Coaching moment: Focusing energy

This time of year always feels busy, with so much going on, and yet it’s also a season when there’s less daylight time, and colder months are starting here in the Northern Hemisphere. Whether at work, in leadership practice or in relation to personal goals I often have conversations with my coaching clients about wanting to accomplish more whilst feeling that there is less energy.

One of the tools I find really helpful to think through these kinds of moments is a remix of the Wheel of Life (a popular coaching tool used to reflect on different priorities). I find this tool very versatile, and have adapted it for example in the context of hybrid working. In my work coaching leaders and managers, we use this for quick self-assessment that always offers some new insights. If you’d like to give the hybrid working version a go, there is a dedicated episode of my podcast complete with resources you can check out.

Identifying priorities and focusing energy

Typically however the focus of this exercise is on assigning a score reflecting how things are currently going, and then reflecting on these, e.g. what was easy to score or hard; what scores feel satisfactory, and which don’t and so forth. It’s designed to help identify priorities, and to check in with how things are going. What I find especially helpful at this time of year, however, is to focus more on what energy I have and how I want to spend it between now and the end of the year. This small shift in emphasis opens up a different reflective frame and I use a basic template of the resource to help do that.

In the example below, I have used general categories to reflect, using darker shading to indicate in each area how much energy to spend. It can be hard at first to recognise that there isn’t enough energy to spend maximal effort on everything, all of the time. Often what happens during this exercise is that we can identify several areas which can be maintained fairly easily, and find one or two areas which require more energy. That helps giving a sense of not being as thinly stretched and instead focus energy where is really matters. I have used the terms “little” or “medium” but you could also use a number scale, i.e. energy out of a max of 10 for example.

Reflective prompts

If you’d like to give this a go yourself, here are some reflective prompts to get you started. There are not listen in any particular order, but simply designed to help get you thinking.

• What areas can be maintained with minimal energy?
• Where do I spend most energy?
• Where does my effort have the biggest impact?
• What can I does less or pause?
• When do I next have time to replenish my energy?