Your Energy Is a Currency - Here's Why Most People Spend It Wrong
She fought cancer three times. 3x!!
I witnessed my friend ‘Sarah’ navigate multiple cancer diagnoses. Three different times in her life she pivoted from her demanding executive role, her trainings for a marathon, her exploration of a side business, her personal joys of travel. She knows all too well that those ambitious dreams and demands and get shelved when her body demands something else - survival.
These moments taught me a truth that changed how I view success. A healthy person carries multiple dreams, pursuits, and aspirations simultaneously. But illness has a way of focusing everything down to a single, overwhelming priority of getting well.
Health Creates Bandwidth
When you're truly well, with solid energy, a clear mind, and a stable emotional foundation, your capacity for goal-setting expands significantly. You feel powerful to nurture career ambitions, maintain meaningful relationships, pursue creative openings, contribute to your community, and invest in personal growth.
Think about your best mornings. You wake up feeling rested and energized. You can think about advancing your leadership skills while also planning a weekend adventure with friends, considering a new fitness challenge, and dreaming about that business idea you've been nurturing. Wellbeing creates space for multiple paths of growth and fulfillment.
But when our health becomes compromised, our focus narrows to survival and recovery. The person with chronic fatigue doesn't think about her next promotion; she thinks about making it through the workday. The entrepreneur with anxiety doesn't plan his next creative project; he focuses on finding peace in his mind.
This narrowing of goals during illness is a sophisticated survival mechanism that allows us to channel our limited energy towards restoration.
Leadership Connection
The leader who maintains her/his wellness, prioritizes sleep, manages stress effectively, maintains boundaries, and addresses problems before they become crises has the cognitive and emotional bandwidth to hold complex ideas, make nuanced decisions, and support multiple team members simultaneously.
I've watched many brilliant leaders neglect their health and eventually find themselves in crisis management mode, putting out fires rather than building something meaningful.
Redefining Success
Isn’t it time (overtime) to redefine success to include the maintenance of health as a primary achievement, not just a secondary consideration? When we choose nutrition, sleep and exersize over powering through more work, when we choose rest over overcommitment, or seek therapy when struggling emotionally, or address physical symptoms rather than ignoring them or covering them up with meds, we are investing in our future capacity for multiple goals and dreams. Consider these principles:
Energy as Currency: Your energy is finite and precious. A healthy person has more energy to pursue life effectively.
Prevention as a Strategy: Investing in wellness is strategic. Time you spend maintaining your health multiplies your capacity for everything else you want to achieve.
Seasons of Focus: Sometimes, having "one goal" of getting well, healing, and recovering is just what's needed to invest in your future.
Integration: True wellness is the integration of physical vitality, emotional intelligence, mental clarity, and purposeful living. We operate best when we integrate wellness to everything else we do or dream to do.
The Ripple Effect
It becomes clear to us and others that with a foundation of integrated health and wellness, our energy is contagious, our leadership more effective, our relationships more fulfilling, and our contributions more significant.
Sarah beat cancer three times. Her life story is powerful because she has fought for it (literally) many times. Each time she rebuilt her life with a deeper understanding of what truly mattered, with better boundaries, and with a strong commitment to maintaining the wellness that made everything else possible.
It’s a learning we all discover and embrace, if we are lucky (and wise).