What’s Draining Your
Battery Pack?

“What’s Draining Your Battery Pack?^sm” is the speech of choice for several companies over the next few weeks. Clients are telling me that employees need a “recharge in energy and enthusiasm”. Well, this probably is not surprising to many of us. It’s cold, it’s gray, the flu is flying around, and the stability of businesses and the economy is ever in question. So yes, we can use the charging up of energy and enthusiasm.

Here are three questions that we’ve asked of employees to shape the content that I’ll be sharing with you. Consider what your responses would be.

What depletes your energy?

What is challenging to you about your work-load?

What stresses you?

By far, employee responses have zeroed in on two issues. The first is overwhelming workload. Employees express major stress of all that they have on their proverbial plates. Their insights remind me of an article about an accident in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It seems that a man was enjoying a summer day’s drive in his red convertible. With the top down, and the sun bright, he was enjoying the fresh air and beauty of the day. Suddenly, something crashed on his head. The consensus was that it was an airborne turtle. Officers pieced together information that suggested a sea gull had swooped down to pick up a turtle to enjoy as a meal. In flight, the turtle became too heavy, the bird lost its grip and the turtle was dropped- right on the head of the unsuspecting driver. Are we analogous to that seagull? We pick up goals and responsibilities and interesting opportunities until we suddenly realize that our plate is too full and then things begin to drop. Here are three strategies that will make a difference to managing your load.

1. Regularly evaluate your priorities. A phrase that is nearly a mantra for me is, “identify the result you want and plan for that result.” Say it. Say it out loud. This statement is a guide for the wise investment of your time and energy rather than digressions to confusion and anger. Here’s an example, thanks to mail from the Internet. A man was driving by a ranch when he hit and killed a calf crossing the road. The driver stopped to find the owner of the calf and explained what happened. He offered to pay for the loss and asked the animal’s value. “Oh, about $200.00 today,” said the rancher. “But in six years it would have been worth $900.” The man, with his checkbook in hand, looked at the rancher, thought for a moment, and then wrote out a check for the $900.00 which he handed to the rancher-- post dated six years later. Identify the result you want, and plan for that result.

2. Take great care with your communication. Often we create more work or problems for ourselves because of assumptions and misunderstandings. A hospital employee offers this example. She works in X-ray and receives calls from nursing staff to schedule patients for their x-ray appointments because of doctors’ orders given on rounds. One of her frequent assumptions has been that the nurse is calling for an x-ray to be done “right now” when, with additional information, she discovers that it can be done in the next 24 hours. With this understanding, this sonographer now schedules in a way that makes her workload less frantic. The learning? Use accurate, specific language in asking questions and providing answers.

3. Make your own opportunities. It is a fact that we have obligations and duties foisted on us at times, but it is also a fact that we enjoy choices in many situations. Recognize that your outcomes most often are a function of how you choose to respond to the events in your life. The equation E + R = O tells us this. The Event + Your Response = Your Outcome. Here’s an example that most of us will encounter. The event is the 40th Birthday. Consider the response of those who face it. There are some of us who respond to it with a sense of fun and joy. Others of us have a response of sadness or avoidance. And you’ve guessed it. Those with a positive response enjoy their 40th birthday; those with a more negative response do not. Here’s one more example of a man making his opportunity. Bryan Thayer, a Vice President of Progress Industries shared this story. He tells me that his brother was in conversation with a gentleman in New Orleans. The New Orleans gentleman and Bryan’s brother spoke of bigotry and personal discrimination. With a smile and just a few words, the gentleman shared his truth about making his own opportunity. He said, “No one can steal my shine.”

What’s draining your battery pack? Are you suffering from your workload? Consider the strategies of regularly evaluating your priorities, avoiding miscommunication that adds to your workload, and honor the gift of making choices.

Just this week, the Safety Director of a manufacturing company was asked the proverbial, “How are you?” Rather than responding with the familiar, “I’m fine”, he said, “I’m having a great day.” His vigor and enthusiasm was so apparent that another question followed. “Why is your day so great?” “Well”, he replied, “I’d rather be here than in the best, most deluxe hospital room in America”. There’s a positive perspective!

The second issue is maintaining life/work balance. Consider these strategies:

1. WOW yourself and others. WOW stands for words of wonder- words of encouragement, affirmation, support, thanks and praise. Use WOW to honor your value as well as the value of others. Use WOW to expect the respect that you deserve and to give the respect that others deserve. WOW is language that is positive, specific and personal.

Here are a couple of specific examples that provide us with actions for using more WOW. In the past few weeks, I’ve been working with college staff on the topic of Advanced Communication Skills. One of the women acknowledged that a powerful piece of WOW for her is to hear her name used. She says that, “far too frequently, people reference me by saying, ‘hey you’ ”. She went on to say, “I’m going to expect people to use my name; and I’m going to make more of an effort to learn other people’s names.” At least a dozen participants referenced the power of WOW in remembering to say, “thank you”. After all, whenever someone does something for you, whether typing a report, meeting a sales quota, or doing a household chore, they are completing a goal that deserves appreciation.

Not too long ago, I heard Mark Victor Hansen (co-author of the ever popular Chicken Soup for the Soul series) say that each one of us thinks about 50,000 thoughts each day. How many of these are positive rather than negative?

Just this past week, I was speaking to a group of students at an academic honors banquet that included seventh through twelfth grade. One of the young men, also an outstanding athlete, was asked to take part in an exercise demonstrating the power of positive language. He was asked to raise his arm and let me push down on it as he was resisting. My effort hardly made a dent in his muscle. Then I removed his strength. He was asked to say three words, “I am stupid” repeatedly. With ease, I lowered his arm. Then he was asked to say, “I am smart” over and over again. After a few seconds, I pushed on his arm. The strength of “Goliath” had returned. The power of positive language.

2. A second strategy is to deny junk talk. Remove yelling, demanding, put-downs, and sarcasm from your language. And as you know, junk talk can be rampant. There was a magazine that ran a contest asking for real life examples of “Dilbert-like quotes”. Dozens submitted their experiences. Here are just three examples from the finalists.

“Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. No one will believe you solved this problem in one day. Now go act busy for a few weeks. I’ll let you know when it’s time to tell them.” (Research and Development supervisor for a manufacturing company)

“Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say.” (Marketing Executive)

“We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.” (Switching supervisor, communications firm)

Junk talk- it is an obstacle to clear and respectful communication. Each of us probably can recognize an area of our speech that needs improvement to reduce the junk talk to make more room for WOW!

From interviews with several dozen employees over the past year, we’ve learned that their lives, both personally and professionally, are less happy as a function of the quality of relationships. Despite busy schedules, when communication is happier and healthier, relationships improve and so does the expressed quality of peoples’ lives. Choose to use the power of your language to recharge your energy and enthusiasm.

By: Susan B. Wilson, President, Executive Strategies