That’s exciting!
“Greater self-awareness can unlock our love for life and re-energise our work”
0:00
/
0:00
That’s exciting!
When last did you feel inspired to leap out of bed and get going on your work list? Hmmm… perhaps a while? It’s true that we all have periods when that excited energy seems absent and we feel burdened by the prospect ahead, yet one way to dance around this feeling and into your day is to acknowledge that things are tough and seek out energising tasks to put us back on track.
In my own experience many years ago as the business grew, I reached a point of such despondency and low energy that I seriously considered closing up, quitting and getting a job. On investigation I realised that all the things I loved in the early stages of building the business – the innovation, creativity and scoping new solutions for wild problems, had been replaced (in my opinion) by the boring, mindless rinse and repeat of management.
Luckily, I had a mentor who set me a task to discover where my energy drain was coming from, which is where I discovered that just by recognising what I truly enjoy about my work, and making space for more of that, I was able to reconnect with love for my work and carry on building. Interestingly just the acknowledgement of what I needed, followed by a very small adjustment to increase the creativity in my work day by about 5% was all it required.
If you are struggling with this, you might find value in creating a ‘heat map’ of your day to identify which tasks build your energy and which drain it. One way to do this is to create a template with four squares labelled Energy builder/energy drain down the left and High value / low value across the top. Over the next couple of days notice how you feel and plot your tasks in one of those boxes. This should reveal what tasks inspire and energise, you and which drain you.
Now circle the one or two that you really love and those you really dislike.
Now consider if you can delegate the drainers to someone that loves this task. How can you increase the number of inspiring tasks that energise you?
| High-value tasks | Low-value tasks |
Inspiring energy |
|
|
Draining energy |
|
|
(Another way to do this is to go down your standard to do list and flag those that drain in red and those that inspire in green 😊)
It really is amazing how self-awareness such as this can bring about a radical and lasting change in the way we live our lives, and permanently increase the satisfaction we gain from it.
