How I’m Managing My Energy Right Now

Welcome to the April CEO debrief. 

I’m going to think that you are all probably like many of the people that I have talked to in the recent weeks and that you’re making some big changes due to the awareness this global pandemic is having on you. Business owners who are excited to work from home, from now on. Now they want this to be a permanent situation. I have clients gaining clarity on who they want to be working with as this crisis is doing a great job of highlighting behaviors they don’t want to be engaging in. And I have one client who talked about how relaxed they are not having to be in the office, traveling to see their clients, and we were able to help them connect that feeling of relaxed with weight being lifted from their shoulders. 

So when I asked them, what does relaxed feel like in your body, they said it felt like a weight being removed from their shoulders. And then we started to notice that when they engage with certain clients, their shoulders would start to feel tight again, signifying not relaxed. So an insight this person had that we then took to further levels of clarity and now we’re putting into implementation and that’s what this looks like for them. That when they notice their shoulders tense up, they’re signifying, not relaxed, and that is not how they want to be feeling. We then dug into why this is happening with these specific clients. What about these clients are making their shoulders shrug up so we can gain some psychographic data on their not ideal clients? Because this client of mine was noticing that it’s not what they’re saying that signifies this problem. It’s their actions and how their actions are actually in congruent with what they have said. So they’ve said something that allowed my client to say, “Oh, this is potentially an ideal client of mine”. But then they’re in congruent with what they’ve said and they’re behaving in a drastically different way. And I think that this is really getting a spotlight right now that we’re seeing this in a really big way in our personal lives, in our professional lives, that people have talked about values, but now aren’t showing up in the way that actions on these values make them operational. 

And so from there we extrapolated so much data that we can use as boundaries and filters for my client’s work, which will greatly impact the joy and freedom they want to continue and feel after this year is over. So this is an example of how insight turned into implementation, becomes boundaries and filters and processes going forward for them.

And really my insights this month have also been around energy management like this person’s. 

So, I want to share three of the places where I’ve had some insights and maybe this’ll jog something for you. So my first insight around energy management has been, what am I tolerating? It’s a great question to ask yourself, what are you tolerating? For those of us high achieving, ambitious sorts, we have a high threshold for pain. We can tolerate a lot and not only do we tolerate, which causes us pain and suffering, we normalize it, I do this, you do this. And it isn’t until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change that we do something about it. John Kotter in the book, Leading Change, talks about how our organizations need a burning platform for change to occur. People aren’t any different. COVID-19 has definitely emerged as a burning platform for many, including myself.

My tolerations at this point have become downright irritations that I can no longer stand. And the biggest area of toleration or irritation for me has been around what drains on my time, places where I’m spending time, but not getting a large enough ROI or ROE so many of us hear the term ROI, return on investment. But what about return on your energy, ROE? And this is really what I’m taking into consideration. What is the most efficient use of my time, what feels easy on my energy? And I’m coming up with some radical shifts that we are going to be making over here and if you want to know what they are, I suggest continuing to follow along with us because as you know, I’m transparent and I will be sharing more about them on this podcast as well as to my email list.

So two, the second area of insight that came up for me is I’m in the burn down in my business phase of COVID-19 which is interesting because I’m not a burn it down type. So usually when people are, “Oh, I’m burning it down”, I roll my eyes or I will say, “Please don’t do that. Call me first. Message me”. Very rarely do I feel this way and only once have I even co-conspired with a client to burn her business down. It was totally warranted though. She had cobbled together too many marketing tactics sold by internet gurus to make a cohesive and legitimate sustainable business. So we kind of had to burn it all down. But as I sat with the burn it down feels for the last week I came to an important insight that I want to share. It’s not the business that needs to be burned down.

It’s my current way of being. The business is sustainable. 

The way I’m operating in the business is not sustainable. My energy around my business isn’t sustainable. 

And when I say burning myself down, I don’t mean it in a really violent way. I’m going to punch fear in the face and all that stuff. But I mean in the imagery of how a Phoenix rises from a pile of ash. So there will be some significant changes over here. Most probably won’t even be noticeable to many people. Maybe they will, but probably not. But really the difference and the change is going to be happening within me and within my leadership so I can step into my business from a different perspective and ultimately a different kind of energy that will grow this business and take it to its next level.

The strategy is fine. That’s really what I want you to hear. A lot of the strategy is really fine. It’s not about the strategy, it’s about me and how I’m approaching the strategy. I can give client one a strategy and client two the same exact strategy and they’re going to go and implement it very differently. Why? Because of their personality, because of their energy, because of their attitude, because of their beliefs, because of their past history, because of the generational narratives that have been given to them because of their trauma in their lives. Right? And so it’s never truly about the strategy.

Now the third piece of insight and awareness that I’ve had that you might find very interesting, very relevant and something you want to try to protect your energy is I’m bringing back my inbox. I don’t know about you, but I’m so drained by social media these days and screens in general, Oh my God, if I have to see another Zoom meeting right now, I’m Zoomed out. I’m social media’d out, everyone’s opinions, the politics, the stupidity, the memes. It’s noisy times a thousand out there. And over the last year I’ve been silently experimenting with curating my content differently. So I set up an email address, which I only use for content that I genuinely want to consume and implement from.

And I want you to hear that, consume and implement from, not just consume. Information does not lead to transformation. You actually have to do something with the information in order to get a result. So I started my curation with five people who I’m interested in hearing from or about. I let that settle for a few weeks to see if they were consistently putting out quality content. I also wanted to see if five was the right number or if I wanted to seed the inbox with more people and I realized that I wanted to have different categories, life, business, news, money, whole-30, and then I decided how many people I wanted to hear from in each category.

So I do have more than five people that I am learning and implementing from, but they’re spread over different categories. Then I go into that email three times a week to read and engage with the content. And by engage, I mean take action, implement, respond to it in some way. It’s not a passive situation. So on Sundays when I do my planning, I assess whether the content was enjoyable, if I want to continue with it or not, am I feeling too overwhelmed by it? And then I make a choice whether to unsubscribe or to remain subscribed. And if I unsubscribe, I decide whether or not I want to add somebody different into that mix. For years, I’ve been preaching to clients to get out of their inboxes. But I think this conversation is actually more nuanced and a guide is what is the most intentional use for your inbox and can you have boundaries?

So for example, my business has a customer support inbox. That’s managed by somebody else. That inbox is not my job. I have my business email address and I’ve helped managing that, but I do go in there and read and respond to emails. I have an email only for family and kids activities. And then I have my curated content inbox and I love having them separate. And as a matter of fact, my curated content inbox isn’t even on the same email platform that my other emails are on. So I really want you to think about as we’re wrapping up and winding down this episode, I’d love for you to take one action this week and look at where you have energy leaks. Because if there’s one thing COVID-19 has taught me is how important it is to protect and refill my energetic capacity. If we all have 10 units of energy to spend each day, how do you want to spend those units?

One thing that can help you do that is by joining the master class that we are going to have on May 11th that helps you with the most overlooked business growth system that helps you generate real results. 

Because we’re going to be helping you focus your effort and your energy and leverage your performance. We’re going to give you a clear focus on the most effective revenue generating business activities. So head on over to my show notes and grab your spot.