Personal Energy

Personal energy is a commodity just like electricity or gasoline. It needs to be managed in much the same way. Sometimes it can be bought or sold. You may give or receive it as a gift. Personal energy is harder to measure. It takes an awareness of oneself that most people don’t have. Those who have that understanding of themselves will tell you that their energy levels become more manageable as they become more self aware.

I have discovered four kinds of personal energy within myself. This doesn’t mean there aren’t others or that my list is universal for all people. It’s my experience. They are: mental energy, emotional energy, physical energy, and social energy. Mental energy is my ability to focus or concentrate on something. I expend emotional energy to process my feelings and reactions to things. Physical energy is self explanatory, it’s the energy I use to make my body do things. Social is about community. It’s what connects me to others. I expend social energy to build, strengthen, and let go of connections to people.

My Experience

For most of my life, I believed I was broken because I couldn’t understand why sometimes I could do an activity for hours and other days I had virtually no interest in participating in it. Other times I would be invited to some kind of function, but the idea of going made me feel exhausted, yet I would often spend hours doing something else instead. When these things happened, it caused me to examine my motivations or believe there was something wrong with me. It almost always caused me and those around me to view me as selfish.

What I didn’t know is that my life contains various kinds of energy. Each one influences the others, but regenerating one does not increase the rest. Each needs to be nurtured and managed individually. I’ve tried for many years to heal my physical body. And at one point, I realized I needed to work on my mental health too. I didn’t learn how to improve both at the same time until very recently. When I did learn that us guys need to give as much attention to our mental health as our physical, I started to see that I had other kinds of energy that didn’t come under those two categories.

I first learned about social energy in a book about ADD. In it he talks about a person’s need for human interaction and relationships and how that leads many people to search for those things in some type of faith based life style. He says that social energy isn’t a mythical energy that originates from some mysterious deity or all powerful force, but it comes from within ourselves and from positive relationships. It’s the energy we use to decide when and how to interact with other people. We spend it on enriching the lives of those around us. Managing it is about learning to limit our interactions that consume our social energy, spending more time with others that feed and regenerate our energy, and being by ourselves to let it slowly regenerate on its own.

Emotional energy is one that I had a tough time believing in. Even once I was convinced of its authenticity, it took me too long to understand its relevance to my masculinity. I consume it by feeling both positive and negative emotions. I’ve discovered that my depression was a result of an empty tank of this kind energy. Emotional energy is the strangest of all the energy pools because it’s built by feeling emotions, but only by specific ones. Confidence in oneself is the easiest way to increase it. Forgiveness is another way to recover it. The only way I know of to increase your capacity for emotional energy is by loving others unconditionally. Loving others is one of the biggest uses of this energy, but loving someone unconditionally actually increases the size of the pool I can draw from.

Mental energy is one of the fastest growing areas of interest on my Facebook feed right now. A lot of people are learning for the first time that it is separate from physical energy and needs to be managed separately too. This is the brain power that contributes to many of us not being able to sleep at night even when we feel physically exhausted. If I haven’t done much that was mentally challenging that day, I might have a surplus when I try to sleep at night and brain wants to use some of it before it will let me go to sleep. At other times, I have used up my pool of mental energy when there is still a lot of day left. On those days, I like to go out and do something purely social and/or physical; dancing, wondering the mall, or walking my dog are all activities that use less of my mental energy.

Physical energy is one of the easiest for us guys to understand and manage. Not all of us know how to do those things though. Eating healthy and proper exercise are obvious to most of us. But regular checkups aren’t so easy to keep up with. Good rest is also important here. But so are limiting our exposure to addictive substances and practices. Most of us can agree that too much alcohol or street drugs will have harmful effects on our bodies. Did you know that food addictions or consistent use of pornography can too? There are a lot of things to keep in mind if we want to manage our physical energy.

The fun parts for me have been identifying situations that might need more than one kind of energy. Witty jokes require just the right mixture of mental and social energy. Sports use social and physical, sometime with some mental energy thrown into the mix. Sex uses the emotional and physical varieties. Family needs emotional and social. And the hardest for most of us, trying to stop being single uses both social and emotional energy topped off with a good helping of mental energy. I have decided to reserve that last activity for when I have learned to manage all my energy levels adequately.

A good, wholesome, restful sleep will regenerate all my energy pools. I have had 3 different naps while writing this article because I used up a lot of them last weekend. It’s taken me a few days to recover enough of it to finish this project. Now that I’m learning to understand my abilities and limitations surrounding my energy pools, I find my moods far easier to regulate.

If this is you

Maybe you are having difficulty trying to understand why you want to do things sometimes and other times just don’t feel like participating in those same experiences. Learning what kinds of energy you use and in what ways you use them will probably help you manage these things better and give you a greater sense of control in your life. You might have the same types of energy that I have, or you may have other ways to divvy up your pools of energy. The important part, though, is knowing that there are different pools of energy for doing different things in your life. Learn what yours are, and learn to manage them. When you do, you will find yourself better able to do the things you want and avoid the things that suck your energy dry.

If This is Someone You Know

You know that guy that you just can’t figure out what he likes and doesn’t like? There’s a good chance the same thing confuses and frustrates him too. Try understanding that he has different pools of energy to do different things. They might not be the same pools of energy that you see in your life. He might really like hanging out with you at the pool hall, but if he’s had very socially heavy day, he may not feel like it this time. Or maybe he has a pool of energy dedicated to drinking booze. If his boss or a client has just spent the whole day treating him to various fine restaurants and pubs, he may have used up his booze reserves. Whatever the situation, you don’t know what is in his head or how much of which types of energy he has left, so please be kind with your judgments. Hell, he might not even know he has pools of energy. To a lot of guys, the word energy means oil & gas or electricity. Just because he might not understand his own pools, does not mean that he doesn’t have them. In fact, it probably means he’s kind of crappy at managing them in the first place. Give him the space to say yes or no and let him know that either answer is OK. It’ll help him feel like his feelings or at least his decisions matter to you.

What is means

Personal energy comes in all shapes and sizes. It has all kinds of uses. Some of us know what ours are, but most of us don’t. Most guys I know understand the idea of personal energy, but would look at you as though you wore a pink elephant on your nose if you told them he could use one type energy instead of another one. Mine are physical, mental, social, and emotional. Some of you might find my types of energy make sense to you. If they help you understand yourself better and manage the things you want to do and limit the things you can’t do then your world will be a better place for it. The most useful this information has been for me is when I have to explain to someone why I can’t do something I have enjoyed in the past and might still enjoy. I tell them that I want to do those things but I have to manage that type of energy. When I figure out how to do that, I’ll probably return to those activities with gusto. I’m learning new ways of understanding my energy levels every day.

If this or any article on my blog hit a cord with you, drop me a line and join the conversation.

Sick ‘n’ Tired

What does sick time look like when you are working for yourself? Well, for starters, it looks different than when you are working for someone else. Down time of any sort is unpaid time. Sick time is usually unplanned and varies in it’s length and intensity. Each person has a different sickness tolerance level before they let themselves be sick for a while. For a large portion of us, it’s a momentum killer. If you have been trying very hard to get something going, finally hit a stride and start to feel optimistic about the future then suddenly come down with an energy draining, motivation sucking, doozey of a cold/flu, it will often kill any forward motion you have created. Even when you come out of it and begin to feel normal again, the motivation is usually gone.

These are the moments that separate truly successful people from those that are simply lucky enough to have a great start. The person who is naturally motivated, has a great support system of friends and family, or just never gets sick doesn’t know the real struggle that a depressed person goes through. We have to remind ourselves of the reasons we had for doing our thing in the first place. That becomes harder each time we have a setback because we have already achieved the initial high that comes from starting something new. When that high is no longer able to sustain us, and we haven’t seen the huge success that we secretly wanted but knew we wouldn’t get, that’s what tests our true resolve. That’s when most of us fall short. We don’t quit because it stopped being fun or some other random accusation we usually get from our “kick in the ass” support group. It’s because we have a very hard time picking ourselves up when we get stopped by something beyond our control. It seems like nobody cares anyway so what’s the point. This is the point when we need the most encouragement and usually get it least often.

My Experience

It’s been two weeks since my last post. I wanted to make this a bi-weekly thing, but a fever got in the way of that. At least that is the reason for missing the first post. I had written some of my next post before the one week mark, but I let my cold be the excuse for a second time and forgave myself for missing two in a row. By the time is came to missing the third scheduled time, I had to start admitting to myself that I was letting my goals slip through my selfish, procrastinating fingers. I had rethought about the purpose of my blog and decided on a couple evolutionary changes, but thought and planning are pointless without actually writing anything. The difference this time is two-fold. First, what I’m writing about is something others want to know and I have the experience to share it. And second, it’s something I can write in a day or two and publish to my blog, then I’m done with that piece. It isn’t like my novel that will be years in the making before I can even see the end of the project. I can go from concept to published post in a matter of days, usually a week or two from start to finish. My need for immediate gratification is satisfied.

This blog satisfies my need for instant satisfaction because my goal with it is just to contribute consistently. Of course, I have further goals of eventually supporting myself with my writing, but that is still something I’m working out the details for. The goal here is only to be consistently posting. Essentially, I want to make a habit of writing that no other formula I’ve used has done yet.

It comes down to goal setting. At first my goal with my writing was to write something that the world really wanted to consume in such volumes that it would rocket me to stardom and make me enough money that I would never have to worry about it again. It would support my family, put my kids through college and pay for my retirement while still leaving enough behind that it could do those same things for my kids too. Nothing too greedy. Eventually, reality set in. First, I didn’t actually write that much very often. It’s hard to take the world by storm when the story they really want to read is still in my head. I talked about writing far more than I actually wrote. Then, I had to admit that my writing kind of sucked. While I had moments of pure brilliance, by the time they got from my head to the blank page, they seemed more like slightly better fertilizer than the crap around it. That really killed my motivation pretty hard. It was a few years before I could even find the courage to put my fingers on the keyboard again. Eventually I started hearing that I should break my goals into smaller goals. Then I had to translate that into something other than breaking my novel up into chapters and scenes. I’d already tried that and it didn’t give me enough to keep me going. I struck on the idea of short stories. That helped. I wrote a few and even finished three. But then life got in the way again. Other things needed my time, my wife and I fought about what I did locked up in my little writing closet, and I got sick. In the end, I just couldn’t find the point any more.

When my wife left, I decided to try again, this time as a copy writer doing marketing writing for clients. Again, the goal was to use my writing to earn a living. Although I found many clients that seemed to want to pay me for what I wrote, they all ultimately fell through. By that point, I had joined a writers’ group because I really wanted to find a way to make this into a career. After a bout of depression last fall that nearly killed me for the third time, I iterated again and decided to write more of these articles I’d written over the past few months. This turned out to be a good thing because I could do one in a short time and go on to the next one without having to go back again to the old ones.

I’m back to writing again after two weeks of not posting anything, so this just might be the thing I needed to give me the motivation to restart after stalling. Hopefully, I have made my goals small enough that I can feel like I’m reaching them and keep going. Maybe this is the thing that will get me writing on a regular basis.

If This is You

If you have gotten sick and are having a hard time rebooting and getting back into it, this might be a good time to revisit the reason you are writing in the first place.

Is it the money? Are you making enough to keep going? If not why? Most writers find that money is not motivating enough to keep going. It isn’t usually much, if any, for most of us. If you want to write for money, you need to learn what will actually earn money. Most of what you see online to make a living as a writer is other writers trying to sell you their own success plan. While that may work for you, its far more likely that you will simply end up paying their bills but making nearly nothing yourself. The simple truth is that you need to just write, and write a lot, then write some more, and eventully, you will learn what sells and maybe start to earn a living. It’s a long and dedicated process, but a few have made some money this way.

Is it for recognition? Are friends and family enough? Do they even notice? The writer’s I know don’t get a lot of recognition from their friends and families. A few of them get some from their social media networks, but that’s usually because they’ve put a significant amount of time and energy into cultivating their social media for that purpose. You can get recognition as a writer, but you have to put the effort into finding the people that want to read what you write.

Is it to get a message out there? Do you have an audience? Do you know what they want to hear/learn? The hardest part about this purpose is remembering that your content isn’t for you own entertainment or enlightenment. If you have a message you want to get out there, you need to be sure you find the audience that wants to hear that message and that they haven’t already heard it too many times to care. For example: if you are going to write about climate change, make sure you find an audience that agrees it needs to change and that they haven’t already heard enough to desensitize them to the message. If you are going to write about mental health, find an audience that wants the information you are writing about. Then give them information that is helpful to them.

Is it simply because you have an inner need to write that no amount of TV, Netflix, Facebook, reading, or music will ever satisfy? This is usually the easiest one to restart after a bout of sickness. It almost reboots itself as soon as you can sit up long enough to get the words down. These are the natural writers out there. You don’t have to try, you just write. You aren’t trying to please anyone or get anything from your writing. Your writing is an end of its own. The blank page is where you are most at home. Welcome to it and enjoy the ride.

For each of these reasons and others I neglected to list here, you need to remind yourself why you are writing in the first place. If the reason you have isn’t enough to get you back to the keyboard after a setback, then maybe you need to do a little more soul searching and see if “being a writer” is still in there, or if you just put it in there as a way to reach another goal. Either way, the soul searching should help you find what you are really doing here. If you want to keep the motivation going, you need to find something close to your heart that will kick you back into gear once you get back to your ‘normal’ life.

If This is Someone You Know

You have just nursed your spouse back from the dead and they are driving you mad with all the ideas that keep spilling out of their mouth that used to go onto the blank page. This can be a difficult position for you if you, like most spouses, have been trying to keep the household from falling to pieces as your significant other has taken themselves out of the world to make an attempt at the zombie life style for a while. You may have run out of patience days ago. You probably have issues coming up that is their area of specialty. You just don’t have the energy for their neediness anymore. They’re perfectly fine and you need them to just get their shit together and participate for once. But you know from past experience that if you said anything close to that, it would destroy their fragile ego and cause more pain, fighting and dissention than you can deal with right now.

So, what do you do? You pull out the loving kindness they fell in love with and you gently encourage them to get back to the passion that lets them express their inner self in ways that won’t tax your already short temper. You patiently listen to their dreams and quietly assure their insecurities. You stroke their ego just a little. You bake them some reward cookies; they get one for each chapter/article/short story they finish. You help them reconnect with the other writers that have been asking after their health. You remind them why they wanted to write in the first place. Essentially, you become the super support system that so many writers lack. For so many of us writers, our spouses are the real reason we have felt safe enough to pursue this insane passion in the first place. We count on your grounded reality to keep us from floating away on our dreams.

What is Means

Every writer has different ways of dealing with sickness. The secret to getting back to writing when you are better is to know why you write and caring enough about that thing that you will reboot yourself even when you don’t have the normal motivations that go with starting something new. When you find yourself stopped because of a cold/flu, the proof of your passion is what you do with it once you can function enough to put words in writing again. If you find yourself stalled and can’t restart, it’s time to dig deeper and find what you’re really made of. Is “writer” deep inside you somewhere or just a cool idea that you had when you were drunk one afternoon. If you really want to be a writer, this is the point you prove it. Not to your mom or dad, not to your wife, not to your boss, but to you, the one who won’t be convinced by delusions of grandeur. Nobody will be hurt if you aren’t a writer except your inner writer. If this is what you are, dig it up and get to it. Find a reason, find a way.

If this or any other article in my blog has hit a cord with you, write me and open the discussion. I’d love to hear from you.

The Encouragement Gap

We all know someone that needs encouragement. Most of us can also think of someone we admire. But, have you even stopped to really consider the point of view of those people that we disdain or out right condescend? How about from the other side of the picture? I’m sure you can remember times when you have felt the encouragement of the people around you: often when you were trying something new or hard. There’s probably a few among us that have felt the praise of others for the success we have reached. Can you remember the support you got after you had shown you could do something, but hadn’t yet mastered it enough to be recognised for success? In my own life that is the point I have given up on the things I could have been good at.

Can you remember your own children or kids you have known as they learn to do new things? While we see them learning something new or hard, we encourage them to “try your best” and “just keep going”. Once we’ve seen them do it for the hundredth time, we don’t give them the same attention. They might be lucky to get any acknowledgement at all. “Yes dear, that’s a pretty picture,” is the response many kids get while mom or dad doesn’t even take the time to actually look at the 20^th piece of art their child has brought them that day. Worse yet, some people look at the pictures and think, usually to themselves, “There’s nothing there. Why would you praise that? It’s just scribbles on a page.” However, things change again if that same child keeps drawing and coloring and, one day a few years later, they present an accurate representation of their favorite cartoon character. Suddenly that child deserves national attention and a specialised art school where he/she can culture those talents. But have you wondered where that talent came from and how they stayed with it long enough to get that far? Most parents would like to take some of the credit here, but let’s be honest, do you really think “yes dear,” is enough encouragement for a heart hungry for mom and dad’s admiration? Not for a second. Why do you think so few people who have real talent ever develop it? Because “yes dear,” isn’t enough for most of us. God forbid one of those kids actually hear someone call their ‘art’ “just scribbles.” You can almost watch their little hearts crushed under that ugliness called criticism that they don’t even understand.

How about when we notice someone we know has a talent or skill we think is valuable. If we’ve just noticed or they have recently started exploring that gift, most of us are very encouraging. What is your reaction when it’s their 50^th big sale, or their 30^th interesting blog post. I’d be willing to bet that it’s significantly smaller than the first few times. After all, it’s become the new norm. Who recognises normal. Even if each one is slightly better than the last one, we probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Some of us look at someone who is ‘faking it till they make it’ with their talent and we might call them pretentious or arrogant. Isn’t that the point of ‘faking till you make it’? Pretending we are good at something until we actually become good at it? Us artists don’t believe we can do it either, but someone early on told us to ‘keep at it’ and ‘push through’, so that’s what we are doing. That’s why it seems we are pretending, because even we think we are. The recognition returns when a milestone is met, but even that recognition is usually short lived until the person reaches a point that is impressive even amongst their peers. That is when the encouragement and recognition returns on an on-going basis, but by then we are so used to pretending that we still don’t believe the praise.

In my own experience, I’m usually able to find a lot of encouragement early in the process. As I get better at it though, I find it hard to stay motivated because my support group usually loses interest so when I share my achievements, it seems as though nobody cares. I sometimes even hear, “your writing isn’t all that good” or “the subject isn’t very interesting.” Take this blog for example. When people first find out I have it, they are all encouraging and most even read an article or two. Sometimes they will like or comment on them, I might get a phone call from them if they know me personally. But so far, no one outside my writers’ group has even recognised most of the articles I post. This is the hard part that I have to just ‘push through’ according to all the writing advice I’ve gotten. Most of the encouragement I get these last few days is the shallow ‘that’s cool’, kind of comments that carry no sincerity and even less commitment. I know that if I stick with it long enough that I will eventually gain an organic audience that wants to consume my writing. But how does a guy with very little self esteem find the motivation to do something when it seems like few actually care? I feel like I’m hitting the encouragement gap right now. That point where those closest to me have fulfilled the obligation to get me started, but I haven’t reached enough milestones to gain sincere appreciation from my own audience. More to the point, where can you get the motivation to persevere when your support system fails to hold you up?

The answer, for now, is from where ever you can find it. Join a club that you can share that activity with. Most hobby centered clubs I’ve been a part of are very encouraging to all the members regardless of where they are in the journey. I get a lot support from my writers’ group and dance club. I’ve also made some friendships from each one. When I get validation from one of those hobby groups, it feels real and sincere; having friends among these groups giving me that encouragement hits it home just a little harder. I think this is why nearly every podcast I listen to lists writing peers as the greater part of their friendships, because they were the ones to support them when the non-writers in their circles lagged in the encouragement department. Also, the podcasts I listen to feel like another community all together that I can rely on to always be there and be encouraging. The most valuable relationships for this kind of support are the ones the artist doesn’t need to earn.

If you are one of the non-artist types with an artist friend, this is the part where you can be most helpful. Don’t let your encouragement dwindle. In our quest to get better and better we have to make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes our quality will actual drop for a time as we learn the craft of our chosen discipline. Even when it does, keep the excitement up. Be genuinely happy to see what we present to you. Regardless of the end product, we have usually poured our heart and soul into the creation of it, but we never really believe it’s good enough for public consumption (just ask any successful author). The best ones among us join like-minded clubs to practice, get feedback, and improve. What we need you for is pure, plain joy. We share our passions with you because we really want you to appreciate what we have done. We don’t need you to critique it (unless we specifically ask for that, even then it’s best to direct us to a club or group), what we really need from our non-artist friends is unadulterated admiration or, in other words, unconditional love.

We are soft creatures, us creators. We need people that will help us protect our squishy insides from the harshness that is the public. Our best writing comes out when we manage to open our vulnerable hearts to the refreshing air and the healing rays of the sunshine. While we are trying ever harder to get in touch with that pure creativity at our core, we need our friends around us to ensure the air we expose ourselves to is actually clean and pristine, and not the fetid corruption of a waste dump in an industrial area. As each of us strives to let the sun shine on our creative embryo, it’s the job of our peers to provide a little water and shade to make sure we don’t burn up in the brilliance of our pure genius.

All pretty words aside, everyone who is trying to develop a talent needs to feel that they can screw up and still be noticed. That’s where you come in. Encourage them, especially when it seems they are lagging in motivation. Support them when they get past the joyful stage. Be the reason they keep going. You’ll only benefit from it in the long run. Wouldn’t like to say you know someone famous? I know, we’d all rather be famous than just say we know someone who is. But being the reason someone else followed their dream to fruition is a feeling like no other. Even fame and fortune can’t give you that.

If you need some encouragement drop me a line and tell me a little about yourself. If you’d like to help me out, share this post with your social media friends and help me get my message to more people like you. Either way, I’d love to hear from you.