Energy and Satisfaction Zones

Let’s dive deeper into the 2×2 Grondin diagram from the prior article in which a person’s energy is measured from low to high on the vertical axis and satisfaction from low to high on the horizontal axis. What is happening when we are in each of these quadrants?

Let’s start with what I’ll call “The Neutral Zone” in which energy is high but satisfaction is low. This is often where we find ourselves when simply coping with change. You might be learning fast, but under pressure. Maybe the “tough culture” of your employer has you worried about losing your job. Your energy may be high because you’re in discovery mode, but satisfaction is low because of the uncertainty of the environment you are working within. Other factors may play in as well, we’ll talk later about the “J-curve” of productivity in which the time taken to learn will initially reduce quantity and quality of output. So you may be diving hard and applying yourself but things aren’t quite working yet and there is a sense of danger.

The trap here is in becoming frustrated or mistaking this moment for failure. This is where anger and denial can intervene as it is a moment when panic can set in and cause us to either retreat to old patterns or burn out. The key to navigating out of this state is to give yourself (and insist that your organization give) room to learn which includes “failing” at times. Ship rough prototypes to users, not polished products. Let yourself make bad drawings before good ones. Experience the new tools and what their strengths and weaknesses are before judging yourself or those tools against old measures.

Going wrong from the Neutral Zone can lead you into what I will call “Depletion” in which your low satisfaction is now matched by low energy. This is the danger zone. You’re running on fumes and nothing feels worth it. The work you’re shipping feels sloppy, the meetings blur together, and even small decisions feel overwhelming.

If you do find yourself here don’t try to power through with willpower alone. When you or your team are in this quadrant it isn’t going to be motivational speeches or pizza parties that get you out again. This is where we need to understand how our intellectual state is impacted by our physical state. The actual solution is to protect sleep, body state, and scope. Reduce what you are trying to do ruthlessly. Cancel non-essential meetings. Take PTO. One team I know instituted “Recovery Sprints” – deliberately light workloads after intense pushes, focused on documentation, learning, and technical debt rather than new features.

Doing this can allow you to climb, even with low energy back into a high satisfaction state, a zone I’ll call “comfort.” Don’t get too complacent! This zone is good for recovery but risky if you park here too long while the environment moves. We can sometimes mistake this for sustainable success. Comfort feels earned, like you’ve “arrived.” But markets shift, skills atrophy, and what felt like mastery becomes obsolescence. Use this zone for strategic recovery, not permanent residence. One idea is to run “Innovation Fridays” in which people are encouraged to do low-stakes experiments with new tools and approaches.

The ideal place to be is in the zone called “thriving” where high energy and high satisfaction come together. You can’t be in this zone permanently. Thriving is constant balancing act in which you are finding your footing, getting knocked down by some new event, and finding your way back again. And in this stage you’re spending down accumulated learning and energy.

Use this time to document everything: write the playbooks, record the decisions, capture the design principles. This is when you have both the clarity and energy to create artifacts that will guide you through the next neutral zone.

You won’t move through these quadrants linearly.

The key insight isn’t to avoid the difficult quadrants but to recognize where you are, name it without judgment, and choose your next move intentionally. The neutral zone is just learning and comfort is just recovery. Even depletion, caught early, is just information that something needs to change.

The most resilient people and teams are the ones who can name their quadrant they are in without shame and know what to do to navigate back toward thriving: “We’re in the neutral zone with high energy but nothing’s quite clicking yet. Give us two more weeks of experiments.” That normalization makes the whole journey possible.