Energy Management: How To Improve Your Work-Life Balance with Jeni Raitsin

Oct 3

If you’re like me, a Type A individual, a go-getter, and a high achiever, then you know that you often find yourself in a cycle of burnout, rest, burnout, rest.

You often find yourself wondering if there really is a balance between those two mediums without lowering your standards or letting go of some of your goals.

Is it really possible to have a thriving personal life, thriving mental health, as well as a thriving business?

I sat down with Jeni Raitsin, a former architect turned Mindful Productivity coach, Mental Fitness trainer, and international keynote speaker.

Her mission is to help high-achieving people find a less stressful way to be successful through a neuroscience-based, mindfulness-infused approach to productivity.

First, we dove into the problem with a Type A personality.

“We have this, ‘but I can do it’ mentality. ‘Well, I can work 12 hours a day, and I can do this project and this project’. But the fact that we can do something doesn't mean we should be doing it and should be more mindful about managing that time and energy.” Jeni

Sometimes, these hyper-achieving qualities are actually a setback. It's actually sabotaging us from being as successful or as successful as possible, and it's just not setting a pace for us to move forward consistently.

As a Mindful Productivity coach, Jeni answered the question, ‘What is positive intelligence?’

“It's a measure of the quality and the strength of our positive thoughts versus our negative thoughts. So we can actually measure it from one to 100%, at each point of the time, the day in our life, how many of our thoughts are moving us towards our goals and how many of them are hindering us.”

If our PQ score is low, meaning we have more negative sabotaging and scattered thoughts than calm, confident, focused ones, then we're not going to live up to our potential because we are going to sit and procrastinate, overthink, and doubt ourselves. And there's going to be this little voice in the back of our mind that's telling us, ‘You can't do that.’

So all of the things that people usually value, like knowledge and skills and strategy, actually, it's just our potential at every given moment, and PQ actually determines if we live up to that potential.

Positive intelligence is a combination of practices from neuroscience, positive and cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, and original positive intelligence research done by the person who invented it, Shirzad Shamim.

He did his research at Stanford with over 500,000 people in the beginning. So recent discoveries and functional MRIs allowed him and other psychologists and scientists to pinpoint the regions of our brain in charge of different thoughts.

We know right now which parts of our brain are in charge of our negative thoughts and of our positive thoughts. And once he discovered that he discovered he could actually change the thought patterns in different parts of our brain. And he discovered that we all have Nine automatic thinking patterns.

We all have about 60,000 thoughts per day. These aren’t in our conscious mind because we’d go insane. So, it's happening in the subconscious mind. But because as human beings, our brain is hardwired in the way that most of these thoughts are processed through our survival brain and are based in fear.

Procrastination beyond productivity

Jeni calls procrastination ‘the avoider’ because procrastination is just avoiding something that we need to do. When it's our job, we call it procrastinating. But in our personal life, we're going to avoid having hard conversations with our partner, or we're going to avoid scheduling an appointment with the doctor because we don't want to hear what they have to say or going to the dentist or whatever it is.

“So the way we sabotage our work is usually the way we sabotage other parts of our lives. If we're coming back to productivity, once we're aware of these patterns, we know how to rewire these parts of our brain so that it's easier for us to think different thoughts.”

Jeni is also an expert in energy management, and I asked her what energy management means to her.

“It’s a holistic approach to managing ourselves. I always look at it as four pillars, which is physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy.”

Physical - Maybe we didn’t sleep last night, and we're tired and distracted.
Mental/emotional - We are thinking about what our partner said last night or whether we're overthinking or doubting ourselves.
Spiritual - If we are not passionate about what we do and don't believe in it, then my motivation or desire to get things done will be low and sabotage what I am doing.

We're humans, especially if we're entrepreneurs and the business is literally us. If we're tired, the business is tired. If we're stressed, the business is stressed. So we first have to manage ourselves - self-management/self-mastery.

My favorite part of our conversation was when we talked about how to increase mental energy and focus with water!

Jeni shared the following information:

“A couple of years ago, there was research done at the University of London that they took two groups and tested how water affects productivity. They discovered that if we're not drinking the minimum amount of water during the day, there's a difference of 15 percent in our productivity. Getting to the minimum amount of three glasses of water a day can increase our productivity by 15%.

That’s the easiest thing a person can do: drink three glasses of water a day, and boom, your productivity is increased! And when we're looking at this and the food we eat and how much we sleep and our cycle and all of this, even on the basics level, we can already increase our productivity levels by 50%.”

There’s a difference between being mentally healthy and mentally fit.

Jeni left us with this gem:

“We can be mentally healthy - There's nothing mentally wrong with us. But if we're not mentally fit, when we're trying to handle challenges in work and life, we're going to feel mental stress. We're going to be burned out, stressed, anxious, and whatever else because we're not mentally fit. The more our mental fitness grows, the better we can easily handle challenges, big or small.”