What’s Your Relationship with Structure? (And Is It Helping or Hurting?)

What if the thing you think is holding you back… is actually the thing that sets you free?

We’re talking about structure.

The rules. The routines. The shoulds.

You might love ‘em or want to burn them to the ground.

But here’s the truth: structure isn’t the problem.

It’s the kind of structure—and your relationship to it—that determines whether it supports your expansion… or strangles your spirit.

In this, I unpack how to consciously create structure that fuels your joy, your creativity, your relationships, and your results.

✨ What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why do we default to rigid or rebellious structures without even realizing it
• The influence of militarized thinking in our schools, work, and culture
• How feminine energy flows inside masculine structure—and why both matter
• A simple framework to build a structure that actually serves your goals
• Real-life examples (from Cirque du Soleil to childhood playgrounds) that show why safety = space to play
• How to give your habits time to earn your trust
• What to do if you’ve been living in chaos, rigidity—or both

🎁 Ready to rebuild your relationship with structure?

Start here:

• 📘 Get the Book: Engineered to Love
• 💬 Work With Me 1-on-1
• 📥 Join the Email List for Events & New Episodes
• 💫 Share this episode with someone who’s craving clarity with flow.

Watch the full video episode at Justin Wenck, Ph.D. YouTube Channel!

Check out my best-selling book "Engineered to Love: Going Beyond Success to Fulfillment" also available on Audiobook on all streaming platforms! Go to https://www.engineeredtolove.com/ to learn more!

Got a question or comment about the show? E-mail me at podcast@justinwenck.com.

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Transcript

Justin Wenck: 0:00

CHAOS with some structure leads to creativity, but chaos, for the sake of chaos, is just chaos. There's no boundary. There's no kind of fun of like, oh, what happens if I get up to the edge? Maybe, what happens if I go a little bit over so it can allow for a lot more excitement and magic when you have the structure, but again, you're doing the structure for a purpose, not because somebody told you so, and because you're bad or you're wrong or that you're hurting people because you go against the structure. The rules are there for a purpose. And if you don't know what the purpose is, find it out or figure out what the purpose is, and then start to shift the rules, the structure, the habits, so that it matches and allows for that purpose to come into alignment. But this sense of structure that you create is going to allow you to feel safe, so you can really play, so you can really create, so you can use that whole space, and maybe, you know, you do play around with the boundaries a little bit. Are you ready to live a life with enough time, money and energy have relationships and connections that delight you? Are you ready for the extraordinary life you know you've been missing? If so, then this is the place for you. I'm a best selling author, coach, consultant and speaker who's worked in technology for over two decades, I'm a leader at transforming people and organizations from operating in fear, obligation and guilt to running off joy, ease and love. It's time for engineering emotions and energy with me. Justin Wenck, PhD, hi, there today talking about, what is your relationship to structure? And I mean not just, you know, the buildings, the roads, although there could be something to that, but the structure that you encounter in your life. What are the ways that things are supposed to be, and what are the rules to be followed, the regulations, the processes or even the habits, and then what's your relationship to these that's what we're going to be going over in today's show. So start thinking about, you know, do you like it when things are a set way and this is like, this is how it's going to be, or does that give you a little anxiety? And it's like, fuck that. I want to be a rebel. I want to do it my way. You can't tell me what to do. I'm a free spirit. I'm going to do it the way I want to do it, not the way anyone tells me to. In fact, somebody tells me to do it one way or another. You better believe I'm not doing it that way anyway. But to start to consider these things, and we're going to go into like, how your relationship with various forms of structure might be serving you, because it's not all way or the other. Like many things, it's often about finding the balance that works for you, and also are you able to get out of balance at the appropriate time and then get back into balance when it's time to get back into balance. So structure in my life, I have found, you know, because I'm an electrical engineer, so there's definitely aspects of me that just love, love structure, that this is the way to do it. You do it this way. Everybody does it this way. It's partially a little bit of my German heritage. I lived in Germany for a while, and there was parts of it I loved, because the Germans there is a way to do things. It's one of the reasons the Autobahn works there and would not work anywhere else, especially the United States, because there's a way to drive if you are passing, you go in the left lane and you pass, if you are just cruising or you are not passing, you get over to the right. And if you, for some reason, make a mistake, and you are cruising or going slow in that left lane, and somebody comes up behind you wanting to pass, and they flash their lights or honk their horn. Do you know what a German does? They move over and get out of the way. That's incredible. Do you know what happens here in the United States if, if you were to come up behind somebody and flash your lights and honk your horn, oh, now they're gonna fucking obstruct. There's Who are you to tell them how to drive. They got they're driving. It's their lane their way. Fuck you. Now I'm going to get in your way and obstruct you and show you who's boss. So culture has a part of it. Your upbringing has a part of it, and then your personality has a part to it. And so for sure, going to school, lots and lots of school, lots of tests, lots of studying, lots of rules, lots of equations, lots of formulas. So lots and lots of structure is what I grew up with. And chances are, if you went to school in the US or in the Western world, you had lots of structure one way or another. And that's one of the things that I started to realize, is that, for the most part, we all, whether you know, we. We are aware or not, or it was explicit or not, have a big influence of sort of a militarized way of being that, you know, this is, there's, there's a way to do things, and if you're out of the bounds, then it's, it's wrong, and there's something wrong with you. And so this goes, you know, to how our schooling is and how a lot of our workplaces are. If you really look at how a well formed military functions, you'll probably see that there's a lot of that influence in most aspects of your life. And you might even say, well, oh wait no, my I work at a I work at a startup, and we're very loosey goosey and things like that. And oftentimes, when there's something that we don't like, we don't actually create what it is we want. We just recruit. We just react to it, and we do the opposite. So a lot of these, you know, oh, of really, really open ways of working, they're more just a response to that sort of militarized of working, thinking, being doing, and so is that really a way of being free and independently creating? I'm going to submit that absolutely not that it's still, it's still just bringing along that very structured, overly rigid, militarized way of thinking and doing. So am I saying that we just got to get rid of structure altogether and like, really choose to, like, really do whatever we want? Actually, not at all, because structure is important, but it's the type of structure and the purpose of why the structure is there in the first place. Because one way to think of structure is in terms of masculine energies and feminine energies. And so a masculine is all about structure, a container safety, ways of doing things that can ensure that there's a space for what is meant to go in that, what is meant to go into that. That's where the feminine energies come in. That's the creation, that's the flow, that's the I don't know what, but I'm going to fill it with something really cool and amazing, and I don't exactly know what it is yet. And you look at any kind of art, and you're going to see this interplay of structure that allows for the creativity the space. So think of painting. What's the structure? It's the canvas. It's that blank piece of rectangle, and the painting goes in the rectangle. Now you might think of like there's other arts that sometimes play with that, like Banksy, turning other things into a canvas, and there's other artists that will sometimes, you know, paint on the canvas and then paint on the wall, or do something that's out of the canvas. Yet the canvas is still important to sort of define where to create. So even when it's Banksy on a building or something like that, there's still like that has become the canvas, effectively, and thinking of dance, if there's no floor, there's there's no dance, there's nothing to push and jump and go against and provide that friction and all that other stuff. You know, we see that, you know, move the dance, instead of on a on a dance floor or a stage, into the water with synchronized swimming. It's still something, but it's definitely different, right? So the structure is going to influence what you can create and how you're able to create. And you might be going Justin, I'm, I have no interest in being an artist, a dancer, any of this things. I've got a business to run, right? And your business is going to require some structure, and you're likely consciously or unconsciously creating a structure that's either just a pulled over from what's been done or a response to it either way, you're not actually crafting the structure based on what it is you're wanting to do. And so it's noticing what structures don't work, that are both traditional and also non traditional, and creating your own structure that works for what it is you're trying to accomplish. So there's a little bit of, you're going to need a structure in how you create your structure, right? And then you're going to have to test it, try it out. So like, a little bit of, like this podcast, it's like podcast, it's like, well, that's got to be every single week, or that's got to be every single day, five days a week, right? Like a lot of, a lot of really popular podcasters, YouTubes, it's like they do daily or what. But then there's also the like, Well, I'm just going to do it whenever I feel like it, you know? I'm going to do it whenever I want. And the thing is, is if I just do it whenever I want, then I'm not having. A set time to be able to, like, create and put, get into this mode where I'm going to share something with you in a way that is unique and fun and exciting, but I also don't have to do it every single day or even every week, which is why currently I'm doing every other week, not super common, but it's still structure, and it works for me, my business. And ideally, if you're subscribing, it's working for you, like maybe you want more, maybe you want less, but this is what it is, and you can count on that. And again, structures can change and shift. At some point, maybe I'll go once a week, maybe I'll go once a month. We'll see. But you know, it's going to be a conscious decision based off of what are my goals and what serves both me and the people that I'm serving and the medium and things like that. And so when it comes to your business, you know, or your life, or your relationships, stop trying to, just like, go against the structure and try to see what's the structure that's going to serve what it is you want to create in your life. Because, again, like, if you want to meet people, you need some structure to go out and meet people just, you know, sitting around and doing nothing, because it's like, well, all the other ways haven't, worked. Like, that's, that's a response that's not going to work. But also being maybe highly overly rigid, and, you know, it's like, oh, this is the way that you go and meet people. Is you go do this activity, then this activity, then this activity. Maybe that doesn't work. So finding a structure of something like, Well, I'm going to, you know, look for things in this category, so that I can meet people that are interested in the things that I'm interested in, then that's some structure to like, you know, your social, relational, whatever. And so it's finding that structure that's going to support you and what you want to do. And when you go through it this way, this also allows you to have some creativity and some flow in the structure. Yet, remember, the structure does require being stable for an amount of time, to allow some safety to ease into and to just allow to explore that space that the structure is actually providing. You know, for example, for going to the stage thing. If the stage starts moving around or shifting, that's that it's like, Well, wait, I don't know if I can actually go stand there or dance there, because maybe something's going to happen to it. Good example of this is Cirque de Soleil. They have a show, I think they still have it, called Ka it's in Las Vegas where the stage actually moves around. It's a feat of mechanical engineering, where the stage can go up and down and rotate and shift and again, the whole thing is planned with this. So everybody knows what's going to happen next. So to, you know, the audience, it's like, oh my gosh, that person was climbing, climbing up the stage, and then part of the stage just sort of disappears. Now, the person, like, falls down. The person knows that there's probably a pad that they're going to be safe. We know that everyone's going to be safe. And so it can a lot it's a whole other level, right? So, but you need some structure like that. Stage is doing the same thing every night. They're not changing how the stage moves every show, because that would be chaos dangerous. And if you're changing your structure, you know every day or depending on what it is, every week or even a month, depending on what it is, it's probably causing some chaos and some friction and some uncertainty, because structure creates a sense of safety, which can allow us to really play and be creative. There's a, there was a study that was done, and I heard it was in Eastern Europe, where they're like, oh, let's, you know, have we have an elementary school, or, I don't know, school age kids that like to, you know, play. Let's see what happens. If they don't have any fences, they have free reign. It turned out that because there wasn't a set to find boundary, most of the children just played really close to, you know, where the buildings were, because it felt safe when they later went back and they put the fences back up. The children played in the entire space, all the way up to the fence, because they knew that the whole region was safe and it was okay, and that nothing bad would happen. And so this sense of structure that you create again is going to allow you to feel safe, so you can really play, so you can really create, so you can use that whole space. And maybe, you know, you do play around with the boundaries a little bit, because that's fun sometimes, right? If there's no there's no boundary, there's no there's no kind of fun of like, oh, what happens if I get up to the edge? Maybe, what happens if I go a little bit over, right? So it can allow. A lot more excitement and magic when you have the structure, but again, it's you're doing the structure for a purpose, not because somebody told you so, and because you're bad or you're wrong or that you're hurting people because you go against the structure. You know the rules are there for a purpose, and if you don't know what the purpose is, find it out, or figure out what the purpose is, and then start to shift the rules, the structure, the habits, so that it matches and allows for that purpose to come into alignment. So it really is about the, you know. Again, this is like, you know, we talked about how it's like masculine and feminine working together, the yin and the yang. They go together, they support each other for this beautiful dance of life and creation that allows you to create beautiful relationships, beautiful body, beautiful business and beautiful adventures and experiences. So again, and I encourage you to see what's your relationship with structure. You know, the rules, the regulations, the habits, the things that you believe have to be this way, and are you too far one way or the other, and what's some structure that you could lovingly bring into your life and your world. And then loving that your creation enough to give your new structures a chance, right? Cuz it's like with this podcast, or, you know, with a way of eating or a way of exercising or a way of, you know, getting my business out there, if I don't do it for a certain amount of time, to see, to get to start to trust it and allow it to do its magic. I'm just going to be wanting to change it all over the place, and it's going to create chaos. And again, chaos isn't a total bad thing, but it's how do you use the chaos and structure? The chaos, chaos with some structure, leads to creativity, but chaos, for the sake of chaos, is just chaos, and there's probably not that you're going to ultimately enjoy in pure, unbridled chaos. I might be wrong. I've given it a go, and I do find that some structure, consciously created can allow for so much more fun, so much more enjoyment, and such amazing impact and results. And so with that, I'd like to hear what your take is. So let me know you know by a comment or messaging me on the social medias. Justin Wenck, PhD, what are your thoughts? What's your relationship to structure, and what's an area where maybe you could maybe shift your structure, you know, maybe loosen it a little bit, or maybe tighten something. So I'd really love to hear that. And again, if it's something where, like, you want some support, that's one of the things where I'm really great to work with. My Book engineer to love also has some ways to maybe figure out, like, where there's some some things that maybe could use some shifting, or some changing, or just giving you some reflections of where you're at. So then you can figure out, well, where, where do you really want to be? And with that, I want to thank you so much and good day. Thanks for tuning in to engineering emotions and energy with Justin Wenck PhD, today's episode resonated with you. Please subscribe and leave a five star review. Your feedback not only supports the show, but also helps others find us and start their journey of emotional and energetic mastery. You can also help by sharing this podcast with someone you think will love it just as much as you do. Together, we're engineering more amazing lives you think.