Hey there and welcome back to day nine of the 30 day challenge.

Just a quick recap we have discovered that there are four elements to a great life and a successful one both at home and at work and they are;

1. Building energy
2. Stopping the loss of energy
3. Storing energy
4. Directing energy

The first week has been spent talking about building energy but we’re going to talk about that a lot more as we go on. For now we moved into the topic of stopping the loss of energy and this is a daily process.

During this week we are both going to emphasise in your coaching sessions where you may be burning energy completely unnecessarily and therefore exhausting yourself without getting a good result, and we’re going to make sure that you continue to build energy so that you grow and expand your influence, both in your career and in your personal world.

The power hour has seven stages. Each is required on a daily basis to make sure that you stay on track and don’t burn petrol unnecessarily. This also helps you because if you don’t burn petrol unnecessarily you won’t seek petrol from substitute sources, and we know those as being things like fast food, alcohol, getting all anal retentive at work or at home, we call that greed, unnecessarily infatuated with sexuality, and of course the most weird one of all which will cover later, spirituality the ultimate dive to escape the real world of life.

Today we are going to focus on step one which is the discard process and this process is about turning up every day 100% in life. There is a massive topic that company is very rarely address and that is the concept of presentee ism. This is a phenomena identical to absenteeism except that the body is present but the person is out for lunch in the mind. We say, the lights are on but nobody is home. More and more as we progress in working from home and dealing with the new reality of life this concept of lights are on and nobody is home is going to become a very serious leadership struggle. Both leaders and those they lead I’m not turning up as much as they used to when they were under the governance of an office and people walking around.

Admittedly at home there are many more distractions. I have witnessed people doing the washing hanging out the laundry and putting away dishes in the dishwasher while they speak on a coaching session thinking that this is the ideal way to do two things at once but, it’s highly likely they’re doing neither thing correctly or with total commitment.

There is also this horrific concept of balancing work with life. Now I don’t think a company pays you enough money to bring the dirty laundry from work home and launder it in your home. Now I’m not talking about your shirts I’m talking about your emotional baggage. If you find yourself talking about your work and the employees and staff and team at home I strongly suggest that you are abusing your relationship with your spouse or friends. When you carry that rubbish out of the workplace into your private life I wonder what you need to be paid in order to make that justified.

What I’ve witnessed over the past 35 to 40 years in business that most relationship problems come because people don’t turn up. They turned up when they first met, then they relaxed then they introduced their work to their family and then they worried about work after work and next thing you know there is no Boundry. That’s really sad saying to somebody that you’re not important enough that I clean up my dirty laundry before I come home.

Short story about pig poo boots.

When I was 34 years old I went back and completed a two year full-time MBA. At the end of that period I started up a consulting business with the professors at the university plus a colleague. Within 12 months we had a very successful business running. The first client that I had of a major proportion was a pig farm. Not necessarily the most salubrious of clients but they were huge and it was a family own business that had really come to be the most important employer in the town. The family and that Town love the business and ate the pigs happily. They also grew them.

I worked on site for 6 to 8 weeks. During that period I gained a real insight as to how you deal with the the mud and the poo and the stink of dead pigs. Firstly when you get to work you put on a white uniform, overalls and boots. This way you can see that mud has splashed on you and you know you shouldn’t go back to the offices and sit in an office with mud poo, splashed on your shoulder. Second part about this was that at the end of the day you could take off your white blue splashed overalls and boots and put on your street clothes. Most days after work these beautiful country people invited me one by one back to their home for dinner to meet the family. It was such a gift. So at the end of the workday at work I took a shower, I threw all the white poo stained clothing into the bin for the laundry system, and put on my civil clothes. Then I got in my car and went to dinner at the family house. But when I got to the family house smelling like a rose, I was asked to take off my shoes and put on a pair of house slippers, then I was asked to wash up and invited to walk on special Mats in the house. The metaphor of this is that because we worked in a dirty factory with big poo we knew that we had to take off our work things on the way home for dinner. My next job was a corporate job and it was clean. And I was similarly invited back to dinner at people’s place after work. But very often we went straight from the office straight to the home and straight to the dinner table. We didn’t change our work clothes, take a shower or for that matter let go of being at work. We sat at the dinner table and very quickly morphed the conversation from family matters back to the office. This is called presentee ism. Sitting at the family table surrounded by beautiful people talking about work, similarly sitting around the office talking about family. The lights are on but nobody is home.

As a professional speaker travelling the world this became one of the more important things to speak about two or corporate audience. The idea of separating themselves from their work before they walk in the front door and not using their family to counterbalance their incompetence at work. Yes I call it incompetence. Incompetence is the inability to close off the day and reopen at the next day. Incompetence means we carry stuff home and we use Homelife to defuse what we could’ve diffused at work. Simply put this means that we are not turning up in either place.

Now satisfaction, in life, means turning up. What do children want from a parent? Do they want dinner do they want breakfast or do they want the parent to look them in the eye with love? So much of our lives has resulted in what’s called dialogue. We talk to each other but we are not fully engaged with each other, we are afraid to meet each other in truth and therefore we throw comments and we throw language all over the room all over the office all over a meeting and don’t turn up. Another aspect of this is a witness people going from meeting to meeting to meeting back to back. That means if we are grumpy in one meeting because it was a tough gig then we’re going to carry that grumpiness into the next meeting and turn that into a tough gig to or become obsessed with the second meeting being peaceful and calm because we need a break. This type of inefficiency and this type of human potential is absolutely causing a real havoc in both family homes, offices and most importantly in individual mental health.

The emotional shower is the same shower I used to take at the pig factory. The emotional shower serves to wash off the big poo of the day which is basically the anxieties and worries and stresses that we have been experiencing and come to closure. But the process can be used before work if we’ve had a domestic struggle, before we attend another meeting when we’ve had a disappointment, or any situation where we need to turn up 100% but feel as if we’re still thinking about something that went on previously.

So this process can really impact your relationship, family and everything else that depends on clarity of thought. Especially your performance at work. One of the most important things about the current era of work is that we are working less hours and expecting to get more done in less time. Therefore the concept of being more focused, turning up more, being able to release work so that we can turn up at home and sustain a healthy family life and protect our family from stress is now what I would call competence at work. Competence will lead to remuneration. So being more attentive, working less hours and getting more done is going to be the new definition of competence in the future. It is also fundamental to personal well-being and family health.

So let’s now dive into the emotional shower.

If you turn the next page in your workbook you will find switching off turning up emotional shower as the heading. It’s quite shocking to find out that the universal law balance, that every single thing in the universe has a balance includes your day. It’s quite astonishing to find out that the idea that you’re going to have a positive day is an illusion. You’re going to have support and challenge in your day. That’s natures definition of love. You might not like it, you might not want to believe it, but it’s just a fact of life that 99.999999% of people in the world don’t know. So they come Home from work pissed off that things went wrong when in fact they must. Also those who run businesses completely delude themselves that they can have a business operating without challenge. People take this challenge personally and when they do that they start to think that they are wrong and therefore abuse themselves which is one of the core sources of mental health problems.

To get over this delusion, the idea of a positive day without a challenge, I created these forms for you to try. Those clients that I’ve been working with for any longer than two years use these forms as a religion between meetings and at the end of the day and, most importantly when they are making decisions about something important. The idea that you can come to a Noel hypothesis which means, no answer is benefit greater than drawback leaves us sometimes frustrated that ambivalence is the ultimate state of mind of wisdom. But for those of us who practice this for a long time that is not actually the case. When we settle down the ego, the mind through the discard and the emotional shower, we turn up and the answer is always clear. It is also the solution to anxiety and stress and therefore prevent stress and anxiety coming to the home. I can’t emphasise this enough because it is such a contradiction, this form of balance, to the meme of most religious society that it takes a few goes before you really can absorb it into your every day life.

 And just before we dive in I would say this, it can’t be done in your head. I’ve been doing this process now for 30 odd years, most of the time it’s automatic and I do do it in my head, but when it’s something significant or I’m triggered by something I must do it on paper. Even now. And I do prefer to do it on paper rather than on my computer because there’s something tactile about writing things down that makes it very different.

On the form the first column asks what went well today and that’s wise to list down of things that you can celebrate and things that happened well. Remember the boy playing tennis that yelled out hooray and boo every time something went wrong. But it’s very easy to focus on what went wrong so it’s key here to emphasise the things that went right. But we don’t want to pump ourselves up because if you build yourself up somebody is going to build yourself down. So it’s very important to fill out the third column.

The third column ask what went wrong today. The first column and the third column should be completely balanced by the end of completing the form. You might think you had a great day and you made a great sale but there’s stuff that went on today you didn’t do well you could’ve done better and you need to note that down.

Next step is the tricky bit where people really get spun out. Column two asks what is bad about what went well today. If something went well there’s a downside. It will require more maintenance, it sets a new standard, whatever it is that went well has a downside. And wisdom is the recognition of the balance in everything. So the emotional clown runs around thinking everything went well and there’s no downside and that person usually runs into brick walls when they find out things aren’t as they thought.

To complete the spin we go now to column 4 and we find that everything that went wrong today has an upside. In sport psychology the word loose has been eliminated there is just when all learn. And I think adapting this is a very important way to sustain energy and hold your space. You either win, positive which has its drawbacks, or you learn which has its benefits.

So today your homework is not only listening to this audio but giving this emotional shower a go.

It would then be in your best interest if you can find the time today to go to the next Page which is health, then to the decision-making process, then to the helicopter mindset, then marriage, then success, environment and last but not least, Life itself.

You may not get them all done all the way to the bottom of the page the most important one is the first one to go all of the rows to the bottom of the page but each other one can be three or four rows to give you an idea that there is this complete balance in every single thing in life. One of the funniest workshops experience I had was when we all through the marriage columns up on the whiteboard and had everybody sharing what they thought in each of the columns. It was mind blowingly funny.

Okay it’s over to you now.

See you tomorrow.

Which spirit

Chris.