Every day we trade our energy for something and how we trade this energy eventually determines the outcome of our lives. When we wake up in the morning and decide to do a particular thing before the other, we’re in those moments making decisions trading our energy for that day and whatever we trade the energy on determines the day.
The type of energy that we give would indeed determine the ones that we get back. But we must not limit our knowledge of trading energy to our interactions with people alone.
The investment of energy goes beyond our interaction with people. It goes into every area of life like the attention we pay to our health, fitness, business, romantic relationships and spiritual life. The type of energy we invest in all these aspects of life will determine the kind of results that we’ll get from there.
“Don’t invest your energy on things that don’t help you build a better life.”
The primary thing to note in the process of investing energy into anything is to determine whether such thing makes our lives better or not. Financial investments are meant to make us richer, the same with investing energy into anything in life; it must be intended to make our life better, so, we have to be calculative about making those efforts, if it’s not going to make our lives better, it is not something that we should spend our time on.
Individually, our most vital asset is our mental, emotional and physical energies, how we invest those energies will determine the entire quality of our lives.
Companies and investors are very strategic about their financial investment, the same way in personal strategic planning, our goal must be to get the highest return on the energy we invest in life through our activities.
Just as we are careful in investing our money to ensure the highest return, we must also take all precaution in how we invest our time and on what we invest them on to provide the best return in life.
The Beginning.
The starting point to investing our energy rightly to yield the best return is to discipline ourselves in using our time.
You can’t control time, you can only control what you invest the time on, and what you spend your time on would determine how you invest your energy. If you want to get the highest return possible in life, you must discipline yourself only to invest your time on the things that matter.
We can do the following things to ensure that we always correctly invest our energy to yield higher returns every day.
1. ORGANISE YOUR DAY.
Start each day organised based on the importance of the task for the day. Organise tasks for the day from the most important to the less important. It is advisable to do this every evening before the next day.
Give the best energy to the tasks that give the most advantage in life, invest energy this way every day and get the best return in life.
Note: Because something is more fun to do doesn’t mean it should be the first thing to do, our priority must not be fun but productivity.
2. CLEAR YOUR MIND OF ALL GRUDGES.
This is probably going to be hard for a lot of people, but it is a necessary thing to do to ensure that we’re not wasting some mental energy on irrelevancies. Our mental energy is the orchestrator of our physical energy, don’t go to work in the morning with a lot of grudges bottled up; it will never allow the good energy to flow.
To invest the right energy, we must be in the right mental state, clearing up our heart and mind every day and making the resolution to start the day with clean energy and a pure slate is vital to investing the right energy in life.
3. THINK BEFORE YOU ACT.
It will surprise you how many people don’t think before they get on a particular task and just put in all their time and energy into it. People do this all the time only to finish and discover that what they’ve been doing has little or no importance.
We must always ask this question before any task “is this the best use of my time.” This is the question that will drive us to think about what we’re about to invest our energy in.
We must always analyse before we act, that is how we can ensure we’re investing our energy rightly on the most productive things in our lives.
4. PRACTICE SINGLE-HANDLING.
Single-handling means that once we select our most important task and begin work on them, we must single-mindedly focus on that task and give our 100% energy to doing it and finishing it rightly before moving to something else.
There is no advantage in duplicity of energy; it is just a way to scatter your efforts, waste your time without getting any good and specific results.
Many of us cannot discipline ourselves to stay on one task, and this led to so much waste of energy. It is crucial to be able to focus at a time on investing our best energy undisturbed into our most important task at that moment.
5. DON’T INVEST IN THE BLAME GAME.
The natural inclination of most people is to look for who to blame every time something they don’t like happens, and this stops them from giving their best energy to being proactive and finding solutions.
Looking for who to blame means we’re not ready to take responsibility and put our energy to work on finding solutions.
The blame game is always a waste of time and a waste of energy.
It is not debatable that how we invest our mental, emotional and physical energy will determine the qualities of our lives; the five tips above will help significantly in guiding us to invest our energy properly.