Fill it Up - Heidi Hanna (Author & CEO and Founder of SYNGERGY)
Heidi Hanna is a dynamic and insightful speaker, a New York Times Bestselling author, and CEO and Founder of SYNGERGY. As a global speaker and consultant she has trained thousands on practical ways to manage energy. In her Paper Napkin Wisdom, Heidi shares a core principle of good energy management. She says, “You are your most valuable resource.”
While on a plane several years ago, Heidi came to a realization. As she sat listening to the flight attendant go through the safety presentation, she noticed a parallel between the safety advice and energy management: In case of emergency, you’re encouraged to put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you because you can’t help anyone if you don’t have oxygen yourself. Heidi noted that the same logic applies to energy: If we’re not taking care of ourselves, we can’t help anyone around us.
It’s especially important for us as entrepreneurs, leaders, and passionate people to recognize that we have a responsibility to take care of ourselves. We’re the kind of people that tend to make ourselves the last priority and just keep pushing through because we’re strongly motivated. It’s OK for us to take our energy to those extraordinary levels, but Heidi reminds us that we have to remember the human system requires oscillation.
There’s an up and a down to everything and if you aren’t consistently going down and getting that strategic recovery, your system will shut you down when you don’t want it to. We shouldn’t wait until we feel burned out to recharge our batteries; it’s something we should be doing all the time. We owe it to our teams to be at our best and we can’t do that if we run until we crash.
Heidi talks about the stress we go through in everyday life, but she defines the word stress a little differently than most. “Stress,” she says “is anytime the need for energy is more than what we have to offer; it doesn’t matter what’s requiring that energy,” Heidi says that stress is a response to change and we fall into that stress response because we don’t have the energy we need.
To get the energy we need, we need to strategically add in that recovery time. If we consciously make the effort to set time aside for investing in ourselves and have that recovery period, we avoid burning out and ensure that we’re at our best for our team and stakeholders.
It all sounds very simple, when you’re stressed you need to recharge, but Heidi is quick to point out that relaxing is harder than it sounds. Stress is as addictive as alcohol or chocolate. If you’ve been in an amped up state for a long time, she says, you get used to it and you can get addicted to it. When you’re addicted to stress, it’s hard to relax because you don’t really know how to anymore, but it’s important not to give up.
Train yourself to relax, be proactive about it, start small with three minutes or whatever it takes, but train yourself in smaller pieces so that you can learn to relax and turn off that stress response. If you do that, you’ll find the stress response changes; if it’s an acute situation and it’s in the moment and you believe you have the resources to deal with it, you will grow from stress instead of falling into the chronic stress response.
If we can avoid a negative stress response and grow from stress in a positive way simply by investing some time in ourselves, don’t we have a responsibility to do that?
Listen to my conversation with Heidi here:
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