I walked into the venue in Savannah, Georgia, to meet the conference organizers before my keynote (shout-out to GHTA). We had already met once on a video call, where they vet you to make sure you won’t embarrass them in front of their people. Meeting them in person was a different thing entirely.
They were lit up. They told me their audience was the best audience, the one with the most energy. One of them said, “We are all competing, but we genuinely care about one another.” Then she asked if I wanted to hear the introduction she’d written for me. No, I said. Surprise me.
This was sound check. The chairs were empty. And I was ready to burst onto that stage, fueled by nothing but the people standing in front of me.
I’ve been thinking about energy ever since.
I’ll be honest about which kind I know best. It’s the other kind. The vampires. The people who walk into a room and drain it. Everything is going wrong. Nothing is fair. They can’t cope, and by the end of the conversation, neither can you.
Over the years, I’ve developed a natural repellent. Once I diagnose the affliction, I build a force field and stand behind it. They exhaust me. I’m not mad at them. They aren’t bad people. They just aren’t my people.
I wrote that paragraph feeling pretty good about myself. Then I went looking for a quote about people who bring energy into a room, and Amy Poehler came to mind. She wants to be around people who “dream and support and do things.” Yes. Those are my people.
Except that’s only half of it. The first half is that she doesn’t want to be around people anymore who judge and talk about what other people do.
I’d grabbed the energy and blocked out the judgment. And what had I just spent three paragraphs doing?
Here’s the part I skipped. There’s a story my family still tells about me. I let my wife pick our vacation. I’m usually the one who goes down the rabbit hole of reviews before booking anything. She isn’t. She found an all-inclusive resort with a beach, and when we got there, it was run-down.
And I pouted. The gym was the last straw. I was trying to plug in a junky treadmill, broke my Apple Watch in the process, and stomped off to find an Apple Store. We had been told not to leave the resort. I left the resort. I marched into a city in another country over a watch, with a beach right there. My kids still re-create that scene. They’re right to. It was childish.
I was so busy complaining about what was wrong, I didn’t see what was right. My wife picked the place in good faith, and I had a bad attitude about it.
No one can be energetic all the time. I don’t trust people who never have a bad day. Having a bad day isn’t the affliction. Making your bad day everyone else’s problem is. And almost nobody who drains a room knows they’re doing it. They think they’re just being honest. I thought that too.
So who are the other people? A subscriber named Richard Rudow wrote to me and suggested I check out The Moth on Spotify. Later, I was sitting at an airport bar, turning that imagery over in my brain, and it landed right on top of what I’d been chewing on. Moths don’t decide to fly toward the light. They just go. That’s what certain people do to the rest of us. They aren’t always the smartest people in the room. They’re the ones who try things and fail in front of you. Who dance with no rhythm and don’t care who’s watching. Who hear your good news and get excited before they get jealous, or instead of it.
There’s a name for what happened to me at that sound check. Psychologists call it emotional contagion. Researchers like Elaine Hatfield found that we unconsciously mirror the faces, posture, and tone of the people around us, and our moods follow along without asking permission. I didn’t decide to be fired up in an empty room. I caught it.
Every human being has an effect on every other human being. You don’t get to opt out. Energy is contagious, and you’re carrying something into every room whether you know it or not. I carried a broken watch and a bad attitude onto a beach, and my whole family caught it.
Which brings this back to you.
You walk into rooms all week. A conference table. A kitchen. A text thread. A Zoom call where your face is saying more than you think. Every one of those rooms catches whatever you bring. The question isn’t whether you have vampires in your life. You do. You can probably name three of them right now.
The question is whether you’re one of the three on somebody else’s list. And whether you’d know.
Right now you might be blind to it. You think the room goes quiet because the room is tired. You think people are short with you because of their own stuff.
Now you’re aware. You read this, and somebody’s face came to mind, and for half a second it might have been your own.
That half second is the moment. Walk into the next room and notice what you’re bringing. Not what you’re taking. What you’re bringing, because they’re going to catch it.
Or don’t. Keep diagnosing everyone else. Keep building force fields. And one day you’ll realize the force fields are going up around you, and nobody is going to tell you why.
Energy is a drug to me. I want to mainline it. And I bring it every time I walk onto a stage. The harder question is whether I bring it when there’s no stage. When it’s just my family, a rundown resort, and a broken watch.
You have a stage too. A meeting you run. A classroom. A roll call. You know how to show up there. So who gets the version of you when nobody’s watching?
This is your moment of reckoning. Step into it.
