Energy Audit - Learning How To Do Less Better

Welcome to A New Life podcast with Pamela Jean, where it's all about empowering women to empower more women. Get ready, friends, to create a new life. And here is your host, Pamela Jean.

Hello, my friends. Welcome to this episode of A New Life podcast. This is Pamela Jean. I'm your host today. Today's topic is about doing an energy audit. Before we get to that, I want to ask a favor of you. If you are enjoying this podcast and you know someone that could benefit from hearing our uplifting motivational topics and really, really would love what you're listening to right now today, please share this podcast. I would love to grow this community so we can bring so much goodness into the world. Not just for you and I having our chat today. Build and grow this community into being the best world that we can make it. So as I said, today's topic is doing an energy audit. Have you ever thought about how many things that you do every single day that you are committed to that absolutely drain your energy? And you've done these things for so long, you have no idea how to stop doing them. It just becomes part of your routine and then you resent yourself half of the things that you have to do every single day because it absolutely drains your energy. I want to talk about doing an audit today. So have you ever thought about this? Working less actually has more impact. Working less, it's true. When you do less better, big things happen. And shift. The first thing to the first step to doing an energy audit and figuring out how to do less better is to truly look at all of the things that you have going on in your life that gives you energy, that energizes you, that sets your soul on fire, and the things that drain you. So if you want to get out a notebook, go ahead and do that. Have a notebook and a pen ready almost every time you hop on a podcast with me. Get a notebook and pen ready because you're going to want to make notes. I want you to put on the left side what energizes me and on the right side what drains me. Also, before I get started, here is another thing. I will have the energy audit workbook pages in the show notes. So if you want to pause this podcast, download those, print them off, then you will be ready to do the homework with me. Or you can just do it on a blank piece of paper. It's up to you. So on the left side, you are going to write things down that energize everything that you do in your life. Think about today. Think about tomorrow, think about your whole week. What energizes you? For me, some of the things that I put down is my church. I love my church. It's a place where I get connected. It energizes me and I leave feeling amazing after I've been to my church. The gym, I love the gym. I've been going to the gym five mornings a week for the last five, nine years. Nine years. Oh my gosh, I still love it. Nine years at five o' clock in the morning. Absolutely love the gym. It energizes me. Time with my girlfriends, you know, friends we have to have time with friends. We do. We need good quality girlfriend time. So time with your girlfriends. Time with my husband. I love my time with him. We have such a great time together. So I love having time with him. My family sets me on fire. When I know my kids are going to be in town or my grandkids are coming or I get to see them. That of course energizes as me and my work. I love my work, absolutely love my work. I love what I do. I love impacting other people's lives. I love helping women that are high performing, high achieving women live a balanced life and a balanced business or career because you know how that is. You might be excelling in your business or your career, but everything happening in your personal life is out of balance and not going well or vice versa. So it's important to learn how to have both. You can have both. That's part of the work that I do and that absolutely sets me on fire now. Things that drain me. I'm going to be really honest with you. I have done this work for so long, there isn't anything in my life, honestly that drains me. I don't allow it. I've eliminated those things a long time ago. But if you're new to the work, you have the things that drain you, that you're committed to, that you don't want to do, you don't enjoy. It sucks the life out of you. So I'm just going to give you some ideas. So maybe one of them is bad relationship. Maybe you have a bad relationship with your mother in law or sister, your parents, your spouse. The relationship just absolutely drains you. Maybe you're in a situation where you have a co worker that drains you. That person you dread to see every day when you walk into the office or into your place of work, you just, it's like, oh, this person just sucks the life out of me. Maybe something that drains you is something that Brings you pain from the past. Like visiting a childhood home or a place from the past, that when you go there, it just drains you. It hurts your heart. Maybe it's the gym. Maybe you're not like me and you don't love the gym. Going to the gym is work. It drains you. It's not fun. Your job. What if you're stuck in a job where you need the money financially, you can't make a move, but you're stuck, it drains you, and you're stuck in the job. What if you volunteer at your kid's school and you have overextended your time and the volunteering is no longer fun? That when you see the thing pop up that you have to go take care of, it drains you. You dread it. You don't want to do it. You wish you could just not show up. So those are some examples of what might drain a person. But take the time to write down the things that energize you, bring you joy, and the things that drain you. And be really, really honest and transparent. If you lie to yourself about how you feel or pretending that your feelings aren't real, you're not going to be able to level up and move forward and create balance in your life. You're just telling yourself a lie. So don't do that. Be honest with yourself about what drains you. And it might even be something like this. And I hate to say this, but if you're a parent whose kids are home from school for the summer, your kids might be draining you right now. I mean, you love your children. I totally get it. But when they're not in their normal school routine and neither are you, your kids might drain you. It's okay. Just be honest with yourself so you can help create a roadmap and a good, healthy strategy and create a new system and process for your life. So there are typically five categories that your responses are going to fall into, and it's important that we understand those categories. The first category are people. It's people that drain you, or people that energize you. Places, things, habits and thoughts. So the next assignment here is for you to look at the list that you just created of all the things that energize you and the things that drain you. And you're going to separate each of those items into those categories. So write on your paper or look at your download. The second page of your download where it says, people who energize me. People who drain me. People, places that energize. Places that drain things that energize. Things that drain Habits that energize. Habits that drain Thoughts that energize. Thoughts that drain. So take a moment to write all of those things out and then I want you to separate each of those categories. All of the things you put on your first page, separate those into the proper category. Because what we're going to be doing is working on a strategy to eliminate the things that drain you and amplify the things that energy that energize you. We want you to do more of the things that you love the most, not more of the things that drain you the most. You know, some of the things you know, people that energize you might be, you know, your spouse, your friends, your family. People who drain me would be those hard relationships which could be spouse, friends, family. Because it goes both ways. It goes both both ways. Places that energize. Church, the gym, work. Places that drain might be your old hometown. It might be going to the grocery store. That's not one of my favorite things. I can't stand going to the grocery store. So there's places that will drain you. Things that drain you. Things that drain you might be cleaning the house, shopping. Those are things that can drain you. Doing bookwork, paying your taxes. Those are things that drain you. Habits that energize. Working out that energizes me. Habits that drain. Being a couch potato after dinner. If the first thing you do after dinner is go sit on the sofa and you waste three, four, five hours of the evening just sitting there watching Netflix, that's going to drain you. There's so many positive, amazing things that you could be doing in that time that would better serve you and better serve the people around you than sitting watching Netflix for four hours every night. Drinking habits that drain. Vaping ice cream at bedtime, drinking wine every night. Those are all things that can drain you and that are not serving you well. Thoughts that energize Growing business. I think about growing my business and changing and serving my clients better all of the time. That never, never leaves my brain. I think about that all the time of how I can do something better, how it can be, how it can impact more. The next podcast. Everything about my business absolutely energizes my thoughts. And it doesn't always have to be about business. It can be about a variety of different things. Thoughts that drain you could be what you say to yourself, I am not enough. You self sabotage in your thinking. You have low self esteem and your thoughts just feed right into that. Those are all thoughts that drain you. Thoughts that drain you could be financial fear. You don't have enough money to make ends meet. Those are all things that are going to drain you. So after you have done all of that and categorized everything, it's important for you to start creating a process and a strategy to take action. It's obvious that you're going to do more of the things that energize and less of the things that drain you. But honestly, that's easier said than done. It's easy to say, oh well, duh. Takes do more of the energizing things and less of the draining things, but it takes time. Taking action means tactfully and strategically eliminating the things that drain you. Look at each of the lists and put them in a priority order. Start addressing the items with the easiest things. You'll build up to the hard thing that drains you, because that typically is going to be something that's going to take extra, extra work. But if it's a simple thing like it drains you to volunteer for your kid's pto. Stop saying yes. Just stop saying yes. No can be your very best friend. It doesn't mean that you're no longer going to support the PTO or support the school. Perhaps you're going to serve the school and your kids class differently. One idea would be to give more monetarily, if you can, to take on projects that are behind the scenes, that you don't have to actually be there over your lunch hour or before or after school. You can take on those projects when it fits into your schedule so it's less draining. Projects that would be less taxing overall is what you're going to volunteer for. And friends, I want to jump back just a little bit to stop saying yes. You know, I think women especially are wired to please. We are pleasers. We want everyone to be happy. And if everyone in the world is happy, then we can be happy. That feeds right into dysfunctional codependency, which, that's a completely different podcast topic. But anyway, we are people pleasers. We are yes people, or yes, women. So I want you to think of it this way. If you say yes to something, you say yes to something. That means you're going to be saying no to something else. If we're honest, our plates are full. We have our plates so full with activities, with work, with projects, with volunteering, our plates are full. If we're saying yes to one more thing, it doesn't mean we can add more to the plate. That means something that's already on the plate is going to suffer. That means something on the plate is going to be neglected and something that is already there is going to go to the wayside. Unfortunately, more times than not, what that ends up being. The thing is, the people that mean the most to us, our family, our children, our friends, that's what gets said no to more than anything else. And if you think about it that way, will this yes impede on time with my family? Will it take time away from my children? You know, at the end of your life, your kids are never going to say, wow, mom sure took on extra shifts. I'm so happy she took on those extra shifts. No, your kids are going to say, I wish mom would have been around more. I wish she could have done more things with us. I wish we had more time. Not time to go back to work or to do things without them, but to be with your children. We get our yeses saying yes to so many different things that the people that are the best part of us get the least of us. The people that make us who we are as mothers and parents and human beings, they are the ones that gets the worst of us, the leftovers. So be really mindful when you're saying yeses. If you're saying yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else that you're currently doing. So make sure that the yes is important, that it's serving you, it's serving your family, it's serving your children. And if it doesn't, it can be no right now. No doesn't mean no forever, but no right now, that's not going to fit into my calendar right now. Check with me in a few months. No doesn't mean no forever. It's just no right now. And really assess the yes before you give the yes. Another really good example, let's say a place that drains you. Maybe it's your childhood home because you didn't have a very good home life, that there was a lot happening there. That still brings up some sad emotions and some pain. Today you still have that. You go to that home, you feel the heaviness, you feel the anger, you feel the sadness, you feel the pain of a place. I've definitely felt that before. Where you go to a place and you can just feel the heaviness, it's still with you, but you still have elderly parents and they still live in your childhood home. What are you going to do, just not see your parents? Of course not. But you can create strategy. You can create a plan that does not Feed the part that drains you, that hurts you, that just makes it very painful to go there. What if you agree to meet your parents at a neutral location? Maybe invite them to your home, meet them at a restaurant. If they're not able to drive, then pick them up and take them out for the day. You can still nurture a healthy relationship with your family, with your parents, with a healthy boundary from the place that drains you. You know, you don't have to go into any place that you don't want to go. Everything is figureoutable. Get out of your way. We are so good at getting in our own way and feel like, nope, I just have to do it, I have to go home. Well, maybe you meet your parents on neutral ground. Get out of your own way and make it happen. Just make it happen. So ultimately you're going to create a strategy to decrease the draining list and increase the energizing list. To live a balanced life and have a balanced business or career, you have to get rid of the things that drain you, that hold you back, that keep you from living your best life. The things people, places, thoughts and habits that suck the life out of you. You have to get rid of those things. Ultimately, you are responsible for what you allow in your life. You are responsible for everything that is in your life right now because of choices and decisions that you've made. You are the gatekeeper of you. It's time to stop blaming other people, playing the victim, blaming your circumstances and allowing your past history to suck the life out of you and drain you. To reach high levels of success, the energy has to be high. You have to love what you do with purpose and passion. When your energy is aligned in all categories. Truly, truly, the sky is the limit. It really, really is. I want for you to have a profession with a purpose, volunteer with a purpose, make an impact, make a difference in this world. And the only way you're going to reach that true high level performance is to get rid of the things that drain you and multiply the things that are energizing you. My friends, thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you downloaded the worksheet. It's much better to do the worksheet as opposed to just scribble it on your own notebook. So I hope you've downloaded that. Check out the link in the show notes and you can go ahead and download that workbook. Reach out to me@pamela jean.anew life.com to schedule a virtual coffee. I would love to visit with you and see if I can help you strategize the energy that you have in your life right now. And I would love to visit with you about living the life of your dreams. You can live your very best life, friends. It's all up to you. You are the gatekeeper for what happens in your life. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate and comment. I would love your comments and your reviews. That's so helpful in building and growing this community. If you have a friend that you know that needs to hear this today, please pass it on to them. Subscribe and like the podcast so we can grow this community and elev all the women in our lives. My friend, thank you so much for being here and we'll talk to you soon.

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