Title: During Your Career Search Campaign, Manage Your Mental and Emotional Energy.
When you are unemployed, it’s both human and natural to experience stress. When you are employed but hate your job, the same dynamic holds true. I often say to my career clients that it takes more energy to hold down a job and look for something better.
In my last post, I wrote about managing your physical energy. Today I want to talk about managing your mental and emotional energy.
The dictionary defines “mental” as of the mind. So mental functioning involves the harnessing of the mind. To replenish mental energy, consider using the following action steps:
- Before turning in for bed each night, determine your most important priority for the next day. And when arriving at work, be sure you tackle that task first.
- Set responding to voice and emails aside for specified times of the day. Don’t be a slave to your cell phone!
- Focus on one task at a time; multi-tasking is not an effective use of your time or energy. In fact, the practice fragments your attention.
Our thoughts and feelings contribute greatly to how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about our world, and how distracted we feel throughout our day. Positive thoughts allow us to function well; negative thoughts drain our energy. Positive feelings enhance our sense of well-being. Negative feelings, if left unchecked, contribute to anxiety, depression and fatigue.
Learn to nurture and enhance your emotional energy by practicing these strategies:
- Accept negative thoughts and emotions as the price of being human, but utilize the power of deep abdominal breathing to diffuse their power. Such breathing increases detachment.
- Stimulate positive feelings within yourself and others by expressing gratitude for what life (and people) have given you by journaling (for yourself) and sending notes, cards and emails to family, friends and co-workers.
- Defuse the power of upsetting incidents by cultivating detachment, curiosity, and reframing – “What is the lesson in this for me?”
If you commit to actively working with your mental and emotional energy for the next two months, I guarantee you will notice the power these action steps will have in your life!