Nourishing the Soil: Restoring Energy, Clarity and Purpose

Last week, I met with a coaching client I’ve had the privilege of working with for over a year.

She is an extraordinary woman who recently completed her PhD while working full-time, raising a family and managing the countless demands of everyday life. Not only did she successfully defend her doctoral research, but she received summa cum laude, the highest academic distinction.

It was an incredible achievement, and I couldn’t have been prouder of her.

Yet, when we met, she wasn’t celebrating. She was exhausted.

She described struggling to wake up in the morning, feeling mentally depleted and having difficulty thinking clearly. For years, her mind had been consumed by research, deadlines, presentations and the enormous responsibility of completing her doctorate. Now that it was finally finished, she expected to feel relief and excitement about what came next.

Instead, she felt empty.

She couldn’t see her next steps or imagine building the business she had been dreaming about. She was even questioning why she had pursued the PhD in the first place.

As I listened, it became clear that what she needed most wasn’t another goal, a business plan or pressure to figure out her next chapter.

She needed to replenish herself.

When our demands exceed our resources

During our conversation, I shared a model adapted from the work of Dr. Daniel Friedland that illustrates a simple but powerful principle: Our experience of stress is influenced not only by the demands we face, but also by the resources we have available to meet them.

Our demands include everything life asks of us, from work pressures, deadlines and caregiving responsibilities to emotional challenges, uncertainty and the countless expectations we place on ourselves.

Our resources are what enable us to meet those demands. They include sleep, physical energy, emotional capacity, supportive relationships, time, autonomy and practices that help us regulate our nervous systems.

When our demands exceed our resources, we are more likely to experience those demands as threats. We can begin spiralling downward into reactivity, becoming increasingly anxious, overwhelmed, impatient or irritable. Our ability to think clearly and respond thoughtfully diminishes, and situations that once felt manageable can suddenly seem impossible.

If this imbalance continues, chronic stress can leave us profoundly depleted, physically, mentally and emotionally. In the context of prolonged, unmanaged workplace stress, this can contribute to burnout.

Dr. Friedland’s work contrasts this reactive state with a more creative state, in which we have greater capacity to meet challenges, connect with others, see possibilities and experience fulfilment.

What I find particularly important is that when we become deeply depleted, we can lose access to the very qualities we need to imagine a different future. Our creativity diminishes, our perspective narrows, and we struggle to connect with our sense of purpose.

This was precisely what my client was experiencing.

She hadn’t necessarily lost her ambition, creativity or purpose. She was trying to access them from a place of profound exhaustion.

I shared this model with her to help her see her experience through a different lens.

[IMAGE: Demands and Resources model]

Model adapted from the work of Dr. Daniel Friedland, MD.

Replenishing the resilience bank account

I also shared my metaphor of the resilience bank account, another way of understanding the same dynamic.

Every day, we make withdrawals through the demands placed on us. We also have opportunities to make deposits through experiences and practices that restore our energy and capacity.

My client had spent years making enormous withdrawals while completing her PhD, working full-time and caring for her family. Her resilience bank account was deeply depleted.

Rather than pushing forward with her next ambition, we explored what it would take to begin making meaningful deposits.

What would it look like to make replenishing herself her next priority?

What does it mean to resource yourself?

One of the most important principles in coaching resilience is recognizing that although research identifies practices that can support resilience and well-being, what genuinely nourishes each of us is deeply personal.

As coaches, we can draw on evidence-informed approaches while remaining curious about the individual in front of us. Our role is not simply to prescribe a list of resilience practices, but to help people discover what restores their energy, supports their well-being and fits meaningfully into their lives.

So I asked her, “What would resource you? What helps you feel restored, nourished and more connected to yourself?”

She began talking about her garden.

She loves gardening and finds great pleasure in being outdoors, surrounded by nature, with her hands in the soil.

Because gardening was so meaningful to her, we began exploring her recovery through the metaphor of a garden. We talked about how even the most beautiful plants cannot flourish without nourishing soil, water, sunlight and care. You can plant extraordinary seeds, but if the soil is depleted and the conditions aren’t right, those seeds will struggle to grow.

The same is true for us. We cannot expect ourselves to be creative, inspired, patient and purposeful when we haven’t been giving our bodies and minds what they need to flourish.

As we continued exploring what would nourish her, sleep emerged as another important resource. She was profoundly tired and needed more opportunities for genuine rest.

We talked about protecting time in her calendar and creating space for herself without feeling obligated to fill it with more activity.

I asked her, “What would make for a delicious ME day?”

She imagined mornings when she could sleep late, stay in her pyjamas, enjoy a leisurely coffee, spend time in her garden or simply do absolutely nothing.

We also explored how she might create more unhurried time with her daughter and give herself permission to enjoy life’s simple pleasures.

What emerged wasn’t an elaborate recovery plan. It was a collection of deeply personal ways she could begin restoring herself.

Reconnecting with the body and heart

Something else emerged during our conversation. My client had spent years immersed in research, analysis and intellectual achievement. Her mind had been working extraordinarily hard, and she was now describing a level of mental exhaustion that made even simple thinking difficult.

Of course, she’s not alone. So many of us spend much of our lives living in our heads, constantly thinking, analyzing, planning and trying to figure everything out. Yet our bodies hold a wealth of wisdom, offering signals about our emotions, needs and well-being that we can easily overlook when we’re caught up in the busyness of our minds.

We explored what it might mean for her to move beyond trying to figure everything out intellectually and begin reconnecting with the wisdom of her heart and body.

I shared a heart-brain coherence practice that I’ve been using for years, drawing on research from the HeartMath Institute. This practice invites us to shift our attention from our busy minds into our hearts and intentionally cultivate feelings of love, gratitude and appreciation. Research suggests that these practices can support physiological coherence, emotional regulation and greater inner calm.

For my client, this offered another way of reconnecting with herself, one that didn’t require more thinking, analyzing or striving. Instead, it was an invitation to slow down, reconnect with her heart and experience greater ease.

Explore this heart-brain coherence practice [LINK TO BE ADDED]

From depletion back to creativity

When we return to the model, we can see what becomes possible as our resources begin to exceed our demands.

Instead of spiraling downward into stress, reactivity and exhaustion, we create the conditions to move upward toward greater calm, clarity, creativity and possibility.

Dr. Friedland’s work connects this creative state with our capacity to learn, connect, express our potential, serve others and experience a greater sense of significance.

This is what I find so important about the model. When we’re profoundly depleted, we may struggle to connect with our sense of purpose, not because that purpose has disappeared, but because we simply don’t have the capacity to access it.

Sometimes we don’t need to find our purpose. We need to restore enough capacity to reconnect with it.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily happen overnight, particularly when we’ve been depleted for a long time. Restoring our resilience bank account takes time, intention and sometimes meaningful changes to how we’re living and working.

My client has extraordinary gifts, knowledge and experience. She has dreams of creating a business that allows her to contribute in meaningful ways, and I believe those possibilities are still there.

For now, her focus isn’t on forcing those dreams into existence.

It’s on nourishing the soil.

As she restores her energy and capacity, she can begin reconnecting with her creativity, imagination and sense of possibility.

Are you living as a human doing or a human being?

I wonder how many of us are living in a similar place.

We keep pushing, meeting deadlines, caring for others and accomplishing what needs to be done. We tell ourselves that once the next project is finished, once the children are older or once life settles down, we’ll finally rest.

Yet somehow, there is always something else.

We’ve become so accustomed to being human doings that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to be human beings.

So I’d like to leave you with a few questions.

Are your demands currently greater than your resources? Are you making more withdrawals than deposits from your resilience bank account? Have you been expecting yourself to be creative, patient, inspired and purposeful while running on empty?

Perhaps most importantly, what would it look like to make replenishing yourself your next priority?

Sometimes the most important thing we can do for our future is stop pushing and begin nourishing the person who will create it.

With love,

Monica

Would you like to explore resilience more deeply?

Are you feeling depleted or uncertain about what comes next?

I offer complimentary one-hour coaching conversations to explore where you are, what may be draining your energy and how you can begin restoring your resilience and reconnecting with what matters most.

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