The 5 Batteries

Are your batteries full or empty?

I was just so tired. These are the words I said to my coach only a couple of months ago. And I felt it. I felt completely drained. I felt angry. I was once told that I saw life with humour and positivity but I couldn’t see anything funny or sunny anymore. I didn’t understand.

My coach ordered me to rest. Rest? I don’t do rest well. That is what the coach ordered and I’m a good student. Thus I rested.

If you look back a few weeks, you will see I blogged about this already. As I mentioned during my weekend of rest I did research. Research that started out with why I thought rest was “selfish” as I put it. That is something for another day, another blog, maybe. Today I want to talk about where that research lead me.

I had scheduled a November talk about creating space. That was what I was going to talk about. I called it avoiding burnout but the premise/idea was to talk about creating space. (I’ll cover the concept of creating space in future talk or in a blog post) Yes, there I was on Thanksgiving weekend journaling about rest and I ended up googling for clarity. I have found on more than one occasion that I have these ideas of what words mean to me. Then I google them and am shocked that the meanings, the definitions, are so different than what I think. Selfish is one of them. This lead me down a google rabbit hole (ever been down one of those?). It’s a real thing. At least for me.

Somehow that google rabbit hole lead me to research burnout. I then realized that I was likely experiencing burnout. The more I looked at it, the more I was certain that more of the people around me were suffering from burnout too. This leads me to more research. I needed to know how to recover, how to avoid it in the future. During my research I learned about 5 batteries that should be kept full. At the very minimum they shouldn’t be used to empty. I realized that most of my 5 batteries were empty.

Over the last number of weeks, I’ve been working to fill those batteries. Starting with the one I thought was the most repeated. I also changed the premise of our Talk to share what I found and how to recover. In that talk, I shared the concept of the 5 batteries. Yet, it doesn’t feel like I’ve done enough to bring awareness to this. Thus, I’m here with you today to tell you about the 5 batteries. This isn’t my idea but I thought it was simple and it made sense that the world today had stripped me of the things I used to do to fill these batteries. I understood that I needed to find new ways to fill them. I also knew I had to do it with intention. Would you like to learn about the 5 batteries? Great!

Pull out a piece of paper and draw 5 batteries on it. Underneath each battery, give them one of the following labels:

– Rest
– Play
– Social
– Alone
– Health

Now colour in each of the batteries based on where you think your battery level is for each. If you aren’t sure. Trust yourself, trust your unconscious. Take a deep breath and as you exhale, draw the line to indicate the level your battery is at. Don’t think about, just draw it.

Hopefully you have an idea of how healthy your batteries are. Let’s take a quick look with examples:

Rest: Sometimes, we need to just do nothing. We need rest. The key is to give yourself permission to rest. Examples: read a book – particularly a book that has nothing to do with productivity, your industry or making yourself better, go outside and connect with nature, curl up on the couch. Rest can also be playing board games with friends.

Play: This is the other side of the coin to rest. The idea is to create space by doing things that we don’t take seriously. Give yourself permission to have fun, to laugh, to be silly, to make mistakes. Examples: play a board game, craft, go out and play with your kids.

Social: We are wired to connect. Being longely can be draining and add to your stress. Connecting can allow you to relax. Examples: have good quality moments with family – baking day, date night with your spouce, cocktail hour with friends, a play session with your pet.

Alone: this is the other side of social. We need both. We do need time to ourselves. We need time to reflect, process and just see where we are at. Examples: Meditation, bath, reading, going for a walk.

Health: Mind and body. Examples: Sleep, good food, exercise.

Now look at your coloured in batteries. Which one was low? Can you make some changes to include some time for that? Maybe you need to get up 15 minutes earlier to grab some alone time before everyone is up. Maybe you can work with your lover, parther, spouce to give you some time alone (and I don’t mean to do grocery shopping). I’m an introvert, alone time is important to me most of the time. With my husband and I both working from home, it seems that alone time has become a luxury. I love my husband, I really really like him even. I enjoy his company actually. Yet, I still need my alone time. We both do. We now work together to give each other that time.

I’ve looked at my batteries and am working to fill them up. I need to be intentional now about it because things I did automatically to keep them full are not available to me now or are in short supply.

Filling these batteries isn’t all I’ve done. I’ve done a Quantium Time Release which helped me release a lot of negative feeling and energy that was draining my batteries faster than I could fill them. I’ve also been open and honest about this part of my journey. Giving myself permission to be vulnerable and opening the door to others to be just as vulnerable. When we talk about it out loud it just seems to have less of a hold on us.

I encourage you to find intentional ways to keep your 5 batteries full and if you want to chat about this, message me. You are not alone.

“Recharing your batteries is giving love to yourself and consequently to others”

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