This past week, I feel like I’ve had different variants of a single conversation with different people, so I’m going to elaborate on it today, and it has something to do with Energy Management (yes,again).
Most of the people who complain about scarcity of energy don’t realize it’s not always a matter of physical energy that’s lacking but rather emotional energy.
To perform at your best, you need to access positive emotions such as enjoyment, challenge, love, and adventure. Instead, we tend to live lives that fill us with emotions such as anxiety, fear, frustration, and anger. Constantly living in stress negatively impacts the quality of our work, our relationships, and overall, our life.
Sadly enough, most of the complaints I hear are on toxic workplaces, and though I’ve been there before, I’m grateful that I currently work in a positive environment that my next series of posts will probably deconstruct how they’ve nailed their culture. But until I’ve collected enough material on that series, here are a few things to remember when it comes to building and protecting your energy:
Nothing Works Until You Do
I probably have mentioned this phrase before because I love it so much, “Nobody got to the top of the mountain by falling there.”
Unless you’re falling from a helicopter or something with a similarly fatal outcome.
Managing your energy needs work.
It needs you to be intentional about eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep, putting boundaries with toxic people…etc.
But what if you’re really, really stuck in a toxic workplace?
Recently, I’ve been telling the story of the day I knew I was going to leave one of my previous workplaces. My colleagues and I were all hanging out after hours to celebrate an ex-colleague’s birthday (she had just been fired that week – yes, her birthday week), and the main topic of conversation was how toxic the environment was because there was so much fear around.
As the complaints increased, it suddenly hit me that we if I don’t do anything now, I might still be here one year down the line just complaining – or might have shared my colleague’s fate and been dismissed.
After that, my after-work activities changed from going home to order take-out and numb my mind with boring TV shows to focusing on networking, taking after-work meetings, and working on small projects over the weekends.
Because everything needs work.
If you want to make money, you need to put in the work.
If you want to build a happy relationship, you need to put in the work.
If you want to manage your energy, you need to put in the work.
Change How You React To Circumstances
What matters more than what happens to you is how you react to it. I used to be the type of person who’d emotionally react to everything by crying in the washroom and calling my mother.
I once went through an incident where after delivering my work, my manager announced in front of the entire staff that it was not done. I got so upset but instead of calling my mom, I went out for a walk with one of my colleagues and told him, “I don’t get it! How can he dismiss my work like that? In front of the whole team!”
My colleague then said, “Amina, I want you to resist the temptation to take things personally. His frustration is not with you, but rather with himself and his own level of incompetence.”
After that, I started to notice that every time I was picked on, it was a reaction to my manager not delivering on something he had promised to someone else.
Once discovering this correlation, I just stopped reacting, and that one line turned into an anchoring thought.
Another incident from one of my PhD qualifier’s exams is this, I remember reading a question, and going into sudden panic mode, because I’ve never come across anything similar before.
But then I remembered reading somewhere about how panic interferes with clear thinking, and if nothing else, I needed clear thinking during that exam.
So I paused, took deep breaths to calm down my racing heart, and consciously changed my state of mind by reminding myself that I’ve always been able to derive equations from their fundamentals, so what if this question looks different?
The fundamentals of engineering have always been the same.
So just start there.
Know What You Love Doing and Do More of It
Unfortunately, sometimes we hold the idea that if you can’t measure the ROI of an activity, then it’s not worth pursuing. We’re not encouraged to do something for the sheer joy of doing it.
The authors of The Power of Full Engagement write, “Access to the emotional muscles that serve performance depends on creating a balance between exercising them regularly and intermittently seeking recovery. Any activity that is enjoyable, fulfilling and affirming serves as a source of emotional renewal and recovery.”
It’s why I’ve been blogging for the last ten years. I just love how I get into a creative state of flow when I’m stringing words together.
You’re Not Tired, You’re Uninspired
Sometimes, your problem might not be that you’re tired but simply uninspired.
Know what inspires you.
Know who inspires you.
Then seek them.
And that’s my riff for the day.
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