Episode 85: Small Business Tips: Check Your Energy Levels Before Attending A Meeting - Online or In Person
Have you ever walked into a meeting and sensed its environment is tense and unhappy? In this quick tip episode, Fiona shares two tips to help small business owners when joining meetings and talking to others (online or face-to-face): one for a positive mindset when joining meetings, the other for checking your energy.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Coaching with Fiona
How To Enter A Meeting
Why Checking Your Energy Matters
Conclusion
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 85 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today, it's Tuesday. If you're listening to this in real time, we are literally finishing up the first quarter of the year. This is coming out on the 30th of March 2021. And this is a really good time to reflect on what you want from the year. And also, as I'll get into today's Quick Tip episode, how you may be kind of preventing those things from happening on a level that perhaps you just have not thought about. And I have to say that today is a little bit different than usual, but it's definitely something that I explore a lot in my personal life and yeah, bringing it into the podcast today.
So before I get stuck in, I also want to let you know that if you listen to this podcast and you think it's really useful and you've been thinking that perhaps you'd like to even put in for business coaching, we are currently booking people in from June 2021 onwards. So as I said, it is the end of March. We are booked up for a couple of months and we do have people ongoing for 12-month and 6-month programs. But if you're interested, you can do as little as a 1-hour session with me. And that often gives you enough to go on to really get cracking into some areas of your business.
So if you're interested in that, you can literally send us a DM at @mydailybusinesscoach on Instagram or you can email hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com or if you like, all guns blazing, you can just go straight on to My Daily Business Coach shop, find a package that suits you and buy it there. And you can find that over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/shop can't really get any easier.
All right. Let's jump into today's Quick Tip episode.
All right, so today's quick tip, tool or tactic is really I guess you'd say it's a tip, but also a tactic. So years ago, I can't actually remember which manager it was that I had. It could have been Cathe at Mimiko. It could have been somebody at Amazon. I'm not really sure exactly who told me this. I wish I did know. So then I could, you know, give them a proper shout out. But one of my bosses at some point in my employed career gave me the advice that you want to enter a meeting with the same energy and in the same mindset as you ideally hope to leave that meeting. And it was such great advice because often, you know, particularly if you rushed, you're busy. If you have staff, people are watching you and they don't even you don't realise necessarily that they're even watching you unless you're doing, you know, proactive feedback, unless you have, you know, feedback that's not just related to an annual review or biannual review.
Often you're not actually getting that feedback. And I know that in some places that I've worked in, in some seasons of being super busy, I was literally rushing like I'm not even joking. I would be running from one meeting down one end of the building to another meeting. I wasn't eating anything between, you know, I'd be eating in the morning, I'd be eating late at night. But during the day it was just rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush.
And at one point I remember saying we should have 45 minute meetings because at least there's 15 minutes. Then if the meeting wraps up on time to get to the next meeting, and especially when I was consulting at the start of my career, my own business, when I started that about six years ago, I definitely sometimes would say to the CEOs or these people that had brought me and, you know, they were paying a decent amount. I'm just sitting in meetings all day like, you know, I don't feel like I'm being that productive. And in some cases, they'd say, “That's fine. We actually just want you to sit in a meeting.” But I've often thought of that advice that that person told me to enter a meeting in the same with the same energy and the same mindset as you hope to leave it.
And I've actually given that to so many people, even, you know, to my husband, to, you know, my friends and to clients, of course, especially when they've got difficult conversations that they have to have. If you can enter into a meeting, you know, upbeat, positive, in a good mood, and hopefully you finish the meeting like that as well. So that's kind of the first part of today's tip episode.
The second then which leads on from that is to really check your energy. And I know that that can be a lot of kind of woo woo stuff out there around energy. But it really is. You know, it's scientifically proven, though, all, you know, energy particles and what's happening in the world and the universe. And no matter what your belief system is, you will have been in in an experience where you say you walk into a room and you can feel that the energy is tight and tense or you walk into a room and it's just really upbeat and you just feel it without anyone even saying it, you just feel like, yeah, I'm like, hi, vibing. This is great. Now, if you've been listening to this, you may be aware that 2021 is like my year of health and 2020 was supposed to be it.
But you know, I gave myself a bit of leeway and not to say that you shouldn't be healthy all the time, but definitely it's something that I'm focusing on and I'm not just focusing on, you know, eating well, all that stuff. I'm also focusing on the holistic health. So looking at, you know, meditation, yoga, working with an energy healer, working with, you know, I look at my little tarot cards, shout out to coach to Linda Johnson because she's the one that put me onto those things. And, you know, sometimes they're a bit of fun and sometimes they're a distraction. But, yeah, I'm really interested in this space. I've just booked in to work with a kinesiologist. Shout out to Kate Vandermeer from the supercool, who suggested that a few years ago. And I took a while to come around, but really I'm really interested in energy. And I can see I get to work with so many different business owners.
And yes, I mean, predominantly, it's always on Zoom. It has been on Zoom well before Covid made Zoom like an everyday household name. But I see their energy, I sense their energy and especially when they talk about what they're passionate about. You can see this like excitement bubbling up at other people when they talk about their work. They might just be super super flat. And so we talk about, you know, what do you actually want to change? One particular client? Recently, it just seemed that what they were saying and what they were doing were just at odds. And so I sort of stopped them and said, hey, hey, like, let's just stop this session right this second. Like, what do you want? Because I actually think you're telling me what you think I need to hear. But I want to know, like, what do you want to change because maybe you don't want to change anything, maybe somebody else has influenced you to say that you need to change and you're actually fine with how things are.
And one way that you can tell that is by people's energy. And so today, my quick kind of tool or tactic is really for you to think about the energy levels that you have over the last four weeks. This is a question that I asked people to answer before we even start working together. I say on a scale of one to 10 where one is I'm completely deflated, I hate everything. And ten is I am loving life, living my best life. Everything is fantastic. I could be a poster child for business owners. That's a ten. And I'll ask people to write themselves over the last four weeks. So where have your energy levels been? And then we'll often talk about what is causing that. And sometimes there's a very legitimate reason. Maybe, you know, you've experienced something really horrible in your life. Maybe Covid-19 is super impactful on your type of industry. So it's not to say, oh, gosh, you should just be high vibing all the time, but to consider how your energy is playing a role and how you might tweak things, just small things like trying to get to bed twenty minutes earlier, going for a walk, considering your response to things.
So definitely I know it's certain parts of my life. I've really had to say to myself, do not respond. Do not respond whilst your energy level is here. So I might say get an email that I'm frustrated by, let's be real. And my instant response will be to respond, to be like, you know what? Let me tell you, let you know about. And yet I've taught myself, do not respond when you're emotional, do not respond. So even if that person has to wait six hours or a day or longer for me to be in the energy that I want to portray to that person and then I want to be, which is not to say, oh, gosh, you can't reply to people if they're annoying you and stand your ground. But I think sometimes we can not check our energy and not think about other things that are going on in our life that maybe not anything to do with that email that's going to then be pushed over to the recipient of your email. I hope that makes sense.
So there was a great kind of I don't know if you call it a meme, a video that went viral. Oh, I don't know, a couple of months ago, maybe the end of 2020. And it was of a Chinese schoolteacher. And in the video, you saw him pause at the front of a classroom and take a minute and put a smile on his face and prepare himself to enter that room with the energy that he, you know, obviously felt that he needed to enter as a teacher to students in this time. And, you know, one hand people can say, oh, he's like forcing himself to smile or he's faking that. But on the other, he's actually checking his energy and perhaps he's had a really crappy morning, but maybe he doesn't want to pull that energy into the classroom with students. So he's in this video and you can Google it. It literally if you just Google teacher smiling before entering a classroom, you'll see it went viral everywhere. But basically what people loved about that was that he took a second to think about where is my energy at right now? Where do I want it to be? And how can I kind of close that gap in the same way that when that boss had said to me, you know, into a meeting with the same energy and the same mindset as you hope to leave it, that was really about saying, you know, before you rush into a meeting and kind of spread the the rush, rush, rush, rush. I'm so busy. Vibes take a minute, take a few deep breaths, have a glass of water and really collect yourself and be in the energy and the mindset that you hope to have throughout the meeting. And when you finish that meeting said that is the tool, tip or tactic today. Really consider energy levels. Consider how you sort of where you would score yourself between one and 10 over the last four weeks and then what you might do to raise those energy levels if you feel that they need to be, sometimes you might be like, I'm absolutely fine.
Other times it might be that, you know, maybe it's about meditation or like I said, getting a bit more sleep or even just pausing. Another thing that excellent health coach that I worked with a few years ago, Yolanda Johnson, said to me was to kind of put in a three minute meditation between my coaching calls so often on a Tuesday or Thursday, I will have Back-To-Back calls depending on, you know, what's happening that week and especially on a Thursday. That's my big day for coaching. And so she was sort of saying, you know, instead of rushing between these or kind of giving yourself a half hour break in that half hour break, you know, write your notes up, do what you need to do, but also take three minutes and do some deep breathing, do a guided meditation or do something. Just listen to some music. Close your eyes at your desk, take your shoes off. Just really be there present so that they know you're going into that next coaching session with the energy that you want to take forward. So that is it. I really hope it has helped you. I will link to Linda Johnson in the show notes, and she's definitely going to come onto the podcast soon.
So I can't wait to talk to her because she's really an incredible women's health coach and just so much more than that as well. But that is it. If you found this useful, I would absolutely love it. If you could share it with a friend, perhaps there somebody who would really benefit from this information. But, yeah, more than more than anything, I would love for you to take away from this episode just looking at your own energy and how that potentially is impacting on your business and on the people around you.
Thank you so much for listening to the show. Notes for this episode will be over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/85. All right. See you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
