Personal Energy

Personal Energy

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all”.  
                Oscar Wilde

The difference between living fully and existing is personal energy. How we feel when we get up in the morning and face the day. How we feel about ourselves, those around us, and the canvas upon which we paint the story of our lives.

There is an apocryphal story that is worth telling:
A Spanish gentleman knocks on his son's door. "Jaime," he says, "wake up!" Jaime answers, "I don't want to get up, Papa." The father shouts, "Get up, you have to go to school." Jaime says, "I don't want to go to school." "Why not?" asks the father. "Three reasons," says Jaime. "First, because it's so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school." And the father says, "Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years old, and third, because you are the headmaster."

When we were at school we learned simple arithmetic. We learned how to subtract and add, and later to divide and multiply.

When we think of energy, we can think of people who subtract – who take energy away from us. When we hear their voices or see their names come up on our cell phones, our energy sags. Other people add and our energy lifts.

The very worst are those who divide. They seem to be deliberately destructive. They make trouble, they set one against another, they stretch relationships to breaking point. And then there are the multipliers – those wonderful people who come into our lives and spiral up the energy – infinitely. They live in the world of what is practical and possible. They create potential. Somehow they seem to know how to generate huge amounts of positive human energy which they share abundantly.

The Chinese call this energy qi (pronounced ‘chi’). They attribute qi to BALANCE.

A delightful tour guide on a bus in Bali pronounced to us all on the subject of balance:
“Ladies and gentlemen, whatever you do don’t lose your EQUILIBARIUM. If you lose your equilibarium your wheels webble!”

BALANCE is different for each one of us. Some say it is the balance between yin and yang, or between the left and right hand sides of the brain. Others find it, or lose it, in the work-life balance. The soul, body, mind, heart can easily get out of equilibrium.

To balance, we need a fulcrum, a centre, a slow turning point in a spinning world perhaps, a solid sense of who we are. Some find that in a faith and in a relationship with the divine; some find it in solitude; some in a relationship with another human.

But people who are off-centre have no fulcrum; they are doing too much of what they don’t enjoy doing, and too little of what they really do enjoy. They are out of balance – they are not generating qi – and they have to draw energy from other sources.

They have to find energy from those around them – they subtract or divide. ‘Energy thieves’ we call them. Or the Chinese would say they draw down from their ‘jing’. Jing is the energy gifted to each one of us before we are born, by our biological parents.

The problem with jing is that it is a finite gift and it is not renewable, so if we use too much of it, it runs out and we die. We are burnt out and long before that happens we are probably increasingly ill.
Pulling these wisdoms together, it is our observation or hypothesis that high energy multipliers and adders have three things in common:

• They have BALANCE in their lives, and they seem to know how to maintain it
• They spiral their energy up in AUTHENTIC RELATIONSHIPS - relationships with others who add and multiply – relationships built on high levels of trust and constant exchange of high quality information. Our formula is e=it2. It is extraordinarily simple.
• They BELONG. Because humans are social animals, being part of a family or team or organization even or even tribe, that is warm, exciting and worthy seems to enhance personal energy significantly.

We believe that we can enable people to become aware of, measure and master their own personal energy – their qi. We can do the same for teams and organizations.