My Framework for Energy Management & Mindset

And why energy management is one of the #1 most useful life skills

What is energy management?

I’ve had many people look at me in confusion when I’ve told them that I do energy management and mindset coaching, helping Silicon Valley product managers and engineers manage burnout and manage energy smarter.

So first, my definition is: Energy management is how you choose to use your energy.

This may be unintentional or intentional. I find that many people are mostly unintentional because they are not aware of this concept or don’t know how to use its power. This used to be me, too!

You’re going to end up spending your energy no matter what, because your work, play, people around you, and world events will drain or boost your energy, and it is much more powerful if you are intentionally in charge of it.

Why is it important?

I view energy management as one of the #1 most useful life skills.

I wish I knew this 24 years ago when I started out in finance and then forayed into my career in tech. No one teaches us these skills in school or in life!

I love this concept much more than time management. I view time management as one tool within my energy management framework, but energy management is so much more encompassing and versatile than that.

Energy management is not just about maximizing productivity, it’s about optimizing your life: productivity AND happiness.

As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz said, “Managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal.”

If you can manage your energy well, you will have the confidence to tackle anything in life. On top of that, you will truly feel like you’re living your best life.

Using energy management effectively requires you to show up as your most authentic self, set yourself up for your best work, and by default, has you spreading your positive energy to everyone around you. This doesn’t mean every day is fabulous and amazing. We all know life’s ups and downs are a given, especially in intense tech and startup life.

It’s our attitude, not the reality, that makes it a bad day or a silver lining.

Without energy management, you might feel:

• Tired, still burning out, especially with the next-level intensity we have in startups and high-growth tech companies. You might even be doing some things to combat it like exercise, but it’s not enough and you’re still burning out. The goal is to move up in your career without killing yourself!
• Not optimally using your time and energy. You’re not creating your best work or using your best brainpower to flourish and be the best you can be, even more than you might even know! You’re not tapping into your best talents. As PMs and engineers, we’re all about optimization. We know when things aren’t efficient.
• Frustrated at work with teammates or execs for overpromising and underdelivering, or seemingly being unreasonable and pushing for too much. Maybe they feel that way too.
• Pessimistic or down energy — if say your team isn’t hitting goals, or goal metrics are sliding backwards, or the tech stock market is severely down (like it is at the time of this writing), or naysayers are trashing your company and the innovative products that you’re building.
• Not as patient, fully present, and mindful as you want to be with your family, friends, and colleagues. If you’re still seeing your friends and family, that is. It’s tough when work is all-consuming.
• Stretched thin, overwhelmed, being pulled in many directions with too many responsibilities on your plate. Doing all the things like the highly responsible high achiever that you are.
• Like you’re running on a hamster wheel. It feels like life is leading you, you are not leading your life.
• You’re thinking: I love this badass stuff we’re building, but there must be a better way to live life. This ain’t it.

With energy management, you will:

• Feel in charge of your life. And happy with where it’s going. You’ll feel good and healthy in your body, and strong mental health.
• Feel like you are at your best and feel like you’re thriving. You’ll tell people, “I’m living my best life” and mean it. It won’t sound hollow or cheesy like some meme slogan you see all over Instagram and TikTok.
• Protect yourself from your energy drains. So you don’t waste energy on low ROI (return on investment) activities, content, or people that are draining.
• Intentionally allocate your energy on tasks and people that give high ROI for your priorities. Work smarter, not harder. For example, more mental space to think longer-term strategy as you scale as a product or engineering leader, and allow your most creative ideas to emerge.
• Boost your energy for even higher ROI on life. You will know how to create the conditions to produce at your best, or to quickly get yourself out of a rut in difficult times that tax your energy levels.
• Feel fulfilled and grounded, like a peaceful buddha creating great works and living your best life in a zen bubble, collaborating with other positive-energy beings in your bubble, despite the crazy storms and sunshine whiplashing outside your bubble.

My Framework Explained

This is the framework for the system that I use today for myself and in coaching clients in energy management.

What makes my framework unique

My approach is differentiated by my unique synthesis of what I’ve found most useful in managing energy in intense tech life.

In particular, my framework is designed based on the most non-obvious and most useful levers that I have found over the last 15 years of developing and honing an effective energy management system.

3 major levers in energy management that are not obvious:

1. Mindset needs to come first because emotional energy is your most powerful lever.
2. You need a structure to sustain the habits and build energy management into your muscle memory, especially in more intense tech life. Hence this overall framework provides a structure for a system that includes mindset, ongoing tools to build habits, and ad hoc tools for tough times. A good structure also means you don’t waste as much energy on repetitive problems because you’ve made it more brainless and automated.
3. People have more agency than they think. In particular on product teams, PMs and engineers have the most influence over team energy, even if they might not fully realize it. I’ve seen this over and over on teams at different companies, and it’s such a big opportunity to improve everyone’s energy that it gets me excited to work on it.

My framework for energy management has 3 main themes:

1. Mindset: This theme provides a sub-framework for best managing your emotional energy. I’ll explain more in a bit on why this is important.
2. Management: This theme centers on a core model for 4 pillars of energy management: physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy. This provides a sub-framework for how to best allocate your energy across the 4 pillars, in a way that works for you and achieves your personal goals.
3. Mastery: This theme is about sustaining the system. It provides a sub-framework for how to think about your personal toolbox: both ongoing habits and ad hoc tools. In my coaching, I have a “Christina Pan template” as a starting point for experimenting and tweaking, but ultimately each person builds their own toolbox that works for them.

These 3 themes (Mindset, Management, Mastery) that comprise my overall energy management system are always continuous works-in-progress!

Managing energy is a lifetime skill, and you’ll always be improving upon it.

The main goal of this design is to love using the system so much that this framework gets ingrained in your muscle memory, and the tools and habits become automatic. When it becomes second nature and automatic, this means you’re expending less energy planning and have more energy to allocate to using your personal genius to bring awesome things to the world that are uniquely YOU and catapult your life forward.

Working smarter, not harder! That’s the goal.

The themes are listed in order of priority from left to right, but let me start with a quick explanation on the “Management” theme first because it’s the core of this framework and system.

Here’s the framework again so you don’t have to keep scrolling up:

The 4 pillars of (Energy) Management

Under the Management theme, there are 4 key pillars. This comes from the book The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. This model made immediate sense to me and I’ve found it very useful as guiding principles, even as I continuously test and iterate on figuring out how to apply energy management in real life. This is how I would explain it:

1. Physical energy: This is energy for your body from sleep, exercise, nutrition, hydration, and most non-intuitively especially for folks in tech, rest/recovery (beyond sleep).
2. Emotional energy: This is your mental health. I know it can be confused with “mental energy” given the wording “mental” health, but I find this the best way to think about it because it’s critically important, highly undervalued, and requires immense self care. Emotional energy affects your mood and outlook on life (and vice versa). This is about feeling fulfilled, challenged, and accomplished in your work, creations, hobbies, and interactions with people. It’s also about feeling optimistic and positive.
3. Mental energy: This is your capacity to think clearly and strategically. Mental energy helps you come up with your best creative ideas leveraging your unique strengths and your team’s best strengths.
4. Spiritual energy: This is living a life aligned with your values. I like to call this “living your authentic self.” It’s about feeling connected to a purpose greater than yourself. In real life, this translates to feeling like your personal values match your team and company values. If you feel this isn’t true for you in your current situation, it’s not necessarily a doomed ending. A simple reframing could easily tweak it so that it feels true for you.

I call these “pillars,” but they’re all intertwined, so it’s more like a Venn diagram with 4 overlapping circles.

For example, when you’re in good physical health, this obviously helps mental energy and emotional energy. You think better, you’re in a great mood, you’re nicer to everyone, they’re nicer back, you’re more motivated.

Another example is spiritual energy or emotional energy can power you through difficult times when you’re sick or injured, times when you’re low on physical and mental energy.

Ok now let’s circle back to the first theme on Mindset, as it is the most important and again, it’s generally not obvious why.

Why mindset comes first

In my framework, the Mindset theme comes first because if you don’t have a right mindset in place, you won’t have a truly effective system for energy management for two reasons:

The first reason is that emotional energy is your most powerful lever.

Emotional energy can be your biggest energy drain, yet also your biggest lever for boosting yourself. This was a non-obvious learning that took me a long time and many life smackdowns to understand. Because I didn’t have the mindset dialed in, I prevented myself from scaling well as a product leader and still experienced burnout, even if not as massive as my original biggest flameouts, after Zynga and co-founding a social gaming startup, that started me on this energy management odyssey.

Even if you proactively do things to manage your physical energy and mental energy, for example, it won’t matter because the lack of managing emotional energy would majorly crimp your efforts. It’s like pouring water into a bucket with holes.

The second reason why mindset comes first: You won’t use the tools or sustain habits if you’re blocked by old beliefs.

You might not even be aware of your beliefs, or that they might be holding you back. We all have beliefs that society or our cultures have ingrained in us. If they’re abundant beliefs, then awesome! If they’re limiting beliefs, we need to do the mindset work to re-program these beliefs in our head.

You won’t be motivated to do anything you don’t truly believe in.

If you grew up with beliefs like “Don’t rock the boat. Work hard and good things will come. Don’t talk back to the boss. Just be happy you have a job.” — you might not even think to speak up when you’re burning out, much less do the inner work to change your behavior to live your best, authentic life and not people please or overextend yourself. You might not even know you’re burning out because you think that’s just the way life is.

There’s nothing wrong with us by the way. This happens to everyone! Flipping the limiting beliefs that are holding us back, that society has told us is the truth and that we might not even be fully aware of, are all part of personal growth and evolving ever more into the wisest versions of ourselves!

I’m harping about this because if you haven’t built a solid foundation in the Mindset part in this framework, you’re not going to have an effective system.

You won’t optimally allocate your energy in the most important areas across physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy per the Management theme. You might not even do the action steps, even if you say you’ll try it or intellectually know it’s good for you.

And you won’t use the tools or keep up the routines in the Mastery theme, even if I give you a list of all the things for your personal toolbox to manage your energy better.

People intellectually know that getting exercise is good for health. But does everyone do it? No they don’t. It comes down to mindset, as in your beliefs. Not everyone truly believes it is worth it or that they are worth it. These are mental blocks. Maybe they didn’t grow up with exercise being important, or maybe they think their body isn’t like those Instagram fitness models so it’s not as easy for them, or maybe they’re already trying to survive over here with work, kids, family issues, household duties and nobody’s got time for that.

On the flip side, other folks make exercise a priority and treasure it like gold. Because they treasure their energy like gold! They also have jobs, kids, family issues, and perhaps they ask for a lot of help and outsource household duties, or unsubscribe from things taking their energy, to be able to have energy for exercise. They truly believe it helps them feel better and perform better. Exercise GIVES them more energy and they don’t want to function without it. They’ve practiced this tool enough to know in their bones that this is true and have gained the confidence that it is worth it and they are worth it. They weren’t necessarily born this way or grew up in a family of sporty people. They believe it now though, and might have had to get through major mental blocks to get to this point.

I’ve always like this saying:

If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.

Mindset Theme: 3 Guiding Principles

My Mindset theme comprises of the three guiding principles that I’ve found most useful for mindset for effective energy management. As I mentioned previously, mindset and energy management is an ongoing work-in-progress. Some days our energy is going to be lower or under duress, and it’s always helpful to have strong guiding principles to come back to on the days when you need to boost your energy or get back to where you want to be.

3 Guiding Principles for Energy Management Mindset:

1. Speak your truth & set boundaries with yourself and others.
2. Get in your emotional zen. Focus on what’s in our control.
3. Reframe for positivity.

These might look like simple platitudes or taglines, but there is a lot packed in under each guiding principle. In my coaching programs, we work together to dig deep in each of these areas to identify and re-program limiting beliefs until people have truly flipped old limiting beliefs and take on new actions that used to be completely unfamiliar or uncomfortable. It takes practice, externalizing with others, and continuous encouragement to ingrain new beliefs and actions into your mind, body, soul, and muscle memory.

Speaking your truth and setting boundaries with yourself and others is about speaking up and assertively communicating your needs. There’s no “I wish I had said something in that meeting” regrets. When you’ve said everything you want to say without letting it fester, you’re not wasting precious energy ruminating or managing anxiety or resenting that you agreed to more than you wanted to.

I’m very passionate about working with people to be their best in this arena because it leverages my personal top strengths in the Clifton StrengthsFinder’s Influencing theme. I naturally want to speak up and make sure others are heard, and greatly enjoy encouraging others to speak up and maximize their best strengths.

Setting boundaries with yourself is about managing the overwhelm you’re putting on yourself, and evolving your mindset to not take on responsibility for all the things, and learn how to inspire and empower others to lead where you don’t need to. This means at work and at home, in all aspects of your life. Easier said than done, of course. This also involves a lot of self-compassion and self-care — a big opportunity area for many high achievers.

Setting boundaries with others is about speaking up and putting in place ground rules for your best energy and sanity. It’s about changing YOUR behavior, not others’. We cannot expect to change other people’s behavior and don’t aim to. For example, if you close Slack and mute your phone during focus time to protect mental energy, it’s on you to do the mind work to cherish that and not feel guilty or worry about how it looks or how other people feel, and to communicate clearly with teammates.

Getting in your emotional zen is really about focusing on what’s in your control. Again, this is easier said than done, and the mindset work is around ingraining it in your muscle memory such that you can quickly recall it under stress or in a difficult situation. This guiding principle is also about emotion regulation, an important life skill built through a ton of inner work and therapy. We’re not born with it. If you think about the best leaders you’ve worked with, they all are good at staying in their emotional zen. They have high emotional awareness, communicate thoughtfully, and stay grounded no matter what chaos is going on in the ups and downs of tech life.

Lastly, reframing for positivity is one of my favorite guiding principles. Another top personal strength of mine is positivity and I have seen its immense power, time and time again. But what I really love about this guiding principle is that it’s about creating energy, not just protecting energy. I’ve come to learn that many people don’t even realize you can boost yourself with energy!

At its core, reframing for positivity is about flipping limiting beliefs. The human brain naturally latches on to the negatives AND we can train the brain to immediately reframe it into something positive and productive. There is a silver lining and learning in everything, even if it might not be all jolly happy rainbows. You’re training yourself and your team to not wallow where you are and to use your big brains and tremendous capabilities to flip it into something that moves you forward.

Again this is not only useful for managing energy, but it’s also a top skill of great leaders. The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr and Schwartz points out that the most effective leaders can summon positive emotions during challenging times.

A recent Harvard Business Review article talks about research affirming that the best leaders have a contagious positive energy:

“…we found that the greatest predictor of success for leaders is not their charisma, influence, or power. It is not personality, attractiveness, or innovative genius. The one thing that supersedes all these factors is positive relational energy: the energy exchanged between people that helps uplift, enthuse, and renew them.”

Now let’s put all the pieces of the framework together. Here’s a summary of what it looks like in practice…

What the system looks like in practice

In my coaching programs, we first get the fundamentals in place.

We start with mindset — we identify and discuss mindset limiting beliefs, examine why and where these came from, and through inner work exercises, externalizing with others, and practice in your real life, we reprogram our mind, body, and soul to integrate new abundant beliefs that we will make our new reality. Also, a huge part of achieving big change is continuous reinforcement and encouragement in the new beliefs along the way, which largely happens by talking about it with other likeminded people on a regular basis.

I want to take a quick minute to talk about “externalizing with others” since I’ve mentioned it a few times and people might be wondering what the heck I mean. In my experience, it’s not obvious, greatly underrated, and a key factor in successfully flipping limiting beliefs.

What I mean by “externalizing with others” is speaking about these old and new beliefs with others and hearing them reflect back their opinions to you or vocalize similar experiences. This could be with a coach, with others in your group coaching program, or with accountability buddies, for example. Externalizing your thoughts is what people do in therapy, and that’s one reason why I think therapy is so awesome and powerful. You can’t tap into this bountiful source of personal growth from merely reading books or listening to podcasts.

The reason why is because over time, externalizing to others changes the way you talk to yourself about it and how you talk to others about that topic or belief.

Instead of saying, “I can’t take vacation— we have too much going on” or “I’ll take time off after we IPO or sell this company,” you can flip it into being a person who talks like this: “Taking time off is not a luxury. It’s a basic need like food and water. No one is even telling me not to take vacation, but if they were, this is non-negotiable and I’m more than worth it, this is how I bring all my badass value to the team! Rest and recharge time is put into the schedule first, and we plan around that, so no one is surprised or left hanging. My mind, body, and best capacity to be there for my family, friends, and team require it.”

Along with the Mindset theme, another fundamental step is getting clear and staying clear on your life priorities in the Management theme.

This will drive how you allocate your energy across the 4 Management pillars: physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy.

Many people are not spending their energy according to their life priorities. It takes continuous proactive intention. That might sound like a lot of work, but we make this easier (and take less energy!) by putting in place structure to make it more automatic and ingrain it in your muscle memory so that it becomes second nature to you (which takes less energy). That’s the point of a system in general, and why I harp about this system!

Within life priorities, product and engineering leaders would also get clear on their work priorities and allocate energy accordingly. And make the strategy and priorities clear to their teams so that everyone is spending energy wisely in the right places.

However product and engineering leaders need to create and protect their mental space to come up with that smart strategy in the first place!

When the product or technical strategy is well-thought-out, the reasoning is clear to everyone on why it’s a good bet and how it is aligned with the company strategy, and the team priorities derived from that strategy are obvious to everyone and the team is excited to tackle it.

This is why energy management is so important and utterly useful! No one wants to waste energy spinning wheels on unclear direction or priorities that don’t seem to be backed by good reasoning (and in fact, it’s actually very draining).

In case you need a quick refresher:

As these fundamentals in Mindset and Management are being built up and honed, we also start working in the Mastery theme of my framework. We test and experiment with various tools for physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy. Some tools will resonate with you, while other tools will not be exciting at all, and either way, you’ll get great learnings!

As I mentioned, I have a Christina Pan template toolbox as a starting point. There are both ongoing tools and ad hoc tools. Ad hoc tools are useful in tough times, like when I had unexpected lung surgery while traveling abroad and I used these tools to boost myself with positive energy.

I’ve tried and continue to use many of these stress management and energy management tools from the last 15+ years of synthesizing learnings from mindfulness, yoga, positive psychology, strengths-based leadership, tech product management and engineering, fast iterative software product development best practices, personal development, life/business coaching, money mindset, high-performing athletes and creative artists, cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal communication, nutrition, and of course, The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr and Schwartz.

The main goal is to keep what works for you in your toolbox. That and your mindset are what will keep you motivated to keep practicing and using these tools until these habits ingrained in your muscle memory.

If this talk about “muscle memory” seems weird, let me give my favorite analogy from hip hop dance class:

When you first start learning a dance routine (or anything new), your mind is in overdrive — you’re trying to remember the steps while watching the teacher while listening to the beats while feeling into the music while correcting your mistakes while maybe watching others in front of you or yourself in the mirror all at the same time.

As our hip hop teacher says, the goal is to practice the dance steps over and over and over until it is in ingrained your body, in your muscle memory and you don’t even need to think much about it, your body automatically knows the next move or step with the music. You’re not exerting as much mental energy, and you’re gaining the joy of positive emotional energy and rejuvenating physical energy. This smooth-operating ease and joy is what I mean by ingraining energy management into your muscle memory. You’ve got that sh*t down!

And there you have it: Mindset, Management, and Mastery.

This framework takes a holistic view of energy management by creating a system that uses the levers of flipping limiting beliefs, energy allocation according to life priorities, and tools that work for you personally.

In conclusion

As you see how your choices in how you wield your energy make a positive difference in your life, you will feel more large and charge of your energy.

This breeds even more confidence that you can navigate anything in life like a zen buddha regulating your emotions and filtering out any noise cluttering your brain or dragging you down.

Engineers and PMs, you keep on pioneering! We’re going to keep doing amazing, monumental things in new lands like crypto, web3, the metaverse, health tech, fintech, the future of work, the future of anything — regardless of all the media swirl and people hyping it up or pooh-poohing it as fake or evil, or making dramatic proclamations like crypto is dead or [insert tech innovation] is dead. We will speak our truth to call out bad behavior, but otherwise as Taylor Swift says — haters gonna hate, shake it off! Unsubscribe. No emotional space for that — we’re over here managing our energy!

When you do manage your energy, it is truly a beautiful thing.

I would rate myself an 8–9 (out of 10) on intentionally managing energy across the 4 pillars of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. Life has many, many bumps, mountains, and crevasses in the road and I’m happy and grounded on a daily basis.

This is what I wish for you and everyone on the planet.

Can you imagine what a wonderful world that would be if we achieve that??

For the back story on how I got here and lessons learned — see My Personal Story of Burnout.

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Find me on Instagram (christinawpan) or LinkedIn.

Founders, executives, and leaders in new scaling challenges: If you’re seeking to elevate your leadership and career by strategically using your energy to leverage your zone of genius and full potential—direct message me on Instagram or LinkedIn for info or to book a short consultation to discuss what’s getting in the way of your highest impact and how you might benefit from my executive coaching program. My zone of genius is maximizing other people’s zone of genius!