Shivani Gupta

Hi everybody, and welcome to the Grow Your Business Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about this very, very important word called energy. It's not the energy in your house and what your house uses. It's not the energy and the fuel efficiency of your car. It's your personal energy. As a business owner, one of the things that happens is there are so many things that are expected of us, and we expect of ourselves, we have our business to manage. And in that we have so many challenges and actions that we've got to take around our people. There are so many actions and challenges, we've got to take about making money and earning a great revenue and profit. We've also got lots of actions and things that we need to do and take around our processes to constantly improve it. And that's just business, then we have our family, then we have our friends, then we have our personal health goals, then we have others and so on.

So, the list of things that occupy your time and energy and space is huge. So, I want to talk a little bit today is about energy, this really, really important topic. And I have talked about energy before. And I'm going to talk about other podcasts of energy as well. Because I'm a big believer that you've got to constantly be reassessing what is taking your energy up, what do you need, and there may be some areas that your energy is going, but you go absolutely, I want that energy to go into that part to grow my business. And in fact, you want to have more energy to be able to go into that part. But there are other things that are not really serving you in terms of what you need to do. So, you really need to look at that. The first model that I want to share with you is a model that I came across probably at the age of 19 or 20 years of age, I had just started my first work. And there was a speaker and a leadership coach that came in. And he drew this big circle on the whiteboard, and just massive circle that basically took up all of the whiteboard and inside it he wrote, COI, I didn't know what COI meant trying to look pretty smart compared to the you know, people that were 10 or 20 years older in the room than me. And he said, does anybody know what that means? A couple of people have guesses. But essentially what COI stands for is Circle of Influence.

Now you might have heard circle of influence, our circle of concern, circle of action, but essentially circle of influence and how this relates to energy is inside the circle, other things that you can control, outside of the circle, other things that you cannot control. So, one of the really important things in terms of what you do and how you do it is that you want to be able to make some changes, and write everything down that's inside of your circle of influence and outside of your circle of influence. So, for example, I've got a trip booked for Bali this year. And I'm going to be going there for a particular conference. And one of the things that's happening there is I don't know what's going to happen around COVID, things could escalate again. So for example, what happens around COVID is outside of my circle of influence, but what's inside my circle of influence would be making sure that I've checked all the documentation, making sure that my passport is up today, making sure that any other things that I need and talk terms of being able to do that.

Now let's take that example in terms of growing your business. So, for example, you've got a staff member, that's not behaving very well. And you really need to have a fairly stern pretty one of those uncomfortable but necessary, challenging conversations to say your behavior is not okay. Now, what's in your circle of influence is to have that conversation, what's outside of your circle of influence, is how badly they may be behaving. One of the things that happens as business owners is we spend a lot of energy on things that are outside of our circle of influence. How do they I've given them so much time we've sent them to all these courses, they even got to go to that conference before Joe and Jane did, et cetera, et cetera. And the more we think about the stuff that's outside of our circle of influence, it is energy wasted. What we want to do in this case is have more energy that's going into working out what this conversation is going to look like with this particular person. And how am I going to structure that conversation? How do I acknowledge them? Maybe there's something going on for them? How do I make this a very open-hearted conversation but also at the end of the day, let them know that some of their behaviors are not okay. And that they're having an impact on the business and on such and such person. So that's something that you would use for circle of influence.

You know, I use it as a mum as well to two teenagers. So one of the things that happens is sometimes teenagers can be moody, if anybody's got teenagers and you relate to this, and you know their moods despite having done well, also things for them may fluctuate, and how their moods are, besides the fact that I can influence is making sure that particularly my son who gets very hangry, which is when you're haven’t eaten and you get angry, this is one of the words that we use in my friendship circle is whether your child or your son gets angry when he gets hangry. So, what's in my circle of influence is to make sure that the fridge is stocked with some beautiful food. And we've done some preparation on the weekend. And there's always three or four things cooked in the fridge that he or my daughter can access. What is not in my circle of influence is whether he chooses to eat it or whether he then fluctuates his, you know, moods around that. So just rather than focusing all that energy on the fact that his moods are fluctuating, and why is this happening, and this isn't right, you can waste a lot of energy in terms of being able to do that.

I also wanted to take you through an example of circle of influence where through COVID, one of the businesses that I had was in a shopping center. Now when that business shut down due to the nature of COVID, then the government forced me to say I don't have to pay 100% of the rents, but I had to pay 60% of the rents. Now in this one particular place, my rent was over $20,000 a month, which is a lot of money. So, I still had to fork out $12,000 a month 60% of the rent, but I had zero income coming in. And you know, that started to eat into savings. And that started to eat into the school fees. And that started to eat into the mortgage payments, etc. Because the duration of COVID went on. And that was only for one of the businesses that I was running. So, I started to get pretty stressed about it. And one of the things I did was I went back to the circle of influence. And I said COVID is outside of my circle of influence the government saying and you know, big shopping centers imposing that 60% of the rent, subject repair is outside of my circle of influence. I'm not in charge of the policy, I'm not in charge of that whole industry. I'm not in charge in government around doing all of this. What I am in charge of is how do I manage my finances. And I now need to do that. The other thing is it was starting to cause me a lot of stress. The other thing that I'm in charge of is to say, well, what about you know, if I maybe had a psychologist, for example, and that psychologist could just really help me keep my mind positive, because I was starting to get stressed and a little bit of anxiety have few sleepless nights worrying about how long this will went that obviously none of us knew at that point in time. So, what it was with my circle of influence was how I managed my mental state by hiring a site that I caught up with every two to three weeks. And how I manage my finances, what's not in my circle of influence, as COVID went for the fact that there was an expectation that we would pay 60% of the rents, and there was some still some outlines, etc. So, by using this, this really beautiful simple diagram that I've been using, since the age of 18, literally getting a whiteboard or a piece of paper, drawing a big circle on it that occupies most of it. And writing COI or a circle of influence and to say, What am I spending my energy on at the moment, that is absolutely out of my circle of influence. But that often is taking up a lot of my energy because I'm thinking of analyzing and critiquing a getting angry and resentful about it. Rather than just focusing on what's within my circle of influence, I'm having a bit more energy, because energy I find leaks. You know, it's like somebody punches a hole in a tire and the air comes out or a balloon or whatever. Well, you know, when we think about things that are sometimes outside of our circle of influence, it feels like somebody's punching us. And we're losing all our energy and our motivation and our you know, way of doing things. So, what you want to do is minimize some of that what you want to do is maximize the energy that you spend on what you do. I'd love for you to try this on something that's really bothering you and just use the COI and say is it within my circle of influence or not. And then just work on and put your energy and time into the bits that are really important. I hope you found that useful. Please let me know any topics that you're ever interested in. And I would love to be able to bring on a guest or shift some of the experience and wisdom I have around that topic. And I just want to make sure that you are there and getting some tips so that you can continue to grow your business. Thanks for listening.