Full Speed Ahead! Use Daily Drivers to Energize Your Life
Nothing keeps my motor humming along like my purpose. My purpose is what makes it fairly easy for me to get up at 4 a.m. for a 6 a.m. flight or get home at midnight, catch a few hours of sleep, and and then be out of bed and primed for my first call at 9 a.m. The coffee helps, but the purpose is the real source of energy.
Yet this is not to say purpose alone can keep us at peak focus and energy. Sometimes, our purpose gets swamped in the day-to-day grind. And that’s where daily rituals come into play. It’s not sheer luck that makes some days energizing and others exhausting. You can influence your energy by virtue of how you structure your days, weeks, and even years. It just takes a little planning. Are you ready?
Earlier in my career, Nick Van Nice was my personal coach; today Nick is still my coach and also a personal coach at ScalePassion, working with our clients to help founders, entrepreneurs and leaders integrate their personal and professional lives into a single vision. “I believe in the whole person paradigm,” explains Nick. “If I'm healthy and my relationships are healthy, and I'm physically and emotionally healthy, and I'm spiritually connected to my purpose and the thing I’m trying to create, people will resonate with that. It’s a very powerful and attractive quality.”
Nick wrote an article on managing resonant energy that I encourage you to read. But one of his key points is that “leaders must prioritize self-care and well-being to sustain their vitality and avoid burnout.” They can do so, wrote Nick, “by designing their daily routines/habits in great detail.” One trick involves setting up “gateway habits” that serve as prompts for productive activities during the day, such as prepping your workout gear for the next day to make that morning run just a bit more automatic.
We take Nick’s wisdom (and experience) to heart. I aim to work out at least four times a week, have regular date nights with my wife, meet bi-weekly with my personal coach, and rely on several daily drivers to keep me focused, in my zone of genius, and on purpose.
Here’s a sample weekly tracker for my daily habits:
Each day I check in with my personal flight plan to ensure I’m fulfilling my purpose as a leader, husband, friend, and dad as I pursue my personal and professional goals. I do the same with my Scale Passion flight plan. I take 15 or 20 minutes to meditate, which enables me to face the day’s challenges with an open mind and heart and an attitude of gratitude and a mindset of abundance for the opportunities I’ve enjoyed to make a difference.
I clear my inbox down to zero, clearing my mind of distractions to focus on the things that matter most right now.
The bi-weekly meetings with my life coach keep me accountable when I’m dropping the ball and help me reorient when one priority, say work travel, throws another top priority, say my family life, out of whack.
There. I feel better just having written all this down. Now I’m off to work, ready to answer your call and help you live and work full speed ahead.