We are not out there to do more and more in the same 24 hours, day in and day out. What we want to do is manage our energy so we can use less time to perform at the highest level and harness it to allow us to be fully engaged and give us freedom for personal renewal.
Performing at the highest level is being able to balance your focused tasks with short recovery periods. People who can recover and engage with their tasks get better results than the people who don’t—make sense? Think about professional athletes and their dedication to their sport. When they get on that field or enter the arena they are in a state of full engagement that allows them to manage their energy and control where it’s being directed. How about people such as Sir Richard Branson, who effectively manages his energy not his time by emphasizing on recovery? His wellness approach to business is unprecedented; here is what he says on the Virgin Pulse blog:
“Exercise has always been part of my life—right now tennis and kite surfing are my favorite sports — and I feel that keeping fit has helped me a great deal in my professional life. Many business leaders I know get run down by overwork and by not taking care of themselves; in time this leads to exhaustion and poor decision making.”
To get to a similar mindset, you need to switch from time to energy management. It’s a powerful and easy shift to make, and yet so many people fail to understand, let alone make that shift mentally and physically.
Managing your energy allows you to give your best at whatever it is that you’re doing. If you are an actor or actress and you’re practicing for a movie role, but every time you practice your mind wanders off and you just lose focus, how do you think you are going to perform during the audition?
What if you’re a business executive and you’ve been looking to get a promotion or close an important deal, but in the last six months your performance has dropped because you have no energy and are not fully engaged. Do you think you’re going to get the promotion or the deal? Probably not because there is someone else who is in tune and is simply way more mindful, focused and engaged than you.
When you focus on managing your energy and directing it towards what you want, it will become easy to perform at a high level you’ll be able to save a huge amount of time and allocate it to the things that matter most to you!