365: Deciding What Gets Your Energy

Transcript

Welcome to the Superabound podcast, where vision-led entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing what matters most. You are listening to episode 365, deciding what gets your energy. Hello and welcome. I have been on a little bit of a journey. I've been working away getting ready for the launch of my brand new oracle deck, the Superabound Oracle. Um, and one of the things I've been working on in the last little while as we prepare to ship out the decks is working through each card, one card per day, uh, following following along with the 30-day journey to the Superabound Oracle. And I realized that in a very short span of time, I essentially recorded kind of like a podcast, a teaching lesson, self- coaching prompt, um, kind of session for each and every single one of the cards. And it was a lot of talking. It was a lot of me talking to the camera. So, you haven't heard from me in a couple of weeks because I have been doing that and it has been very fruitful. But as I was recording, I told myself, I'm going to go back and I'm going to go through each one of these. So, for this whole entire month, I've been working my way slowly through each one of the lessons. And I, you know, I knew they were good when I recorded them, but actually doing the exercises along with other folks who are doing that program, even though we're all doing it on our own, um, it's been very illuminating. And I've noticed that one theme has been coming up for me as I've been going through some of the cards. Um, I can show them to you. If you're watching on you're watching this on YouTube, I'm going to flash a couple of the cards up. If not, you know, you can see them at buperbound.com/oracle

journey. Um, yeah, they've been really fun. Actually, this was today's card. This is called release and rebuild. And the theme that has been coming up that I have been noticing in the cards as I'm doing this work with myself is really thinking more intuitively and strategically in combination with one another around what we as visionaries, as business owners, as leaders do to not only protect our energy but decide what deserves. s our energy. So, if you've been listening to this show for a while, you probably are familiar with a concept that we wrote about in our book Superabound called the personal filter. Um, this is basically it's another concept kind of describing what a lot of people will call boundaries, but boundaries are much more I think rigid. Whereas I think of personal filter as more of a membrane that allows in what we need. It allows in the energy that we need, but it blocks or filters out what is not supportive to our long-term whole life success. And so I spend a lot of time with clients really building up the personal filter, but one of the things that we maybe don't always spend so much time on is deciding ahead of time what gets your energy. Because as visionaries, sometimes the path changes. Sometimes the thing you wanted at the beginning of the year is not the thing you want at the end of the year. And so that's why I don't love the idea of boundaries as much because it's it tends to be very firm, very rigid, very um like ruleoriented, whereas personal filter I think can be a little more flexible. So, I've been I shared this on the coaching mixer in my other podcast with Elena, but a few weeks ago, I had an encounter with a bat that was I guess sleeping um outside of my house and we were coming in at night, my whole family, and it apparently I learn I learned this in my bat medicine research. um in order to fly they kind of fall and swoop. So they have to kind of like let their themselves drop a little bit before they can take off. So as that was happening it collided with my head and so I have had to get a number of vaccinations just you know as a precaution um just a cautionary thing but no don't want to get rabies. Um, but I've spent a lot of time in in uh waiting rooms. I've spent many hours just kind of like waiting for all of that. There were a few times where I felt a little bit tired afterwards. And it had made me in that week or two, one of the one of the things I took away from that experience is that much of the time we are planning our life when we're sitting down to do our calendar or we're planning for, you know, the next little while. We often plan that from a place of optimism. You know, we think we plan as much as possible. If you ever look at your calendar and you think, "I have eight hours back toback of obligations, commitments, meetings, things to do, that plan happened because you didn't take into account that maybe something would come up." And I I will say over the years I have gotten better about this because you know I as soon as I had kids and I realized oh one of them is like sick every other week and you know uh sometimes they need things and I kind of stopped overpacking my schedule as a result of becoming a parent. But I know that many of us still plan when we are at full tilt energy. And so for me in the last couple of weeks, you know, I had that unexpected trip to the hospital and then several other trips to various clinics to get, you know, my my vaccination. And it meant that some of the things I had wanted to do, some of the things I wanted to complete were still possible, but were probably not the kindest thing I could have offered myself. So, it was just kind of a little learning in the background. But I realized that the personal filter concept in order to make it real and really make it work for you, it has to be aligned with a deep understanding of what deserves your energy and what does not. It has to be in conjunction with prioritizing your well-being pretty much above all else because the only way that any of us are going to reach the top of our mountain or we're going to realize our vision or do as much as we can in a lifetime to make that vision real. We have to have a certain degree of health and well-being. you don't have that. It doesn't matter how inspired you are. It doesn't matter how good your idea is. Um, and I notice that a lot of times this is the biggest challenge for my very successful clients because we plan that we're always going to be healthy and we're always going to have energy and we're always going to be inspired and then we organize our life around that expectation without a lot of wiggle room. And so I think when we're trying to answer the question, you know, if you're trying to answer this question for you in this season of your life, of your business, of your work in the world, deciding what gets your energy comes down to understanding not only what's most aligned with your big vision, but what is the reality of your capacity. How much time do you have? I know plenty of people who um can work really hard and they have brilliant ideas and really clear lanterns that they want to light, but they're in a season where that timing is not as uh spacious perhaps. So, this is going to be a very quick episode today, but I I I know we've talked about personal filter before, but I think what I want to offer or remind or hopefully, you know, inspire you to do today is take a step back. And it may be sitting down with your calendar before you just say yes to everything and and plan. Um it's actually look at the state of your day or your week or your month and notice when you look at what you have laid out for yourself, the commitments you have, the timing that you've given, the energy that you're offering. First of all, ask would this be realistic even if something came in to interrupt it? Like would it be very clear to me what a priority is if you know one of my kids had to come home from school today? Then what would I do differently? Do I even have room where that would be okay? Because I know for many of us it would throw a big wrench in the plan and it would feel very uh sticky and hard. But if you feel like, no, I think I've got enough space. I have wiggle room. And if I can't finish everything today, you know, I've set time aside in the week or in the month to reallocate to

the second part is maybe what's hard for people. Um I was talking about the card of the day. This card was what came up in our practice today. The release and rebuild. A lot of times it is not about better organization. I mean some that helps. It's good to be organized, but most of the time if we're feeling overwhelmed, if we're feeling like things are pressing in on our personal filter, it is because we've said yes to too many things. And most like like maybe for two of my clients I would say this is not true but for everyone else in the world that I know most of the time we have things on our calendars that really are not aligned. They're not bringing us the light. They're not making our well-being and our relationship with ourselves better. And they're not actually bringing us closer to any lantern or any vision. There has to be some releasing of those things. You know, I'm looking out at my trees. It's autumn here. The trees cannot hang on to those withered, dead leaves and make it through the winter. They don't have the energy to bend in the wind if the heavy if the leaves aren't weighing them down or if the energy is not being able being redirected within. We are the same. And I watch a lot of us, and I'm not just talking about you. I'm talking about myself as well, hang on to withered, tried out things that have run their course because we feel like I've invested so much into growing this. I just have to keep pouring my energy in. And I think that, you know, especially because this is the card that came up for us today, um that's not true. You don't have to actually do that. And that can be really hard. But I think it's where you call upon your personal filter to say, "Help me get space from myself, my old self. You know, this might have been really important to invest in in the past, but what is going to take me towards my future? what needs my energ what needs my energy to grow to rebuild. And so I I there's a few things you can do and I'm without having to make any huge shifts. Here are a couple of questions that could maybe support you. Looking at your calendar, looking at those big things that are taking up your time and your energy. You just ask simply of each one, does this support my vision and my values? It's a yes or no question. If it's like sort of, maybe, I don't know, it could, I think that kind of has to go in timeout. We need to see things that are clearly supportive because if they're not supportive, then perhaps they need to be reworked. I would just assume that if you can't answer a clear yes, it needs to be reworked. The second thing you could ask yourself is what will it ask of my time and energy to keep committing to this and is that worth it?

And finally, should I keep it? Should I shift it? Should I let it go entire? And you're going to ask this with a very light touch. you don't have to go and change everything tomorrow. But if you don't start to look at what you are giving your energy to in your life in a way that it's very clear to you, it's going to be hard to shift it. You're going to end up kind of getting in the cycle that I see a lot of people in where they think, "Oh, I just have to be better at time management and I just have to be more organized and I just have to figure out how to optimize an already maxed out optimization. and I just never have to get sick. I can't ever get sick and nothing can ever happen in my life. Because I think that that is unrealistic and it's what a lot of us are kind of holding on by a thread with is like just hoping that nothing else externally happens because we're we're holding so many things and maybe some of them are not aligned. So I wanted to offer that today. Um, if you would like to have more internal support on that day-to-day basis, you can get your own deck and you can join the uh, Superabound 30-day oracle journey, which will take you through each and every one of the cards in depth, like a lesson. Um, it'll help you when you're doing readings for yourself, but it will also just give you prompts to discover things like, hey, maybe my personal filter needs an upgrade. I hope that this was supportive to you and I will talk to you again soon. You can find out more about the deck over at buperbound.com/oraclejourney

or here in the show notes. Take care.