In this podcast, I am talking about the power of paying attention to the ebb & flow of your energy.
Start by noticing and answering a few questions:
Understanding this has truly transformed many aspects of my life and my hope is that it can also help you on your path toward living a vibrant life!
Links
Let's connect.
I am cheering for you!
In this podcast, I am talking about the power of paying attention to the ebb & flow of your energy.
Start by noticing and answering a few questions:
Understanding this has truly transformed many aspects of my life and my hope is that it can also help you on your path toward living a vibrant life!
Links
Let's connect.
I am cheering for you!
Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbetts, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together helps you live a life that is brave and creative and full of purpose and really helps you understand your own energy so you can align it and create the results that are important to you.
Speaker 1:One of the most important things that my business partner, ellen Ellen and I discovered as we were creating the Live a Vibrant Life program is the idea of the nuance of energy. The first people who introduced me to the idea that energy is something that moves throughout the day were thought leaders like Kerry Newhoff and Michael Hyatt. I love the Michael Hyatt Full Focus Planner. Kerry Newhoff was somebody that I listened to a lot as I was leading an organization, and they both sort of said the same thing that there were times of day where your energy would fluctuate and that it was important to notice that so that you could make decisions based on what was best for you and the results that you wanted to create. However, as I started to dive a little deeper into this idea, I also came across one of my favorite podcasters. Her name is Lisa Woodruff and she has the Organize 365 podcast, and she pointed out something that I hadn't noticed, and that is that, as women, we rarely have days where there is a before work, work and after work kind of day. In general, there's a lot of things that we are responsible for in the maintaining of a home. Now, this is not true of every single family, it's just in general, women tend to hold a little bit more of the emotional needs of a family and the mental load, and because of that, she said, it was really important and as I began to do a deeper dive, noticed how important it was for me to understand the nuance of mental, emotional, physical, spiritual energy. So that's where I landed.
Speaker 1:Having studied a few different speakers on this, I began to do my own work and noticed that, just like Jesus said when he said love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength, that as a human, I have mental, emotional, physical and spiritual energy, and one of the most important things we can do is gift ourselves time every single day, simply to notice, without judgment. Notice your mental energy. Is it easy for you to think about complex things? Do you get depleted very quickly? Notice your physical energy, again without judgment. So many people I know, including myself, have made so many judgments about our physical energy when sometimes what we needed to notice was that we just had physical energy at a different time of day than we were expecting to have it. So if you are somebody that were surrounded by people who said the first thing you do in the morning is exercise and you start to notice without judgment, you may realize, like I did, you don't have physical energy first thing in the morning. Some people do, and if you do, that's a really great time for that long walk or that trip to the gym. I noticed that I have mental energy first thing in the morning. So the biggest gift I can give myself is wake up, have a project ready to go that I can think about, that I can write about, where I could discern, maybe do some editing. Then you have emotional energy. That's the energy that allows you to be in a healthy relationship, first with yourself and then with others, the ability to love and to listen and to connect and then I believe you also have spiritual energy, that there's this soul, this true part of who you are, and that can also get depleted.
Speaker 1:For a lot of years, the way that my soul connected to God was through going to church and singing songs and listening to scripture and being in community. But in 2003, I actually entered into a role in a church and didn't know that that would completely eliminate all of the different practices that had previously served me. I was still going into the same building, but it was no longer something that poured into me spiritually. I was now pouring out and had to create all kinds of different systems, and I've talked about this before. I'd love to just highlight it quickly.
Speaker 1:I think for your soul, there are different things that begin with the letter S, and I just heard somebody I think it was Kate Nothrop speaking about this recently with the word savor. So what is it that you love to savor? It could be like a delicious treat at a bakery, it could be watching the sunset, it could be going to the ocean, it could be reading poetry, it could be writing poetry. When was the last time you just did something that felt like your soul was just savoring it, and maybe you need stillness, silence, solitude, singing. There's just so many different things that, as you begin to allow yourself to notice, you can make small decisions, and those decisions can move you away from exhausted, overwhelmed and depleted and back onto a path where you are feeling abundant, aligned, vibrant. So that's our goal for today to give you a tool so that you can notice the different types of energy and then notice, without judgment, how you're doing in each of the four areas.
Speaker 1:Ideally, you would have your own toolbox for each of these areas. What do you need when you get emotionally tired, so that you don't end up emotionally depleted? What do you need for your mental energy, your physical energy and your spiritual energy? So a toolbox can look like a notes app on your phone. It could look like a Pinterest board full of beautiful images and words. It could look like a journal entry. It could look like little index cards or sticky notes that you keep in front of you. You know what's best for you. The work is to just notice, then make a decision, and small practice steps that can move you in the direction you need to go to.
Speaker 1:If, at the end of our time today, you notice oh, you're pretty healthy mentally and emotionally, but you're physically feeling really tired or sick or you're recovering from an illness. How kind and loving would it be for you to decide to focus on that area of your life, to say, I'm going to take all of the resources I have available to me, the friends who would lean in and help, the money that I have, the time that I have, and I'm going to work towards recovering my physical energy. Then, once you get back to that healthy, vibrant place, you'll have energy to share and go and do the work. So throughout the summer I have a course called Fill your Soul with Sunshine and it has a little equation that I made up that says first we rest. That comes from all of the understanding I have about how God loves us so much that he doesn't expect us to constantly be working. He wants us to rest and then work. So you rest and then you play. You find the thing that you savor, that you enjoy that creative outlet. I believe you and I are creative because we're made in the image of the creator. So it might be that you want to do some puzzles. It might be that you want to bake something absolutely amazing. It might be that you want to go. Take some pictures for fun. Notice what it is that fills your soul with sunshine. Rest, play and then go and do your purpose-filled work.
Speaker 1:And I think purpose-filled work can look like sending intentions of love, of praying for people. It could look like sending a card with a handwritten note that says I see you and you're valuable. It could be sending a text or making a phone call. It's not just about money. That's a capitalistic idea that everything is going to be about a money exchange. It's about doing what you were brought here to do, and so why we focus on our energy is, I think, that each of us have important dreams inside of our body, inside of our soul, things that we were put on earth to do. It might be sing a beautiful song. It might be write a book. It might be create a community so that people feel seen and known and loved. It might be to parent the children that are in your circle, the people that not only are your biological children, but maybe those spiritual kids that come along with them. It might be just making the most beautiful flowered gardens and having people over to enjoy them.
Speaker 1:I know that inside of you there is purpose, and so noticing your energy, deciding where to focus your energy and creating small practice steps that you can stay in healthy, abundant, aligned energy is the most important work we can do. Can you imagine if the entire world, all 7 billion plus souls, were aligned to the truth of how loved they are, made in the image of God, made on purpose, for a purpose, and all of us were sending out into the universe that energy, that vibration of love and connected and valued? I think the world would be such a different place. So let's start with us today. Notice our energy, decide to notice without judgment. It's so easy to judge ourselves, but as much as possible, we want to be people who treat ourselves in a kind and loving way, so that we have love and kindness for the rest of the world. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. So notice your energy, decide how you want to focus it, how you want to invest it and then create the small practice steps.
Speaker 1:So, if you've never really heard me talk about energy before, or if this is a refresher and you want to either grab the little workbook that's included over on my Buzzsprout page If you put Kelly Tibbetts Podcast, you're going to see my Buzzsprout page and I have a link to this workbook, or you can grab your own piece of paper, use your notes app. But here we go. First, you want to notice the type of energy. You want to notice your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual energy. So we're going to decide today to use the colors of a stoplight. Green means go. This is high energy. What can you do physically with high energy? Can you go rake your yard? Can you go for a run? Can you clean out your basement? What's high energy look like for you? What's medium, average energy? We're going to use the color yellow and we're going to be totally fine that that's sort of hard to notice. There's so much nuance in the middle, so we'll notice a little easier if we're in the high, vibrant energy or if we're in the red, low energy. And we want to be really aware here before it turns into that gray, depleted, exhausted energy. So if we start with mental, emotional, physical, spiritual energy, pick one of them. I'm going to start with emotional energy because I'm an Enneagram 2.
Speaker 1:I process life through my heart center and I think emotional energy is very nuanced. It's hard to notice and when you become emotionally depleted it is hard to do anything else. So what things in your life currently fill you emotionally and what things deplete you? I think about television. There's a lot of news out there that is emotionally depleting. It fills us with fear, and fear is such good body information. But being concerned about things that might happen in the future is no longer fear. It's filling us with dread, it's filling us with a sense of overwhelm. So be careful what you watch and listen to. Notice if it fills you with energy or it slowly depletes your energy.
Speaker 1:How about the relationships in your life? You can truly love somebody that you are related to, that you are at work with, and they may emotionally deplete you. They just think and feel and do life differently. So just notice that there are people that when you're with them, it's like they fill your emotional tank. And there are people, when you're with them, and you may love them, but they deplete you. And if you only have a little bit of energy and you go and spend it with somebody who's very emotionally draining, at the end of that conversation or visit you're going to find yourself very tired, perhaps moving towards depleted and overwhelmed. Each of us has a core motivation that drives all of our behavior, and so when you are at work whether it's for pay or volunteer, and you're surrounded emotionally by people who are not only not meeting your core desire but they are helping you experience your core fear, you may find work, whether it's volunteer or paid, to be emotionally depleting. Maybe that will be your aha today.
Speaker 1:When I'm with these people at work, I feel seen, I feel heard, I feel valued and my emotional energy stays pretty consistent or it even raises. But when this person enters the room the way they use humor, the way they speak in an abrupt or dishonoring way I find myself feeling emotionally depleted by the end of our conversation. And as humans, as adults, we're going to have to do so many things that don't necessarily fill us up. What we do have authority over, what we can decide, is to notice in advance. Okay, on Tuesdays I have this meeting. It's about twice as many people as I'd like. This one person tends to take over. I don't feel seen, I don't feel honored. How can I prepare for that meeting, attend the meeting and then recover from the meeting? And when we don't pay attention, we do try to recover, but often we do so in a way that doesn't serve future. Us it to recover, but often we do so in a way that doesn't serve future us. It might be eating food that's not good for us, going out for alcohol, overspending. So that's why the nuance of this is so important Notice where you are emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually.
Speaker 1:Notice what things fill you up and what things deplete you, and then have a plan in place where you prepare for these events. You attend them and then you recover. So say, your decision this week was you really want to work on a basement that has 20 years of things in it? This is very common for people. My age Life was busy when the children were little. They've now flown the nest. They're either at college or moving on. A lot of their things are still in the basement. A lot of my own things are in the basement. Lots of emotional energy needed to go through it. A lot of my own things were in the basement. Lots of emotional energy needed to go through it, but also lots of physical energy.
Speaker 1:We overestimate what we can do in the short term and we underestimate what we can do in the long term. So we often say, okay, I'm going to just spend the whole weekend on it, and the whole weekend feels like 48 hours. But in reality the amount of energy you have, the amount of time you have might be four to six hours and the project itself could be a 40 to 50 to 60 hour project. So we haven't really figured out how much time and energy are needed. We go down there with the best intentions. We have pretty good physical, mental, emotional energy. It gets depleted quickly. Doing work that's really hard to do, going back and looking through things, very emotionally draining, very physically exhausting. We get about a quarter of the way through, a third of the way through, we've run out of energy completely and often have a bigger mess than we began with. And we may do silly things like just shove things around just to make the space clear again, creating more work in the future. That's why honoring our energy is so important.
Speaker 1:What if we said over the next six months I will spend 20 to 30 minutes a day on this project? Some days it'll be thinking and making the plan because I have good mental energy. Some days it'll be using my physical energy to execute the plan. Some days it'll be bringing up a few items that need some discernment, some emotional energy, and I'm going to do that from 12 o'clock in the afternoon till 1230. And then I know I have a really good conversation with a friend or some time in a book, or I'm going to go for a walk and I'll recover that energy. If this sounds like something you would like to grow deeper in your understanding of, you'd like to know more, I'm offering you the workbook by going either to kellytibbetscom or when you go to Buzzsprout for Kelly Tibb' Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I have the link there. That's all the information.
Speaker 1:But I think transformation actually occurs when we have a community around us and we have consistent time and space being held for what's important, when we can grow in our understanding of why we think and feel and do life the way we do, create the plans that serve us and then hold space to follow up and say well, what worked, what didn't work, what would I do differently. Much of our life can change and move in the direction we want it to move in. So that's why I offer group coaching on Wednesdays every single week in my Live a Vibrant Life group coaching program. I would love to have you join us. You can either go to kellytibbetscom. You can send me an email at coaching at kellytibbetscom, you can send me a message on Facebook or Instagram.
Speaker 1:I would love to have you join us for a few weeks, see if it's a fit. Absolutely no cost for the first two weeks of you joining our group coaching program, so that you can see is this a program that could serve you. I would love for you to find the community that believes in your deep value and that just comes from breathing in and breathing out. There is nothing more needed. But I believe you were made on purpose for a purpose, and that purpose involves living a vibrant life. Aligning your energy is the path forward to that. So I'll be back next week. I hope you have a wonderful week. We'll talk soon. Thank you for joining the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life, and if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, kelly Tibbetts Life Coach, or visit my website, kellytibbettscom. I look forward to connecting again soon. You.