Energy Audit: These Four Questions Will Show You Exactly What's Weighing Your Business Down

Chances are really good that you’re carrying something heavy that is slowing down your business. Something you’re avoiding that you might not even be aware of.

That’s what an Energy Audit is for. In this post, I’ll walk you through the same process I take my clients through. It takes about 15 minutes, there are four questions and one rule to follow.

But first: if you’re somewhere you can’t actually stop and write things down right now, bookmark this and come back. Because the benefits show up best if you do the work in real time.

What an Energy Audit Actually Is (and Isn’t)

The word “audit” makes people think of spreadsheets, time tracking, and a color-coded calendar analysis.

That’s not what this is.

An Energy Audit is about finding what’s quietly draining you. We’re not talking about the obvious stuff or the big dramatic problems here. You alredy know about those.

I mean the low hum of things you’re not dealing with: The decisions you keep circling, the situations you keep tolerating, and the work that costs you more than it should.

The entrepreneurs I work with are often operating at a significant energy deficit, and they don’t fully see it. They’re showing up and getting things done.

But underneath that, something is off. And because it doesn’t show up as a crisis, they don’t treat it like one.

An Energy Audit makes these invisible problems visible, which is exactly what you need if you’re going to fix them.

What Happens When You Don’t Look

This is worth spending a minute on, because most people underestimate what sustained energy drain actually does to them.

A leaky energy drain doesn’t usually show up as a breakdown. If it did, you’d deal with it.

Instead, it shows up as a general sense of heaviness you can’t quite explain.

You’re keeping your commitments, mostly. But something feels off, and because you can’t name it, you tell yourself to push harder, add more to your plate, or convince yourself you just need a good weekend to reset.

Then Monday comes, and the heaviness returns.

What I’ve seen, consistently, in the people I work with: when you’re carrying unaddressed drains — the dread you’re not dealing with, the decision you keep circling, the thing that keeps coming back unresolved — it affects everything downstream.

Decision-making slows down. You’re using a portion of your cognitive and emotional capacity just to manage the weight of what you haven’t looked at yet.

Every conversation, every plan, every goal you set — it’s all happening with a depleted engine.

And here’s the part that’s hardest to see from the inside: when you operate that way long enough, it starts to feel normal. You forget what it feels like to have full access to your own energy and attention. You assume this is just what running a business feels like.

It’s not.

When you’re not dragging unresolved weight behind you, decisions come faster. Momentum feels less forced, and the work that actually matters gets more of you — the focused, intentionally present version of you — not what’s left over.

You can’t get to this place by working harder.

You only get there by getting honest.

The One Rule Before the Questions

There’s one rule you need to answer as you work through the four questions: the first answer that comes to mind is what you write down.

Not the answer you land on after you’ve thought it through. This is often the tidier, more comfortable version your brain offers you thirty seconds later and will tell you it’s the more important one. It’s not.

Your brain is going to want to help you come up with a “deep” answer. You’ll ask yourself the first question, something will surface immediately — and then almost immediately your brain will say, well, that’s not really the problem,

And it will offer you a second answer. One that is more manageable and…comfortable.

That second answer isn’t wrong. But it’s not the one this audit is for.

The first answer — the one that came before your brain had a chance to manage it — that’s the one we’re after.

Write it down, even if it surprises you, seems too simple, too big, or too uncomfortable to name out loud.

In my experience, the first answer is almost always the real one.

The Four Questions

The Energy Audit contains four questions. Work through these one at a time.

Pause after each one. Write down your first answer before you move on.

Question 1: What am I dreading right now?

Not what you’re a little nervous about. Not what’s mildly uncomfortable. What are you actually dreading — the thing that, when it crosses your mind, you immediately think about something else or find something to do?

That avoidance is data. What is it pointing to?

First answer only. Write it down.

Question 2: What decision have I been putting off?

This one tends to surprise people, because the decision they name is often one they’ve been telling themselves they’re “still thinking about.”

Some of that thinking is real. But some of it is avoidance. You probably already know what you’re going to do — or you know what you should do and you’re not ready to do it yet.

Either way, name it.

First answer. Write it down.

Question 3: What issue keeps coming back unresolved?

This is the thing you think you’ve addressed — maybe multiple times — and it keeps returning.

If it keeps coming back, it isn’t really handled, and it’s taking up bandwidth.

What is it? First answer. Write it down.

Question 4: What in my business takes than it gives?

This is the one that tends to sit with people the longest, because the honest answer can feel like a problem with no clean solution.

It might be a service offering that has run its course. A client relationship you’ve stayed in past the point it was working. A platform or marketing strategy you keep investing in out of habit or fear of letting go.

What is taking more than it’s returning — in energy, time, capacity, or clarity?

First answer. Write it down.

What You Do With What You Find

This audit is not a to-do list.

You are not walking away from this with four action items. That’s not the point.

The point is to stop pretending these things aren’t costing you anything.

Because when you don’t name them, they don’t disappear. They stay in the background, pulling on your attention and your energy and your decision-making in ways you don’t always notice. You move a little slower. You hesitate a little more. You stay busier than you need to be and wonder why you can’t get traction on the things that actually matter.

The audit interrupts that pattern by making what was once invisible, visible.

And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — just naming the thing is what makes it moveable because you can’t make a real decision about something you’re pretending isn’t there.

What Comes Next

Sit with what came up.

Notice which answer surprised you most -- and which one you wanted to skip.

Those are the ones asking for your attention first.

I run a version of this audit with my clients inside The Momentum Room — and I run it on myself.

What I’ve found, every single time, is that when we stop managing the thing and start actually working with it, the path forward becomes clearer than most people expected.

If you’re ready to stop carrying these things alone and start working through them, that’s exactly what The Momentum Room is built for.

We do this kind of work every week — making the invisible visible, building the self-trust to act on it, and staying accountable to the follow-through.

Learn more and schedule a conversation at jenlaffin.com/tmr.

Jen Laffin is a Chief Momentum Officer for women entrepreneurs who are wildly capable…and also wildly good at avoiding the exact things that would uplevel their business. She is the founder of The Momentum Room and host of The Goal Getter Guide Podcast. Learn more about Jen by visiting her website here.

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