Have you ever had a time where your phone battery seemed to deplete far quicker than you expected during the day? Only to discover that you had some program running in the background that was draining the power? Once you turn the App off or change the settings, you realize how much longer your phone battery lasts. It now has the power to do the work you need it to all day long.
In many ways, we are like our phones, where we can have invisible energy ‘leaks’ in our lives that drain us of the energy we need to do our best work and live our lives at their fullest.
Energy Leaks You May Not Be Aware Of
When I’m coaching someone, it is always illuminating for them to pause and consider where they have energy ‘leaks’ in their life.
For most of us, every time we pick up our phone (often reflexively and with little conscious awareness), it has the potential to fragment and diffuse our focus or upset our emotional energy.
For other people, the ‘Most Important Task’ for the day keeps getting bumped by incoming ‘urgent but less important’ tasks. Not getting to what we intended to creates guilt and unease that robs us of focus and energy. Much like one of those Apps in the background.
Or for others, the energy they waste ruminating on the past or worrying about the future or things that are beyond their control saps their energy to be present, focused and productive in the moment.
And for all of us at times - the energy we give to complaining about people, circumstances or how we are doing distracts us from our work and saps our energy.
To perform at our best we need to fix the ‘leaks’. We also need to make sure that we are plugged into what fully recharges our batteries.
Three Ways You Can Have More Energy
While there many different ways to make sure your ‘battery’ maintains a full charge, here are three of the basics that go a long way:
1. Fix the ‘Leaks’. Perform an ‘energy audit’ of the leaks in your life: mental, physical and emotional. Refuse to accept them as normal and choose to eliminate or minimize them. Say “No!” to distraction. Put your phone away and leave it away while you are focused. Unsubscribe from anything that isn’t essential. Say “No!” to complaining and practice more gratitude. Say “No!” to procrastination and prioritize your “Most Important Thing”. Say “No!” to negative people or online feeds that rile you up and give your attention to what fuels you. Then refocus all that recouped energy toward your work and life.
2. Plug into the Equivalent of the “DC Fast Charger” - Make Sleep a Priority. Matthew Walker’s book “Why We Sleep” should be on everyone’s must read list. One of Walker’s key messages is as follows:
“A balanced diet and exercise are of vital importance, yes. But we now see sleep as the preeminent force in this health trinity. The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise.
See sleep as the equivalent of the DC Fast Charger for Electric Vehicles. It is the #1 low cost, high reward thing you and I can do to increase our energy and overall health and well-being. Make sleep a priority and make sure you plug in fully every night.
3. Meditate. If there was a ‘pill’ that will help you with the above two tips, it would be meditation. The science is clear that meditation changes our brain in ways that reduce stress, increases focus and enable us to have better relationships.
Moving through your day with lower stress is like closing out one of those energy sucking Apps running in the background. Meditation also helps with greater focus and less distractibility, which are a winning combo for productivity (and can even build energy). For me personally, meditation has been huge as far as being less reactive. Better relationships can reduce one of the biggest energy leaks we experience – interpersonal conflict.
Conclusion
Some days it seems like we are more concerned that our phone is fully charged than we are. To be at our best we need our equivalent of a full charge every day and to make sure we aren’t draining energy unproductively.
Do your own audit of ‘energy leaks’ and fix the ones you find. Make sleep a priority, and make sure get a full charge every night. Use meditation as a hack to reduce the energy leak we experienced when carrying too much stress.
Then take all that energy, focus on what is most important, knowing that you are ready for whatever the world throws at you.
To find out more how your team could have more clarity, focus and energy to do their best work, please visit my website. Check out the Webinars Page to learn more about a new lunch ‘n learn on Meditation 101.
To learn more about how mindfulness and leadership coaching could help one of your team members perform better at all levels, please or reach out to me at scott@mindfulwisdom.ca.