What Letting Go Reveals About Leadership Energy

December 8, 2025

Douglas Herbert

Workplace Visibility Strategist

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I recently started listening to Letting Go by David Hawkins, MD. I wasn’t familiar with his work before, but one idea caught my attention - not because of how he describes it, but because of how deeply it mirrors something we see every day inside organizations.

Hawkins writes about the emotional weight we carry and the tension it creates. In his language, letting go is a release. In ours, it’s an energy shift - the moment a leader moves from internal pressure to internal clarity.

What struck me is how often leaders underestimate the impact of that shift. Most of the friction we experience at work isn’t caused by the external situation. It’s caused by the energy we bring into it.

Two people can face the same challenge with completely different outcomes.

One becomes tight, defensive, and controlling. The other becomes steady, clear, and constructive. Same pressure. Same context. Different energy - and that difference radiates outward.

This is the part Hawkins is pointing to, whether or not you follow his full model: when a person releases the emotional tension that distorts how they show up, the environment responds. Conversations open up. Decisions become cleaner. The space between people becomes easier to navigate.

Within Work Day Awareness®, we see this pattern constantly. Leaders who approach their work with aligned energy - grounded, present, and unburdened - create teams that naturally rise. Leaders who approach it with unprocessed tension unintentionally create turbulence around them. Not because they want to, but because energy is contagious long before it becomes visible in behavior.

Letting go is not resignation. And it’s not passivity. It’s the choice to stop carrying the unnecessary emotional weight that clouds perception and pulls teams off course. It’s the internal unclenching that allows better options to appear. It’s the moment clarity becomes possible again.

And that clarity matters.

Not as a philosophical idea - but as a practical advantage in today’s workplace, where speed, complexity, and disruption are constant companions. People don’t organize around a leader’s title. They organize around the steadiness of that leader’s presence. They trust direction when the energy behind it is coherent.

The more I listened to Letting Go, the more I realized that Hawkins’ concept and the reality we see in workplaces are describing the same phenomenon. The language differs. The setting differs. But the human experience is the same: when we release internal resistance, our external influence strengthens.

The real question for leaders isn’t whether they can control every variable around them. They can’t. The question is whether they can regulate the energy they bring into those variables.

Because when a leader lets go of the tension that keeps them guarded, hurried, or reactive, something important happens: the people around them stop bracing. They start contributing. They start thinking more openly. The environment becomes more capable.

That’s the deeper insight - one that sits quietly beneath the surface of Hawkins’ writing and loudly beneath the surface of organizational life:

Teams rise when leaders operate from alignment. Teams constrict when leaders operate from pressure.

And the earliest signal of that shift isn’t a decision or a directive. It’s the energy behind the work. Be Energy Aware.