Confront your weariness and...Engage your energy

Published: Fri, 04/08/22

Dear ,

Welcome to this installment of "To Be Clear..." - a refreshing sip of regular coaching clarity in your inbox where I share a couple of brief ideas which I hope that you can apply in your work life.

First of all, thanks for all the support around the Learning in Law conference in London which Chrissie Easom and I spoke at a couple of weeks ago. We were super encouraged by the incredibly positive feedback on our session on Drive: Maintaining your Energy & Motivation at Work.

After extensive academic as well as on-the-job research on the subject, Chrissie and I have come to define drive this way: "Drive is the sustained, strategic energy we need to pursue, accomplish or complete a goal, ambition or desire." It's a key component of sustainable success in our work and businesses and we all know what it feels like to have it and also to be lacking it.

After a bit of a break and, as we hit the weekend, today's installment includes some key insights about weariness at work as well as highlights from our session on Drive to help you think about how you can replenish and sustain your drive in your work or business

Wake up to your weariness

Image: Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

I don't know about you but as I've worked with teams, organisations and individuals over the last month or so, I've been aware of a deep, collective weariness. It's not that people are not doing their jobs or living their lives, or even enjoying themselves, but underlying it all has been a sense of exhaustion which has contrasted with the beginning of Spring. And then it struck me that the last few weeks marked the anniversary of the start of lockdown in March 2020.

As anyone who's lost someone or undergone other significant trauma will know, anniversaries are powerful things especially anniversaries of crises or unexpected events. Whether we like it or not, these milestones often bring emotional and mental disruption as we are (consciously or subconsciously) confronted by difficulties which we might want to forget or put behind us.

All of this can cause a deep weariness as we seek to live and work in the present while being tossed about on the waves of the past. This is as true in our professional as our personal lives especially when they intersect as they did over the early and subsequent days of the pandemic when we all found ourselves having to adjust our relationship to our work in huge and unexpected ways.

One thing that this kind of weariness can do is to gradually and negatively impact our drive and decision making at work.

As the weekend and the upcoming Easter break approach, it may be worth taking time to acknowledge any weariness you're feeling and to think about how that is affecting your work and relationships at work and beyond.

Why not open up a conversation with a colleague or client on the subject in the coming week? It might feel weird at first but, as I work with individual and organisational clients on this topic, it's amazing to see the positive impact addressing this has on their working and wider lives.

As always, feel free to get in touch if there's anything you'd like to ask or share. Chrissie and I continue to develop and share our work on Drive with a wider audience and we'd love your input.

Next a tool and a couple of tips from our material on how to sustain your drive.

Get into the (energy) zone...

Central to sustaining a sense of heathy drive at work is managing and and maintaining our energy and one resource which Chrissie and I shared at the conference is a 2x2 grid which comes from Tony Schwartz as part of the Energy Project.

Image: R.A. Williams - adapted from The Energy Project (Tony Schwartz)

As you can see, the grid splits energy across two axes - high/ low and positive/ negative.

In the top right quadrant is the high, positive energy Performance Zone - this is where we are individually or collectively doing good work well and is characterised by not just great results but a sense of enjoyment, purpose and alignment as well as healthy absorption in our work.

Moving anti-clockwise, we find the Survival Zone - a place of high but negative energy. This is where many of my clients often find themselves when they come to me. It's certainly where many were functioning over the pandemic and since, spinning plates frantically. I often refer to this as the Danger Zone because, while individuals, teams and organisations are still producing a lot of decent work on the surface, under the surface they are increasingly feeling like they are spinning their wheels - more and more depleted and disillusioned with their work and even questioning the purpose of what they're doing. Clients in this zone are often both unable to stop working and exhausted and resentful of their work and those for and with whom they are working. I wonder if this sounds familiar?

Moving round anti-clockwise again into the bottom left quadrant, we find ourselves in the Overwhelm Zone. This is where people have fallen off cliff of the Survival Zone into the abyss of low and negative energy. This is a place which is often characterised by burnout. People in this zone feel completely depleted at and by their work or business. They may struggle along for a while, generally making poor decisions and negatively impacting those they work with. They may be increasingly manic or checked out, they take long or short team sick leave or even leave their work or business altogether.

A couple of tips for maintaining healthy energy and drive using this grid.

1. No individual or team can operate in the Performance Zone 100% of the time. Professional athletes know this and, for the rest of us, learning how to recognise this is key to preventing exhaustion, disillusionment and burnout at work.

2. Try as we might, it's impossible to hop straight back into the Performance Zone from either Survival or Overwhelm. Again, succesful professional athletes and sports teams know that key to sustainable, succesful performance is the Recovery Zone in the bottom right-hand quadrant. Although this is a place of low but positive energy, it's not just about taking proper holiday or sleeping well, vital though those things are. Instead it's an active, intentional place of individual and collective professional learning and reflection as well as activities which refresh and replenish our energy and drive. As we told those who came to the conference a couple of weeks ago, the Recovery Zone is where success at work is fuelled and sustained and individuals, teams and organisations who understand this are those who succeed sustainably in the long term.

More on how to restore and replenish drive in future newsletters. In the meantime, a couple of questions to ask yourself over the coming week, "Which zone am I or my team or business operating in right now? Is it characterised by positive or negative energy?" and "How can I/ we build sustainable recovery into our individual, team and even organisational practice?"

If you have any questions or want to explore this topic further, get in touch. Tony Swartz's article on what to do when you find yourself in the Survival Zone might also be helpful.

I'll be in touch next week to wish you a Happy Easter but wishing you a clearer week ahead in the meantime.

As ever,

Ranti

About this email: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to "To Be Clear...” which regularly shares insights around gaining greater clarity at work and more. If you have had this email forwarded to you and would like to receive future issues of "To Be Clear..." directly, you can subscribe below.

Click here to subscribe