How full is your battery?

Are you feeling drained?

One of the worst things that can happen to us in our modern lives is our phone battery dying. Imagine - being completely cut off from using your phone! No texts, no emails, no scrolling your social media feed. If you’re like me, when you start to get those “low battery” notifications your anxiety starts to spike; you start to do the calculations of how much juice you have left and how much time until you can find a charger. Lots of stuff gets pushed to the back of your mind as you shift your focus to finding somewhere to plug your phone in and recharge, even for just a few minutes. Losing power on our phone is almost unthinkable, so we pay a lot of attention to keeping the battery charged. But not many people can say the same for themselves.

If human beings came with “low battery” notifications I think we’d see them popping up a lot in homes and offices around the country. People are feeling burnt out, more so now than ever; so many people are walking around with their internal battery at 2%, and most can’t find a way to recharge themselves. It’s dangerous, it’s counterproductive, and it’s becoming more and more accepted (to our detriment). We wouldn’t walk around all day with our phone battery this depleted, so why do we do it to ourselves?

I have clients tell me frequently, “I just need a couple weeks off to recharge, then I’ll be good to go again”. And while that might work for a time, I know before long they’re going to be burned out and drained, with emergency “low battery” notifications popping up all over the place. Because living and working in a way that requires a full two weeks off to recharge isn’t sustainable. If you’ve got to endure months and months of stress just to get the one break you give yourself each year, there is no possible way you’re operating at your best. We have to build businesses and lives that don’t require us to work ourselves to the bone in hopes of finding those precious few days or weeks to recharge in the future. It’s not sustainable, it’s not practical, and it’s not serving us as human beings.

When a client raises that point with me, I tend to push back in the same way:

“How do we build a business and a life that you don’t have to escape from?”

And the answer to that question moves us toward something that is more practical, more sustainable, and better for them as business owners and as people. It won’t happen overnight - there will still be days and weeks where the battery level is low, but the breaks to recharge start to come a little more frequently. You can find a way to fill up your battery more often, more regularly throughout your daily life. And when you start to do that things get easier, you can get more work done without worrying about “low battery” notifications popping up.

• It starts by getting clear on what you want from your business and your life, clearly defining the things that are most important, and finding a balance between the activities that drain your battery and the activities that recharge it. Being deliberate about what you do and when you do it is crucial, especially for small business owners.
• Organize your day to align your high energy times with high energy tasks, and vice versa. If you have something on your priority list that you know is draining, don’t wait for the end of the day when you’re worn out to try and tackle it. Schedule it for a time when you know you’ll have the energy for it, and get it done.
• If you need to find time daily or weekly to read, write, or meditate - build that into your schedule the same way you would a client meeting. You don't have to sacrifice all of your time and energy to "doing the work".
• The activities that recharge us are just as important as the day-to-day business activities on our calendar. Treat them that way and you’ll find your battery feels charged much more often than it probably does right now.

Like one of my favorite Instagram accounts said this week - it’s 2019, nobody lets their phone die. So why are we running so low internally?

If you want to change how you're thinking about your time, energy, your small business, please reach out! We can find a way to move the needle for you.