How often to do we hear the phrase ‘there are just not enough hours in the day?’ A common complaint in the world we live in with ever more increasing demands on our time, focus, roles and commitments.

How much time and investment do organisations place into time management programmes, effective delegation, work life balance programmes and policies?

Ultimately, managing time is never going to reap the rewards we need. Time is finite – we cannot create more despite all our efforts to save it, cheat it or cram more activity into each minute.

The key to optimising our performance lies in managing our energy. Human beings all have endless supplies of energy – much more than we acknowledge or respect.

Managing our energy enables us to ensure that all our resources are optimised and we are using our internal strength and agility for the best purpose.

Consider how often we ‘train’ for life. What would that look like? We all have some awareness of the benefit of training to keep our bodies in our shape, but what about our minds and our hearts? How often do we take time to consider our direction and what we are working towards, really working towards, beyond the weekend, pay day or our next holiday?

Managing our energy effectively to be physically energised, mentally focused, emotionally connected and spiritually aligned guarantees a life that is connected, purposeful and fulfilling both at work and at home.

Increasingly organisations are not only acknowledging that they are constrained as to the level of financial reward they can offer employees, but that offering more holistic rewards has an incredibly beneficial impact on the all important employee engagement level.

Optimising energy is more than a wellness programme, more than time management, more than an employee assistance programme or providing internal coaching services. It offers employees a chance to develop their own personal potential which benefits both their work and private lives.

Let’s look at each dimension in turn:

Physical energy
The foundation to extraordinary energy. Understanding how to use our bodies to their ultimate resourcefulness doesn’t mean we all have to be athletes.

Simple principles reap massive reward:

Mental focus

Emotional connection

Spiritual alignment

Organisations which adopt this approach benefit from:

Fundamentally, this programme offers a step change in the style of reward being offered to an employee. All the evidence so far is showing that employees and organisations welcome this change. Ultimately the effects are longer lasting and tap deeper into the core of what drives a human being’s motivation and engagement, than purely financial rewards can do: expect to see more of this type of reward in the coming years. 
 


Tracy Skyrme is a Director of TWP, the behavioural change specialists. For more information about this type of training email success@twpartnership.co.uk. Also visit TWP’s website at www.twpartnership.co.uk.

One Response

  1. All work and no play

    Having taken the last 2 weeks to recharge my own batteries I explored the impact on me of much of what you discuss here Charlie. I have a few things I’d add from that exploration:

    • I’d always thought I ate well but realise I wasn’t eating enough breakfast nor early enough – I often left it to 10.00 having got up at 6.00 which hampered the body from coping with the day.
    • I certainly used sugar too much to boost my energy levels and was amazed when I read the negative impact that had on the body’s metabolism in the long term.
    • Having returned to work this week I’m amazed at how easy it has been to start to skip nutritious snacks and grab a sandwich rather than take time to have a more balanced and nutritious lunch. 
    • The biggest aha was how much I didn’t take time to recognise my achievements and pat myself on the back. It may seem inconsequential but reward is something that produces positive reactions in our body that keeps it healthy. So constant work with a sprinkle of perfectionism and no play wasn’t helping. I basically finished one project and moved into the next without taking time to recognise and reward myself for my achievements.  My metabolism certainly paid the price for that.

    I also realise the 4 areas you mention are included in the Paddle Finding 7 step process I use and wonder if there is an order in which we engage with them?? That is before ‘spiritual alignment’ (Step 3: Mission) we needed first to pay attention to our ‘physical energy’ (Step 1: Stop) and ‘Emotional connection’ (Step 2: Life jacket). It’s only then that we can use (or even have access to) our ‘mental focus’ (Step 4: Map) to explore the options of how to meet the mission.