A Vibrant Summer Energy Budget

In this episode, I cover the topic of balancing rest, joy and work in the busy summer season. Our most important, non-urgent needs—like rest and meaningful connection—often get squeezed out of our busy schedules. That’s why a summer protocol can be so helpful. It is  a way to budget your summer energy with intention.

The formula for a vibrant summer is creating space for Rest, Joy AND Work.

• Rest – Fill your tank first. You are worthy of rest, simply by existing.
• Joy – Once you’ve rested, engage in something that lights you up.
• Work – With your energy restored, move purposefully into your responsibilities.

How can you do this for the rest of summer?

Create a weekly chart with 3- 5 boxes per day (adjust for your energy levels). Choose colors for rest, responsibility, and relationships. Fill in a few boxes with time for each important area of life.

Life happens! Allow blank spots so you can pivot if needed. 

Start with just the next 2 days if a week feels overwhelming. Decide your energy allocation ahead of time and stick to it. Check in daily and move your energy blocks to where it feels right.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Join Kelly’s Free community on Skool

 Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:00

Ideally, you're intentionally allocating energy to the areas of your life that are important to you. Some of us need to focus on one thing at a time. Some of us need to be checking in aligning your energy on a daily basis, and have some freedom and some flexibility. I want each of my days to have three decisions that are already made. This is where my time is going for my work. This is where it's going for responsibilities. This is where it's going for relationships. Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life Podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbits, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. We're going to be talking about a protocol. A way for us to budget our energy. We're about halfway through summer as I'm recording this, and the first question I have for you, is there anything you'd like to decide today that you want to change? Many of us decide to run at a much faster pace and when we were younger, this often works, but as we get older, we might discover we have less energy, more responsibilities. Would you like to decide today to change anything in your approach to summer, specifically when it comes to the next few weeks of summer this year? One place you might wanna consider starting is would you change anything to create healthier rest practices? When we begin working on our protocol, the very first thing we're going to start with is rest. Our formula says rest, then joy, and then work. All three are important. We wanna do them in that order. We wanna rest until we have the energy for joy and fun and play, and then once we've spent some of our energy on joy and fun and play and brought energy back into our lives, then we want to do our purposeful work. How would you like to cultivate your summer version of soul care and rest? It might start with a thought. You are worthy of rest. You deserve it, not because you've done your work, not because you've completed something, just because you breathe in and breathe out. We suggest finding something that reminds you of this. We have a picture of a resting tree, a tree that might be near your home, and when you see it, it reminds you to take a chair or a blanket and just sit and breathe in and out and ground yourself. But maybe you wanna pick something else, a plant or a flower or a table. Could you choose something right now that when you see it, it will remind you are worthy of rest, and you deserve it just for breathing in and out? Many of us hold rest until the thing that we wanna be productive in is complete. So let's just notice, what do you need right now in order to rest? A protocol is a way to budget your energy, and I'm going to be giving some examples today of how to budget your energy based on what works best for you. And if you don't know, as I'm sharing these examples, what's best for you, maybe try both and see what happens with your energy. Some of us are going to know right away, "This is the right way for me to invest my energy," and for others, it's going to take some time and some nuance and some curiosity. So the first thing I have here is just a blank schedule of seven days and five boxes. I high, highly, highly suggest that you only have five boxes a day in the middle of summer when there's more daylight. The rest of the year, you might have three or four boxes a day. So midwinter you might only have three boxes a day, but for summer you might have five, something before breakfast, something after breakfast, something after lunch but before dinner, something after dinner, and maybe one extra box in the evening. What we do when we create a protocol is we decide in advance where we want to put our energy. So if you were to label this Sunday through Saturday or Monday through Sunday, whatever works for you, could you pick one or two boxes right now that would be a place of rest? This is where I'm going to pause and fill my own soul with sunshine. It might be taking a nap, but it might be going out for a coffee with a friend. Could you choose right now, "Okay, I'm going to say that Saturday morning, the first box, and Thursday evening, the last box, are going to be my time to rest"? Below you see the different colors. I have yellow and pink and blue. What would you like to choose as three colors just to start with for your relationships, for your responsibilities, and for your rest? Pick one color that would seem like restful energy to you, um, and pick one, two, or three boxes and decide in advance, "These are my boxes where I'm going to rest." Maybe they're in a row, three boxes on Saturday in a row, and I'm not going to have any kind of responsibilities. I'm not going to be giving out in relationship. I'm going to be fueling myself with things that fill my soul with sunshine. Once you've chosen where you want to rest, could you decide something that gives you joy? Maybe it is going to the gym. Maybe it's taking a class. Maybe it's reading a book. Could you also fill that in? So right now we're saying rest and joy. Here's where I'm holding space and energy. The next thing we want to say is we have a lot of responsibilities in life. We have homes to take care of and work that we do for pay and not for pay. Where would you like to do some of the responsibilities that are important to you? And you can do this in a nuanced way and say, "When I do work for pay, it's purple, and when I do work around my home, it's green." Whatever works for you. We're just coloring in a few blocks that say, "I'm going to hold space. I know my home requires laundry and cleaning floors and going grocery shopping, so I'm going to pick three or four boxes a week to do that important responsibility." And then the final thing is what about the relationships in your life that matter to you? Maybe it's spending time with a significant other or children. Maybe it's making sure that those friends that are so important to you are getting your time and energy. Do you want to give a few boxes each week to different people, or at least hold space for time for a relationship? Ideally, as you fill in the colors, you also have white space. So when you look at the chart that I created, there's colors, but there's also white space because life happens, and you need to be able to pivot. So say you decided Saturday morning is going to be my time of rest, and then I'm going to go do something that fills me with joy, and that turns out to be the exact same time somebody that you really care about needs your help. Of course, you're going to want to go and help them. If you don't have a way to pivot and to trade the time that's important to you with something that is open, that's where we get to a place where the things that are important but not urgent just fall off the table and we don't ever get to them. So could you hold some space and not fill in every single block? That might not feel possible right now. It might be something that every week as you pivot, you start to be able to say no to some things, and then you start to notice two, three, four weeks out that now you have some space to be able to move through and decide the yeses and the nos that fill you with sunshine and allow you to create the results that are important. What a protocol does is it says, "This is important to me. This is where I want my energy to go." It's like a budget for your energy, the same way we have budgets for our money. So could you create a protocol for the rest of the summer? Perhaps not if you've never done it before. But could you create one for the next two days? That might be an ideal way to start. What would you like to do tomorrow and the next day? Then once you've followed your protocol, you might learn, "I didn't give enough energy to this," or, "I held too much space and time for that." Then you might want to pivot and do another two days, and after a while, you might get to a place where you could do a week or two weeks at a time. One of the most important things is to notice your thoughts about having a protocol, acknowledging that you can't always do every single thing that you would love to do, and when we have to accept the things we can't change, it sounds simple, but it actually requires us to process feelings. And so you might be disappointed or frustrated. We want to hold space for that. Ideally, you're intentionally allocating energy to the areas of your life that are important to you. So I want to share two pieces of information with you. One is that some of us need to focus on one thing at a time. That is the ideal way for us to do life. So for me, this works. I would decide in advance where my energy's going to go, and then I would focus on that block of energy at a time. I would make the decision in advance, and I would be focused and strategic and direct and active. I would make sure that what I said I was going to do was what I was going to do. When I created this program, I thought this worked for everybody, but it doesn't. Some of us need to do this very differently. You need to notice what's important to you, and maybe that's in a journal. Maybe that is just in the Notes app saying, "Here's 10 things that are important to me." But then each week, you need to be checking in with yourself, aligning your energy on a daily basis, and without having clear, decided hour-by-hour decisions. Allow yourself to have some freedom and some flexibility. So for me, I would say I want each of my days to have three decisions that are already made. This is where my time is going for my work. This is where it's going for responsibilities. This is where it's going for relationships. You, if you are different than I am, might decide, "I want to focus on this relationship this summer," but I'm not going to decide to do that on Thursday. I'm going to notice as my day is going, what would I like to put in place today, having already written down somewhere what's important. So the only way to figure this out is to do the careful, slow work and discover what works best for you. For some of us, it is having decisions made and a clear protocol to follow. For others, it's to decide what's important and then allow some flexibility and some nuance in making the decisions on a daily or even hourly basis, trusting your own intuition that you know your energy and you know where it's best to spend it. Thank you for joining the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life. And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbits Life Coach, or visit my website, kellytibbitts.com. I look forward to connecting again soon