I have a friend. He is very enthusiastic & optimistic. He comes across as someone who is all charged up & unstoppable. But unfortunately his enthusiasm is usually once a week affair.
Even if there isn’t any consistency in his energy, he is more than willing to share his secret recipe – he has taught himself this habit of reading all the latest motivating articles on life hack.
He seems so fired up after reading a couple of viral articles on productivity hacks & time management that he feels no less than the invincible Iron man. There is nothing wrong on his part to feel at the top of the world as long as he is not making all his friends unsuspected victim of his newly found weekly wisdom.
Even if he could extend his enthusiasm for the whole week, his limited resource of energy would struggle to keep up with his newly found consistency in enthusiasm.
Lesson learned: There is no harm in you being at the cusp of life where your aspiration to achieve something more than what life has so far given you is keeping you on your toes. However, there is a definite cost attached to this choice of yours.
Because if you chose to be on your toes most of the time, then despite the best of your efforts, you might find yourself losing that constant tug of war with your limited source of energy.
So how do you work around the limited source of energy?
You can maximize your personal energy by eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep. Point is everyone knows this & it is not a secret anymore.
The secret lies in complementing the physical efforts with the application of mental aspects; therefore I am outlining a few of the psychological issues that could help you in maximizing your energy.
Priority
People who have a sense of peace that their priorities are in the right place also have a sense of humility and a realistic view on life – Patrick Lencioni
The objective of having clearly demarcated boundaries of priority is to save significant amount of time & energy by staying clear of the least productive activities.
If you make choices that help you in optimizing your energy, not only it will make easier for you to manage all of your other priorities, but it will also make you wiser enough to realize that there is something in your life that makes you excited to wake up.
Illusion
Illusion is the first of all pleasures – Voltaire
The dictionary meaning of illusion: an idea or belief that is not true/something that is not really what it seems to be.
In the context of this article, we are describing illusions as something that can be visualized as a possibility that lies within the realms of reality. This belief in illusion plays a fundamental role in propelling the motivation quotient, which in turn keeps our energy high. Therefore, there exists a positive correlation between your conviction in the illusion and your motivation.
Motivation can get you started. But it’s faith in the illusion that will keep you energized enough to persist for long.
Success
“The passion hypothesis” taught by life coaches and authors urges individuals to “do what they love.” The recommended advice is to find your passion first, and then meaningful work will appear at your fingertips.
But the truth is the path of passion doesn’t always guarantee success. Because it’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, but once things start failing they end up becoming a drain on your passion.
So what’s the solution?
Autonomy and competence are the means through you can achieve mastery in any given field. And once you have mastered something, it is more likely that you will become passionate about it – Cal Newport
Therefore, there exists a high possibility of success causing passion rather than passion paving the way for success.
Simplicity of System
If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.
If you learn to appreciate the power of systems over goals, everything becomes less frustrating, because you stop getting obsessed with the final results. And results if not dovetailed properly with things that you care, often lose its meaning. And anything done without meaning is difficult to sustain for far too long.
By investing in developing a highly personalized system for getting your best work done, you might free up your cognitive bandwidth for more creative output.
Love
The spiritual journey is the relinquishment or unlearning of fear and acceptance of love.
Love is the most readily available, natural energizer. Despite knowing this fact, we are susceptible to dismiss its importance while we are busy chasing our dreams. Love & its expression in various forms usually get lost amidst recurring narratives of daily dose of struggles & problems of life.
However if we develop the immunity to grow beyond the daily dose of struggles & problems we are in a better position to appreciate the fact that throughout the ages, mystics have compared our lives to a drop in the ocean or a grain of sand on a beach. It reinforces the universal wisdom that people are less like separate beings and more like parts of a much bigger whole connected through the threads of universal love.
To Sum Up
Somewhere between the sunrise and constant exposure to hours of the blue screen, the endeavor to find a way to recharge & optimize your limited source of energy can yield the desired result only if you can find a balance between both physical & psychological aspects of your existence.
Worth Sharing!
If you got something from this post, and feel someone else in your life needs to see this, please share it and tell them how much you care about them.
