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The Emotional Powerhouse Within Us
Have you ever wondered why some leaders seem to effortlessly inspire those around them while others struggle despite having all the right credentials? What if the secret wasn't found in another leadership framework or productivity hack, but in something far more fundamental-your emotional energy? In "Energy Rising," neuropsychologist Dr. Julia DiGangi reveals the revolutionary science behind emotional power and how it shapes every aspect of our lives. This book has become a quiet phenomenon among Fortune 500 executives and Silicon Valley leaders seeking to transform their approach to both personal and professional challenges. Drawing from her groundbreaking work at the intersection of neuroscience and psychology, DiGangi offers a refreshing counterpoint to traditional leadership advice: rather than avoiding negative emotions, true power comes from transforming them. As Brene Brown noted, "This book completely reframes how we think about emotional intelligence in leadership," while Arianna Huffington called it "essential reading for anyone who wants to lead with authenticity in today's complex world."
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The Neuroscience of Emotional Power
Your emotions aren't just feelings-they're literal energy. Electrical, chemical, and magnetic forces that neuroscientists can track with fMRI and EEG technologies. Your brain, an electrical machine sending impulses at 260 miles per hour, constructs your reality through these energies. When projects fail despite having the "right" strategy and people, what's missing is often the right energy.
Emotional power isn't about eradicating negative feelings but about rising when situations give you every reason to stay down. All emotions ultimately distill to two core energies: emotional pain (negative sensations like stress, anxiety, and fear) and emotional power (positive sensations of worthiness, confidence, and strength). Counterintuitively, your emotional power relies on working with your pain rather than avoiding it.
Leadership isn't just a position but an identity-your ability to use your energy to influence your life across all domains. Many leaders focus intensely on others' emotions while neglecting their own, which diminishes their power. Though you can't directly control others' emotional states, neuroscience shows emotions are contagious-people naturally synchronize with those around them. When you manage your own emotional energy, others naturally calibrate to it.
Our lives typically break down at the point of our own emotional pain-those negative feelings of stress, fear, inadequacy, and worry. Until you feel bad about a situation, you don't have a problem. How you lead yourself through difficult emotions directly shapes your decisions, communication, risk-taking, and relationships. When leaders change their relationship with emotions, relationships change and the world rises.
The eight neuroenergetic codes presented in the book serve as blueprints for harnessing brain energy to improve your life and others'. The first five focus on personal development, while the final three help you inspire and influence others. These codes present counterintuitive yet scientifically-backed approaches to overcoming emotional pain, drawing from diverse scenarios-from workplace challenges to extreme trauma-demonstrating how the brain processes emotions similarly across different contexts.
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Transforming Pain into Power
Avoiding negative feelings isn't weakness-it's your brain working as designed. However, there's a vast difference between surviving and thriving. The first neuroenergetic code shows how to transform stress, fear, and anxiety into emotional power.
The truth about pain is you can never eradicate it; you can only transform it. Like all energy in the universe, emotional pain follows the law of conservation-it cannot be destroyed, only transformed. If you could have "solved" your emotional pain, you would have by now. Instead, the situations change but the same painful feelings keep appearing. When pain remains untransformed, you transmit it to others through short-tempered leadership or impatience, but worst of all, you pass it on to yourself through self-criticism.
Your edge of emotional power is the maximum energy your nervous system can hold while remaining connected to your power-your threshold before becoming emotionally dysregulated. When triggered beyond this edge, your brain loses balance in one of two ways: hyperarousal (feeling too anxious, angry, or overwhelmed) or hypoarousal (feeling numb, flat, depleted, or disconnected). Your goal isn't to eradicate pain but to expand your edge so you can hold more neurologic energy without becoming dysregulated.
Rather than seeking perfect, pain-free solutions (which don't exist), choose a more powerful pain that ultimately strengthens you. Like lifting weights at the gym, where you must continually increase resistance to grow stronger, emotional power requires embracing more challenging emotional states. When facing relationship problems, career challenges, or personal growth, ask yourself: "Which pain do I choose?" The familiar pain you've been living with, or the unfamiliar but potentially transformative pain of change?
Consider Meg, a global VP on track to become CHRO, who built her career on being "consensus-based"-which was often code for people-pleasing. She responded to emails at midnight, over-delivered on projects, and felt her success depended on not disappointing others. This constant overgiving left her exhausted and resentful. Working with DiGangi, Meg chose the more powerful pain of self-respect-honoring her own energy even at the cost of others' approval. Initially, her anxiety and guilt increased as she worried about the consequences of setting boundaries. But these uncomfortable feelings weren't warning signs-they were evidence she was finally expanding her emotional power.
Just as building physical strength requires muscle shake when lifting heavier weights, building emotional strength requires experiencing and tolerating emotional discomfort. The shaking itself is evidence of increasing strength. Daisy, an early-career professor gaining media attention for her research, struggled with perfectionism that manifested as obsessive preparation for interviews. When she chose self-trust and did interviews without excessive rehearsal, she physically shook-trembling hands, wobbly legs, quivering voice. But after holding through this emotional shake for five interviews, her nervous system habituated to this new level of emotional power, and she began enjoying the very interviews that once terrified her.
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Building Your Power Pattern
Our brains function as powerful pattern-detection machines that predictively determine our actions amid overwhelming environmental information. This pattern recognition shapes how we perceive reality, with our brains finding what they predict should be there. While situations may be outside our control, changing our internal patterns puts relief within reach.
Our brains cling to learned patterns even when objective reality changes, affecting how we interpret everything from entrepreneurship to marriage to solitude. These patterns govern nearly everything about our quality of life, with two people experiencing the same event yet having drastically different interpretations based on their preexisting patterns. Even in trauma, the strongest predictor of response isn't the trauma itself but who we were before it happened.
Most change attempts fail because people focus on specific situations rather than addressing the underlying patterns that created those situations in the first place. To overcome unsatisfying patterns detracting from your life's promise, you must build a "power pattern"-a holy frame designed to hold your entire life. This pattern should be expansive enough to contain both triumphs and tragedies while leaving you continuously empowered.
Begin by assessing what pattern you typically grasp when in pain (like "nothing works out for me" or "no one can be trusted"). Then design a pattern that makes you feel incredibly expansive-more possible, confident, and beautiful than before. Create a word, phrase, or simple sentence that makes you feel so empowered that if you embodied this energy, almost nothing in life could defeat you. Examples include "I am my greatest work of art," "I am already worthy," "I can't run out of options," or "Everything contributes to my powerful evolution."
Consider Anabelle's case-a renaissance woman with an MD and PhD who combined medicine and dance. She transformed her limiting pattern of "No one understands me" to the empowering "I am ahead of my time," allowing her to see resistance as evidence of being cutting-edge rather than personal rejection. With this new frame, she saw herself as a visionary whose work included leading others to ideas they didn't yet understand.
Once designed, take your power pattern into the real world to stress test it. Ask whether it offers empowerment in situations that previously triggered you. Since you've likely operated from your old patterns for years, be gentle with yourself through graceful commitment to repetition. Patterns only exist through repetition, and your neuroplastic brain can discard harmful patterns and adopt healing ones.
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Harnessing Your Emotional Energetics
Emotions are your first language-primitive, raw, unapologetic zaps of neural energy we physically feel. They power your brain's pattern-detection machine, yet can be confusing: why do we feel hurt when we know something was just a joke? The third neuroenergetic code expands your emotional power by teaching you to work with one specific emotional energy at the root of nearly all emotional pain: humiliation.
The pain tree model illustrates how emotional pain works in your life. Like all trees, it has roots, trunk, and leaves, representing different aspects of your emotional experience. Leaves represent every individual situation where you experience negative emotions-deadlines causing stress, social media triggering jealousy, disagreements with colleagues. We tend to focus on these situational specifics, describing detailed events when our feelings are hurt. But your lasting power doesn't lie in situations; it lives in your emotions.
In the trunk, situational specifics disappear, leaving only emotional energies-the neurological sensations that electrify you. The trunk contains anger energy (whether called annoyed, mad, frustrated, enraged, irritated). Though anger projects strength, it often lacks real power. People get angry repeatedly hoping for change, but their lives don't improve because anger isn't the source of pain-fear is. You only get angry to protect something you're afraid of losing.
Fear lives in the roots of your pain tree. People often mistake situational fears ("I'm afraid my boss will criticize me") for root fears, but this merely returns to the leaves. Your root fear is never about particular situations-it's about the energy of humiliation. This sensation ignites most painful situations in your life. You don't even need to be humiliated to be activated; just fearing you might be is enough.
Dave, a senior tech leader with a reputation for intolerance of mistakes, discovered the root of his anger through examining his emotional energetics. While he blamed specific situations-team members underperforming, deals falling through, public challenges-these were merely the leaves of his pain tree. Digging deeper revealed his trunk emotion: fear of losing control. At the roots lay his deepest fear: humiliation. Despite his outward success and charm, Dave feared being seen as "a loser" if things went wrong.
Pain and power are two sides of the same energetic coin-humiliation is your root pain while worthiness is your peak power. Your peak emotional power comes from an unwavering awareness of your inherent worth regardless of any situation. We mistakenly link worthiness to our actions, feeling worthy only when coworkers agree, kids listen, or partners affirm us. This creates emotional instability since we don't reflect on who we are outside what we do.
To release others' power over your nervous system, quit lying and stop gossiping. We lie because we believe our authentic selves are unacceptable-a profound form of self-rejection that signals the truth of your life isn't good enough. Similarly, gossiping occurs when we lack the emotional power to address grievances directly. While cathartic, venting merely equalizes energy temporarily without strengthening your emotional system, which is why it becomes a chronic behavior.
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Mastering Uncertainty
Uncertainty is one of life's most powerful forces that we must learn to master rather than avoid. Consider Jerry, a patient who would provoke his abusive father in the morning to "get it out of the way," illustrating how uncertainty can be more painful than certain negative outcomes. Research shows people find it more painful to be uncertain about receiving an electric shock than knowing they will definitely receive one.
Our attempts to avoid uncertainty through "overs" (overthinking, overworking, overgiving) often cause more pain than the uncertainty itself. The key insight is that uncertainty affects our nervous system similarly across different situations, and it's not the situations themselves but our anxious "what if" thinking that shapes our experiences.
While you cannot control all of life's uncertainties, you can be the most powerful person in your own life. Most uncertainty-related pain stems from fears about others' behaviors-what if people get mad, misunderstand you, or don't support you? When you manage this uncertainty by abandoning your authentic self, you create pain through self-division.
The solution is becoming your own source of safety by being the hero in your own story through two key approaches: becoming an information seeker rather than a reassurance seeker, and learning to say "I don't know."
Reassurance-seeking behavior-looking to others for certainty they cannot provide-temporarily relieves anxiety but ultimately weakens emotional power. Unlike information seeking (gathering facts), reassurance seeking aims to create emotional certainty through questions like "Would you have done the same?" or asking multiple people until getting a desired answer. When you rely on external sources for emotional regulation, you undermine your inner authority.
Saying "I don't know" represents true leadership courage. When uncertain, you have only two choices: pretend to know or tell the truth. Pretending to know is a form of people-pleasing that creates future problems. Leaders who fear disappointing others often provide false certainty, believing their safety depends on others' certainty. During the uncertainty of 2020, organizations that communicated honestly about not having all the answers maintained employee engagement, while those waiting for perfect knowledge before communicating saw engagement plummet. When you own your "I don't know," you create relationships rooted in emotional freedom, and emotionally free people become the most powerful people in the world.
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Rewiring Your Source Code
Your childhood experiences formed the foundation of your leadership style. Your parents were your first and most powerful leaders-not necessarily the most loving or attentive, but the most influential due to your developing brain. During your first three years, your brain formed over a million neural connections per second, with your parents teaching formative lessons about emotions, power, pain, and relationships.
This "source code" profoundly shapes how you lead today, even though you can't consciously access many early memories. Strategies that served you brilliantly at age seven often hinder you at forty-seven. The four-step process-Remember, Relate, Recognize, and Rewire-transforms childhood conditioning that blocks your emotional power.
First, bring unconscious patterns into conscious awareness by examining what behaviors earned your parents' positive attention-whether being right, successful, mistake-free, socially acceptable, quiet, responsible, strong, achievement-oriented, or emotionally controlled. For a child, parental attention represents the most powerful energy available, and understanding these patterns reveals the foundation of your current leadership approach.
Next, connect childhood patterns to present leadership challenges through either "because of" energy (repeating parental patterns) or "in spite of" energy (doing the opposite). Examples include becoming inconsistent after dodging explosive parental moods, becoming hypercompetitive after pressure to excel, struggling with connection after parental neglect, or becoming fiercely independent after feeling controlled.
Then identify specific behaviors stemming from childhood programming that weaken leadership. This step distinguishes between normal reactions and "trigger" reactions-disproportionate responses rooted in old patterns. The five defensive nervous system responses to triggers include:
1. FIGHT: Aggression through combative language, shouting, intimidation
2. FLIGHT: Avoiding triggers by dodging difficult people, using screens as barriers
3. FREEZE: Reactive immobility with overwhelming fatigue, numbness, mental fogginess
4. FAWN: People-pleasing from survival need, saying yes when you want to say no
5. FALL APART: Catastrophizing minor issues, using dramatic language
Finally, create specific alternatives to override your source code patterns. Document the precise ways your source code causes pain, connecting current behaviors to childhood experiences. Then create highly specific alternatives with clear behaviors, powerful statements, and precise timeframes for implementation. Your brain will resist these changes, creating urgent justifications for returning to old patterns, but holding steady through this discomfort is essential for developing new levels of emotional power.
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The Power of Connection
The foundation of relationship pain is difference-when people want, think, or value different things than we do. Our brains interpret these differences as threats, activating our defense systems. The key to emotional leadership is managing your response to difference effectively.
Command energy appears when you try controlling others' behaviors, thoughts, and feelings to avoid changing yourself-the "you do what I say so I don't have to be different" approach. While theoretically efficient, command energy blocks thriving relationships because it rejects the brain's fundamental drive for independence. This energy manifests in various settings: managers who claim to want "self-starters" while micromanaging; parents who send contradictory messages about independence to adult children; educators who encourage individual strengths but restrict exploration; and romantic partners who create "energetic zeros" by sending conflicting signals.
Command energy creates "energetic tugs-of-war" where everyone expends energy but nobody progresses. When you insist on being right, repeatedly try to convince others, or withdraw when they disagree, you're communicating: "I don't feel confident in my position until you agree with me." The emotionally exceptional recognize that outside of objective facts, there's no room for "being right" in powerful relationships.
In a tug of war, people expend enormous amounts of energy and hardly move. Ongoing stalemates persist only when both parties maintain roughly equal opposing energy. If these exhausting back-and-forths continue, you're actually an energetic match for what frustrates you. The solution is surprisingly simple: to end a tug-of-war instantly, just drop the rope.
Dropping the rope isn't weakness but a total power move. Letting go of being right doesn't mean capitulating to others' opinions-it means no longer requiring external approval for what you know is true. This emotional posture allows you to create relationships where others can be both connected and free.
The root of command energy is lack of trust-not in others, but in yourself. You only seek to control what you don't trust. When you feel you can't reasonably control yourself, you try controlling others instead.
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Unleashing Your Magnetic Leadership
When you quit commanding, you free up energy in your relationships, allowing you to unleash a more powerful force: the energy of your magnetism. Magnetic leadership happens when others follow you because they're attracted to the power of your example. This represents the most powerful way to lead because it aligns with how the brain operates. People connect to you not because you insist, but because they choose-creating a neurological win-win.
Consider the case of a large nonprofit with an exceptional mission but abysmal employee engagement. Initially, the executive team wanted to reorganize staff, remove "problematic" managers, and offer rewards like gift cards-all approaches that fundamentally asked: "How do I get these people to behave how I want without changing myself?" When meeting with executives individually, DiGangi discovered they were exhausted, frustrated, and even considering leaving. Many were in conflict with each other while complaining about staff engagement. They had forgotten they were the magnets to which others are attracted or repelled.
The work began by stopping downstream efforts about staff and focusing on reconnecting these leaders with their own emotional power. As they addressed their intra-executive conflicts and built more transparent relationships with each other, they naturally began creating more informal interactions with managers. With one particularly difficult manager relationship, they committed to assuming good intent rather than interpreting fear-based behaviors as hatred. One executive made it a point to regularly visit this manager's office. Though initially painful and awkward, they eventually began stopping by each other's offices and even bringing coffee.
As topline managers felt genuine concern from executives, they reflected this energy toward their own teams. Beyond formal town halls, small informal interactions signaling trust increased dramatically: seeking opinions, accommodating schedules, genuine engagement. Employee scores rose significantly. When you change yourself, relationships must change too-it's emotional math. Control of others only emerges when you've lost your own power, often unconsciously trying to use others' behavior to regulate your nervous system-a childhood pattern. True leadership means trusting yourself and the process, knowing those meant to connect will do so by choice, not coercion.
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Building Relationships from the Future
If your relationships lack strength or reward, it's likely because you don't have a clear vision for them. Relationships are energetic connections over time-people feel emotional energies around you, and you feel them around others. For relationships to endure and strengthen over months, years, or decades, you must project how they will evolve by looking beyond past and present toward a powerful vision of how you want them to feel in the future.
Just as we celebrate stories of individuals like Michael Jordan rising to meet a more powerful version of their future self (visualizing success after being cut from his high school team), the same principle applies to relationships. By envisioning yourself being the person you desire to be in relationships, you're not practicing magic but neural conditioning-priming your nervous system to hold the emotional energy you desire, particularly under painful conditions.
Relationships are cocreations, but when they deteriorate, we often forget our role as cocreators and fall into a passive mentality where relationships happen to us rather than being co-controlled by us. Leaders complain about disengaged teams, couples lament unresponsive partners, and parents feel helpless about uncommunicative children-all forgetting that relationships vanish without our participation.
The quality of your relationships with others energetically mirrors your relationship with yourself. A manager frustrated by an uncreative team often isn't feeling creative herself; a father feeling disrespected by his child struggles to respect himself; a wife heartbroken by her husband's apparent lack of love can't describe how she loves herself. Since you access relationships only through your nervous system, the quality of your external relationships is always mediated by your internal relationship with yourself. When you change your energy, the relationship's energy invariably changes-this is the emotional math of relationships.
Relationships have an energetic set point-a consistent rhythm they naturally calibrate to. This happens because your brain is a pattern detector, superimposing past experiences onto present interactions. The emotional memories encoded in structures like your amygdala and hippocampus determine how you feel about relationships. If your memories are generally positive, you'll feel positive; if negative, you'll feel negative. These emotional memories are more powerful than factual ones, creating energetic projections that shape your relationship expectations.
To strengthen relationships for the future, visualize a specific, significant future moment with your target person (colleague, partner, child) with intense detail-your words, feelings, body language-writing it out as an Oscar-worthy scene. Then calibrate your energy to this vision by identifying one specific, manageable action you'll commit to "no matter what" to evolve into your stronger future self. Examples include stopping criticism or interruptions, giving daily compliments, offering thoughtful gestures, asking better questions, or creating space for others' opinions. The "no matter what" commitment is crucial-maintaining your practice even when conversations are easy and especially when triggered.
Grace's story illustrates this: after seeing her daughters mirror her sarcastic humor, she committed to releasing sarcasm to create softer family connections. Three months later, when her younger daughter knocked over a block tower, the older one responded with kindness rather than mockery, proving that Grace's energy shift had transformed her family's relationships.
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Rising to Your Emotional Power
Our deepest pain comes from our self-beliefs about not being good enough, important enough, or worthy enough-beliefs we can never outrun. There's a sacred promise in pain: the aspects of ourselves we consider too broken, inadequate, or humiliating aren't meant to sink us but to set us free. We are literally energy incarnate, with brains originating from stars 13 billion years ago.
For a brief 700,000 hours, we're called into the pure potentiality of life. Our leadership-our energy to affect our lives and others'-is our greatest power. In a universe where we energized a human body on a strange ball floating through endless space, what can't be redeemed? What can't we accomplish?
The world needs leaders who believe in the full promise of our full humanity, especially as uncertainty creates widespread pain. Our most powerful service requires nothing more than everything we already are. To lead powerfully, we must lead wholly, embodying our complete energy and showing others the way home too.
The eight neuroenergetic codes collectively integrate to strengthen emotional power, offering scientific insights into how the brain constructs reality, enabling more satisfying and empowered living. From expanding your emotional edge to mastering uncertainty, from rewiring your source code to building relationships from the future, these codes provide practical pathways to transform emotional pain into power.
Remember that your emotions are not problems to be solved but energies to be transformed. Your path to emotional power doesn't lie in eradicating negative feelings but in working with them intelligently. By expanding your capacity to hold emotional energy, building empowering patterns, addressing the root of humiliation, mastering uncertainty, rewiring childhood conditioning, quitting command energy, unleashing your magnetism, and building relationships from the future, you become not just a better leader of others but a more powerful leader of yourself.
