In this personal‑development video, Mary Schiller (aka Mary in Paris) opens by noting the usual advice for boosting energy—better diet, sleep, exercise, and stress reduction—while acknowledging those methods are valid but often insufficient. She then shares a pivotal moment from 2014 when, after years of battling PTSD and being told by professionals to control her thoughts and emotions, she decided to stop trying to manage them. By simply observing her thoughts and feelings without judgment or attempts to fix them, she realized that the mental energy spent on control was draining her vitality. This acceptance freed a substantial amount of creative and physical energy, which she redirected toward building the life she wanted: moving to Paris, starting a coaching business, and increasing her overall output. Mary concludes by urging viewers to adopt the same mindset—recognize thoughts and feelings as normal, let them be, and reclaim the energy previously wasted on unnecessary mental management—promising that this shift can dramatically improve their energy levels and life satisfaction.
Chapters
Hello, bonjour, it's Mary Shiller, also known as Mary in Paris, and I am coming to you from one of my favorite parks here in Paris. It is on a busy street, so you will hear traffic and you will hear park sounds, but that's part of the charm, right? In this video, I want to help you with energy. If you feel like your energy is flagging, if you want to have more of it, this video is really going to help you because I am going to tell you the thing that completely not only increased my energy level, but changed my entire life. So how's that for a big promise? So what do most people do when they are trying to increase their energy levels? In my experience, they look at things like what they're eating. Not a bad idea. You know, it's a good thing to look at that. And they look at things like their sleep patterns and how to improve their sleep patterns. Again, nothing wrong with that. They might look at how much exercise they're getting and they maybe try to increase it depending on what the situation is. Again, totally okay. They might look at things like stress and see if there's anything they can do to reduce their daily stress. All of these things are fine, nothing wrong with them. However, if people are looking at those things as the way to increase their energy, and if you've been doing that, you're missing something super important that I don't hear many people talking about except for me. I've talked about this for a long time, and it's the reason why I have so much energy and why I have so much creative output. People always ask me this, How do you have so much energy, Mary? How do you create so much? How do you do so much? And what I can tell you is that this discovery that I made that I'm going to share with you in just a second is responsible in large part for why I have the life I have, why I have the energy that I have, and essentially why I'm able to do what I love to do. So what is this big secret? So back in 2014, I had reached a point where I was pretty frustrated. I was in a job that I didn't like. I was not happy with a lot of aspects of my daily life. I liked living in New York City, which is where I was at the time, but professionally in particular, I was so frustrated. I just couldn't seem to get out of the situation that I was in. I was kind of a mess in that regard, and I felt like the job that I was going to every day was just sapping my energy and like chipping away very slowly at my soul. I don't know if you can relate to that, but that's how I felt. And in 2014, I had a gigantic— I don't even have a word for it— realization about something that changed everything. Up until that point, My entire adult life, I had been dealing with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. I had seen numerous professionals to help me. And basically, they all told me some version of the same thing, which is, Mary, your feelings and your thoughts are problematic. You need to try to control them, you need to manage them. And if you keep having them, you should be worried because it's going to end your life early and all this stuff. I mean, it was really nutty when I think about some of the things that these professionals said to me, looking back, I'm like, oh my gosh, no wonder I was a nervous wreck. Well, what I realized in 2014, very simply, was that all the things that I had been trying to do all those years to control my thoughts, to control my feelings, to manage myself in that way None of it worked. It just didn't work. And I thought, what might happen if I just stopped? If I just let myself be? If I didn't try to manage my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions, however you want to describe all of that? What if I just didn't do anything? What would happen? Yes, there is traffic noise. They're just getting in on the conversation. What would happen if I just stopped all of these management techniques and tools and whatever else, and I just let myself be? Literally left myself alone. What would happen? So that's what I did. I simply let my thoughts and feelings be whatever they were. In the moment, I noticed them. I saw kind of the patterns of them, but very quickly I realized that they weren't actually doing anything to me. Whatever thoughts and feelings I was having, they weren't having any impact on me, on Mary, on, if you will, big Mary, you know. The, the part of us that is infinite and immeasurable and, you know, glorious. Nothing was touching that, where all of my creativity was and all my energy was. And I thought, wow, this is really amazing. So I kept kind of experimenting with this, just leaving thoughts alone, not worrying about them, leaving my feelings alone, just kind of having them. And what eventually happened was I recognized how much time and energy— important word— I had been spending on trying to manage something that didn't need to be managed at all. I was truly shocked, and I'm getting kind of emotional thinking about this, at how much time, how much of my precious time I had been spending trying to fix myself when I wasn't even broken. How much time I had spent focusing on trying to manage thoughts and feelings that weren't problems to be solved in the first place. They were normal. They were fine. I could see them and experience them as more neutral natural energy instead of putting all of these labels like stress and worry and panic and fear and all that. I could just leave all of those at the door, and instead I could turn all of that precious energy that I had been spending like that— I could take that energy and use it towards what I really wanted to create in my life. And it took me a little while. It took me a little while to create what I wanted, which was this move to Paris. My coaching business. I didn't know I wanted a coaching business when I first had this realization. I just knew that I wanted to work for myself. I was able to get so much more creative energy out of myself because I was no longer preoccupied with all of these thoughts and feelings that were supposedly harmful to me. I could just let them be and they wouldn't do anything. Instead, they were giving me a gorgeous experience of being human, and I didn't have to worry about them anymore. I just didn't have to worry about them anymore. So if you are finding yourself in a place where you want more energy and you've tried all of the normal routes, you've tried all of the avenues, I invite you to try this one, to ignore whatever thoughts and feelings are going through your head, because most of them are not true anyway, especially anything that says you are less than or that you can't do something or whatever. You can really just ignore those. You can also recognize that any human feeling you have is normal and not problematic. And when you start to even catch a glimpse of that, your whole experience starts to change. You're no longer trying to manage your feelings and keep them in line and put them in a box and put them away somewhere. It's not necessary. So think about all of the energy that can be revived in you when you stop doing all of that stuff, when you stop all of this unnecessary mental management, because it's truly unnecessary and it's taking away energy that you could be using to create what you want to create. When I had this realization, it was like, whoa, my whole life just changed. My whole life just changed like that. And yours can too. Yours can too.
