Rebuild your energy to accelerate into the New Year
By: Jennifer Clamp, Founder Coach
Tags: New Year, Coaching, Energy, Resilience, Resolutions

In my article, ‘To the Holiday Finish Line’ I spoke about how the build-up to Christmas and getting your business prepared for time off can feel like a race against time, and you can end up feeling exhausted from the demanding deadlines you set yourself. Even just trying to remember to wish everybody in your contact list a ‘“Merry Christmas” can feel like an impossible task, and soon the festive period feels less energising and more draining — and when you’re low in resilience this is made even worse.

I was reminded of how we hold back when we aren’t feeling resilient while in conversation with one of my clients. She’d been looking to make a number of changes, including immigrating to a new country and finding a new role. She has big ambitions for her career. However in this session, while talking about her ideal role, she wanted to keep as much as possible the same saying “I don’t have the energy right now.”

This resonated with me and I really understood her, because when you are handling big changes it depletes your energy levels and your resilience can run low, you don’t want to push or challenge yourself — you can’t do the things that you would normally do easily. I admired her self-awareness and self-compassion, that she recognised all that she is taking on and gave herself space to adjust.

Resourcing yourself for the best year yet

Resilience is a renewable resource

So what is resilience? When we think of resilience, we often think of it as something to aspire to have, and can forget to recognise that we already possess it. When you have resilience, you will have the energy to take a risk or extend yourself; to try out for a new role, to reach out to new leads with cold calls. Or simply navigate the daily challenges of running a business.

Being resilient isn’t a character trait, it’s more like a resource you can draw from when you need it. Like savings in the bank.

How do you know when your resilience is low?

There are many indicators that your resilience is running low, such as when things that are usually easy seem hard, like getting stuck in a conversation and not knowing what to say when normally you would have navigated it easily. Or perhaps, hearing yourself say: “I don’t have the energy for this right now”, or “I just can’t deal with that person today.”

Other indicators include:

Feeling out of control

Finding it hard to stay positive

Not wanting to make even one more decision

This can happen any one of us — it’s important to be aware and take action when you start to recognise the signs — to make sure it doesn’t get so low that you can do what’s required to refill it — that’s when you reach burnout.

Low resilience can leave you not wanting to make one more decision

How to protect your resilience

There are structures you can put in place to keep your resilience levels from getting too low. Think of it like breakdown cover.

You’re on a road-trip, but then your car breaks down. What do you do? Probably call for Roadside Assistance? You use your phone to call a friend. Pop your hazards on, put out your emergency warning triangle, maybe even remember the motorway services you passed a few miles back. You go through a plan in your head to get yourself out of a crisis and you calmly execute the steps.

But when your resource levels are low, how do you react to the same situation? Rest your head on the steering wheel and wonder why you ever left home? When you’ve run down your resilience, it feels like it’s just ‘one more thing’, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So how does this translate to structures you can put in place to support your resilience? Let’s look at it this way:

Phone call to a friend: supportive relationships

Plan to get out of a crisis: your mindset

Roadside Assistance and your phone: your tools

Motorway Services: a safe place to retreat to

Composure: your wellbeing

A Resilience Checklist

⌦ Supportive relationships: identify who the people are in your circle that leave you feeling energised when you spend time with them. People that you can rely on.

⌦ Mindset: connect into what you’re capable of, what you’ve achieved in the past and what is most important to you in life. Choose positive, encouraging language when talking to yourself in your head.

⌦ Resources: financial resources and tools, such as your laptop, CRM and software systems, advisors or a team you can delegate to.

⌦ Safe place: somewhere you feel settled and secure. This might be a physical place or even just personal space you carve out in your schedule to focus on yourself, reflect and experiment.

⌦ Wellbeing: physical and mental, are you getting enough sleep, eating well and taking time to exercise and look after yourself?

Putting these structures in place will give you deeper reserves when you need to draw on your resilience, when you want to stretch yourself or need to get through a challenging time.

How coaching can help build resilience

When a couple of the items on the Resilience Checklist are low, you can rely on the others. When too many are low at once and life throws you a challenge, that’s when things can start to get wobbly.

A coach offers a supportive relationship and creates a safe space, free from judgement, to express doubts and expand your options. A coach is a resource you can draw on to work through a decision. They can help you identify the structures that will best support you when your resilience is low — and they can help you to create the space you need to refill when your reserves have been depleted.

How well resourced are you?