I mean, energy is everything, is it not? So what excuse do we have as leaders to not make this our highest priority. Behind every struggle and every success is your ability to understand how energy operates and how to channel it correctly towards your desired goals.
From juggling work responsibilities to maintaining a fulfilling personal life, sourcing consistent energy can seem like an elusive goal. However, by incorporating insights from neuroscience, positive psychology, and ancient wisdom, you can unlock the secrets to sustainable personal energy and enhance your overall well-being.
What is energy?
Energy is the currency of life. It's the driving force behind every action you take, every decision you make, and every outcome you experience. Understanding and managing your energy is essential for achieving peak performance and maintaining overall well-being. Energy is how life flows, and being in flow means releasing stubborn beliefs, projects, and strategies that go against this natural order.
Natural order is not a rational concept to be researched, analysed, understood, and placed in a box. It's dynamic and can look different based on the system in which it moves. Be it internal systems such as your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing or external systems such as your business culture and community.
The best way out is through. This means day-to-day sensing for what is needed in the moment so that energy can best thrive, as well as instilling practices that build energy reserves for times of challenge.
"Life is about the management of energy. Where you place your attention is where you place your energy." Dr Joe Dispenza
Common Energy Drains
Identifying common energy drains is the first step towards effective energy management. Let's skip over the obvious blog topics such as poor sleep, lack of nutrition, overthinking, multitasking, and emotional stressors. At its foundation, energy requires the freedom to flow, to transform at will, to remain in balance, to remain connected to a system, and to remain aligned with its source.
Force: Using force, control, or coercion to get your goals achieved only creates more resistance. Energy requires flow, ease, and the space to shift, to reach its destination more efficiently. This becomes fundamental for team culture and your own personal endeavours.
Stagnancy: When energy is stagnant, it becomes toxic. Growth, agility, transformation, and dynamism play a vital role in activating fresh energy. Long periods of inactivity create dullness, fatigue, and numbness. Where do you feel stuck in life or in business, and how can you release the tension to get things moving again?
"Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another." Albert Einstein
Imbalance: Life's essential impulse is to move towards balance. So pushing yourself to only experience one outcome or state creates a force field of opposing experiences. This results in suppressed energy, which, over time, will find expression in more unhealthy ways. For example, if you force consistent peak performance, you may eventually pendulum into burnout.
Isolation: Physics tells us that any system, if isolated, will eventually result in chaos. To increase energy, we require connection, collaboration, assurance, support, and all the good stuff that teamwork and community can offer us. With remote work and social media as our new normal, how many authentic connections are you making daily?
Unaligned movement: This includes being in activity as opposed to action, allowing your state to be influenced by external factors, adopting the modern urgency culture, and having no northern star to guide your decisions. These play a role in draining your energy. When you create space and time to pause and recalibrate, you access a well of energy resources.
Benefits of Effective Personal Energy Management
Effective personal energy management leads to increased productivity, enhanced focus, improved health and well-being, and greater overall happiness and fulfilment. By optimising your energy levels, you can maximise your potential and achieve your goals with greater ease and efficiency.
Understanding how energy operates and developing practical strategies in your life to follow these laws will shift your experience dramatically. Drawing inspiration from ancient wisdom, such as the teachings of Taoism, can provide valuable insights into personal energy management.
The concept of Wu Wei or effortless action, teaches us to work in harmony with the natural flow of life, rather than against it. By letting go of the need to control every outcome and learning to trust in the process, we can conserve energy and achieve greater levels of efficiency and effectiveness.
"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." Lao Tzu
Tips to get you started:
Vision-building and Goal Setting: Develop an emotionally-driven vision and set meaningful goals aligned with your values and purpose. Having a clear direction helps you focus your energy, creating momentum and more effortless outcomes.
Honouring Our Rhythms and Cycles: Become aware of and respect your natural rhythms and energy cycles. Schedule tasks and activities according to your peak energy times to maximise productivity and efficiency. Rest when your body needs it. Its in times of pause and relaxation that our best ideas come to us!
Working with Reality: Accept and adapt to reality rather than resisting it. Energy converts and cannot be destroyed, so reframe challenges into opportunities for growth and learning. Be open to emerging creative solutions. My best question in times of turmoil is, "What next step would bring me the most peace?"
Working with Resistance: At the core of resistance are your inner saboteurs. Understanding and addressing these mental "predators" increases your daily batteries, creates more ease, and allows a more effortless path to accomplish our desired outcomes. Whether it's judgement, worry, avoidance, people-pleasing, or hyper-vigilance, these resistant thoughts and feelings kill even the grandest of ideas and projects quickly.
Stress Management: Energy by nature seeks neutrality, so create moments in your day to rest in a more centred, composed, and calm state. Techniques such as mindfulness, meditation, somatic exercises, and breath work do wonders to replenish those energy reserves. Take regular mindful breaks when involved in intense mental work to create spaciousness and ease.
Create Completions: Many of us are walking around with mental and emotional incompletions that drain energy daily. These include unkept promises, procrastinations, unfulfilled dreams, unforgiven events, changed agreements, secrets, and unexpressed needs. Create an internal and external environment of phycological safety to ensure regular completions.
"Our energy is our most valuable currency. Spend it wisely." - Jeffrey Fry
Returning to centre
In the journey of mastering personal energy, returning to center is not just a destination but an essential state of being. It's about anchoring ourselves in our core, where we are not swayed by the dualities of success and failure, or external circumstances beyond our control.
By finding your inner compass and tapping into your internal resources, you become resilient and empowered to navigate life's challenges with grace and clarity. It's here in your centre (or neutrality) that you discover the limitless reservoir of energy available to you.
