The 7 Keys to High Energy through the Day. What Is Consuming Us?
Have you noticed that there are days when time flies and you are still left with plenty of energy? And other days when you’re internal battery shows 1% at about…2PM?
What makes these days so different?
The difference lies in the way your inner energy amplifies based on the things you do on the outside, on your thoughts and perceptions. This mix influences your mental and physical energy. Your outer and inner activity either makes your energy drop or touch the sky.
Here is how you can grow your energy and flame:
1. Be yourself in everything you do
You are yourself when what you do matches your passions and talents. Doing the things you love increases your energy and makes time fly without feeling tired, even after long hours.
Make sure that your work is about the things you love to do as well or see how you can improve it. Ask yourself why you chose to do this in the first place. Get back to that initial feeling and enthusiasm when you felt you can move mountains.
2. Get rid of indecisiveness
You consume precious energy when you can’t make a decision on a highly important subject. If you let your mind analyze and reanalyze the pros and cons of a situation, you’ll notice how you’ll get more and more tired. Going back and forth on the same subject is so energy draining.
Settle every subject as it appears. Sleep on it for some time if necessary, but set clear deadlines for deciding on those subjects that are holding you back.
3. Stop procrastinating
I know. You don’t like this and that, so you postpone it. You hate making that phone call or start working on that presentation, so you procrastinate. You may think you’ll get away with it, but you won’t, as the deadlines and consequences remain present in your mind.
Take one step at a time. In this case, when you dislike the process, focus more on the result and on setting your mind free of those tasks. The result will be more time for you to think and plan the things you like, rather than hang on those you still need to do.
This article in Harvard Business Review on how to beat procrastination might help you get it out of your system.
4. Keep your purpose in mind
We all need to be conscious of our higher meaning and contribute to a better world according to our personal vision of what a better world looks like.
Your purpose is your internal fuel. It gives you great energy once you identify it and remain aligned to it. If you feel constant dissatisfaction because your work has no purpose, put it on the table and make a plan to solve it.
Define your own ground for manifesting your purpose and don’t forget about it. Don’t settle for anything less.
5. Stop worrying about what others may think of you
Being faithful to yourself while keeping in mind to be considerate of other people's beliefs and emotions is all that matters.
Otherwise, what other people think of you is their concern only.
6. Ask for and offer help
Sometimes we keep struggling to solve everything by ourselves when the colleague next office may already have the answer. Or could help with an idea. Sometimes we’re doing the same in our personal life.
Think you’ll seem less interesting or capable if you ask for help and show some vulnerability? Think again. Team work makes the world work. People need reasons to connect. The energy we put in common generates greater energy and achievements. Make sure you also offer valuable help and ask for it openly when you need it.
7. Change your perception
We don’t see the world the way it is, but we see the world the way we are. We look through lenses and consume our energy believing that what we see is real. When layers of worrying thoughts or negative emotions blur those lenses, we see things differently from what they are.
The simple intention of changing perspective will work miracles because it will clean your lenses. Sometimes it is better to get away from the center of the field and just witness what is happening in your life. Just observe, don’t play for a while. Try to find the meaning and the lesson every experience is trying to teach you. This new perspective brings with it a light heart, a calm mind, and a refreshed energy.
Stay connected to yourself to identify the moments that make your energy drop. Make changes, smile and enjoy the ride. You need all your internal resources and flame for making great things happen every day.
5 Essential Things for a Healthy Corporate Culture
Culture is that feeling and common drive that a company fosters and stands for, the sum of values and purposes that guides and links their employees. It is that common impulse that makes them come to work with a smile every morning, sell effectively and support the company for steady growth.
Then why do we too often see corporate culture build more like an accident and less like a conscious act?
Cultures can indeed appear all by themselves but they may not return the results we expect. They could end up randomly reflecting some company traits, but not the big picture, nor the essentials. Culture is an asset that pays for itself in times of both enthusiasm and crisis. Culture is the glue that brings and keeps diverse people together and gives them a common reason to believe and act.
Here are 5 essential things to have in mind when it comes to your company’s culture:
1. Care about your people more than you care about your numbers
When you show empathy and respect for your team, it will show in the numbers they make. The more you value your people and respect their uniqueness, the more motivated they will be to contribute to business success. People always have personal reasons for their action or lack of action. They also need to belong and feel that they are treated like individuals and not like machines.
So paying attention to these triggers, reasons, beliefs, and to what gets your team into action, gives you priceless insights into what matters to them and the best ways to amplify this human potential in order to generate the results you forecast. And you will build a culture and sense of community naturally on the way.
2. Enhance communication and flexibility
We all want to build companies that can naturally stand up to challenges, seize new opportunities and move dynamically between changing market situations. The flexibility you prove on the market reflects the flexibility you encourage inside your company. The quality and efficiency of the dialogue you want to develop and nurture with your customers reflect the way people communicate at work.
Communication and confidence expand when you deliberately create and use informal contexts to share ideas or take a break to chat and encourage people to speak their mind. And when you really listen.
3. Support and grow your people
Employees become company fans when they feel their personal goals are integrated into the company’s big purpose. When seeing the link between their own personal mission and the corporate mission, they start feeling they are in the right place. To get them perform to their full potential in line with both missions you need to build a culture of support and actively encourage individual growth.
You can do this with the right and tailor-made amount of the following:
- courses and training
- formal and informal knowledge sharing
- one-to-one discussions
- showing empathy
- standing up for your team when the context requires it
4. Ask questions
Asking questions makes people feel valuable and proves that their work matters. Besides this, when you ask you easily find out:
- What are those things that go smooth
- What needs improvement or adjustment
- Where you have to step in
- Who needs support and who can offer it (resources optimization)
- Those soft, intangible and essential aspects that you can only hear when you ask questions
You can then take the time to think about the actions needed to solve the issues, to grow the good parts and to keep walking on an ascendant path. And then repeat.
5. Have fun
Probably the hardest part, when we get caught in daily operations, is to have fun. Who has time for this when everything needs to be done at once? Who thinks about corporate culture and making individuals work smoothly and joyfully as a whole?
Well, keep in mind that we are not one person at work and another in our personal life. We need to put joy and smile in everything we do and stop thinking we need to wear a professional mask or leave the true-self jacket at the company’s door.
Yes, we are building a reputation and it is wise to keep our personal stuff for ourselves, but this has nothing to do with showing and spreading the joy of our work, about being comfortable and proud of our professional decisions.
It is human and healthy to have fun and get satisfaction as long as we are spending our everyday’s energy and time at work.
In conclusion, building and nurturing a solid culture will turn separate players into professional teams that join efforts for achieving one business mission.
If you manage to grow confidence, offer support and encourage your team to continuously stretch limits, they will naturally make your company agile, adaptable and competitive.
The 5C's of Authentic Communication
Have you noticed that communication tends to have a passion of relating to words starting with "c" ?
Beyond content planning, right context spotting or measuring channel efficiency, there are some other c-words that are equally important, even if they are harder to quantify or more idealistic as they might seem at first.
I would call them the soft skills of transparent, authentic communication. These 5C's help us build sustainable companies and turn complete strangers into enthusiastic brand ambassadors:
Clarity
Clarity comes from vision. Businesses with vision make it in the long run as they see their development path clearly and follow it from strategic and daily business decisions to brand management and integrated communication. Clarity attracts just the right type of customers, the ones you really need for steady growth.
Corporate purpose
Knowing, manifesting and communicating your greater good purpose that stands above the commercial purpose is proved to generate both financial benefits and brand favorability. Customers tend to favor companies and brands that bring value to the world. Moreover, this filters and attracts to your team those talents driven by the same purpose. So invest time in defining and communicating your corporate purpose for attracting the right people.
Creativity
Creative communication captures the business and brand essence and makes it appealing for commercial use and consistent across all channels. Just like a sculpture revealing from a stone block, a truly creative communication focuses on using shape only for revealing the essence.
Connection
Well, we all seem connected thanks to the digital era, but still, we seem to be missing to build real connections. The more connected are our virtual worlds, the fewer connections we build for real. So it’s not only about connectivity by all means, but about creating communities of people driven by the same values your business has. It is also about showing empathy for their interests and needs through the solutions you offer.
Consciousness
Every word we say has meaning, energy and intention and makes us responsible when using it. Conscious communication keeps us aware of the impact and value our words have and of their contribution to building a consistent and credible business and brand.
How are these 5C’s manifesting and growing in your company?
The New Marketing Works Its Way through the Crowd
In the crowded world of promotional messages that assault us, cramped between offers, spam emails, and ads of all sizes and ranges, the questions pop out naturally:
How do I make my company’s voice heard in all this noise? Or how do I create, grow and practice a differentiated voice?
First, we need to stop fighting for the limited attention of people and stretch it as if it was endlessly elastic. This is why we get ignored too many times. What we need to do is shift the focus from talking our prospects into buying to showing a deep understanding of their specific needs, goals, behaviors, pain points and prove that we can best address them.
The new marketing includes only those actions that are relevant and useful to your customers, in a natural, human and non-interruptive way. The new marketing steps in only when it’s helpful and needed. In other words, it’s seamless.
This doesn’t mean it’s inexistent or passive. It just doesn’t play the 'who can shout louder' game. It advises and accompanies discretely. It helps people make the best decision.
Key instruments of the new marketing:
- get to know your customers and their pain points
- keep your eyes on the competition. They can offer valuable market intelligence
- understand your customer's journey. Focus more on the process and turn it into an experience
- make a relevant content strategy and plan
- personalize your content to match the phases of the customer journey
- spot the right moment and context to give prospects one type of information or the other
- engage them in the right action on the right channel, depending on the phase they are in the cycle
- measure, analyze and fine tune. No one is perfect.
I call this bright marketing. Or clever, human, adequate marketing. The new marketing.
Authentic Communication Brings Sustainable Business Results
All along there were words.
Words that we use to express how we feel, what we want, what we have to offer. In business communication, well-mastered words seem to get us a new contract, obtain a good discount from our suppliers, or more commitment from our team. Well-chosen words and careful reality packing make us look nicer, bigger, smarter, or more capable, may help us get what we want on the short term while making our flaws or slips disappear. Or so we think.
The effects of doing this repeatedly start to show. After doing this for some time, we find ourselves showing an image of a person we are actually not. We realize that our company is not really the way we dressed it to look. Keeping up with this image starts to take too much of our energy.
Communication becomes artificial the moment we try too much. The moment we pack too much.
In a world of competition at all levels, we sometimes forget communication's purpose: to make our interactions smoother, simpler, more open, natural and human. Keeping up with any artificial image requires too much effort and budget.
So why not make sure that they get spent the right way, on enhancing our right and true image? Our efforts should focus on emphasizing our true values and meanings, as well as our company's. This is how it becomes sustainable and supports business growth. Otherwise, people will continue to see marketing and communication as an unnecessary thing that only companies with big budgets afford to do.
Being authentic generates trust, which is the ultimate thing that triggers the buying decision. We should use packing only to put products in bags and boxes that match the inside. For all the other moments, try unpacking. It brings so much freedom and makes people and customers fall for you.