How to Identify Your Energy Givers and Drainers

Happy spring y’all ❤️ 

Have you noticed how your energy changes when doing different activities?

For example, starting the day with some movement and dancing gives me so much positive energy to go through the day, while mindlessly scrolling on social media before going to sleep drains my energy.

To thrive in our lives, we should become aware of activities that are energy givers and energy drainers for us. Even though we cannot fully eliminate the energy drainers, we can opt for a lifestyle that promotes energy givers. Thus, we thrive in life.

ENERGY MAPPING

During the Designing the Professional course at Stanford, I learned how to map my energy and identify energy givers, energy drainers, and flow moments.

Here’s what it looks like:

P.S. This does not represent my real week, it’s rather an example for you.

 ⭐ represents the flow moments.

Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Flow is a source of mental energy in that it focuses attention and motivates action. - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Try mapping your energy of the past week similarly to the graph above. Add more activities than I did.

NOTICE

• Are there sequences of activities that are particularly energizing or draining?

• Does the time of day, the location of the activity, and who is part of the activity make a difference?

• Are there themes in your energizers and drainers? 

Reflect and ask yourself, what are 1 or 2 incremental changes you can make to your energy for the upcoming week?

P.S. You can do this exercise also for activities at work, or people you spent time with.

Book recommendation:

Designing Your Life - Bill Burnett and Dave Evans