Published February 1, 2024 in Coaching Corner • 5 min read • 
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As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.How can I consistently be at my best and give my best when the definition of our “new normal” seems to be constantly changing?
As an executive coach, this is a question I keep hearing from my clients. We are used to demanding a lot of ourselves. That’s normal when the way you got to where you are took ambition, discipline, and dedication, and it’s critical when your role involves being responsible for others. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic challenged so many of the practices that got us to where we are, from Zoom fatigue to being “always on” and more. We all feel drained more often than we’d care to admit.
Over the course of our professional lives, we’ve learned how to manage the day-to-day of our jobs and to look after ourselves – if perhaps not always as much as we wished we did. But then the pandemic came along, disrupting the rhythms we learned to work within and, at the same time, offering an opportunity to stop and reflect. From going fully remote to hybrid to trying to “return to normal”, we all did what we could to make the best of a situation that was beyond our control.
In some areas, we might have gained a new level of agency; in others, we found ourselves struggling to find a balance that allowed us to flourish.
Maybe you feel that despite the stream of self-help tools, resilience tips, and stress-reduction techniques available, you are still searching for how to integrate these strategies into an effective and flexible routine.
When you look at how to strengthen your resilience and well-being, I’ve found that what helps the most is being able to clearly focus on:
During my 24 years as an executive coach, I’ve helped driven, passionate professionals to achieve and sustain their goals by improving how they manage their energy. The key lies in charging your five “batteries”. Your energy is like the battery in your phone: you want to keep it charged to be able to use it when you need it. In the “Professional Energy Management” framework, we break it down into five areas that drive and sustain you in tangible and practical ways:
Physical: health, stamina, and vitality.
Mental: clarity, focus, and intellectual agility.
Emotional: resilience, creativity, and emotional self-regulation.
Spiritual: values, motivation, and sense of purpose.
Social: relationships, surroundings, and professional environment.
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Each battery is recharged or drained by 10 indicators such as your habits, perceptions, lifestyle, and so on. It’s important to remember that each dimension is always influencing the others, which means that changing one has the power to both benefit us by reinforcing another and that bigger issues in one area often boil over and affect others.
When you start to break down energy into the five batteries, you begin to have a clearer, more granular sense of what’s affecting you and what you could tweak. If you are struggling in certain areas, you can begin to ask: “How have my habits, perceptions or context changed? How are they currently helping or hindering me? What can I change? What do I need to accept for now?” Consider these anecdotes to help you reflect further:
Physical: The “convenience” of working from home left Jakob feeling more sluggish. He never realized how much he relied on the rhythm of his daily commute to get him moving.
Mental: With the day beginning and ending with her laptop’s blaring screen, Simona feels drained by the monotone trawl of attending meetings and sending emails without a moment to really disconnect.
Emotional: Gustavo loves his work and his family, but being at home all the time has made it harder for him to appreciate either, making him feel unhappy about the situation and with himself.
Spiritual: Yasuhiro’s truest sense of fulfillment came with seeing how his team’s projects affected communities. With everything remote, his sense of purpose has waned as his contributions have felt more abstract than ever.
Social: When rigid, regimented Zoom meetings became the norm, Tamara lost the relaxed moments between in-person meetings that allowed her to speak with members of her team in an organic way, leaving her feeling disconnected.
When we feel stuck with our energy, we often start trying to figure out how we can get “more” or “better”. Yet, the question I invite you to ask is: “How can you optimize how you use your energy each day?”
It takes building new habits, and it starts with understanding where you are right now.
Whatever your situation, understanding how you are managing your energy is the first step to kick-starting new habits to help you consistently be at your best. Through “Personal Energy Management”, we do this through mini habits: small, beneficial practices that can be inserted between existing habits – like brushing your teeth, making coffee, or opening your computer – to start the change that you want for yourself.
To do that, I created an “Energy Check” to help you establish where you stand and where you can go from here by showing how you take care of your energy through 50 key indicators.
Click here to take the Energy Check. After taking this anonymous, brief assessment, you will be able to download a self-debriefing report featuring questions, further information, and effective steps to get you on your way to creating new mini habits aligned with where you want to feel change the most.
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