Pamela Taylor: Managing Your Personal Battery in a Hectic World

Pamela Taylor’s, a Professional Certified Coach accredited by the International Coaching Federation and Founder of Taylor Macpherson, personal battery gets charged by being able to inspire, support and empower people to innovate and embrace change.

In our March POWERful Connections Breakfast, Pamela gave us a deeper awareness into how our personal batteries can become drained and strategies for managing a better balance.

In our jobs and lives, we are often having to manage ‘impact’ (making a difference) with ‘energy’ (our wellbeing) and at times these can be seen in conflict causing us to burnout. The saying “No pain, no gain”, shows our society’s belief is that making a difference must be hard and be at the cost of our wellbeing.

However, when we shift away from this mindset and focus on how to optimise both our impact and energy, we start to build more sustainable and fulfilling careers and lives.

Pamela provided tips and advice on how to better manage our personal batteries.

Step 1: Know how you spend your time

The first step is to become aware of how you are spending your time and be intentional in your choices. Think about your daily activities at work or at home and notice the impact of those activities. High impact activities are those which make the most difference or have the greatest benefit. From there, notice which activities energise you, and which drain you. Then be as honest as you can about the amount of time you spend on these groups of activities. You can then start to build a picture of how much time you spend on:

• Energising but low impact activities, e.g. treats
• Energising and high impact activities, e.g. optimal
• De-energising and low impact activities, e.g. time wasters
• De-energising but high impact activities, e.g. obligations

Once you have answered the above questions, you then you can ask yourself:

• What can you stop doing? (What doesn’t need to be done at all? Are there habits you’ve developed that are low impact and drain you? Remember, these aren’t the same as treats, which are also low impact but energise us.)
• Can you delegate some of the obligations? (Remember what might de-energise you, might energise another. Or could obligations be shared out differently in a team or household?)
• Can you rebalance time allocation between activities to create a better balance? Could we batch together obligations with the promise of some energisers afterwards? Sometimes, we procrastinate or find ourselves with de-energising tasks throughout the day.

However, even after these practical steps, it is likely that there will be obligations in your job and/ or life that are high impact to you or others, but you find them draining. So how can we make the obligations less draining?

Step 2: Make obligations less draining

Often, we are drained by the mere thought of the task or situation that we dislike. Our thoughts and mindsets play a big role in how we then go to experience that situation.

We all have that inner voice, judging us, judging others and judging situations. It is the voice that wakes us up in the night to berate us for our mistakes and flaws or to warn us about future failings. It focuses on what is wrong rather than right with others. It is also the voice that tells us when situations or circumstances are bad. It creates a lot of our stress, anxiety, fear, frustration, anger, guilt, resentment, apathy, you name it.

The second step is to become aware of inner voices and our emotions. By noticing and labelling our emotions, we are better able to shift our perspective. Pamela explained that she doesn’t enjoy detailed, numeracy tasks. Whenever, she has these to do, she feels anxious and puts them off. However, if she spends a few moments recognising her inner voice, anxiety and inner fears of making a mistake, sometimes that is enough to let go off the negative emotions. We tend to think that if we ignore our emotions, they’ll dissipate but often, the opposite is true. Whereas, if we sit with our emotions, close our eyes, feel them, hear them, see them even, we can process them.

Sometimes, more is needed to shift our perspective and energy. Recentring ourselves by closing our eyes shifting our focus from our thoughts to our breathe, sounds around us or the sensation of our hands rubbing together or our feet on the floor can be helpful. Once we feel a greater calm, we can reframe our thinking around the following themes:

• Empathy: How can I show kindness and compassion to myself?

• Creativity: How can I approach this task with joy, fun, or peace?
• Big picture: When I look back, what will truly matter? How does this task connect to my deeper purpose?  How do I want to be while I complete this task?
• Acceptance: What can I let go of or accept to create ease and flow?
• Activate: What clear-headed action should I take next?

By recognising what drains and fuels us, we are then able to shift our mindset to navigate unavoidable responsibilities with calm and focus and make conscious choices around how we spend our time.

For further information about the services and support Pamela offers, visit Pamela's Linkedin profile and email her [email protected] for a link to a free assessment.