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Secrets to Managing Your Energy Effectively
If you like this article:
I have a client who lives in Europe and is also a coach. She wanted me to coach her because, although she has a very successful coaching practice, she felt terrible. She had no energy and could hardly get through the day. She confessed to me that she had to drag herself out of bed in the mornings and she was beginning to think that she hated coaching because she dreaded her coaching calls.
She is one of those enthusiastic people who believe that they can take on any exciting project that comes their way. She is full of creative ideas so there were always wonderful projects coming her way. This had worked well for many years. You'd think she was well on her way to living the life of her dreams.
Except that her dream was becoming her nightmare.
She was going to school, serving on several professional boards and was raising two small children. All in addition to running her own private coaching practice
The aim in our coaching sessions was to help her gain more control over her life and for her to get a sense that she was doing what she wanted to do. We began by setting up a system where she would start to build some momentum in her life. She was doing so many things and was so scattered in jumping from one thing to the next that she felt she never had the time to complete anything. She never felt ahead of things. It was the best that she could do just handle the next crisis.
In our lives today, we have too many things to do and we simply can not do all of them. The end result, when we follow a pace of life in which the tempo is too rapid, is overwhelm. This creates a sense of never getting where we want to go. When in that mentality, we think we can cure our overwhelm by multitasking.
But people who multitask do not get more done! And they are vulnerable to blowing out their energy circuits.
The body is always stressed when we multitask. We expect the mind and body to shift often and fast. In one day, you may have many different types of things to do. If you are constantly trying to shift multiple times, you are never going to be able to build momentum. You will always feel behind and hurried!
In our culture, very little attention is paid to pacing and rhythm. So we don't experience building momentum or coming to completion. In order to feel ahead of the constant shift and change that is our life we have to build momentum. You have to allow enough time to build momentum! In order to create momentum you have to create focus.
To build momentum you can create a system of focusing each of your days to one type of activity. There are several different approaches to this system. The one I like the best is found in the book Work Less Make More by Jennifer White. In her system she divides life tasks into three theme categories.
- Support -which is maintenance
The phone calls, going to the bank, cleaning, the work you have to do--the stuff that keeps your life going - Laser -projects focused around the most
important things in your life.
These are the things you never get to-what it is you really want to do - to write that novel. And because you never get to them, you end up feeling not connected to what you really want. - Free time -days for you only!
Days to get to do what you want to do. These are your rest and fun days. You know the kind of days you never take. This time is needed for reconstitution and for fermentation. Without rest and regeneration nothing creative ever happens.
To build momentum you designate each day to one of these categories. On that day, during your theme hours, you just focus on the designated type of activity (support, laser or free)...similar type things only. It is too hard on the mind and body, and you lose focus and momentum if you try to cram in other things!
Attempting to do support and laser activities on the same day - like run your errands and write your novel - produces drag and resistance. The dynamic is too hard and does not result in momentum. You just end up feeling frazzled and not accomplishing what you had hoped to.
If you look at your life you may see that most of your days are support days. You are just trying to keep pace with the essential things that are needed to maintain your status quo. The problem is not necessarily in you but rather in the way you have organized your life.
As you begin to organize your time, attention, focus, resources and energy expenditure around similar kinds of activities you will begin to experience a wonderful sense of being in control of your life. As you employ this approach, you will be changing yourself. Where you are now is not where you will end up after one, two or three months of living your life with momentum rather than drag and resistance.
Getting back to my client, we set about to divide her days into laser, support and free days to help her build momentum and feel a sense of control and order in her life. She was a quick study (and highly motivated because of the stress in her life) and went right to work setting up her schedule. She soon experienced that, if she did not stay clearly focused on the day’s theme, she lost her momentum and the power of the system. And she was again feeling tired, cranky and overwhelmed.
She was atypical in that she had her whole life revamped in about 7 days. It usually takes much longer than that for people to accept that this is possible and to slowly change things over. She was happily implementing her new schedule, and enjoying its benefits.
In our next session, she decided to dilute the new schedule a bit. She would see "just a couple" of clients on her free day. When I checked on how this went, it turned out that she found herself dreading her appointments on her free days. She had anxiety about it all day, was irritable and felt down all day anticipating these calls. It was clear that she was not enjoying those calls. She was thinking that she didn’t want to work with those clients anymore - even though she loved the work she was doing! When it was time for a session with a client she just wished they would cancel.
In probing more deeply into what was really happening, we articulated a standard that she could use as a guideline to be sure that she was on track. She would check to see if she was enjoying what she was doing. If she was enjoying it she was on track. Being on track meant that she was effective, efficient, leveraging the strengths of the moment, being her best and there were no hidden costs to eat up her energy reserves. She discovered that she enjoyed herself most when she did not budge from her schedule. When she stayed faithful to her Laser, Free and Support days she kept herself on track and she enjoyed what she was doing.
When she moved those Free Day clients to their proper time in a Support day, she discovered that she really loved working with those clients and she loved what she was doing. And of course, she then was great at what she did!
There are three lessons here:
If you want to be in control of your life, build momentum with focused activity. Design your life so that you work with your natural and biological pacing and rhythm and not against it.
If you are not enjoying what you are doing, then you are compromised in some way. - there are hidden costs eating up your reserves and your performance. Design your life so that you have total integrity and have no drag and resistance.
If you are dreading, anxious, irritable, nervous or avoiding something, then you are less than you could be and you will never excel. You will continue to squander valuable time, energy and other reserves. Design your life so that it frees up your strengths and talents. Learn to manage your physical, emotional, mental, psychological and spiritual energy for peak performance.
Of course there will be times when we all have to do things that we don’t enjoy. When that happens it is imperative that you compensate for your losses somehow - not just continue to draw on reserves. You know what I mean - give something back to yourself in exchange for what you have lost.
The real task, though, is to set up your life in a manner so that, most of the time you are managing your energy effectively. And then you will find that you are enjoying what you are doing.
Remember that enjoying your life is not something you want to ignore or put off for years until you have the time. Every time you are not enjoying something you are costing yourself energy, time, performance, effectiveness, efficiency, health, happiness, good will, etc. etc.
I request that you do what ever it takes to set up a system of energy management so that you enjoy everything you do and when you must do something that you don't enjoy - compensate for it!
By the way, my client in Europe now feels a remarkable flow of high energy. She has plenty of time for all of her projects, has gotten rid of all the commitments that she did not fully enjoy and that were dragging her down, has two weeks out of each month where she does not have to work and can spend important time with her family, and is on target to having her business be the main support for her family.
The last time we talked she was heading out with her family for one of those European 6-week holidays (and that is a topic for another article)
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© Copyright 1997 - 2008 by Mary Ann Copson and Evenstar. All rights reserved.
About the Author:
Mary Ann Copson is the founder of the Evenstar Mood & Energy Wellness Center for Women. With Master's Degrees in Human Development and Psychology and Counseling, Mary Ann is a Certified Licensed Nutritionist; Certified Holistic Health Practitioner; Brain Chemistry Profile Clinician; and a Health, Wellness and Lifestyle Coach. Reconnect to your physical, emotional, mental, psychological and spiritual natural rhythms at
http://evenstaronline.com
