy in the sense that it could do something, potentially. A property has potential in exactly the same sense. Until something moves, until something is done with it, until action happens, nothing has happened at all.

Kinetic energy is the other kind. It is energy that is doing something. Energy in motion. Energy that acted on its own potential and turned capability into something real.

Energy comes up constantly in my life and in my clients' lives. Having it. Not having it. Having it at the wrong time of day. For me the words energy, capacity, and potential have been circling for a very long time.

And the definition physicists use is a lot stricter than the way the rest of us use the word. Energy is the capacity to do work. So there it is again. Energy is/has potential. Work is force applied over a distance, and something has to change, or nothing has been done and no energy has been spent.

Which brings me to this weekend ,or more specifically Monday...

Most of us treat Labor Day as the end of summer and the start of football season. Hell yes, I am all about that. And we wish each other a "Happy Labor Day!"  Fewer of us know what it commemorates.

It did not become a federal holiday until 1894, in the middle of a strike. Workers at a rail car company had walked off the job over wage cuts, sixteen hour days, and the conditions they were working in. The walkout spread until it shut down rail traffic across the country. Once it got to that point, Congress pushed the holiday bill through in a matter of days. Days after that, the president sent federal troops to break the same strike, and workers were killed.

They were handed a day. The hours and the conditions they were asking for took another forty-four years!

Now, whether you own a business or not, and I know I have some serious go-getters reading this, I suspect you looked at that number sixteen and thought, hell, that was last Tuesday. That was last week, and the week before that. Meanwhile a good portion of influencers post screenshots of beautifully arranged calendars, with the quiet suggestion that if your schedule does not look like theirs, you are doing it wrong. There is real nuance in that conversation and it deserves its own newsletter.

So the question this weekend hands us is what we are doing with our time. All of it. The hours you spend working and the ones you do not. What are we doing with our potential? What are we doing with our energy?

Have you ever audited your time, or your potential?

I think about this with my dad.

He had his routine. His errands. The dump, the grocery store, the same loop most weeks, and eventually most days. He held onto it. Even in the hospital, it would be ten o'clock and he would say he needed to get to the store.

And arguably he was happy.

But I do pause. I wonder what could have been different in his life, with his time, with his days. Particularly around his health. His physical health, his mental health, his muscle mass, all the things I have built a career caring about and that people come to me as an expert in.

And ultimately I only get to wonder, because it was not my life to choose. It was his, and he was happy.

Yet, these words...energy, time, and potential have had me looking hard at my own life, my own time, my own energy. It is a large part of why I have been thinking about potential at all. Because when I look at my own potential, I also see the energy it will require of me to meet it...and that, for me, gets me hyped! ha ha. Like how cool is it the lives we get to challenge and create! We get the ability to choose to challenge and dare I say meet our potential...what a gift!

Arguably, this is where potential stops being a philosophical question and becomes a physiological one.

Your capacity to do work is a physical quantity, and it is maintained rather than stored. Aerobic capacity drops measurably within a few weeks of stopping. And respectfully, if you have never built any to begin with, sit with what that means for every year you go without touching it.

Strength can hold on longer, and then it goes too. Muscle you built in your twenties, thirties, or forties is not sitting in an account waiting for you to cash in at sixty-five. It is a negotiation you re-enter every week for the rest of your life.

I need to be direct here because I want to be kind. The weekend warrior version of this does not count. Errands, laundry, hauling groceries, being on your feet all day at work. That activity is good for you and it keeps you moving. It does not build muscle, and it does not build the strength you say you want. Somewhere along the line people picked up the idea that staying busy and staying strong are the same thing. Muscle is built by asking a muscle to do progressively more than it did last time, on purpose, on a schedule. A household asks a great deal of you. A great deal. It does not ask that.

Timing sharpens this in midlife. Bone loss accelerates through the menopause transition and the years immediately after, and that is well documented. I want to be exact about muscle, because it gets overstated in both directions. A woman's ability to build muscle does not stop at menopause. It does not shut off. What changes is everything around it. If you arrive in midlife, say your forties and fifties, already undermuscled, building from that starting point is harder, and the reasons are largely practical. You have a full-time job, kids, aging parents, grandchildren. Your recovery is taxed by a life that does not pause for it. Time management and energy become the limiting factors long before your physiology does.

So the plan that involves hiking, or eight miles of walking a day in a beautiful city you have always wanted to see as you age, whenever you imagine getting to it, depends on a capacity you are either building right now or losing right now. There is no third condition where it holds steady while you wait.

And yet.

I hear people say they want to age well. They want to be strong in their seventies. They want to keep hiking, or start hiking. Keep traveling. Get down on the floor with their kids and grandchildren and get back up again. Then I look at their day to day, and very little of it points toward that outcome.

So again. So much potential energy. Stored, and doing nothing.

I wonder how much of it is fear. It is much easier to talk about wanting to be strong, and about what you are going to do in ten years when you have 'time', than to start now, struggle, and be visibly bad at something for the months it takes to stop being bad at it. Talking about it is free. Committing is an entirely different order of thing.

Your potential for your future starts today. Technically it started yesterday, and you cannot do anything about that. But here we are. Today is available.

Two things I want you to do this week:

1. Write the list. What do you want to do in the next five years...SPECFICALLY? Then write down what you have said you will do later, whenever later is for you. After the move. Once the business is stable. When the kids are older. Retirement. Look at how much of that second list could sit inside the five years instead of waiting.

Then for each one, ask why you are not doing some version of it now. Truly. No bullshit, no stories you tell yourself. If the item is a full career change and that is not available right now, ask what part of it is. Is it the curiosity? Could you take one course, or have one conversation with someone already doing it? If it is a trip, is your passport current, and is there a smaller version of that trip you could take in six months? Ask why not me, and make yourself answer.

2. 2. This one is the one you won't do. It's also the one that's going to make the most difference...Audit the time. Audit the time. If the honest answer is that you do not have any, prove it. Not one day. Track a full week. Block your calendar with what you did and what you plan to do, including the hours that just kind of happen, because life will pull at your day whether you account for it or not. If you wake up and reach for your phone, count that hour. If the TV goes on at four, write it down. I am not telling you to stop doing either one. I am telling you to know what you are doing with your time, your energy, and your potential in this life.

Then read it as data instead of as a judgment. Most people find more room than they thought.

So in review, energy is the capacity to do work.

Your list is potential. It is yours, and until a piece of it has a date on it and action behind it, it performs at zero.

I see enormous potential in people every single week. The hardest part about knowing what I know, and about my career being what it is, is watching it stay potential.

If you read that and something in you said "yes, that is me and I want to start auditing not just my time but my health and get a plan with action behind it", a strategy session is exactly what it is for. [TAKE ACTION HERE]

And if you are a coach reading this, recognizing your own practice in the gap between what you say you want and what you are building, our 1:1 and group mentorship exists for that. The call is free. {TAKE ACTION HERE}