Peak energy cultivation
Do you know what your peak energy capacity feels like? Or does your awareness of your energy occur to you more that you just know when you don’t have any?
I was listening to a conversation two of my friends were in about energy and it got me to thinking about how often this topic comes up with my clients and how my own relationship to energy has changed over the past few years.
One of the comments that really struck me was that the starting place for a lot of us in how we relate to our energy is that we know when we don’t have it, or that we have some. There isn’t much more nuance to it than that.
We have very little feel for when we are at our peak energy, even less of a feel for when our peak energy is aligned with our peak focus. We have even less of a feel for how to cultivate our peek energy, and beyond that even less feel for how to create a daily architecture that maximizes our peak energy and peak focus.
Why is this important at all?
Our energy is more valuable than time. Think about it. Would you rather have 10 years left in this world, yet with no energy to do anything with that time, or a final month yet all the energy to give everything you wanted to those moments?
Understanding how to cultivate peak energy is essential to high performance, masterful learning, creative expression, and a more fulfilled life.
Much of the time, what I notice is we (including me) are walking around half asleep and half awake. We aren’t in a fully rested, relaxed, alert state of being AND we don’t quite have access to turn it on from 0-60 in 2.5 seconds.
There are so many different energies one could keep an eye on: sexual, relational, creative, financial, sound, etc.
I like to have an overall awareness on 4 as my baseline: Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual. I find everything else can be looked at through one of these lenses.
If you do nothing else but begin to notice your energy in each of these 4 places, that alone could be revelatory and life changing.
To take it further, the journey of creating more energy can be as simple as taking an energy audit. Note every activity, and I do mean EVERY activity, you do throughout the day. Note the time you spend on it and assign some value between 1-10 of both what energy you have for it and how engaged you are in it in those moments.
An even simpler exercise is to simply list in one column the people, places, things, activities and thoughts that drain you of energy/ where you are leaking energy and in a second column the people, places, things, activities and thoughts that fill you/source you with energy.
With either of these lists, the practice is then incremental subtraction: eliminating, one by one, the simplest things that have a draining effect on your energy.
On a surface level, the simple removal of these things is going to help give you more energy. Somewhat like reducing spending on unconscious purchases is going to create more money in your bank account.
There is also a deeper cut you can take a look at which I find even more beneficial.
The place to look is who am I being that is creating this as a drain? Or what is the perspective I am holding on this that has it make perfect sense that this is a drain on my energy.
Sometimes the surface removal of something is good enough and is the simple most effective solution. Other times it really is about the deeper work that is required and necessary so that we are able to better to understand our internal relationship to our energy and the patterns and rhythms that arise out of that relationship. We can create a trap for ourselves by trying to rearrange the entire world around us. It’s an internal vs external orientation.
These practices will have us be less asleep, and you may be asking, but how do I begin to have a feel for my peak energy? How do I cultivate the ability to harness that more often?
For now try out and be consistent with what is offered here and from there, if you would benefit from being in more direct conversation, send me a message and I can create some time for you.
Loving you so,
Allan