5 Steps to Never Be Bored or Tired at Work Again. Seriously.

We talked last time about the importance of connecting your personal purpose to your job. Getting that right is the easiest way to drive energy when you go to work every day, especially and specifically when you are working in your zone of genius and doing what you love to do and do best.

 But how do you keep all that positive energy over the long run? You have to guard it. Protect it. Staying on purpose will help you do this, but you also need to do more. You have to learn to preserve that precious spark. But how?

Preserve the spark!

A good friend of mine who is also a client named Andrew was wonderfully on purpose. He was a doctor, founder, visionary, and CEO of his company. Every Monday, he ran his team meetings, just like a good CEO is supposed to do, right?

Well, that’s what he thought a good CEO was supposed to do. One day, I watched him lead a meeting and saw how it sapped his normally high state of energy. Afterwards, I asked him why he ran the meetings.

“That’s what CEOs are supposed to do, isn’t it?” he quipped.

“Not necessarily,” I replied. “Who would you choose to run a meeting if you couldn’t be there? Who obviously gets energy from running a meeting?”

“Oh, that would be my COO, Steve,” Andrew replied.

“Ask Steve to run the meetings and see how it goes,” I suggested.

So he did, and his energy stayed high because he was able to be the visionary in the room and set the tone. Meanwhile, Steve organized the meeting’s topics and saw to it that everyone felt included, and assigned follow-up as needed. In other words, he ran a successful meeting, which meant that Steve as well as Andrew received an energy boost.

During the last couple of months, I’ve noticed my own energy flagging every time I thought about all the things that hadn't been done in the company: SOPs, new product development, things I have to do as a founder. So, I took the selfish step of clearing my calendar for several days and saying no to my team and customer request for meetings. I even canceled a team retreat, just like that.

What I got for my act of boldness was a huge rush of energy that came from knowing now I had all this time set aside to get stuff done. My energy went up. I was able to feel it in my body. I got it done and am now back to doing what I love to do—working with business owners to scale their purpose. Here's an exercise you can do to guard your energy in five easy steps:

1.  Go back over the last year—you can shorten the period if you want—and rank every meeting in terms of energy up versus energy down. (No neutrals!)

2.  Group the energy-down meetings in one bucket and the energy-up meetings in another.

3.  Categorize your energy drainers and your energy boosters. What makes them enervating or exhilarating?

4.  Minimize the drainers by delegating some of the things you know someone else could do as well or better than you.

5.  If you have to do a drainer yourself, schedule time for it and don’t waver in your commitment to getting it done.

I want to spend 95% of my time in my purpose, my zone of genius, and my energizers, and hire people around me who are energized by the things that drain me. How about you? Your most intense sources of energy are your purpose and zone of genius. Determine your energizers. Then get busy guarding them. And let us know how you’re doing on this journey.