Do you suffer from energy hangover?
Energy what? Energy hangover.
For instance when you get home from a mad busy day at work where you’ve been multi-tasking, getting things done and making decisions, then you get home and dinner is a military operation, you don’t really notice that your kids are there and you haven’t had a moment to have a nice conversation with them because you’re still in that busy doing energy. Are you nodding your head?
Or you’ve just had a lovely weekend off and you’re totally in the moment and now it’s Monday morning, you’re back at work and you just can’t seem to engage your brain. Sound familiar?
Well, this is energy hangover. Where energy from one area of your life seeps into another and then means you’re not being as fruitful as you would like to be. You see our ability to perform at work and the other areas of our lives depends upon our effectiveness, or what I prefer to call fruitfulness. And our fruitfulness depends upon our ability to manage our energy effectively.
Research by McKinsey and company called ‘Centered leadership: How talented women thrive’, consulted with some of the biggest corporate companies around the world, in a study of successful women in leadership. One of the key defining features for women who were successfully leading small or large teams was that they had a solid process in place to help them manage their energy. They had strategies to manage the areas of their lives that draw on their energy; home life, health and well-being, as well as their work life. They were able to replenish and rejuvenate when necessary but also had systems and processes in place to maintain their energy on a daily basis.
This is what effectiveness is really about for us as women and what we talk about here at One of many is that our fruitfulness, as women in leadership roles (whether that’s leading at work or in our family), is a constant flow between two polarities of energy. And those polarities are the masculine and the feminine energy.
We are great advocates here of what we call Soft Power, creating from our feminine energy, having said that we also recognise that there is a time for our masculine energy, the yin and the yang.
Work/our career will especially bring out masculine energy if we don’t examine it. The archetype of Superwoman is someone we share a lot about at The One Woman Conference and this archetype is actually our masculine energy of show up, push through, focus, drive, success at all costs type of energy.
Left unchecked this energy can absolutely burn us out and is highly damaging to our intimate relationships and family life because it creates competing masculine energy in the home. For example, kids want the nurturing, nourishing archetype of the Mother. A safe place to be, someone to share in their excitement and love them.
As women we wear multiple hats and operate from different energies. So just how can you shift with ease between the different energies so you don’t suffer from that dreaded energy hangover?
You need Bridging Rituals.
Bridging Rituals are designed specifically to help you deal with this energy shifting and become more fruitful in your life.
Let me share an example to show you exactly what I mean.
One of my clients was a successful corporate employee, she was very effective and productive. A strong independent woman who didn’t need her husband. She felt he was ineffective, couldn’t make a decision and she wasn’t inspired by him. Their marriage was in a seriously rocky place.
I shared with her that the problem was the competing masculine energy. Life needs polarity and her husband was taking on more and more of the feminine, to balance out her masculine. He was getting out of the way because he didn’t want to compete with her and he didn’t want to argue.
I invited her to bring The Lover and The Queen (2 of our other key archetypes) into her intimate relationships.
She totally got what I meant and created a Bridging Ritual for when she got home from work to help her transition. She took a mini bath, just 5-10 minutes to be with herself to consciously make the shift to leave work at work and arrive at home. She changed her clothes into soft feminine clothes and shifted to a place of openness, connection and love for her husband.
Within a week she had a fabulous relationship with her husband because she was allowing him space to be in his masculine. She was resting better and sleeping better as well because she’d left Superwoman at the office.
Men do it naturally.
Because men tend to think more modally and compartmentalise things, they naturally do these Bridging Rituals. Whereas women tend to have awareness of all things at all times, and so we tend to have thoughts of home at work and thoughts of work at home. Which is ok, unless you have energy hangover and it’s not serving you.
This is where the Bridging Rituals really help. Rituals are powerful things. Studies show that rituals improve our confidence, our peace of mind and minimise our stress. And you can create rituals for all areas of your life, they can be anything you like that helps you shift from one mode of energy to another. I like to light a different candle for shifting in energy.
How will you bring Bridging Rituals into your life?
Here’s some things you can do this week to help you create some Bridging Rituals for yourself.
- If you live with a man notice his shifting rituals and see what you can learn.
- Identify your own energetic shifts that you need to go through during the day. Starting work, leaving work, shifting Mum to Lover because you’re going on a date etc.
- Create small rituals that will help you to bridge those energetic shifts.
- Implement them and notice what happens.
I’d love to know the Bridging Rituals you’ve created for yourself. Let me know in the comments below or by joining our BeOne facebook community.
If you’d like to find out more about the archetypes we use here at One of many™ come and join us for the 4th One Woman Conference. We’d love to see you!
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