Watch the video version of this essay on YouTube.
Last week, I watched a room full of accomplished, capable people become three different versions of themselves in under five minutes.
The exercise was simple. Three chairs in a row. Three sentences, each one representing a different internal narrative and energy: the reactive state, where anxiety and urgency run the show; the shutdown state, where energy collapses into fog and defeat; and the resonant state, feeling grounded, creative, and connected to what’s possible. One person sat while a witness read each of their partner’s sentences aloud. The mover rotated slowly from seat to seat, letting each sentence land fully in their body before the next one was offered.
I designed this exercise for my Lead with Energy gathering, an evening built around the first energy center in my book, The Energy Blueprint for Leaders, the one that governs our most fundamental sense of safety, stability, and belonging. The root: the ground everything else is built on.
I wasn’t sure how it would be received. But what I witnessed that night was pure gold.
In the first seat, shoulders curled inward. A few tears fell. The survival sentences people had written for themselves, things like “my worth depends on how hard I work” or “my love and safety are conditioned upon my success,” landed in their bodies instantly. This wasn’t because the sentences were new, but because their nervous systems had been rehearsing those patterns for years, or often decades.
The second seat was heavier. Sentences like “I’ve already failed” or “maybe I’m just not built for this.” I watched eyes go dull, energy collapse.
These weren’t strangers to success. These were leaders, founders, and professionals who look like they have it together from the outside, feeling the weight of a story they’ve been carrying in silence.
And then there was the third seat...
The sentences here started with “I am” or “I have.” Not wishes or affirmations pulled from a Pinterest board. Instead, it was the truest, most expansive thing each person knew about themselves at their most grounded. And when those sentences were read aloud, I watched spines straighten, chests open, and faces soften into something that looked like recognition; like remembering something they had always known but stopped letting themselves feel.
This exercise worked because it names the thing so many of us have wrong about change and about building a life that actually feels like ours. We think it takes years. We think we need to earn it. We think there is some prerequisite of suffering or credentials or perfect clarity before we’re allowed to step into the version of ourselves that feels most alive and free. That’s certainly been my experience, of which I have written many times. But in that room, people accessed it in minutes. And it wasn’t because the exercise was magic, but because that version of them was always in there, underneath the sentences learned as children and the professional identities built to stay safe.
We are not here to pretend the first two seats don’t exist. Life will hand us all moments and seasons of reactivity and shutdown. We get laid off. Our parents die. We get diagnosed with an illness. The anxious grip of “I have to fix this right now” and the heavy fog of “I feel lost and helpless” are not signs of failure. They are a nervous system doing what it was designed to do.
And yet…
We are entering the wisdom economy. Technology has made knowledge a commodity, which means our attunement to ourselves and to our own internal world as a source of wisdom is more important than ever. We need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and recognize our innate emotional fluidity. We are never stuck in an emotion to the degree that we allow it to move through us. The work is building the capacity to recognize which seat you’re sitting in and know, in your body, that the third one is still available to you.
This capacity has a name: vagal authority. It’s the ability to lead and communicate from a state of calm, grounded nervous system regulation. To stay present and connected, even in stressful situations, so that others’ nervous systems can co-regulate with yours. It isn’t about volume or power - that’s the old paradigm. It’s an authentic, embodied sense of safety that changes how you make decisions, how you lead, and what you’re willing to reach for when the familiar path stops fitting.
What I see repeatedly in my work with leaders who feel stuck or quietly sensing that the life they’ve built doesn’t match who they’re becoming is not a strategy problem. It’s that their nervous system has been calibrated around survival for so long that the idea of something expansive, something creatively alive, feels foreign. No matter how much they want to change, their internal operating system hasn’t been trained to hold it. And so they stay and tell themselves it’s fine, that they should be grateful in the grind. Meanwhile, the signal keeps getting louder as they slowly die on the vine.
If your job feels like mine did, soulless and draining, and yet you have no idea what else you would do, you are not lost. Perhaps you’ve conditioned your safety and security on it. I’m here to tell you, as someone who also had the rug pulled out from under her in a couple of surprise layoffs throughout my career, that safety sourced from anything outside you is an illusion. You have an internal operating system, and you have far more influence over it than you’ve been led to believe.
The third seat isn’t a destination you arrive at after years of work. It’s a place you practice returning to, again and again, until your body starts to recognize it as home. Start there. Watch as your capacity to hold the unknown grows, and with it, the creative and unforeseen possibilities for your life.
If you’re sensing that something in your professional life isn’t fitting the way it used to, I created a free quiz called Reclaim Your Leadership Flow to help you see where the misalignment actually lives. It takes a few minutes and gives you a felt sense of what’s underneath the patterns.
And if you want to go deeper, I’m offering a handful of complimentary Energy Meets Strategy Sessions: 30-minute, one-on-one sessions built around your quiz results. This isn’t a discovery call. It’s a working session. You’ll walk away with a felt sense of what’s actually underneath the patterns, and the lived experience of what opens up when you address it.
In resonance,
Nathalie
If you’d like to watch the expanded video version of this essay, you can find it on YouTube.