LEADERSHIP | How to optimize personal energy for peak performance. w/ Josefine Campbell

Josefine Campbell, founder of Campbell Co, a top leadership consulting firm for multinational companies, shares insights from her latest book Power Barometer: Manage personal energy, not just time and money.

Learn how optimizing your personal energy can transform the way you manage or collaborate with others in any professional setting. Discover the secrets to becoming mentally agile and unlock your full potential for leading your company and getting the most from your employees.

Introduction:
In this episode of Business Owners Radio, hosts Craig Moen and Shai Gilad welcome Josephine Campbell, author of the book "Power Barometer: Managing Personal Energy, Not Just Time and Money." Josephine shares her insights on managing personal energy and why it's a critical factor in achieving success in business and life.

Episode Highlights:

1. The Motivation Behind the Book

Josephine explains what led her to write "Power Barometer" and the importance of sharing insights gained from working with and coaching leaders.

2. The Awareness Matrix

Learn about the Awareness Matrix, a visual map to navigate awareness in your mind and energy level.

3. Preparing for Uncertainty

Josephine draws parallels between her martial arts background and the need to prepare for uncertainty in business and life.

4. Managing Energy and Mind

Discover techniques to manage personal energy and keep your mind focused, even in challenging situations.

5. The Values Lighthouse

Josephine introduces the concept of the Values Lighthouse, a tool to guide decision-making and stay true to your core values.

6. The Tombstone Problem

Shai discusses the importance of defining success beyond financial achievements and how to leave a meaningful legacy.

7. Measuring and Managing Energy

Learn practical strategies for measuring and managing your energy levels throughout the day, even during busy workdays.

8. Closing Remarks

Josephine emphasizes the significance of taking care of your energy for success and invites listeners to connect with her for more resources and guidance.

Conclusion:
Managing personal energy is a critical skill for business owners and leaders. Josephine Campbell's insights provide valuable guidance on harnessing your energy for success, making better decisions, and leading a fulfilling life.

Resources:

Josephine Campbell's Website

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.

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About Business Owners Radio:

Business Owners Radio is a podcast that brings you insights, inspiration, and actionable advice from successful entrepreneurs and business experts. Hosted by Shye Gilad and Craig Moen, our show aims to help you grow your business and achieve your goals. Join us every week for new episodes packed with valuable tips and resources.

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Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

And now taken care of business your hosts Craig Moen and Shai Gilad.

Craig Moen: 0:09

Welcome to business owners radio episode 233. Our guest today is Josephine Campbell, author of the new book, power barometer, managing personal energy, not just time and money. Josephine is the founder of Campbell company, a top leadership consulting firm for multinational companies, has a four time jiu jitsu champion, and coach. She has helped middle managers through chief executives and multinational organizations such as McDonald's, Deloitte, and Maersk. Josephine is particularly interested in developing personal leadership in difficult circumstances, such as is often the case in the modern work life today. Good morning, Josephine. Welcome to business owners radio. Good morning. Happy to be here. We're just excited to have you on board today. This is a deep topic, when we went through the book and there was just so many areas of huge interest for our listeners, as business owners, we need all of the inputs and tools to bring forward our best. And this is a fantastic topic. But I got to ask what led up to the writing of this book? Well, exactly to do what we're about to do here to share all the insights I get from working with leaders, coaching, advising, engaging, and you know, as a coach, there's confidentiality, I always say it's just like, when you go to the doctor's, you go, Oh, you speak to a lawyer, there's 120% confidentiality. So as I work with brilliant leaders, a lot of them share their strategies and way of coping with things. And, you know, sometimes I learned from them, to be honest, people have different ways of dealing with leadership, challenges, uncertainty, change, whatever comes your way. And I've often felt that I was in a fortunate situation that I could sit and listen to what these brilliant people have found out. And I thought it would be useful for other people to know, then also, in these processes, you know, coaching, it's, it's like playing tennis, you play together, right? So I'm playing the ball to someone, I coach, and they pick it up, and they throw it back. And we build on each other. Right. And I have a background in Japanese martial arts. I have a background as a lecturer at Copenhagen Business School. So I know a lot of science, about leadership, collaboration, performance, strategy, and so on. And then I have plus 25 years of business experience, I started my first business myself when I was just 21 years old, and had to learn a lot of things the hard way. And so I've combined these three approaches these three pillars of knowledge into how I coach. And I found that sometimes when I came with some suggestions or mirrored back some techniques, from Japanese martial arts, that we would get outstanding effects, that you know, what you do in martial arts and Japanese martial arts, to prepare yourself for uncertainty for a battle is very, very useful. When you're in business. In the modern work life, especially if you're a business owner or leader, there's so much you have to deal with. And it takes a lot of personal energy. And it takes that you management so capacity that you know exactly where your mind is, because very often, we become unaware. And when we become unaware, we are unaware that we aren't aware, and we want see things that are coming from behind, or behind some things that people say, between the lines that we should have picked up on, and it can have severe consequences for us. And for our business. It's tremendous that you've really decided that you needed to share all of these learnings that you've had in your coaching and in your martial arts, combining that and I was keyed up by one of the elements being the awareness matrix. Sometimes we're just not aware and tell us your version of the awareness matrix and how that flows. Yes, awareness matrix provides you with a visual map of how to navigate your awareness in your mind and your energy level. So it's important that you keep consciousness about in what I call the red zone. That's when your mental

Josefine Campbell: 5:00

be hijacked. Or if you're in what I call the Green Zone, that's when you're ready when you're ready to face uncertainties and challenges and see what is beyond your normal scope. And it also gives you a map to check in to your personal energy level. Because your personal energy level has a huge impact on your abilities. And the same counts for the people you will collaborate with or you lead. So let's say you have five people in your team, if three of them are drained, it's gonna affect the team dynamic, big time. So it's quite simple to sense where people's energy level Ah, but very often, we don't do it, or we don't put it into account. A lot of people have been trained to think within the scope of time, money and quality. So when we're under pressure, we have to make a tough decision. We think about time, money, or quality. And very often, we forget energy, because nobody told us that. But as brains run on energy, like energy is the fuel of brains. It can fire any logic, not to consider personal energy.

Shye Gilad: 6:17

You know, Josephine hearing you talk about this, I recall the concepts of potential energy and kinetic energy that I learned in physics. And just thinking about this idea that potential energy is typically we think of it as energy stored, right? energy that we haven't tapped yet. That's why it's potential energy, and then get something moving to make progress. Kinetic energy, and there's a relationship between these two things, isn't there? Yes, definitely. And so it sounds like what I'm hearing you say is you have to manage your resource of potential energy, because at any given time of the day, you're going to have, you know, different balance in that account, so to speak, right? And we need that, in order to spend it to convert it into kinetic energy. Yes,

Josefine Campbell: 7:07

very true. We have to manage it. But most important is we have to be aware of it. So that we balance our activities to the current energy level. And then at the same time, we have to recharge the batteries. Right, fill the tank.

Shye Gilad: 7:27

Yeah. And so many overconfident entrepreneurs tend to think they have this limitless resource of potential energy, don't we?

Unknown: 7:37

Yeah. But then if you measure your energy, we have a tracker we use when we work with individuals and groups. And when we mentioned that a lot of those people you're talking about, or people like us, could be very drained on a Friday, right? leaving the office on a Friday afternoon, or evening. You completely empty? Yep. And then you might reach out throughout the weekend. And then you start over Monday. But then what happens if you have someone at home who also needs you to be a little bit active on participants, and he wants to spend time with you?

Shye Gilad: 8:12

Yeah. What do you bring into that? Then if you're all tapped out? Yep.

Josefine Campbell: 8:15

How are you going to end up and if you don't have that support at home, or other things besides your business, you become extremely vulnerable. Especially as an entrepreneur, you have put so much at stake. If you don't have a life, people around you to bounce back on when it's hard times it's going to be very difficult to go through the hard times. It's part of being resilience to have a full life.

Shye Gilad: 8:40

You know, one thing you said earlier that really stuck with me was this idea of preparing for uncertainty. And you know, to how that's informed the martial arts and you're thinking about this in the connections you've noticed with your clients. What is your practice? Yes.

Unknown: 8:53

So in jujitsu is a martial art. So if you have watched a martial art movie, for example, let's say Karate Kid, you remember that old movie from the 80s? Yeah, exactly. Wax on wax off. There are some scenes where they are attending a fight a championship, they're standing on two green tatami mats, and there's a judge saying it to me, and then they start fighting, right? And then we would do that too. We would have these two time tools. Two minutes, battles would one minutes break. It's pretty intense, actually. And we call that committee, but you would also have another type of championships. It's the type of championships that we call reaction tracks. And there's a day track and there's a night track and a track since to take one and a half hour to two hours to walk the track. And they would put it somewhere this it you know, let's say like in a in a forest, where there are no people and no lights. So the night track would be quite dark. Actually, you couldn't see your hand in front of you when you were walking down the path. And they would put flower on the little path. Because you know, flower lights up in the darkness. So you can only see those little white stripes made of flowers on the

Shye Gilad: 10:17

on the path. It sounds like Avatar or something. Go ahead.

Unknown: 10:21

Yeah. I like Avatar. So I was, well, yes, the first time I participated. And fortunately, my sensei, my coach, had been training me well, he'd been training me not only in the physical aspects of jujitsu, he also taught me the mental and energetic levels techniques of jujitsu. So he trained me beforehand to manage my mind and manage my energy level as I was walking through the dark forest. So an athlete's jujitsu, Marathon basketball, you name it, an athlete will rest before a big performance, you will take it easy and recharge your batteries. Then just before you start the track, you will prepare mentally, we learned how to meditate. So you will focus and I think a tennis player, or soccer player, or football player, they will also focus. So you focus your attention on yourself, your performance, the track, or the court wherever you're practicing. So you learn how to move your focus from what goes on inside yourself, and what happens just around you where you're playing. So he taught me to stay calm. It's very important in martial art that you don't freak out or become aggressive when someone tried to hit you. That instinct that fight flight instinct is designed to help people who do not know how to fight to survive in a dangerous situation. So you just start hitting like you're very unconscious and unaware, right? It just becomes really crazy what you do. And if you're like a true master, true Sensei, a martial artist, you learn not to activate the fight flight response. That's the same response to get activated, when there are a lot of uncertainties, or you feel threatened in some other way. So you learn how to keep that calm, you can stay aware of what happens inside yourself and around you. Because if you're activate it, if you're all on what I call the auto pilots in fight flight response, you won't see things that are coming from behind. Like we can fight with blindfolds, you probably have seen that we can sense what happens around us. And walking through a track in the darkness, it's also almost like fighting in darkness, right. And sometimes you would get attacked by two people, you wouldn't know sometimes it's one person, sometimes there would be three, you're just done with the first two, then there comes another one from behind. So you really, really have to keep attention on what happens around you, you can't just go into some kind of zone, right? And you did so is a martial art, where ethics is a big part of it, we learn how to take life with our hands. So we also learn how to preserve life with our hands. So some of the post would not be attacks. Some of them would be someone in need of first aid. And what happens if you are all fiery with your fight flight response activated, if you what I call mentally hijacked, if you are in what I call the redstone. And you arrive at a post, there's a big guy screaming, he's lying on the floor, and he's screaming, right? But he's screaming because he's pretending that the vein in his thigh is bleeding. He needs first that at some of my competitors that would beat him up, they would actually beat him up. But what you have to do is you have to sit back and you have to calm down the guy, then I would take off my belt, I would tie it around his thigh, I would put it up and let him know that help would be on his way. Right? That's what you have to do. You have to stay calm. It's just like, in your business. You see something happening? Or someone says something to you. And if you're in the red zone, if you're fiery, you might get them wrong. You might beat up someone who asking to buy something from you would be a shame, wouldn't it? Yeah,

Shye Gilad: 14:28

to say the least. But the analogy is just so clear. You know, when we think about it, when we think about classic examples of leadership that we admire again, and you'll say Well, what did you notice? You know, often in my teaching, one of the things we look at is something that happened in the US called the Miracle on the Hudson in 2009. Were captains Elisa Lindbergh first officer Skiles. They lost both of the engines in their aircraft after takeoff out of New York, and they successfully landed that area laying in the Hudson River, everyone survived. Now I play that for my students. And I will ask them, What do you notice? And we listen to the transcript of communications in real time. And the first thing they all say is, they notice how calm he was. Yeah, I'm picturing 12 year old you going through the woods, with this little phosphorus, you know, trail of powder and, and having these very intense role plays going on. And yet, as you say that the skill is to manage that energy to keep yourself from being hijacked that fight or flight response, because once that happens, literally parts of your brain shut down. Definitely. parts we need to make executive decisions, aren't they? Exactly. So how did your sensei prepare you for the you know, what are some of the earliest things that you remember, even as a child for being prepared for that kind of thing, I must have been really intense, to say the least? Well, not really,

Unknown: 15:59

it's actually very simple. And that's also why it has been easy for me to pass it on, in my practice, as a coach working with many different kinds of leaders. And it's been easy for them to adapt it. And if you look at the awareness matrix in my book, and so you can also find the awareness matrix, on my website, on the freebies, if some of the listeners want to check it out. It provides this map, you have to keep your awareness on two things, your personal energy level, and your mind. So it takes some kind of self awareness. And if you realize that you lost yourself awareness for some moments, you probably been in the red zone. Mind you probably been hijacked. Because when you're hijack, you lose your ability to use the executive function. So you lose your ability to have empathy, self awareness, think logic. Yeah, I'm saying I'm serious think logic, we think we think logic, but we are not. He creates so many executive functions, it just goes out of order. And it happens to us, all of us, even to me sometimes. And you just have to say, Oh, I was hijacked. And then you try to stay in the green zone. So just being aware of it is the first and foremost important step, then being aware in itself, it's something you can go on practicing for a long time, right. And meditation does help because when you meditate, you practice your ability to control where your mind is, right? It's one way of meditating. There are many, many types of meditation, like there's many, many types of yoga, like, there are many types of gymnastics, and you know, many types of butterflies. But some of the techniques you can do in meditation is you can do a body scan, where you move your attention from the top of your head to your toes, little by little, all that other things you can do meditation is you can try to observe your breath. Or you can try to control your breath. If you have a meditation teacher that tells you you're not supposed to have thoughts, then get another teacher thoughts do happen, but you have to notice when the thoughts appear, and then refocus back to what you were doing. If you choose the one where you're moving your breath, or you're consciously controlling your press to do slow in breath and out breath, you have a double effect, double effect is that one thing is that you're controlling your mind and your focus. The other one is that you will automatically send signals to the amygdala, when a flight response is located, or when it kicks out from you will send signals telling the amygdala that there is no danger. And that is because your breath is the only of the vital functions that you can control. You cannot control how fast your heart pumps but you can control the pace of your breath. And it's kind of giving body feedback back to the brain, telling it how to behave. It can go both ways, right? It's really smart. So that's why when I was walking in the dark forest, on the path, knowingly, that I would get attacked, then I could keep my awareness on my own body. And I could sense for example, if my breath becomes swallow, or if I get sweaty hands, I know Okay, now I'm kind of moving into the red zone, then I would start to breathe slowly. Yeah,

Craig Moen: 19:23

there's so many elements that can be brought into place to help but I love the analogy of the breath. As far as the one thing you have influence over and have control over these techniques and capabilities. All are excellent to have in your knowledge center. That one of the things that you mentioned a number of times, you know, this element of hijacking and we go into meetings, we have conversations, we have dialogues, and we have all of these potentials that can trigger us and sometimes we don't know them or recognize them when a business owner is Walking into meetings or having one on ones, what should they be aware of that may be silent triggers for them to be able to employ some of the techniques, the atmosphere

Unknown: 20:11

in the room, and what goes on inside themselves. So you should know, where is your own energy level. Now, I have a technique that I call the power parameter. That's why my book is titled The power parameter. Again, it's a very simple mental exercise that can help you be aware of where your own energy level now. And then the book also has a list of body signals, such as the sweaty palms, or swallow breath that you could look at to kind of do like a little self diagnosis on what is it that happens to your body when you're about to get hijacked. And then you can try to keep your awareness of those signals.

Craig Moen: 20:55

Many times were hijacked so easily. And being this awareness element allows us to identify it. identification is the first step of course, and a major step. And it comes with time, your book helps tremendously to bring forward some of those underlying elements that we may not recognize right off. And even to measure your book has a lot of elements regarding measuring your energy level during the day, and being conscious and being aware. One of the items that came up that I thought was interesting was the values Lighthouse that's in your book. Can you tell us more about that?

Unknown: 21:33

Yes. So very often, we will end up in situations where we don't know whether to walk right or left, and you need somewhere to look at. And that's where you need something to guide you like a North Star. And that's where you can look at your values lighthouse. So it's a simple exercise where you from a long list of values, you have to pick three values. And it's easy to pick 50, or even 10. But it's very hard to pick three or two. So when you're in the middle of the storm, or you don't know where to look, you don't know which way to walk, you will look towards those values. And very often it is so that if we live our values, even sometimes it's the tough choices, when we live our live values, then you will never go really wrong. You know, you will always go somewhere that fits you, that is good for you, at the end, compromising for too long on your top two or top three values, it's only going to take you down a wrong path.

Shye Gilad: 22:38

Yeah, it's almost like without this context, I just feel like the more I'm listening to you talk about this. And the more I'm thinking about it, it just feels like it's such a foundational leadership context, like a place to start from. And, you know, you've talked about these analogies of we all talk about time management and money management. I mean, you can actually hire financial managers, right to help you manage your money. And we can get assistance and other things to help us manage time, we use calendars and other tools to manage time. Without G. Neither of those things matter. We can't deploy capital without using some kind of energy. When we think of time management, we think of, you know, activity management, what are we doing at different times of the day? Well, if we're not conscious of the energy, how can we be successful with those things?

Unknown: 23:24

Yeah. And how can you enjoy it? Right? So

Shye Gilad: 23:27

yeah, exactly what you said about Well, now it's Friday, and we all can think about how we would feel on Friday afternoon. But now you've got to come into your weekend and be there for your family and maybe for other folks that you care about and things that you want to do and you want to bring your best to those things.

Unknown: 23:42

And what is success? Like really like a success? Only a big bank account? Or is it also enjoying your success by yourself with someone else? But you know, like, you need a little bit of energy not just to be drained in front of Netflix, right?

Shye Gilad: 23:57

Yes, yes. Yeah. And when I think about success, I always think of what one of my coaches used to call the tombstone problem, which is, what do you want it to say on your tombstone? You know, so yeah, here lies Craig, he was really great at email, you know, nobody wants that on their tombstone. So yes, you know, I, I love that you brought this book into the world through your practice. And I think these lessons are just so overlooked. And at the same time, they resonate. So clearly, you know, and where you started, you talked about how this kept coming up in your coaching relationships. And can you give us one or two examples about how this has shown up with your clients so that we can get in tune with what the symptoms are that maybe we're not in touch with ourselves around our energy? Well,

Unknown: 24:43

let me give you a good case and a bad case. So the good case is that I found that many top executives in large corporations, some of my clients are like big corporations such as McDonald's or Carlsberg and you know, I read a really big companies. And some of these executives manage 1000s of people, and they have a high level of complexity and uncertainty at that job. And some of them are thriving. And I found that they have somehow developed some techniques on their own, or with a coach to manage their energy and their mind, because otherwise they could do what they're doing every day. And other people that I work with, would suffer from severe stress. And unfortunately, that's a quite common condition today, it shouldn't be normal, but it kind of becomes normal to be stressed out, or to have been burned down. And in complexity,

Shye Gilad: 25:40

and entrepreneurial, or executive trope, almost right, the tired executive because they work so many. And some organizations, unfortunately, that are very archaic, and still see this as like a badge of honor. And I think, again, you know, folks that are accidental entrepreneurs, which many business owners are, you know, they didn't start out as a young child and dream of owning a business someday, it's usually some kinds of circumstances and opportunity that thrust them into that role. And they have these ideas and beliefs around well, of course, I work 70 hours a week, all you know, all the hardest chargers do that. So therefore, I need to do that, too. Yeah.

Unknown: 26:17

And that's a dangerous core belief, because it wears out the machinery that is supposed to perform and build value. And that machinery is you. So it's a quite common problem. And many people are in the situation where they can not just get on a sick leaf, because they're stressed out, though your shirt because your nervous system and your neurons in your brain are suffering. So it is like a biological condition that you can measure. And breast does make a difference. And if you don't take care of it, you can lose some of your cognitive abilities, you could lose your capability to concentrate to focus. And you will not be able to work many hours ever again, if you don't take care of it. But then sometimes people cannot just, you know, take two, three months off, which would be unneeded. And then they have to start managing the energy while they're working. Right. And they have to stay in the green zone. Because every time you move into the red zone, it cost a lot on the energy accounts. It's very energy costly, to be in fight flight mode, it exhausts you. So some of the people of the theaters that I worked with, they couldn't just leave their business, because then there would be no business. So we had to manage their energy and their mind just to survive. And it's incredible what people can do. It's always, you know, a little bit like a roller coaster those rights. And it's good to have someone there with you, to support you to help you because sometimes you take a few steps forward, and you take a step back. And it takes a while, you know, sometimes it takes a couple of years to get back on track. If you don't get like a real timeout. Well, I

Shye Gilad: 28:01

think that your analogy of saying it's an account that you have to manage, think it's like any other investment then isn't it? Right? So if it takes time? Well, of course it does. You have to invest that time to build up that to get that return. And there's consequences. If you don't do that, you know, in terms of your potential for leadership, your potential for fulfillment within the other roles you play in your personal life and your family. And getting back to what you said Josephine about, well, how do you define success, right.

Unknown: 28:33

And if you're already in a good place, sure, it takes some time to do some sports or go for a walk or whatever fills you up and give you energy. But the amount of time you have to invest in it doesn't have to be that large, you just most important is that you have attention on it, then sometimes a five minutes break can do wonders. I'm serious, five minutes break. And I mean a break not looking at your phone, but you close your eyes for five minutes. That really resets the brain. And we have substantial of evidence to support that.

Craig Moen: 29:06

Josephine, thank you so much for joining us today. Shine. I had a wonderful time and dialogue with you. And I know our listeners are really going to gain from this and wanted to thank you for being part of the show. You're welcome.

Josefine Campbell: 29:20

It's been great talking to you. And I am so happy that you bring forward these messages I have. I have so much like to give on my website. There are some free tools that just being handled.com. If you look on the freebies, there is different tools that we talked about today that you can access for free and I do what I do, because it's meaningful to me it might work actually gives me energy. It's really wonderful. I'm truly interested in the people I work with. I'm truly interested in, in hearing from people who follow my work or read my book works. What are you struggling with? And what is it that is useful for you that I'm sharing? And how else can I help you so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, you can even connect not just follow me and feel free to write me a message. And I hope that what I've shared with you here today can make the most of it for you, in your business and in your life.

Craig Moen: 30:24

Joining us in the studio today has been Josephine Campbell, author of the new book, power barometer, managing personal energy, not just time and money. You can find out more about Josephine as well as find links to her book and content. All on our website at business owners radio.com.

Announcer: 30:45

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