Be your very own Chief Energy Officer (CEO)
Everyone of us has 24 hours a day at our disposal and it’s your choice how you spend them. Saying “No” and prioritizing what you do or - even more importantly - NOT do, might be challenging and difficult, but it’s an exercise of setting boundaries and ensuring that you establish much more focus on the real important things in your life.
In order to make the best choices for yourself, it's important that you know yourself well, understanding what energises you: a walk in the park every evening, a 30mins afternoon nap, jogging in the morning, a green veggie smoothie everyday, listening to music or making music yourself ….
For example, I have always been a morning person, and I know that it gives me satisfaction if I start the day with something that does ME! good. So I have integrated exercising into my normal routine.
In former times with top health, my exercising routine was more strenuous, more high intensity. As I am still recovering from chemotherapy, I am now doing soft exercises and am simply happy to be able to move, no matter how long...whatever feels right...and I do it whenever I can, not beating myself up if it takes a bit longer to get started.
I have also learned to appreciate meditation and mindfulness training. It’s about pausing, becoming present and enjoying the moment without haste: watching the cloud formations in the sky with indulgence, listening to the birds singing, feeling the wind on my face, …. Mindfulness-training offer tools and techniques. If you are curious to learn more, I recommend to search the audio book libraries (e.g. audible.com) and find the meditiation programmes that appeal to you. There are so many different meditation programmes out there: about finding sleep, losing weight, loving yourself, leading better, …. it’s really important to find one that works for you. Once you found it, download it to your mobile devices. In this way, you can integrate meditation into your busy lifestyle at any time during the day. Perhaps you retreat for a 20minute meditation exercise right after lunch or you meditate on the train on your way to the office or back home.
What ever works for you, just do it.
And similarly it’s key to understand what does NOT replenish your energy levels but drains them. Often we try to overlook energy-drainers because they annoy us so much. We take them for granted and push ourselves to accept them as part of our normal lives. Addressing these energy wasting activities or impacts might be very controversial and require a lot of courage to fix them. Yet, the more you love yourself, the less you will accept your energy drainers and the more you will be creative to get rid of them.
So dig deep to understand what give you energies, what’s good for you and then: do not wait for someone else to make it happen for you!
Empower yourself to make a change for the better and incorporate it as a “holy routine’ into your life. It might be necessary to block your diary for your holy routine to happen regularly – so do it, you are worth it :-)
