Energy Management Strategies with Erin King Energy management expert Erin King discusses balancing energy in this episode of The Keynote Curators Podcast, sharing strategies for peak performance.

November 6, 2025

The Crisis That Changed Everything About How We View Performance

What if everything you’ve been taught about productivity is wrong? Not slightly off—completely backward. While leaders obsess over time management hacks and productivity apps, they’re missing the one resource that actually determines success. Additionally, this oversight costs businesses millions in lost potential every single year.

Energy management keynote speaker Erin King discovered this truth the hard way. After a serious health scare forced her to put her entire life on pause, she made a decision that would revolutionize how organizations think about performance. Instead of returning to the hustle culture that nearly broke her, Erin spent a full year conducting the world’s largest study on personal human power alongside a team of award-winning PhD researchers. What she uncovered wasn’t just interesting—it was transformational enough to earn her recognition from SUCCESS Magazine as one of their “Top 10 Must-See Motivational Speakers” alongside Mel Robbins and Jay Shetty.

This isn’t another conversation about work-life balance or self-care Sundays. This is about treating energy like the strategic business asset it actually is. For meeting professionals and event planners designing experiences that need to land with impact, understanding this means is the difference between an event people attend and an event that changes how they work. In other words, energy management isn’t just a personal wellness topic—it’s the foundation of leadership, sales, and sustainable business growth.

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Why Energy Is Your Only Real Unfair Advantage in an AI World

The robots are coming. Automation is accelerating. Artificial intelligence can write code, analyze data, and optimize systems faster than any human ever could. So what’s left? What can’t be automated, outsourced, or replicated by technology?

Your energy.

Specifically, the uniquely human capabilities that emerge from well-managed systems: intuition, empathy, creativity, and adaptability. These aren’t soft skills anymore; consequently, they’re the hardest skills to replace and the most valuable assets in modern business leadership. Erin’s research revealed that while time is finite and equally distributed, energy is renewable, manageable, and the true differentiator between average performers and exceptional ones.

As the creator of The Energy Exam®—the world’s first scientific assessment to discover your unique “energy instinct”—Erin has been hired by Google, Disney, The Academy Awards, VISA, Adobe, and even the United States Navy to unlock peak performance and transformative leadership. These aren’t organizations chasing wellness trends; therefore, they’re investing in measurable competitive advantages. They understand that elite performance doesn’t come from working longer hours but from deploying vitality more intentionally.

For event planners programming keynotes and breakout sessions, this insight changes everything. Your attendees aren’t running out of time—they’re running out of steem. The best conference agenda in the world falls flat if participants are energetically depleted. Similarly, the most brilliant speaker delivers diminishing returns if the audience can’t access the energy needed to absorb, process, and implement what they’re hearing. So this isn’t a nice-to-have session filler; it’s the invisible infrastructure that determines whether your event creates lasting impact or fades into the noise of another forgotten conference.

The Five Types That Determine How You Perform

Not all energy is created equal. One of Erin’s most powerful discoveries challenges the one-size-fits-all approach to productivity and performance. Through her extensive research, she identified five distinct types, each with its own fastest path to power: kinetic, responsive, generative, synergistic, and contemplative energies.

Understanding your dominant energy type transforms how you work, lead, and make decisions. For instance, kinetic energy types thrive on movement and action—they think by doing and gain clarity through momentum. Asking them to sit through hours of strategic planning before taking action isn’t just uncomfortable; it’s energetically inefficient. On the other hand, contemplative energy types need space for reflection and deep thinking before they can perform at their best. Rushing them into action before they’ve processed information drains their capacity rather than building it.

Responsive energy types draw power from interaction and feedback; hence, they excel in dynamic environments where they can read the room and adjust in real time. This makes them natural fits for roles requiring communication and relationship management. Generative energy types, conversely, need autonomy and creative space to produce their best work. They’re the innovators who transform industries, but only when given the freedom to experiment without constant oversight.

Synergistic energy types are collaborative powerhouses that amplify teamwork and collective intelligence. They don’t just work well with others—they need that collaborative energy to access their full potential. Put them in isolation, and you’ll watch their performance decline not because they lack skill but because they’re energetically misaligned with their environment.

For meeting professionals designing attendee experiences, these distinctions matter enormously. A conference filled with back-to-back lectures might energize contemplative types while draining kinetic ones. Interactive workshops could ignite synergistic and responsive types while overwhelming those who need processing time. The most successful events create varied experiences that honor different energy types, allowing participants to engage in ways that fuel rather than deplete them. This level of professional development programming requires moving beyond generic best practices to energy-intelligent design.

Subtract to Perform: Removing the Blocks That Drain Your Capacity

The productivity industry has sold us a lie: that success comes from adding more. More systems, more habits, more strategies, more effort. Erin’s research points to a different truth—peak performance often comes from subtraction, not addition. Specifically, she identifies three critical blocks that drain capacity: doing too much, quitting too early, and dodging clarity.

Doing too much seems counterintuitive in a culture that celebrates busyness as a badge of honor. However, research consistently shows that over-commitment doesn’t just reduce the quality of our work; it fundamentally alters our brain’s ability to focus, make decisions, and access creativity. When you’re doing too much, you’re not just tired—you’re operating from a depleted energy state that compounds poor decisions, weakens your attitude, and damages relationships. The solution isn’t time management; it’s ruthless prioritization based on return.

Quitting too early represents another pattern Erin uncovered in her research. Many high performers abandon strategies, relationships, or projects just before the breakthrough moment—not because the path is wrong but because they’re energetically depleted and mistake exhaustion for failure. This pattern particularly affects women leaders who often face additional pressure to prove themselves while managing energy drains that their male counterparts may not experience. Learning to distinguish between “this isn’t working” and “I don’t have the energy to see this through” requires the kind of self-awareness that comes from understanding your unique patterns.

Dodging clarity might be the most insidious energy drain of all. When we avoid making clear decisions, setting firm boundaries, or having difficult conversations, we don’t preserve energy—we bleed it continuously. Every unmade decision sits in the background of your consciousness, consuming processing power like apps running in the background of your phone. Every unclear commitment creates anxiety and prevents full engagement with what’s in front of you. As a result, leaders who think they’re staying flexible by keeping options open are actually draining the team’s collective energy through ambiguity.

For event planners, this principle applies directly to programming decisions. That breakout session you’re keeping “just in case” but aren’t fully committed to? It’s draining energy from sessions that deserve full attention. The speaker you’re unsure about but haven’t moved to replace? That indecision is costing you creative juices that could be solving other problems. Subtracting these drains—making clear yes or no decisions—frees up capacity for the inspirational and motivational experiences your attendees actually need.

Close the Loops: Why Open Decisions Drain the Room

Imagine your brain as a computer with dozens of programs running simultaneously in the background. Each open decision, unfinished conversation, or unclear commitment represents an open loop consuming energy, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not. Erin’s research into energy management revealed that these open loops don’t just affect individuals—they drain entire teams and organizations.

When leaders leave decisions hanging, teams can’t move forward with full commitment. In particular, this creates a cascade of micro-delays where everyone pauses slightly before acting, unsure if the direction might change. That collective hesitation might only cost seconds per interaction, but multiplied across hundreds of decisions daily, it represents a massive drain on corporate culture and employee engagement.

The solution is deceptively simple: close loops intentionally and explicitly. Make the decision, communicate it clearly, and move forward. If you’re not ready to decide, communicate that timeline too—but don’t leave people wondering. When you close loops, you return energy to the system. Furthermore, teams can redirect that recovered capacity toward innovation, problem-solving, and the kind of strategic thinking that actually moves businesses forward.

This principle extends to personal commitments as well. That networking coffee you said you’d schedule “sometime soon” but never put on the calendar? Open loop. The proposal you promised to review but keeps sliding down your priority list? Open loop. The conference debrief you intended to write but hasn’t materialized? Open loop. Each one quietly drains energy that could fuel more important work.

For meeting professionals managing complex event logistics, open loops multiply quickly. Venue contracts pending review, speaker agreements awaiting signatures, sponsorship conversations left in limbo—each represents an energy drain. The planners who excel aren’t necessarily the ones with more time or bigger teams; they’re the ones who ruthlessly close loops, creating clarity that allows everyone involved to operate from a full energy tank rather than fumes.

Energy Management as a Leadership Skill, Not a Wellness Perk

Here’s where Erin’s work diverges sharply from typical wellness programming. Energy management isn’t about bubble baths and meditation apps—though those might be useful tools for some people. It’s about recognizing that managing energy is a core competency of effective thought leadership and organizational performance.

Leaders who understand energy management make better hiring decisions by matching people’s energy types to roles where they’ll naturally excel. They structure meetings and workflows that honor rather than drain team vigor. They recognize when a performance problem isn’t about skill or motivation but about energy mismanagement—and they address it accordingly. In essence, they treat energy as strategically as they treat time, money, and talent.

Organizations that have worked with Erin, including Google and Disney, didn’t bring her in for a feel-good wellness session. They engaged her because they recognized that energy management directly impacts innovation, decision quality, collaboration effectiveness, and ultimately, business results. When teams operate from full energy tanks, they solve problems faster, communicate more effectively, and demonstrate the resilience needed to navigate uncertainty.

This shift in perspective transforms how organizations approach mental health and health and well-being initiatives. Instead of positioning these as employee benefits separate from business strategy, forward-thinking leaders recognize them as essential infrastructure for sustainable high performance. Energy management isn’t a perk you offer top performers; it’s the foundation that creates top performers in the first place.

Event planners programming leadership conferences should take note: your audience doesn’t want another session telling them to practice self-care. They want practical frameworks for managing energy in high-stakes environments where the pressure is real and the stakes are high. They want to understand how energy management connects to bottom-line results, not just personal wellness. Programming speakers like Erin King who bridge this gap delivers the kind of actionable intelligence that attendees can implement immediately.

The Storytelling That Makes Energy Management Stick

One reason Erin’s message resonates so powerfully with audiences from Bali to Amsterdam is her ability to translate complex research into compelling narratives. Her insights have been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Psychology Today not because they’re academically impressive—though they are—but because she makes energy management tangible through stories that land emotionally while delivering intellectual rigor.

This combination of research credibility and narrative accessibility explains why her podcast consistently ranks in the top one percent of all downloads on iTunes. People don’t just want data; they want to see themselves in the story and understand how these principles apply to their specific challenges. When Erin shares her own health scare and the year-long research journey that followed, she’s not just providing background—she’s demonstrating the very transformation she teaches.

For meeting professionals evaluating speakers, this distinction matters enormously. Speakers who rely solely on research without narrative struggle to create lasting behavior change. Conversely, speakers who tell great stories without substantive frameworks leave audiences entertained but unchanged. The magic happens at the intersection—where rigorous research meets compelling storytelling that makes abstract concepts feel personal and actionable.

Designing Events That Convert Attention Into Action

Understanding energy management fundamentally changes how you design event experiences. Start by recognizing that attendees’ focus follows predictable patterns throughout the day and across multi-day events. Morning sessions benefit from content requiring focused attention and decision-making. Mid-afternoon slots need either high-energy interactive experiences or permission for individual reflection and processing. Evening sessions should emphasize connection and synthesis rather than new information download.

Consider the energy type diversity in your audience when structuring the agenda. Build in varied formats that allow kinetic types to move, contemplative types to process, and synergistic types to collaborate. Don’t force everyone through identical experiences and expect identical results. The best events create pathways for different energy types to engage in ways that fuel their participation rather than demanding they override their natural rhythms.

Pay attention to drain points beyond the obvious ones, like long lectures. Unclear agendas create anxiety that drains energy. Networking time without structure exhausts introverts while boring extroverts. Panel discussions with too many speakers and no clear through-line scatter attention and waste the room’s collective focus. Every design choice either builds or depletes the energy available for learning, connecting, and changing behavior.

Think about energy recovery as deliberately as you think about content delivery. Build in transition time between sessions—not just for logistics but for mental processing. Create spaces for different energy recovery styles: quiet zones for people who need to retreat and recharge, social spaces for those who recharge through connection, and movement opportunities for those who need to walk or stretch to maintain focus. Mindfulness doesn’t have to mean meditation; it can mean intentional design that honors how humans actually maintain and recover energy.

From Insight to Impact: Making Management Practical

Knowing about energy management and actually implementing it are entirely different challenges. The gap between insight and action often comes down to practical systems that make intelligent choices easier than energy-draining defaults. Start by conducting your own energy audit over a typical week. Track not just how you spend time but how different activities affect your energy. Which meetings leave you energized versus depleted? Which work tasks allow you to enter flow states versus feel like slogs?

Use these insights to redesign your environment and schedule around energy optimization rather than time filling. Batch similar tasks to reduce the cognitive switching costs that drain energy. Protect your peak energy hours for work requiring your highest-level thinking, and relegate administrative tasks to times when your energy naturally dips. Build in non-negotiable recovery practices that genuinely restore your capacity—and remember that what restores energy varies by individual, so what works for your colleague might drain you.

For teams and organizations, make energy management an explicit part of how you operate. Start meetings by acknowledging the people are bringing to the room. When planning projects, discuss not just time and resources but energy allocation. Create team norms that close loops explicitly and value clarity over false harmony. Celebrate intelligent decisions—like saying no to opportunities that don’t align—as much as you celebrate ambitious yes decisions.

The Meeting Professional’s Role

Event planners and meeting professionals sit at a unique intersection of influence. You don’t just attend conferences—you design the experiences that shape how thousands of professionals think about their work, their leadership, and their potential. When you program energy management content effectively, you’re not just filling an hour on the agenda; you’re potentially transforming how your attendees approach every aspect of their professional lives.

This responsibility extends beyond speaker selection to the entire attendee experience. How you communicate pre-event sets expectations. The clarity of your agenda and logistics communications either drains or preserves energy before people even arrive. Your on-site experience design either honors or ignores realities. Follow-up resources either support continued implementation or represent another open loop that drains post-event energy.

The meeting professionals who stand out aren’t just logistics coordinators or content curators. They’re experience architects who understand that managing attendee focus is their most important job. Every decision—from break length to room temperature to the number of networking receptions—represents a choice about whether you’re preserving and building energy or depleting it. Choose intentionally, and you create events people remember not just because of what they learned but because of how they felt and what they accomplished afterward.

Why This Matters Now More Than Ever

We’re living through a period of unprecedented change and complexity. The challenges facing organizations today—technological disruption, talent shortages, economic uncertainty, rapid market shifts—demand our highest-level thinking and greatest creativity. Yet many leaders are running on empty, operating from depleted energy states that make everything harder than it needs to be. This isn’t sustainable, and it’s certainly not strategic.

Energy management offers a path forward that doesn’t require working longer hours or pushing harder. It requires working smarter by aligning how we work with how our it actually functions. It means treating energy as the strategic asset it is rather than hoping we’ll somehow feel more motivated. It demands that we stop glorifying exhaustion and start celebrating sustainable high performance.

For the meeting professionals reading this, you have an opportunity to be at the forefront of this shift. By programming speakers like Erin King who bring both research rigor and practical frameworks, you position your events as sources of genuine competitive advantage rather than just continuing education checkboxes. You create experiences that don’t just inform but transform—and that transformation starts with understanding and managing the one resource that determines everything else.

Your Energy, Your Choice, Your Unfair Advantage

The most powerful insight from energy management research is also the most liberating: you have more control than you think. While you can’t manufacture more time and you can’t always change your circumstances, you can learn to manage your focus intentionally. You can identify your type and work with it rather than against it. You can close the loops draining your capacity. You can subtract the commitments that cost more than they return. You can make decisions with clarity that frees rather than ambiguity that drains.

This isn’t about perfection or never feeling tired. It’s about understanding that energy management is a learnable skill with measurable returns. The organizations investing in this capability aren’t chasing trends—they’re building unfair advantages in a world where uniquely human capabilities increasingly determine success. They’re recognizing that their people’s time isn’t just a personal wellness issue; it’s their most renewable competitive asset when managed strategically.

As Erin’s work with Google, Disney, VISA, Adobe, and the United States Navy demonstrates, energy management scales from individual performance to team effectiveness to organizational culture. The principles work whether you’re managing yourself, leading a team, or designing experiences for thousands. The question isn’t whether it management matters—it’s whether you’re ready to treat it with the strategic importance it deserves.

Ready to Transform How Your Organization Thinks About Performance?

The difference between events people attend and events that change how they work often comes down to one thing: whether you’re programming content that addresses real performance barriers versus surface-level symptoms. Energy management isn’t a nice-to-have wellness topic—it’s the foundation of sustained high performance in an increasingly complex world.

Book Erin King for your next event and give your audience the unfair advantage they need.

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Schedule a 15-minute discovery call to discuss programming that creates lasting impact.

Prefer to start the conversation via email? Reach out at info@thekeynotecurators.com.

Your attendees aren’t running out of time—they’re running out of fuel. Give them the frameworks to reclaim it, and watch what becomes possible.

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