Update: My Energy Audit

I am having an amazing time at Terranea Resort, orchestrating my firm’s “Senior Associate Leadership Development Experience” (which we shorten to be called “Discover”). Yesterday was a really big day for me as orchestrator, as I had about half an hour of time on stage to tell the seniors my “who am I” story. Of course, it wasn’t quite as perfect as I would have liked it to be, but overall I was pretty happy with how it went!

One of my biggest worries with orchestrating this program is that I’m going to come off as manufactured or fake in my presentation, when really, I’m here doing this because I love the Discover program and want to help other people get as much out of it as I did. So even though I loved presenting on stage, my favorite part of the day was getting to go to the big group dinner and chat with a lot of the seniors and coaches – so they can see that I’m authentic and really believe in the stuff I’m talking about. Plus, I can be a little more casual in my verbiage and examples when I’m talking to a group of 5 people instead of 500!

Fun fact: when I told the audience to “chat me up” when they saw me around the resort, I was not aware that in some cultures, that phrase does not mean what I think it means. Even though I still want to meet and talk to as many people as possible, I will not be phrasing it that way anymore 🙂

Today is a lot easier for me – I only had about 10 minutes of formal presenting, though I also have a lot of rehearsals ahead for tomorrow and Friday. (Friday is the other big day for me of the week, since I get to both moderate a panel and also do a big closing ceremony.) But in between my two more logistical talks, I got to listen to the great content by The Energy Project… and have another chance to take my energy audit.

The energy audit is a tool that you can use to see how you’re currently doing across four dimensions of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It’s scored on a scale of 0-20, and the higher scores mean that you’re approaching burnout. When I first took the energy audit in May 2012, I scored a 19 – and I honestly didn’t think it was possible to do this job and score muhc lower. But when I took the energy audit again in April this year, I scored an 11 – huge progress. And today, I was super excited (as in, running around excitedly telling everyone at the event that I knew) to discover that I now score a 7. HUGE progress!

Annie Perrin, the SVP of Human Performance for The Energy Project, also said a lot in her presentation that really resonated with me. Specifically, she talked about how one goal for corporate culture would be to get to a place where it’s the people who take breaks that are celebrated as top performers… rather than the workaholic culture where the person who stays at the office the latest is looked at as the best. Work smarter not harder, right? This really aligned with the research I mentioned yesterday around people who take vacations being more likely to get promoted. I think it’s a really huge sign for my company that when Annie asked for a show of hands of the ranges people’s scores fell into, a lot were already in the lower range. So maybe our company culture is changing (likely in part thanks to this program?) and in a few more years, taking breaks will be seen as the smart thing that valuable workers do.

Overall, I am just SO excited to be here this week in this role. Furthermore, I’m loving the inspiration I’m getting from the other speakers, the coaches, and also the senior associates that I’m getting to chat with here! More to come, for sure 🙂