All true change starts with changing how you think. Of course, thinking alone won’t do it, you have to put action to the thoughts. Without action all your really have are dreams. But it all starts with changing your thoughts. I believe you can make major changes in your life just by changing the way you think.
Today I want to see if I can adjust your way of thinking a little; to see if I can get you to see things from a different perspective. This little shift has the ability to transform the way you think (and act) when it comes to rest.
Change Your Mind
We talked before about your energy and how, when you work from a place of zero energy you are creating energy debt. This energy debt then must be paid back in your time off, often with interest. Now, as we all know, we’re not great at resting so instead of taking the time to rest and catch back up, we just keep going and going and never make it back to even. Eventually this will lead to burnout and probably a myriad of other health related issues that we know nothing about.
What would happen if we changed the way we thought about rest? What if, instead of working from a place of zero or negative energy, we worked from a place where we had a surplus? What would change in your life if, at the end of a long week, you still had energy left?
It’s time to shift our focus. It’s time to change our mindset.
From? Or So That?
The idea that I want to put in front of you today is this:
Instead of resting from our work, we should rest so that we can work.
When we rest after we’ve worked, we are borrowing energy we don’t have in order to get stuff done. When done this way, the rest we get is an attempt to get us back to zero (which never actually happens). This is all so that we can turn around and borrow negative energy again.
On the other hand, when you rest before you work, you build up a surplus (or positive amount) of energy that you can then use in your work. There’s no negative energy balance or borrowing energy you promise to pay back later.
If energy is currency and borrowing energy we don’t have leads us to energy debt, then the same can be true of energy savings and living from a surplus. If you save up energy first, then the work you do will use the energy that you already have stored up.
Just like the financial debt you pay collects interest, savings accounts do too. It might be less interest, but it’s still interest, right? If you have energy saved up, and you live off of that saved energy, there’s a chance you might have some energy left over that will gather interest. Then as you continue your rest and work cycles moving forward, you will continually be building up more and more stored energy. This allows you to sometimes work a little harder, do a little more, and still end up with a positive energy balance in the end.
By living from a surplus, we gather more. It’s the law of compound interest and it works in more areas of your life than just your finances.
I hope this little change in how you think can spark some big changes in how you rest. Now that we’ve covered our problem with rest, what rest is, our reason for rest, and this change in mindset, we’re ready to tackle some ideas about how we can shift our actions to allow us to pay back the energy debt we owe and start to work from a surplus. I’m looking forward to talking about that next week.