People hear “Lead with Energy” and picture enthusiasm — a bright smile, a loud yes, a woman who never seems to get tired. That is not what I mean, and it never was.
Where the phrase found me
I did not sit down one day and invent a philosophy. It found me in the middle of the hardest year of my life, when the company Kunwer had built and raised like a son collapsed under him. I remember the specific, physical pull of that year — the urge to simply stop, to let the exhaustion win, because grief that size seemed to deserve nothing less than total collapse. And I remember the morning I understood that collapsing would not undo anything. It would only mean two people were broken instead of one. That was the first time I consciously chose where whatever energy I had left should go — not because I had plenty of it, but because someone in that house needed to still be standing.
What people think I mean
I carry this phrase everywhere — on this website, in how I introduce myself, in how I sign off talks. And almost everyone reads it the same way: as a personality trait. As if I woke up with more energy than other people, the way some people wake up taller. That reading has never sat right with me, because it isn’t true, and because it lets everyone else off the hook — as if energy is something you either have or you don’t, rather than something you build.
What I actually learned, from two very different men
I did not invent this idea. I watched it, for years, in two men who could not have been less alike, and who never once ran dry for the things that mattered to them — not because they had more energy than everyone else, but because they were relentless about where they put it.
My father
Never too tired for one more person’s problem, one more wedding, one more quarrel to settle in Kashipur. His energy went outward, to people, without end.
My husband
Never too tired for one more idea, one more question, one more thing worth learning — from inverters to solar to AI. His energy went into building, without end.
Neither of them was tireless in the way people assume. Both of them slept badly some nights, lost battles, grieved. What they shared was a refusal to let the tiredness decide where their energy went. That refusal, repeated daily for decades, is the only real definition of “leading with energy” I have ever found convincing.
What it is not
Not constant positivity
I have grieved, lost a company’s worth of certainty, and sat in silence for days. Energy is not a permanent smile.
Not hustle without rest
My father and my husband both paid a price for years of running hot. Leading with energy also means knowing when to stop spending it.
Not performance
It is not the version of you that shows up energetic for an audience and collapses the moment no one is watching.
What it actually is
Energy, in the way I use the word, is finite and renewable at the same time — like a field that produces more if you tend it, and less if you strip it bare. Leading with it does not mean having an endless supply. It means making a deliberate, repeated choice about where your limited supply goes, and protecting it fiercely from everything that would drain it for nothing.
Some days that choice looks like giving everything I have to Advait and Swastika, and guarding what is left instead of handing it to a hundred smaller demands. Some days it looks like rebuilding, slowly, after watching my husband lose a company he had raised like a son — because grief, left unspent, curdles into something worse than tiredness. Some days it is simply choosing, again, to show up fully for one thing rather than half-heartedly for five.
The energy you bring is the energy you get back
Lead with it — boldly, faithfully, completely. Not because you have more of it than anyone else, but because you have decided, again today, where it goes.
That is the whole manifesto, really. Not an endless well. A daily decision, made by two people I loved watching, and now made by me — about where the energy I have goes, and who gets to stand in the warmth of it.
