Protecting Your Energy at Work - 20

In this episode, we explore how to stay centered, grounded, and whole in environments that can feel draining, demanding, or competitive. 

If you’ve ever left a meeting feeling exhausted — or noticed that other people’s moods seem to linger in your body long after the conversation ends — this episode is for you. 

We’ll talk about what it really means to “protect your energy,” how to recognize when your boundaries are being crossed, and how to use simple energetic hygiene practices — like grounding rituals, breathwork, sound, and Reiki — to clear what’s not yours and reclaim your peace. 

This episode will help you reconnect to your natural sense of calm and power, no matter what’s happening around you. 

🎧 Listen before or after work, or anytime you need to reset and recenter yourself. 

Welcome to Lady(ish)—the podcast where real talk meets whole-self transformation. Hosted by coach, healer, and wellness guide Autumn Noble O’Hanlon, this unfiltered space is for women who want more out of life—but on their own terms.

Each week, we dive into the messy, beautiful, and often contradictory layers of wellness, covering everything from career shifts and body image to energy healing, intuitive living, fitness, burnout recovery, and creating change that actually sticks.

Whether you're chasing a new chapter, healing old wounds, or just trying to reconnect with yourself in a loud, overwhelming world—Lady(ish) is here to support your evolution. Expect honest conversations, coaching wisdom, holistic tools, spiritual insights, and permission to be a little bit of everything (and nothing you're not).

Because wellness isn’t one-size-fits-all—and neither are you.

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Transcript

Autumn Noble (00:00)

Hey everyone and welcome back to the podcast. I am so glad that you are here today. We are going to unpack a topic that I think a lot of us as women in the professional world run into on a pretty regular basis. And that's that quiet struggle around how we protect our energy at work despite everything that we are always juggling.

Maybe you've noticed that after certain meetings, conversations, or even just seen emails come through, you start to feel drained and your energy just starts to feel heavy.

Many of us are able to start the day feeling grounded, but by the time we get to the end of it, we just feel scattered, burdened, and heavy, and we can never really quite put our fingers on why. This episode is about learning to notice those energetic exchanges. The invisible transactions that happen all day long and developing tools to help us stay grounded, centered, and whole.

even in environments that feel competitive or chaotic.

So let's start off by talking about what in the world do I mean when I talk about protecting your energy.

Protecting your energy isn't about shutting people out or becoming really guarded and pulling away from those around you. It's about awareness, noticing when your internal state starts to shift and intentionally choosing not to take

on what isn't yours.

The foundation of all of this is that everything around us, things that people say, things that people do, everything has an energy and a vibration to it. Because we are biological beings whose bodies are constantly kind of being broken down and remade day in and day out, that energy around us impacts us in a physiological energetic way. And so we have to sort of honor that reality

and learn ways to protect ourselves from that energy that's always coming at us from everything around us and can have a meaningful and lasting impact on ourselves, our own bodies, and our own energy.

In every workplace, there are energetic dynamics going on around us at all times. Stress, urgency, expectations, even unspoken emotional undercurrents.

As a young attorney, one of the things that I think surprised me the most about practicing law was how mean people were to each other and the things that they would say to each other. And it's a high pressure, high stress type of career, but there was a certain acceptance of people taking it out on each other in ways that I had never really seen before. And over time, it started to really take a toll on my own self

and my own mental emotional wellbeing.

If you're anything like me, maybe sensitive or empathic or just naturally supportive or empathetic, you might unconsciously start to absorb some of that energy.

over time that creates fatigue, resentment, and disconnection. And it's amazing to learn all of this now and look back at my life and my professional career in law and see all the signs of what I was taking on and that I just wasn't aware of. And it was weighing me down so much that I finally just ran away from a lot of it because I didn't know how to fix it. And it wasn't until I started

working with a coach and working with an energy healer and developing my own intuition that I realized that there was a whole other aspect of me outside of my career and my life that you see on paper. There's a whole other aspect of me that I needed to attend to so that I could show up the way that I want to but also protect myself from others around me from bogging me down.

The ultimate goal of this type of work and this type of practice is not to become emotionally disconnected, but to become energetically neutral. can stay open and compassionate about what other people are going through, but we don't need to be a sponge for other people's emotions and we don't need to be a fixer for all of their problems.

So how do you know when your energy exchange is out of balance?

First, you might feel tension in your body after certain interactions. Your chest might feel tightened. You could have a headache or sense a heaviness in your stomach or your gut. That's where our intuition is. That's our inner knowing and that's that kind of intuitive side of ourselves, sort of waving the flag like, hey, things are not good, I'm not okay. But it's also our body's way of doing the same things and trying to call our attention to

that imbalance or that reaction to whatever just happened in our reality. Second, you might find yourself replaying conversations long after they are over. Third, you could catch yourself people pleasing or over explaining or trying to fix other people's emotions. These are all signs that your energy field, your boundary has been breached. Awareness is always your first step in reclaiming that power.

I know I talk about it left, right and center on all of my podcasts, but meditation is one of the easiest practices to start developing this awareness. When you sit down to meditate, your brain is going to run off in a million different directions. And as you start practicing meditation, you're going to notice patterns. You might notice your mind wandering off to pick that fight with that person for the 10,000th time.

or replaying conversations and wishing that you had shown up differently. Or you may simply be sitting in meditation trying to be mindful of your body and notice that you're clenching your fist or you're clenching your jaw. It's those slow moments of practicing meditation, of just witnessing our bodies and our minds and their tendencies that can really shine a lot of light on

these energy imbalances and help us see, okay, there was something about that exchange that is having some type of a physiological effect on me that doesn't feel right. And that's a sign that I need to make some adjustments in that relationship or with respect to that environment.

So I want to offer you some tools and rituals that can support you in protecting your own energy and securing your own energetic boundary, if you will. So once you start noticing these patterns, you can create these simple intentional practices to reset your space.

Number one, find a grounding practice that resonates with you and ground before you enter those spaces that cause you anxiety. This could look like taking two to three minutes before opening your email to feel your feet on the ground or feel your body in your seat, to breathe deeply and notice the sensation of that breath on your nose and how it changes your body as you inhale. You could simply imagine

roots extending out of your feet, out of your bottom, your chair into the earth and connecting you to something bigger than this workspace or whatever it is that's causing you that imbalance. Another very common grounding practice, especially when you're feeling frazzled, is to engage the senses. So this could look like identifying five things in your space, your physical space that you can see.

You might then go on to identify four things in your space that you can hear. Next, it's three things in your space that you can feel with your sensations, that feel and touch sensation. Two things that you can smell and one thing that you can taste. It sort of forces us to really check back into our physical environment and reconnect with ourselves as a person having this very human experience.

to energetically clearing throughout the day.

The simplest way to do this is to use sound. And there's a lot of really good ⁓ healing playlists on Spotify or Pandora or whatever music listening platform that you listen to. But if you find a sound that resonates at that healing vibrational level or chimes that are soothing for you or even just clearing your space of all sound and connecting to your breath. But finding a sound

that will sort of act as a frequency reset for your body. And once you find that, even if it is just silence and paying attention to your breath, or maybe it's a playlist on Spotify, imagine each vibration or each inhale and exhale clearing away stagnant or heavy energy.

Three, visualization for protection. This is one that I utilize a lot when I was first starting this practice and kind of getting into this more holistic work. Picturing a soft luminous light surrounding your body or even kind of a soft light blanketing you and kind of shrouding you from everything around you. And it can be gold or white or any color that feels safe to you.

And it's not intended to be a wall, it's simply intended to filter everything coming at you and allow in love and collaboration, but keeping out negativity. It's also a visual reminder of, you know, a lot of the energy coming at you, it's not yours. And so if you ever have an encounter and you're like, gosh, why am I so frustrated or why am I feeling like this? I don't know where this would be coming from in my experience.

Sometimes it's other people's energy that they're kind of throwing at us all day long and we just soak it up like a sponge. So having this visualization of a ⁓ shroud or a light covering you and protecting you also serves as a visual reminder that sometimes we have to protect ourselves from energy that's not ours to keep ourselves from soaking it in.

4. Engage in some additional support by finding a sound healer or a Reiki healer or a guided meditation teacher who can help you connect and reset on a deeper level.

This type of energy work and energy imbalances in my personal life is what led me to an exploration of Reiki and sound healing and meditation and yoga. And I don't want to spend too much time kind of unpacking why this works, but I do want to share a little bit with you here just to support why these tools are so essential and why these energy imbalances, why they actually happen and provide you a little bit of the science behind them.

So I mentioned earlier that everything in our life, in our world, emit some type of a frequency or a vibration. There is a principle in physics called entrainment. I think I mentioned this in a couple earlier podcast episodes. And the idea of entrainment is that two items with differing vibrational frequencies will eventually sink and the higher frequency will pull the lower frequency up to match it.

One of the ways this is most easily illustrated is that if you put two clocks on a wall with pendulums swinging at different speeds, over time, they will sync together. And that's this idea of entrainment. Sound healing and reiki healing really capitalizes upon that science. And what those tools do is they

present your body with frequencies associated with healing or release. So the different energy centers in our bodies, our chakras, each have their own differing frequency. So if you're feeling stuck in a particular area of life or you're feeling ⁓ ill in certain areas of your body, allowing sound healing, araiki healing, to bring higher vibrations in proximity to those areas of your body.

will allow your body and your brain to sync with those vibrations and kind of release anything that was stuck. So I kind of talk about our bodies as being like a highway and there's all these roads and there's all these interchanges. And sometimes we don't have time to sort of plow the roads and keep the snow off of them, right? Bad things happen. We get emotional, we get sick and we just keep moving. And so that snow and crap in the road just kind of piles up and builds up in our bodies.

When we do sound healing and we do Reiki, it's a way of sort of opening up that flow of traffic and releasing everything that's been building up there because that vibration kind of pulls the roads back open. So when we talk about energy imbalances at work, it's because we just sort of left the gates open and we're soaking up all the vibrations around us instead of really trying to intentionally keep our vibration high and clear.

So using sound and using Reiki is a very simple and accessible way to keep your energy moving smoothly and to ensure that whatever is happening in your body, it's a vibration that you want there and it's not something that you're just soaking up from those around you.

Why is this so important in our modern times? Protecting your energy, it's not about control. It's about being a good steward of your body and your energy. You have to be your own guardian of your own vitality. And when you take care of your energy, you model grounded leadership for everyone around you. It's a lot more difficult for you to be kind of thrown off of your game when you're being a good steward to your own

emotions, your own needs and your own changes within your body. But when you're just soaking it up all over the place, we kind of become these ticking time bombs that are easily thrown off track or explode at the smallest provocations. And so if you want to be that good leader who's stable and reasonable and accessible and kind and compassionate, attending to your own energy is truly, in my opinion,

the only way to get you there with any meaningful consistency.

If this resonates with you or if you've been feeling a little bit out of whack or maybe you're soaking up all the negativity from someone in your orbit and you're just feeling bogged down by it, I would encourage you to reach out and schedule a virtual Reiki session with me or a sound healing and intuitive session with me so that we can get your energy cleaned up and moving. If that's not available to you, I'm going to be releasing a short

Reiki infused meditation in the next few days that's going to help you release some of that stuck energy and realign with yourself.

I hope one of those avenues will adequately support you and help you protect your energy.

If you have any questions about those resources, options, or if you need additional support reclaiming your energy and your power, don't hesitate to reach out to me, autumn at theuncomfortabledream.com. In the meantime, check in with yourself, take a few breaths, and see if you can put your finger on how you are actually feeling and what your body and your intuition may be trying to tell you about what's happening in your orbit.

Until next time, my friends, be sure to check out that meditation coming out in the next few days.

If you are enjoying this work and wanna take it a little bit deeper, I'm going to be rolling out some virtual retreats. This is not a coaching program. This is a virtual reset for your mind, your body, and your spirit. In the future, I'm gonna be aligning these resets with the seasonal changes. But for now, we're gonna be offering a very short four-week reset for you to kinda dip your toe in the pond and see what these virtual retreats are like and how they can transform

your life and your energy. If that's something that you might be interested in, be sure to head over to my website, autumn noble.com and get on the list for the newsletter so that you can be the first to know when those seats become available. As always, thanks so much for listening again this week and thanks for sharing with your friends.