Feel weak, drained? Hitting glass ceiling? Think that your growth is in dead end? Anxious?
If so, your must recharge yourself in one or more of personal power dimensions: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Spiritual.
by aeter
In The Power of Full Engagement the authors state that in order to achieve sustained peak performance you need to be:
- Physically energized.
- Emotionally connected.
- Mentally focused.
- Spiritually aligned.
Physically energized
There are three ingredients to empower yourself physically:
- Breathing right. Thinking and controlling breath seemed to me over-kill. I started to notice I sometime take really deep inhales, It helps me to focus, switch gears. It recharges me.
- Eating right. This one is my favorite. I strongly believe in eating right. The following post was inspired by the book - Food, Energy, And Day Rhythm. I also like blogrdoc’s “Eat no food that makes a health claim”.
- Sleeping right. The authors recommend 7 to 9 hours of quality sleep. Sleeping less is killing, more sleep kills too. I stopped staying awake until midnight and beyond. I wake up earlier and full of energy.
Emotionally connected
Emotional resilience – active engagement with others’ and personal emotions - is the other energy source for personal power.
I was totally drained emotionally lately. Both work and family are the sources of the drainage.
The authors recommend switching channels. So I did. I started focusing on positive emotions both at home and at work. I switched off all sources of negative emotions. I do not ignore it, I do handle the situations but I never get stuck on it. I move on to the positive emotions sources.
I also started to apply Mike King’s morning smiling technique he describes in his A great way to Start and Finish Every Day.
I feel much less drained and with much more motivation to cope with more challenges.
Mentally focused
Mental acuity – intellectual challenge. What do you feel right after you solved tricky problem? Empowered, satisfied, ready to another fight. Right? What do you feel doing tedious work? Boredom. Mental atrophy.
I am always looking for interesting jobs, challenges. When there is none, I make up them, solve it and publish on my technical, other blog. When I finally post and share the solution I feel empowered. Would you?
Spiritually aligned
Spiritual capacity - periodically revisiting deepest personal values. Few of my values are:
- Honesty
- Loyalty
- Respect
- Openness
- Partnership
- Calculated recklessness …
Got values? Stick to it and you will never feel spiritually down.
Flat-liner
The authors say without stretching you muscles - physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual - your life becomes flat-liner. Flat-liner life is atrophy that kills. Push yourself out of your comfort zone, stretch your muscles, get fully engaged, feel the power. The Power of Full Engagement
P.S. Yes, it is Russian in the beginning. It goes like this:
“Amerikanskaya firma Transceptor (not sure here…) Technology pristupila k proizvodstvu computerov Personalnii Sputnik”
Which means “American company Transceptor (not sure here…) Technology just started producing computers named Personal Satellite”.
13 comments ↓
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Tina Russell
Thanks for mentioning my suggestion of smiling every day Alik, glad it has made some difference for you. This is a great summary of what this book has in it and how its affected you. Thanks for the recommendation!
You are too kind to attribute that wonderful phrase to me. Ofcourse, like most of my posts, they are wisdoms I have heard from somewhere else, in that case Michael Pollan.
Regarding multiple dimensions, I really believe that the key to life is recognizing the multi-faceted nature of things. With all the rage of ’simplicity’, the reality is that nature of things often has more than one dimension.
@Tina Russell - great to hear.
@Mike King - looking forward to reading more suggestions on your blog.
@blogrdoc - totally with you. This book helped me to embrace few life dimensions. My feeling that I can now better control my life energy, investing in the “right” places, letting go in others.
[…] ← 4 Dimensions Of Personal Power […]
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Hi Alik,
nice site, look forward to reading more.
mental, physical, spiritual dimensions = aka mind, body, and soul. While most think they are 3 separate entities that form who you are, I feel that the mental and physical dimensions compose the “physical” component of your “self” and the spiritual dimension makes up the “non-physical” component.
Emotions, I think have more to do with being a “signaling mechanism” of how well you are doing. Feeling crappy? probably a sign something is wrong. Feeling joyous? probably a sign something is right.
Therefore, I’m not too sure one can work on one’s emotions directly. Rather, one must work on the other aspects of one’s make-up (physical and non-physical), and then the positive emotions follow.
Tola
Tola, I definitely disagree here about not having direct control on one’s emotions. They are simply a choice for you to make in every response in life and it takes work to change your natural reactions, but you can definitely change them and control your emotions. Its not just happy and sad, but anger, jealousy, fear, loneliness, etc, etc. It IS all in your direct control, its just something that needs to be learned.
Hey Mike,
I agree with what you are saying. I think we are disagreeing with what it means to have “DIRECT CONTROL.” I see emotions as being a signaling mechanism for your life, meaning, you have to change some other aspect of your being (mind, body or soul), and your emotions respond to these choices you make. They tell you whether you are on the right track.
You said it yourself, emotions are a choice you make in response to life.
If I’m misunderstanding what you are saying, please tell me how you can directly change your emotions, without changing some other aspect of yourself first?
Mike, Tola. Here is my take on this.
Emotions can be directly controlled - not suppressed, but controlled. I can tell you i control it much better now than before.
How I did it? Change (or clearly define) core values., be aware of what is worth to spend energy on. Emotions are huge energy spender (Mike, just like exceptions in software, exceptions utilize resources unless you handle it gracefully, you must know it, right?).
W/r to signals – I agree too. I adopted radio dial metaphor http://thebookshare.blogspot.com/2007/08/your-thoughts-create-your-feelings.html. Many actions (or more precisely reactions) are based on emotions. Emotions is our interpretation of reality. If emotions are negative, so are the reactions for these emotions. Loss of more energy. That way when I am in the situation of bad emotions, I tune myself to a “better radio wave” to steer away from energy loss.
In software sometimes even better to not capture exceptions to avoid performance hits, so do I in my life – I just ignore my inner impulse for bad emotions. I feel it but ignore it. Then it vanishes. I move on.
You won’t believe how dramatically this technique changed my life. For me it works. Sometimes people shout at me “how can you be so calm!! Do something!”, “Do what? Yell and shout? We missed the train, the game is lost, let’s go home and do our homework to win next time”
Makes sense?
Minor differences obviously just in how we think of control. Yes, we do control them, and yes, that must be done by making some kind of changes so I guess we’re all saying the same things then.
Alik, I like your analogy with ignoring exceptions. I was thinking that is how we control it directly, choosing to ignore the ones we don’t want and responding to the ones we do. It makes sense to me!
[…] do you manage your emotional energy? How do you use your emotions to motivate yourself and […]
Alik -
You’ve articulated rather well in this article about these four dimensions that are important in our life. Mind - for vitality of our thoughts, Body - for the vitality of our existence, soul - for the vitality of our consciousness and emotions - for the vitality of actions.
Thanks for the insight.
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