You Don’t Need More Motivation: Stop Energy Leakage and Get Your Power Back

In this episode of Taiwanica, Eric talks about why you may not actually need more motivation. You may need less energy leakage.

Many people feel tired, unmotivated, and emotionally drained, but the real issue is not always laziness or lack of discipline. Sometimes your energy is leaking into conversations you keep avoiding, boundaries you keep softening, people you keep tolerating, emotions you keep replaying, and situations that no longer give life back to you.

In Chinese, this is called 漏能量 — leaking energy.

Eric breaks down how energy leakage shows up in daily life in Taiwan: long workdays, LINE messages after hours, family expectations, pressure to be polite, fear of being difficult, and the habit of saying yes when your body already knows the answer is no.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why dread is often a sign that you are avoiding a truth
• The difference between kindness and self-abandonment
• Why generosity without boundaries eventually becomes resentment
• How familiar patterns keep draining your energy
• Why “what if” can either create fear or open possibility
• How to stop feeding the emotional fire
• A 20-second practice to feel the emotion instead of feeding the story
• The 3-step process to stop energy leakage:
  1. Name what is draining you
  2. Stop feeding it
  3. Feed what you actually want

This episode is for people in Taiwan who don’t just want to survive pressure, but want to become clearer, stronger, and more conscious in daily life.

If you feel drained, scattered, or stuck in the same emotional patterns every week, this episode will help you ask one powerful question:

What is one truth I can act on in the next 24 hours?

Transcript

Energy Leakage 3 Step Process

Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to Taiwanica Podcast. My name is Eric, and I'm here to talk to you about not making more motivation for yourself. We don't need any more of that today in this world. We need to figure out where is your energy leaking out. And then when you know how to do that, you'll be able to channel it into places that you actually want.

So by the end of today's episode, you can expect to learn where your energy leakage is and also how to channel it in ways that will become productive with very little time involved. So let's go ahead and dive on in. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from doing too much. It comes from leaking yourself into things that do not give life back to you.

The conversation you keep postponing, the boundary you keep softening, the client, coworker, family member, or [00:01:00] situation you keep tolerating because you don't want to be that difficult person. All of these things at first is just making it so avoidance feels easier. You do not have to disappoint anyone, and you don't have to be direct, and you don't have to have any risk involved.

And so because of that, you don't have to face uncomfortable truths. But the avoidance has a cost, and that cost is energy. Not all at once, but slowly over time. A little attention here, a little resentment there, a little dread before answering the phone, even just walking into a room where you're not wanting to go because that one particular person is there.

This is how people lose power in their own lives. Not because they do not know what they want, but because they keep feeding what they do not [00:02:00] want. So today, I want to say something directly. You do not need more motivation. We need less energy leakage. Okay, so in Chinese we can say something like 漏能量 or leaking energy.

And so when we get into this, we're going to find out how we're gonna stop feeding it and feed what you actually want instead In Taiwanica, this show is for people in Taiwan who do not just want to survive pressure. It's for people who want to become clearer, stronger, and more conscious in daily life. I work with ambitious English-speaking professionals and internationally minded people in Taiwan who feel capable of more internally off track, and I help them regain that clarity, direction, and momentum so they can build a life that actually feels aligned.

And if you live in Taiwan, [00:03:00] you already know this pressure is real. The long workday, the Line messages after hours, the family expectations, the social pressure to be polite, all of these things is the feeling that you should be doing better by now. So many people call this not motivated or . But sometimes that is not the real problem.

Sometimes the real problem is your energy is already gone before you ever get to the thing you say matters One of the clearest signs that you are avoiding a truth is not confusion. It's something else that's much greater. It's dread. You see the name on your phone, and your body already knows. You think about the appointment, and your energy drops.

You imagine the [00:04:00] conversation, and your chest tightens. You tell yourself, "It's not that big of a deal," but your body is already giving you the report. If you do this, it's going to cost you. So sometimes it's people, sometimes it's a pattern, or it's just your responsibility to say yes to something before you actually understand what the price is to it.

So we have developed habits around this, and this is where many good people get stuck. They confuse kindness with self-abandonment. They think being helpful means being endlessly available. They think having boundaries means being rude. But that is not the full truth. There is destructive selfishness, which I call a big S selfishness, where I'm only thinking about things that care for me and only me, and then there is [00:05:00] healthy selfishness.

I call this small S selfishness, and this is the kind that says, "I care about you, and I care about my own energy." That sentence, when you think about it that way, it really changes your perspective on what it is to be selfish. You're not saying stuff like, "I don't care," right? You're saying things like, "I care, but I also care about myself."

And that distinction matters because you cannot build a life without your energy constantly being taken away from you, and if you constantly have it taken away from you, it's gonna leach out, and it's gonna go into different situations that are not the ones that you really want to do. Why? Because you're too polite to tell the truth.

The hardest patterns to change are not always dramatic. In actuality, they're very simple [00:06:00] because they're very familiar. They're usually around people in your lives, like the coworker who talks for 20 minutes about something you do not have the energy to hold onto or have any interest in. Eh, but you keep listening because you don't wanna be rude, and you've done it many times before, so it just feels normal.

Or, you know, maybe the client who ignores your time commitments, and you keep making space because you feel guilty or because you're afraid of losing the business. Uh, or how about the family member who pulls you into emotional chaos, and you keep answering because that's what you've always have done. At some point, the question is no longer, "Why is this happening?"

So, instead of asking this victim-like question, let's ask something else, like, "Why am I still participating in it?" That question is not meant to put any shame on you. [00:07:00] It's more about learning how to interrupt the pattern. A pattern interrupt breaks this loop of thinking around an idea again and again and again so that finally a new choice can become available.

Because many of the things sucking your energy dry are not being forced on you, especially in this present moment. They are just simply being repeated by you because they're familiar. But familiar does not mean aligned, nor does it mean healthy. Sometimes familiar just means you have learned a pattern a long time ago, and you never received better instructions from anybody, from yourself, from others, on how to make it so that you can improve yourself here.

Oops. So [00:08:00] now it becomes your job to give it one, and that's the great part about today. And this is exactly why I created Start Now, because many people do not need another random motivational quote. They need a place to practice the inner skills that stop the leakage, clarity, confidence, emotional control, self-worth.

All of this is inside of Start Now. There are f- over 500 personal development trainings you can read, listen to, and watch when you need a reset. Not random motivation, a training space. So if you're interested in listening and thinking to things that will actually make you feel able to change yourself, there's a link in the description down below.

Now, let's go deeper When a truth is costing you energy, do not try to solve your whole life at once. Start with [00:09:00] these three steps instead. One, name what is draining you. Two, stop feeding it. And three, feed what you actually want. It's simple. Not always easy, though, but it is simple. And simple matters because the last thing most of us need is another complicated method sitting in our notes, and we do absolutely nothing with it.

We need a clean way to stop lying to ourselves. So let's step into the first one. All you need to do is just tell the truth clearly to yourself. Doesn't need to be dramatic, just clear. So what is draining your energy? Who drained your energy? What conversation do you keep avoiding? What decisions keep showing up in your mind?

What emotions keep repeating itself? there's lots of different things here, but [00:10:00] the thing is that matters is that if you refuse to name these things, they keep running in the background of your life, whether you want them or not. The body remembers. It's gonna keep on doing them because that's how it knows what to do.

So a draining truth often sounds something like this: "I do not want to keep giving this person unlimited access to me." Another one could be, "I do not want to keep pretending this situation is okay." Or this one, "I do not want to keep postponing the decision." And of course, we don't wanna lose half of our day to an emotion like frustration or sadness or anger.

And all of these things are going to be related to self-abandonment. We do these things because we believe that it is the right thing to do, but it's not. It's just something that we learned, and sometimes the [00:11:00] things you learn, you have to unlearn them because they're not actually related to you. It's more related to what society expects of you.

And many people, well, they're not exhausted because they're generous. They're exhausted because th- this generosity that they have created just doesn't have a boundary. Generosity without a boundary eventually becomes resentment, and resentment is usually the sign that a truth has been avoided for too long.

The moment you name it, something changes, not because everything is solved, but because the hidden pattern becomes visible, and what becomes visible can finally be worked with. Most people in the world, when they get stuck in negativity, they start to say

something like, "What if?" Like, "What if it goes wrong?" Or, "What if they get upset? What if I fail or lose or don't get [00:12:00] the work I want?" There's a lot of negativity around this, but, there's actually a really great strategy with the words what if, or in Chinese you'd say jia ze. if I were to use this word in a positive way, like, what if I stop answering every line message?

Or what if I walk away, creating a boundary that is actually aligned with who I wish to be? Or what if the situation that I'm in actually doesn't happen in the way that I'm thinking, and it actually turns out for the better? You know, these ways of thinking, although they're very small in their style differences, they change into a new way for you to imagine the outcome.

That's when you start doing something very important. You start to make the goals, and you follow them as soon as possible rather than [00:13:00] leaving them to wait. You say the things that make you feel uncomfortable earlier, you say it cleaner, and you say it before, your body is so built up with negativity that now you're exhausted by the end of the week.

So what we're saying here is just,name the thing that is draining your energy. And then if you do that, you can start doing step two, and that is to stop feeding it. This is where most people struggle though, because they don't want to be in a situation, but they keep giving it the time, the attention, and the emotional fuel for it to keep on sticking around.

You know, for example, they replay the conversation in their head, or they complain about the person that's causing the pain, or they imagine what they should have said, or the arguments that they have in their head of trying to prove themselves right. All of this is just keeping the fire burning. And speaking of fire burning, let's just actually [00:14:00] imagine a negative pattern is like a campfire.

Every thought that you have is another piece of wood you're throwing into the campfire. Every complaint is another piece of wood. Every, "I can't believe they did that," or every hour replaying the situation in your head is also other pieces of wood. Then people wonder why the fire keeps burning. It's not because they want to, it's just because they are unconsciously keep on feeding it.

So stopping the feeding doesn't mean we're pretending nothing happened, okay? That's what... Most important to get clear here is that we're not ignoring, we are directly igniting it, and this means we're going to refuse to keep donating your energy to a pattern you say you don't want. And at some point, once you do that, [00:15:00] you have to stop adding wood.

And then you notice yourself reaching out to the next piece of wood, and that is the moment where you pause and say, "Do I really wanna do this?" And that pause is the doorway- So how do we do this? Well, we start to do the most important part. Most people think letting go of an emotion means you're avoiding it.

Nuh-uh. Nope. It does not. Letting go often begins by feeling the emotion directly instead of feeding the story around it. There is a difference. Feeding the story sounds like this: "They always do this. This is so unfair. I can't believe this happened again. I knew today was going to be ruined." Crappy stuff.

Am I right? Feeling the emotion sounds like this: "Where is this in my body? What is the name of this feeling? [00:16:00] How intense is it from one to 10? Can I feel it directly for 20 seconds without adding more story?" That is very different from the ones before. When you feed the story, the emotion stays alive. When you feel the emotion directly, the charge often starts to burn out.

Not always instantly, but faster than most people expect. Because much of what keeps happening with negative emotions and how they stay alive is not the original event. It's just you repeating in your mind the event again and again and again. So you're not just angry anymore, you are thinking angry, remembering angry, explaining angry, and even rehearsing angry later on in the day.

Well, no wonder why you're angry all the time. And every repetition keeps the fire [00:17:00] going. So pause. Name the feeling. "Okay, I'm feeling angry." Locate it in the body. "Well, maybe I'm feeling it in my chest or my shoulders." Give it a number. "What, how are you, how angry are you feeling right now?" "Oh, it's probably like an eight out of 10.

I'm feeling very angry." Then for just 20 seconds, not doing anything else, close your eyes and feel that anger on purpose. Just breathe in, breathe out. No story, no argument, no victim state, just the feeling. If it's still there after those 20 seconds, do it again. All right, look, I am no miracle worker. Two or three rounds may not solve your entire life, but they can create enough space for you to choose your next action instead of being dragged by the old reaction.

Okay, that's very important. We want to choose our actions that are [00:18:00] new and not dragged into something old. This is the, where the kind of space gets created for you to become a self-leader. So you cannot only starve what you don't want, okay? You have to also feed what you do want. This is where your energy begins to return.

Okay, so you stop giving 30 minutes to a leechy conversation where that does not any, have anything to do with your life, and all of a sudden you have this extra energy. Well, great. That's the cool stuff. Energy does not disappear. So now that it's not being used in this negative way in your life, it gets redirected, and that's why truth matters.

The truth you avoid keeps the energy trapped. The truth you act on releases it. So sometimes feeding what you want means making the call, or [00:19:00] having the direct conversation, or resting instead of fighting your tiredness. So you gotta understand, sometimes saying, "I can help, but I cannot stay," or, "I only have 10 or 20 minutes today to help you," that does not work for me anymore because I need to handle this differently from now on.

You know, these kind of sentences, they are not just things you say, they are energy decisions. Every boundary, every honest action, every avoided truth, they're all energy decisions. We just need to be better at making the right decisions with our energy. Okay, so- Let's look at one more thing about energy leakage, because it's important to find out how it's happening.[00:20:00] 

So one thing that creates leakage the most often for people are expectations. Okay, I have a phrase that I love so much that helps me recognize how this happens for people, and that is expectations means a premeditation to resentment. Okay, it's important to understand. A premeditation meaning a prepared thought ahead of time for you to act in a particular way.

So if you're expecting something to be done in a particular way and it's not because the person didn't do it the way you wanted it to, or the timing wasn't right, or it wasn't at the place that you thought it was going to be, well, resentment is made. It's either made to the person that did it wrong or you did it to yourself.

Either way, it's not good. So if we get stuck in these kind of expectations, we want to [00:21:00] try to do something to help them let go. So a way to do that is to just recognize when are you doing that towards yourself or somebody else. If you can do that, then the feeling of betrayal, that a stand- that you have a standard of how things are supposed to go, will start to become very clear to you.

And that doesn't mean that you have no standards or you shouldn't have any standards, but it means that you need to be aware of the behavior you have attached to those stand- standards And a standard without action, by the way, is just a wish with a spicy attitude. So that's why if we know how our standards are and we start to use our energy wisely, then the actions that we take will start to connect and matter to us, like our time and our [00:22:00] goals.

We will start to feed these better when we understand, okay, this is the standard I'm currently holding. I would rather do this with somebody else, or I'd rather act this way with myself. And that way you do not expect that your life needs to be a particular standard, and when that b- starts to happen, the real test begins to occur where you're no longer having your energy leeched or taken away from you, and you're learning how to redirect it because you're telling the truth.

And then once these three things happen, the only thing that's left is to feed it in the direction that you wanna go. So what action becomes obvious to you now? This question matters because truth usually simplifies this. Before truth, everything feels complicated. You feel confused, you're lost, you're not sure which way [00:23:00] to go, but if you know what the truth is about what it is that you actually want and all this negativity is no longer in for you, you're ready to go.

You can know when to call for support if you need it, or reschedule a meeting, or set a boundary, or, you know, whatever dead horse conversation that you ge- gain stuck in, you know when to walk away. So it's time to do the work before you do anything else. And then if you really need to take a rest, by golly, go take that rest.

For goodness sakes, address all of the problems that you have with truth, because the problem is not always easy that you do not know what to do, because sometimes you know exactly what to do, but you have just not cleared enough emotional resistance to it yet, and that is why e- this energy work matters.

So [00:24:00] one last time, let's look at the practice that you have for today, and I want you to really think about this, not something to just write down and say, "Yeah, I'll try it sometime." No. Try this for yourself right now. On a scale from one to 10, one being low and negative, 10 being high and positive, where are you on this feeling chart right now?

Okay? When you know what that number is, write down these three sentences. "The truth I keep avoiding is..." Okay, what is the truth that you're avoiding right now because you feel this way? If you're feeling negative, it will come up to you. If you're feeling positive, maybe there's no truth that you're avoiding now, but maybe later there will be.

Figure out what you're trying to avoid, okay? And then when that happens, go to number two. "I keep feeding this by..." Okay, well, let's think about it. Complaining, over-giving, [00:25:00] avoiding, waiting. There's gotta be something that you're doing that keeps you stuck. And then number three, what would be the action that you would actually want to do if you were to feel like a 10 on this chart?

So if you're anything below a 10 right now, think about that for a moment. If you are not feeling emotionally negative around whatever it is that you're thinking about that keeps you stuck, make it specific, what would be an ideal way to take care of the situation? Okay, if you can think of something, great.

You now have an action step. The only thing you need to do now is to clear the negative energy that's inside of your system. Okay, so you know your number. Where is it in your body? Is it in your head, your shoulders, your neck, your chest? Find it. Okay? If you find it, then the last thing you need to do is just feel it for 20 seconds.

[00:26:00] Notice what it feels like. Does it feel like sadness, anger, frustration? Take the time to feel it, and when you do that, you'll start to notice that you're gonna become, uh, much more aware over time about what is actually keeping you stuck. This is not to help you become more confident. This is not to help you set better boundaries.

This is not about you stopping your caring for other people. The all of this is just for you to become clear on what's getting you stuck, and then what is the next best action. Simple as that. We don't wanna be stuck because if we're stuck, then we're not moving. But if we get unstuck, the first thing that we can do is take the next action step, and once we do that, hey, guess what?

We're progressing in the direction that we wanna go. So that's the idea. Get through this and you will have all of your actions clear to you so you can be honest for your future. [00:27:00] Now, listen carefully. If this episode brought someone or something to mind, do not turn it into a saved idea. Go out there and use it.

If you know you are not just unmotivated, but you're also drained, scattered, leaking energy into the same patterns every week, then this is your invitation. I am opening space for a free 30-minute coaching call with me personally. Now, this is for a limited time. In that conversation, we will look at where your energy is leaking, what your truth you might be avoiding, and what action needs to become clear so you can move forward with more purpose, confidence, and direction.

This is not for me to pressure you. This is about you gaining clarity on your life. And it feels like a good fit for you to do right now, I will show you how my coaching packages can help you get deeper and build real change with support. [00:28:00] So down in the link description down below, you will be able to find the link for you to book your free 30-minute coaching chat.

Don't wait until resentment builds, okay? Because if you wait, then the same patterns will just take another month from you. Book the chat and we'll find a leak. Maybe we'll even seal it, and then your energies will find a new direction in the areas that you actually want. So avoidance feels proactive at first, but over time it becomes expensive.

It costs attention, clarity, confidence, momentum. It even costs peace. The truth may be uncomfortable, but it's usually cleaner than the energy leech of avoiding it. The truth gives your energy a direction. So let's stop feeding this, and let's start feeding that. Once you start to negotiate yourself with things that you actually want, you tend to be a happier person because your time, [00:29:00] attention, and future matter.

They really do. You only have it. The amount of time you have on this planet is short, so make the most of it, and something interesting will begin to happen when you start to do that. When you start to concentrate more about this, you will see that the hidden gift of honesty will help you not only reveal what is wrong, it also helps you release what has been trapped.

So let's not change motivation. Let's protect your energy. Let's get yourself clear. And my last question I'd like you to ask yourself today is, what is one truth I can act on in the next 24 hours? Uh, that answer may be uncomfortable, and that's good. That is probably where your energy has been waiting to release the most because, like I said, it's time for you to become more of a person that is [00:30:00] empowered and leading yourself to your success.

That is the episode. I'll see you next time.