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Survival Tool #5 Protect Your Energy
In your toxic workplace, you must protect your energy.
You can do this at any time — but this practice is mandatory during interactions with toxic colleagues, and above all toxic bosses.
If used with discipline, you will protect yourself from the draining effects of people whose mere presence saps you of vitality, undermines your confidence, erodes your judgment, and robs you of sleep.
We all know such people. Like gargoyle-faced spigots, they’re vomiting rivers of toxicity through your office as we speak.
Toxic Workplace Survival Guy is the first to acknowledge that these toxic colleagues are the unconscious victims of generations of accumulated ancestral and collective trauma — compounded by attachment wounding in infancy.
They are unconscious, unaware, and unhealed.
That’s what makes them so toxic.
But self-preservation must come before compassion.
Because you can’t be compassionate when you’re fighting to survive.
Because the patterns running these people — if left unchecked — can destroy you.
So it follows:
We must protect our energy.
Latent Ability
It’s one of the many tragedies of our culture that we’re not taught this skill.
Very few people ever realise that they even possess this ability, let alone the difference it can make in the toxic workplace.
Make no mistake: This is a latent capacity we all possess — and a remarkably simple tool to wield.
The key is to:
(a) Know you possess this capacity.
(b) Practice.
What Does it Mean to ‘Protect My Energy’?
Managing your energy is nothing more complicated than paying more attention to what’s going on in your body, emotions, and mind than you normally do.
It’s that simple.
Ridiculously simple, in fact.
But if you do this regularly, your energy field will become clearer, lighter, and better able to resist the corrosion of the toxic workplace.
Let’s unpack how it works:
In a toxic workplace, by definition, you don’t feel safe.
That awareness of being under threat triggers a response.
Your nervous system mobilises all the glorious complexity developed by your body and brain over millions of years of evolution to constantly scan your environment for threats.
This is natural and good.
But if we’re forced to keep up this scanning indefinitely — such as when we’re stuck (for now) in a toxic workplace — then the effort exhausts us.
We become excessively oriented towards what’s going on outside of us.
We lose touch with what’s going on within us.
And that’s the basic reason why the toxic workplace is so insidious.
When we disconnect from our core in this way, we lose our ground.
And that leaves us vulnerable to the energetic tentacles that toxic colleagues and bosses use to choke our will to survive.
Protecting your energy will reconnect you to your core.
And when you’re connected to your core, those tentacles can’t get a grip.
What To Do
Before stepping into our toxic workplace (whether the physical office, or Zoom room), and especially before an interaction with a toxic colleague, we:
Set an intention to protect our energy. You can do this by silently saying: “I protect my energy. I protect my energy. I protect my energy.”
Then we check in with ourselves1:
Body — What physical sensations am I aware of? Do I feel warm, open, pleasant, tingling sensations? Or is there tightness, aches, pains? Maybe I’m so checked-out I can barely feel myself at all. Whatever you notice, it’s all good.
Emotions — What’s my emotional experience? Do I notice any fear, anger, shame, sadness? Am I experiencing weird feelings I don’t have words for? Or maybe I’m completely numb. Whatever it is, it’s cool.
Mind — What is the quality of my thinking? Does my mental experience evoke a time-lapse film of flies scavenging a piece of rotting fruit? Or is there some spaciousness between my thoughts — vibes of big sky and tropical sea? Or maybe the question doesn’t make sense. Whatever’s going on, it’s all fine.
And then we expand our awareness a little further:
Space — What does the space between me and the toxic colleague(s) feel like? Sounds like an oddball question, but trust Toxic Workplace Survival Guy: Your body knows how to do this. Can I literally feel the energy-sucking vortex at work? Can I sniff the hostility fouling the air? And if you can’t perceive anything, that’s also good. Merely asking the question has already shifted your energy and your awareness in a helpful way.
The aim here is not to try to fix, change, get rid or over-ride anything you encounter at any of these four levels: Body, emotions, mind, space-between.
The goal is to be more present to what’s actually happening in each of these domains as you move into contact with your toxic colleague.
Immediately, this will re-establish a greater degree of self-contact.
When we do this, remarkable things start to happen.
You will feel more enlivened, present, stable and anchored within yourself. You will say wiser things, or say less, and expand your capacity to respond — rather than react.
And you will become more sensitive to the impact of toxic colleagues as its occurs.
At first, this can make interactions seem more challenging.
But it’s much better to be aware of the effects these people are having on us moment-by-moment, than it is to stuff them down into the darkest recesses of our mind-body system, where the unprocessed dark energy festers, and seeps out over the ensuing days — often coming out sideways as outbursts directed at the people closest to us.
If we process the toxicity in the moment, we don’t carry it with us. We don’t let these people succeed in their agenda of living rent free in our head.
And we have turned up our own internal Wattage — like a bulb shining brighter.
Once we’ve begun to protect our energy, we’ve begun to make the shift that will ultimately carry us to freedom.
Summary
Protect your energy in a toxic workplace by turning your attention within. Before interacting with toxic colleagues, take a few moments to check-in at the physical, emotional and mental leavel, and then sense in to the space between you. This will reconnect you to your core, and protect your from their energetic hooks.
If you enjoy Toxic Workplace Survival Guy, then please do check out my sister publication Resonant World, serving the global movement dedicated to healing individual, inter-generational and collective trauma.
I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy during my spare time from working as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog (a model workplace). Subscribing, sharing, liking, commenting or buying me a coffee helps make this project sustainable. Thank you!
This explanation is based on the “three sync” meditation taught by Thomas Hübl, who I’ve been training with for more than two years, which is itself based on the kind of mindfulness practices handed down in many traditions.
This is a great tactic!! Simple but super powerful:)