Personal Energy Management

How does Personal Energy Management recharge the ten batteries from our "House of Well-Being & Productivity"?

Five batteries relate to your personal balance: career, spiritual, social, psychological, and physical well-being. Five batteries recharge the vitality of your organization: HRM, mission/vision/strategy, culture, leadership/communication, and operational processes, structures, and systems. To be satisfied, fulfilled, motivated, and balanced, your home should ideally function with charged batteries. If one battery is a bit low, the other can compensate. This way, you balance your own well-being.

The spiritual & career battery:

“Flow” is a state in which you can work with ease, where time flies and you use your talents, resulting in a great deal of satisfaction and energy.

To achieve this, you need to develop your competencies based on your authentic talents, so you can excel in them. You'll experience this state of "flow" when your goals are in good tension with your resources. You want to be able to develop, and for that, you need both sufficiently high resources and challenging goals. To illustrate this principle of flow and balance, I use the stretch model, which I developed for my first book, "Inner Peace in a Busy Life." Resources include your five batteries of well-being (physically healthy, psychological well-being, social network, experiencing meaning in your job, developing your talents), but also financial or operational (e.g., a building to work from or new software). Goals can be both work-related, such as a new project, or personal, such as losing weight. Start with awareness and balance between achievable goals and increase your resources through, among other things, sufficient self-care, to create a concrete action plan from there, because that's what your brain loves.

The physical battery:

How your biological rhythm naturally requires you to work in fluctuations.

Fluctuations in which you exert yourself or work for about 110 minutes at a time, being productive and focused (for example, your cortisol is higher then) alternating with periods of rest, relaxation, connection, movement, and just 'tuning out' (your relaxation hormones are higher then). You can "save up" these moments, but then you'll need longer blocks of free time. By respecting this, you'll feel better physically and mentally (psychological and physical battery).

Psychological battery:

Emotion regulation as a foundation for finding balance and navigating your life with satisfaction.

I will discuss what the three biological emotion regulation systems are and how you can learn to recognize and influence them in your life for more balance, motivation, satisfaction, and happiness.

There's the care system, which relaxes you, the pursuit system, in which you pursue goals, and the danger system, in which you defend yourself or experience disgust, for example. Here, we intersect psychological, physical, social, and spiritual well-being! These are biological systems associated with neurotransmitters and certain activations of your nervous system. This will often depend greatly on who you interact with and how. Try to spend two-thirds of your time in your care system, and also, for example, work from it or activate it in your free time. Choose the right people to surround yourself with!

The social battery:

Why are collaboration and communication in the workplace often not ideal, and how can they be improved?

Behavior during meetings or with your colleagues is often governed by the basic fight/flight/freeze responses: for example, someone might nod "yes," but nothing actually changes, what's requested doesn't happen, or there's no real connection (freeze). Disputes in the workplace are also commonplace (fight). Or people systematically avoid responsibilities or appointments (flight). These are, however, reactions to stress and workload, which are commonplace these days. For this, I recommend choosing the fourth response: the "tend & befriend" response. This is also a biological mechanism in your brain that helps you immediately lower stress hormones by utilizing the social element (help, connection, support). So look for this in your colleagues and offer it yourself. Investing in a supportive "inner circle" and work network pays off!