The Energy Audit is a powerful tool that can transform all areas of your life by helping you align with what energises you. We live and perform best when what we do and how we do it energises us more than it drains us. That’s where your authentic competence and zone of genius are—the things that you do better than anyone else. That’s where you enter flow and unleash your peak performance.

The things we stick with on the long-term are the things that, while they may be challenging and unpleasant at times, we enjoy more than not. They energise us more than they drain us—they are above the courage threshold. Whether we are above or below the courage threshold is the reason why we persevere toward some goals and give up on others.

Knowing what energises you and aligning you work and life with that as closely as possible will help you make better decisions and live a happier and more meaningful life.

How to use the energy audit

Step 1: Make a list of your energisers and drainers

Download the Energy Audit worksheet here and fill in your energisers and drainers. You can organise these into categories. I like using activities, projects, habits, people, places, thought patters, values. The tool is most powerful if you personalise it and devise your own categories, based on what is meaningful to you and representative of your current life and future priorities. You can be concrete, e.g. name specific people that drain you, or describe the type of people and their behaviour and attitude.

Step 2: Eliminate or convert drainers

Examine each item in the drainers section of your list with the following questions:

Why does this drain me? Why do I do it? What do I get out of it?

How could I remove it from the list or convert it into something that energises me?

Step 3: Amplify energisers

Examine your energisers:

Why does this energise me? How can I bring more of this into my life? What are the patterns?

Step 4: Identify the 80/20 elements

Look through each category and highlight the items that have the biggest impact on your energy. Why do they affect you the way they do? Getting to the bottom of this can be extremely powerful in revealing any underlying blocks to your performance. You can use the Five Whys model to dig into this and get to the real root causes.

Step 5: Going deeper. Are you playing the right game?

Any game we play in life will most likely entail difficulties. To succeed, you need to push through them. But how do you know that you’re playing the right game on the first place? We often deal with projects, habits and people that don’t make us happy. How do you know if they’re worth persevering with? Whether they energise you more than they drain you is the answer to that. Making sure that you are above the courage threshold in any meaningful projects and goals will help you persevere with them.

Applying the model to individual projects

You can also apply the energy audit to individual projects, relationships, or circumstances. For example, you can examine the type of work patterns that energise you and those that drain you.

Understanding how circumstances impact you and why they impact you the way they do deepens self-knowledge and helps you make more meaningful decisions. The energy audit is a powerful tool you can use on both macro and micro levels to help you align your life as much as possible with the things that energise you.