Posts tagged 'motivation'

You’ve probably heard this term before—burnout. Sometimes it feels like you have too much to do, but even though you’ve never worked harder, you feel less fulfilled at the end of the day.

If you feel burnout, you’re not alone. According to a Gallup study, 67 percent of American workers report feeling burned out at least some of the time, or even most of the time.

What’s most difficult about burnout is that it can feel as if there is no way out. We cannot add more hours to the day and nobody wants to put things like personal passions and relationships on hold because they’re overwhelmed at work.

Fortunately, burnout doesn’t have to last forever. I know this for a fact, because I’m no stranger to the feeling.

I felt burnout in 2005 when I was working at a startup; I was completely miserable and worried that hopping to yet another job would hurt my career. I felt it in 2009, when I worked myself into enough stress to cause a panic attack that landed me in the hospital. I felt it in 2011, when my company, Acceleration Partners, was growing, but I had completely maxed myself out getting to that point.

I didn’t know why I kept repeating this cycle until I realized I needed a better understanding of what I was trying to get out of life. That’s when I discovered that my spiritual capacity was low.

What is Spiritual Capacity?

The term “spiritual capacity” describes the degree to which you understand who you are and what you want most. Building your spiritual capacity is a journey of self-discovery; it means taking time to understand your what is intrinsically motivating you, and what actually makes you happy.

It’s daunting work, but it’s extremely important—if you don’t know what you want from life, you may spend all your energy running in the wrong direction and be left unfulfilled when you reach your goals. Even if you succeed at something, if it is not aligned with your purpose and values, you will likely feel unsatisfied and drained.

The first step in building spiritual capacity is to develop your core values. Start by setting aside time, putting away distractions and thinking carefully about yourself. When are you happiest? When are you most drained of energy? What types of people and situations are most frustrating for you? Pose these same questions to your family and close friends—often they can provide novel insights.

Putting thought into these questions will help you recognize consistent themes in your life and identify what makes you happiest. One of my core values is “long-term orientation,” which means I am most fulfilled when I’m setting and pursuing long-term goals—whether in my personal or professional life. I have found I just don’t get as much satisfaction from short-term wins.

Identifying your core values will give you a GPS for decision-making in your daily life. While it’s not possible to make everything we do connect to our core values, we can make conscious choices to spend more time doing what fulfills us and to give less energy to things that don’t.

In researching my new book, Elevate, I’ve realized that lasting achievement requires building capacity in four areas—spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional. Spiritual capacity is perhaps the most difficult of the four because it requires us to find clarity about our inner selves. Identifying personal core values and an overarching purpose can be a demanding task—and some of us can even be intimidated by the potential of discovering what we want most.

However, building spiritual capacity is foundational to a fulfilling life. People don’t achieve the life they want by accident; they do it by carefully defining their core purpose and values, and aligning their daily actions to pursue those things.

My workload isn’t any lighter than it was at other points in my life, times when I felt stretched to the breaking point. What has changed is that the majority of the work I do now serves my purpose: to find a better way and share it. I don’t feel drained when I’m working toward my core purpose—even after a long day of working in support of my core values, I feel energized and fulfilled.

For those who are struggling with burnout, I suggest you ask yourself if you know what you want and if you have thought about what your core values are. My guess is that many of people have not, because it is difficult work, and most people don’t know where to start. I know I didn’t until I was well into my adult life, and now I wish I had grown my spiritual capacity sooner.

If you’re working as hard as you can but feel you haven’t been rewarded with a fulfilling life, you’re not alone. To make a change, start building your spiritual capacity. Once you discover what you really want, make a plan to reach your goals. I think you’ll find that life is easier when you have a roadmap.

-Robert Glazer, Author of Elevate

See how capacity building relates to teams in Robert Glazer's new 2023 book Elevate Your Team!

In 2015, I decided to start sending an email every Friday to my company, Acceleration Partners. Rather than simply providing an update on the business, like many CEO wrap-ups, I wanted to inspire people with topics related to improvement and growth, aiming to challenge employees to want to achieve more in all areas of their lives, not just at work.

I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be, but I wondered if my emails would be skimmed, or even ignored. To my surprise, employees started telling me they looked forward to the messages each week and were sharing them with friends and family. The weekly emails were also having a noticeable impact within our company - members of our team started running races, taking bucket list vacations and improving their professional performance.

After sharing the impact it had with a few other business leaders who subsequently shared it with their teams, I renamed it Friday Forward, opened it to the public and encouraged readers to spread it to colleagues, friends and family. Today, over 100,000 people read it each week, in over 60 countries.

What I learned from my Friday Forward experiment, and the impact I’ve seen it have on so many people I haven’t even met, is the ability to elevate your performance and achieve at a high level stems directly from challenging your limits and building your capacity for growth. And when you do this for yourself, you provide motivation and a roadmap for others to follow. We all have a responsibility to be our best for the people around us, and unlocking this potential—in myself and in others—has become an ongoing quest for me.

It’s the driving factor behind my leadership approach to building a world-class company, pushing myself and others outside of their comfort zone, and of my recently published book, Elevate.

In my own leadership journey, and in speaking with hundreds of others who have made meaningful and sustained changes in their lives, I’ve discovered that there are four essential elements involved in capacity-building and all self-improvement: Spiritual, Intellectual, Emotional, and Physical. Elevating your performances holistically requires working to grow your capacity in each of these areas.

Building capacity is similar to developing a muscle—a person who wants to lift a heavy weight must first work to build physical strength over time. Each of the four capacity-building elements must be improved incrementally and developed consistently.

Spiritual Capacity
Developing our spiritual capacity requires us to evaluate who we are and what we want most from life, then align that to our daily lives. This starts with determining our core beliefs and values, which can be difficult for many as it involves deep introspection and self-assessment. Building spiritual capacity is vital to a fulfilling life—if you don’t have a destination in mind, you may waste a lot of time and energy running in the wrong direction. Discovering my core values and my core purpose and using that awareness to make decisions about my priorities and goals took my life to a different level. To make this process a bit easier, I created a tool called the Whole Life Dashboard that helps you determine what’s most important to you and how to align to it daily.

Intellectual Capacity
Intellectual capacity is about how we improve our ability to think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline. Developing our intellectual capacity often involves setting and achieving goals, developing good routines and habits, and learning continuously. Think of it as improving your operating system.

The greater your intellectual capacity, the more you will achieve with the same expenditure of energy or effort. For example, a daily morning routine is one of the main characteristics that many high achievers have in common. They use the first 30-60 minutes of the day to get in the right mindset and think about their goals for the day—not to check their social channels and their email. In my experience, I've seen that people who do this accomplish so much more within the same 24 hours.

Physical Capacity
Physical capacity is our ability to improve our health, well-being, and physical performance. While our brain helps drive and guide us through life, it’s our body that is asked to do the heavy lifting day in and day out. That’s why it’s so important to maintain our health and wellness, challenge ourselves, manage our stress, and get the proper amount of sleep. When your body is tired and sluggish or your brain is fatigued, it makes doing anything more difficult.

Building physical capacity goes beyond just diet and exercise—it also requires us to manage how we deal with stress, how resilient we are in the face of adversity, and how we equip ourselves to face inevitable adversity.

Emotional Capacity
Emotional capacity relates to how we react to challenging situations and people, as well as the quality of our relationships. Improving emotional capacity is difficult for most as it requires learning to manage your feelings, evaluate the best and most challenging aspects of your personality, and accepting a certain amount of uncertainty and unpredictability from both individuals and circumstances.

For example, if two people have a negative interaction with somebody early in the day, a person with a high degree of emotional capacity can shrug it off, move past it, and continue with their day and their priorities. The person without this capacity is rattled and lets this interaction consume and ruin their entire day. People with high emotional capacity generally are able to cope with challenges quickly and move on from setbacks. They also have positive relationships with people who bring them energy and move away from people who drain their energy.

One of the most important outcomes of building your Spiritual, Intellectual, Physical, and Emotional Capacity is the exponential impact it has on others, including friends, family, and those around you. It has the effect of “lifting while you climb.” As you build your own capacity and achieve more, you both inspire and develop the ability to help others to do the same.

-Robert Glazer, author of Elevate

See how capacity building relates to teams in Robert Glazer's new 2023 book Elevate Your Team!

For more on building your capacities, check out Elevate>>