006 | FITNESS | Managing Energy A Leadership Responsibility

Speaker A: Welcome to Leadership by Faith, where we believe that leadership starts within and faith is the foundation we stand on. I'm your host, Miya Allen, executive leadership coach, speaker, founder of Lead in Life, and fellow traveler on the journey to leadership excellence. Each week we'll explore, explore how to live by faith, lead with excellence and love intentionally as we transform how we show up, uh, at home, at work and in our communities. Because when faith and service leads, leadership follows. Today we continue Pillar one, One Live. This time we're talking about something much more practical and often neglected. That's fitness. No, we're not talking about vanity, not aesthetics. We're talking about stewardship. Because let's face it, being burnt out and busy is not cute and it's not a badge of honor. What it is, is a sign, a warning sign that something needs to change. Let's talk about managing our energy and not just our time. You cannot lead well when you're exhausted. You cannot speak life into yourself or others when you're depleted and you're running on fumes. You cannot build a resilient family, a high performing team, or even an effective organization if your own nervous system is unstable. Today we're talking about physical, emotional and mental stewardship. Because your body, mind and emotions are not separate from your leadership. Your energy walks into a room way before the words come out of your mouth. If you're tired, irritable, reactive, foggy, or if you stretch too thin, the room fills it. And if you've ever convinced yourself that this is the season, it just requires me to sacrifice my time. I'll rest later. That's nonsense. This episode is especially for you. Let's redefine fitness as leadership, responsibility. Oh, I'm so excited to do this episode. Um, and I hope you all are excited as well. Welcome again to Leadership by Faith. This is where we put faith and service first and leadership always. I'm your host, Miye Allen. Now, last time we talked about the Live Pillar and its corresponding 5F being faith, which is our foundation. Faith is part one of the live pillar. Fitness is part two. Now, the live Pillar allows us to lead ourselves well before we lead others. And we do that through faith and fitness. Now, faith is the foundation, no matter what, it is the priya, the priority. Excuse me. Our North Star. It gives us direction, it gives us peace and helps, uh, helps us to find purpose in God. Now, fitness is what gives us the capacity and the strength to, to sustain the purpose and to carry the vision God has given us for our lives. Now, if I just Confused you. I apologize. It means one of two things. Maybe this is your first time listening to the Leadership by Faith podcast, or you've listened, but you've listened out of order. Either way, it means you want to go back and listen to episodes three through five. But for right now, I'm going to give you the Cliff Notes. So this podcast is called Leadership by Faith, and it exists solely to help you live, lead, and love. Thus, the three pillars, that's live by faith, lead with excellence and love intentionally the way that God does. Uh, now, those three pillars, live, lead, and love, they're supported by a 5F framework that's F, as in frank. And this framework helps you to navigate those three pillars, whether you're at home, at work, or in your community. Now, the five Fs are faith, fitness, family, finance, and fun. Pillar one, live, is aligned with the first two Fs, faith and fitness pillar number two, lead, is aligned with the next two Fs, which are family and finance. And then the third pillar is supported by. By the last F, which is fun. The M. Bottom line, this podcast exists to give you tools, insight, strategies, and challenges to help you live by faith, lead with excellence, and love intentionally the way that God loves. Now, let's get started. And we're going to start with the Word, because remember, this journey to leadership excellence requires that we stand on the Word. And what I mean by the Word is the Bible, the Gospel. Because faith is our foundation. And faith comes by hearing, hearing the word of God about the Gospel of Christ. And that helps us to align so that we experience transformation. If you have your Bibles, grab them. If not, grab your phone or wherever you read the Word of God. And so the first scripture that I want to share with you, this is the scripture we're standing on when we talk about fitness. And it is First Corinthians, 6, 19, 20, and I'm reading the amplified version. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is within you, whom you have received as a gift from God? And that you are not your own. You are not your own property. You were bought with a price. You were actually purchased with the precious blood of Jesus and made his own. So then honor your body and glorify God with your body. Father, add a blessing to the reading and the hearing of your Word. So, oftentimes we attribute this scripture to sexual immorality. Uh, we also attribute it to harmful substances in our bodies, like drugs, alcohol, junk food, etc. Etc. But I want you to see this verse from a different perspective. I want you to apply this verse in the perspective of stewardship and a way to, to worship God, just as the scripture said. No, we're not talking about vanity, we're not talking about aesthetics, and we're definitely not talking about push ups, protein shakes or six pack abs. We're not talking about that. All that stuff is ego. But what we are talking about is stewardship of your body and the spirit that dwells within your body. By the way, if you didn't know, and I'm sure you did, you only get one body in this life. So you have to take care of it and honor it. And that's part of what this podcast is going to do, help you to take care and honor your body. So what does this mean in our everyday life? I'm glad you asked. It means from the time you wake up to the time you lay down to go to sleep, you are a vessel carrying precious cargo in the form of the Holy Spirit. Now think about it this way. The Holy Spirit, he by the way, is likened unto gravity. I think that's, uh, a great way to look at it in that you can't see gravity, nor can you see him, the Holy Spirit. But gravity and him are always with you. You may never acknowledge gravity, but guess what? It doesn't stop it from operating. Jump and gravity will bring you down. It's the same with, uh, if you can't get the analogy of gravity, how about electricity? You can't see electricity, but it's operating. And get close to an open wire and you'll find out. So in, in life, when you start the day, the Holy Spirit is with you. You step into the shower, The Holy Spirit is there. You're eating breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Holy Spirit is there. You're getting dressed, you're driving to your destinations. When you walk into a room, when you're at work, everywhere you are, the Holy Spirit is there also. You are never alone. Spiritually, your body is literally a vessel to honor because the Holy Spirit dwells within you. I want you to think about that literally. You are a carrier of the divine presence of God, which means exhaustion or overuse and not having boundaries is neglecting your body. Our bodies are not machines to be run into the ground. Your body gets tired, your body gets hungry, your body gets weak. And simply speaking, your body is very needy as a result, God designed rhythm for us. Work a little, rest a little, sow and reap, pour out and be refilled. When you read the Bible, you even See that Jesus had to withdraw, and he was withdrawing to do that very same thing. To rest, to pray, to be refilled so he could pour out of himself. So when we talk about fitness here on this podcast, we're talking about wholeness and its stewardship. Fitness of the body, how do we move. Fitness of the mind, how do we think. Fitness of the soul, how we feel and manage our emotions. And fitness of the spirit, how we connect with the divine presence within us. All four of these must work together if you want to lead yourself well and lead others. We're recognizing fitness as stewardship, and we know we're there when we can confidently say, God, I'm grateful for the body, the mind, the emotions, and the spirit you've entrusted to me, and I will steward them well. Now, let's bring this back to our leadership. Fitness stewardship allows you to lead with excellence as you manage your energy and not just your time. Think of it this way. Managing your time says, how much can I fit into this time frame? Whereas managing energy says, what state must I be in to lead? Well, that's discipline. And if you think of it this way, your energy is synonymous to health and wellness. Your energy is a valuable leadership asset. Now, many people think it's their title, their position, or even their authority. All those things are oftentimes associated with ego. And we know what ego is. Right? Ego. Uh, edging God out. No. Energy. Your energy is a valuable leadership asset. Now, there are three areas we must steward and steward well to ensure that we are fit to lead not only ourselves, but others with excellence. And those three areas are our physical energy, our emotional energy, and our mental energy. So let's start with the physical energy. Think of your physical energy in terms of sleep, hydration, movement, and nutrition. So when we talk about sleep, I want you to ask yourself, if you're sleeping four hours a night and trying to lead people, you're leading impaired. You know, like you drive impaired, you are leading impaired on four hours of sleep each night. Ask yourself, are you prioritizing rest as much as you prioritize work? And if you're sleeping four hours a night, the answer is no. Make a change. Hydration. How much water do you drink intentionally on any given day, on a daily basis? And some of us may not know. Some of us may even say, I don't like water. Well, the rule of thumb to have energy and to have fitness, the rule of thumb is that you drink half your body weight in ounces. For instance, if you weigh 100 pounds, you should be drinking 50 ounces of water. So now you know what you need to do. Physical energy is also gauged by movement. We learn how to move out of gratitude for our temple. That's what we'll learn. We don't want to have movement because we feel guilty or we feel shame about not moving. Are you moving daily? Do you go beyond walking from your home to your car, from your car to your office area, back out to your car into your home? Are you moving more than that. If you're not, you should be. And then finally, as it relates to our physical energy, we have to consider our nutrition. Yes, we're going to talk about nutrition. We have to. That's how you get wholeness. That's how you get energy. How do you fuel your body? Are you fueling it with foods that give you life, or are there foods that promote death? So are you eating fruits and vegetables and lean proteins, or are you eating cupcakes, uh, potato chips, pizza only, you know. So that's our physical energy. We must steward it well. And we steward it again through sleep, hydration, movement, and nutrition. Let's now move to emotional energy. Ask yourself, do you regulate your emotions or do you wear them on your sleeve for everyone else to see? You know, are you self aware or are you reactive? And what I mean by reactive, you're unable to know what triggers you emotionally. Emotional fitness and your emotional energy means learning to lead yourself through your feelings, not letting your feelings lead you. You know, that's what we say in this day and age. Um, I feel some type of way. Well, if you had emotional fitness, you wouldn't feel some type of way, you know, because when you can lead yourself through your feelings and your emotions, you can for sure lead others through theirs as well as chaos. Now, the last thing we want to talk about as it relates to the three areas we need to steward is mental energy. You know, leadership begins in the mind. So I need you to ask yourself, are you constantly consuming or do you create regular, quiet times throughout your day? Not just once a day, not just once a week. Leaders who never unplug become unclear. You cannot make wise decisions from a fatigued brain. Another thing we have to consider when we're looking at our mental energy is what type of self self talk do we engage in? What stories are we telling ourselves? When we rehearse old fears, failures, and doubts, we're depleting our mental energy literally. We are sabotaging our, uh, mental fitness. And when I say this to my clients, they often ask me, well, I Want to be truthful and authentic. But isn't that pretending that everything is okay? No, it's not. Let's be clear. Mental fitness isn't pretending. Let's reframe that. Let's tell ourselves a, uh, new story, a different story. Mental fitness is choosing to, yes, be truthful, authentic and honest. But we don't linger there. We don't linger in that particular fear or rehearsing that failure or repeating that doubt. We don't rest there. Instead of rehearsing those things, things, what we do is turn to the truth of God, turn to the word of God, open our Bibles. You know, Mental fitness isn't about pretending everything is okay. It is, however, focusing on the truth and then training ourselves to go to God's word to look for that truth. Not to other people, go for ourselves to the word. When life gets noisy, that means reading and knowing God's word when you need it. Me, myself, no, don't think that I don't struggle with this because I struggle with this. This is something that you're never going to perfect. You're always going to need to lean into God's word. So for me, when my mouth starts speaking doubt, I remember the word of God and I remember that it says, speak those things that be not as though they were. So rather than saying, I'm, um, fearful or I'm afraid, I need to tell myself I'm courageous. I know that the word says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So I need to feed my mind the truth of God. You know, there was a season in my career where there were high expectations of me. I had high responsibilities, and I was sleeping four hours a night telling myself, oh, I've done that. I can do that. I feel great. You know, I was waking up before dawn. I would look at my emails before I prayed. Then I'd get into the office and there would be meetings back to back. Not to mention there was travel deadlines to meet, performance metrics to make. And, um, to my surprise, externally, it looked like I was thriving. But internally, I knew I was drained. I felt drained. But I convinced myself that this was temporary, just like many of you may be doing. And I lived for the weekend so, so that I could catch up on my sleep. By the way, that doesn't work. You can't wait until Saturday and sleep for 16 hours. It just doesn't work and catch up on your sleep. You've got to get your rest. And I don't think I actually said these words, but in the Back of my mind. Subconsciously, I'm thinking, this is what excellent requires. Until I started to notice little things change, like my patience. I, uh, became shorter with people. I didn't have as much patience as usual. My listening. I seem to always be distracted. Someone's talking to me, but my mind is someplace else. It's on the future. It's on the next thing, thing. And my body felt tight. My prayer life had reduced to almost nothing. And I realized I was optimizing operations in my career. But if I'm honest, I was neglecting the operator. Me, myself, I was neglecting me. And God began to correct me gently. It didn't all happen at once, but I would hear a reoccurring thing drop in my spirit. Like, rest is not optional. Um, rest is mandatory. You know, I kept feeling that or hearing that in my spirit. You know, I'm remembering a time in my career, and I'm laughing now, but it wasn't funny when it was actually happening. I can remember being short on patience when I was just talking about patience. It made me remember this. Filled with a little bit of ego and touched by not being as self aware as I should be. And so in that state, something had happened in operations, and I was coming on to the shift, and I didn't like how it was, so I decided to write an email. And in this email, uh, what was in the whole email doesn't even really matter. But this one line I wrote, it said, whoever made that decision, decision must be mentally challenged. Ouch. That was not characteristic of an email from an excellent leader, now was it? No. And you know what? The next thing I know, I'm, um, standing in HR being warned and reminded about leadership behaviors and what a leader looks like. You know, nothing like that has ever happened to me. But like I said, I had a little bit of ego, so I didn't think anything would happen to me. But what I knew from that experience is that I had to implement some non negotiables because I didn't want to be in that position. I wanted to show up as an excellent leader, as a leader that others wanted to follow. So like I said, I had to implement some non negotiables. For instance, sleep discipline. I made a plan so that I didn't sleep only four hours. And no, again, it didn't happen overnight. But little by little, I went, you know, to four and a half, to five, to six. And now I'm proud to say I get at least seven hours of sleep each night, sometimes more. I had to have the non negotiable that in the morning before I start anything, before I get on the computer, before I work out everything, I must have morning stillness and listen to God speak to my heart and me talk back to him. Whenever I had meetings and it was possible to walk or stand during those meetings, I would do that or and I would even have hand weights at work and move while I'm um, having a meeting. And then there were emotional check ins. I made it a non negotiable not to react to anything, to pause first before hard conversations and especially emails. And what happened? I got clarity. My clarity improved my patience. It began to come back. My listening was undistracted. I could speak to someone and listen and give them my undivided attention. Also my tone so softened and my tight body. I started getting myself a massage every week and my resilience strengthened. Because the bottom line is energy management is stewardship of your mind, your body and your emotions. Energy management is being well, it's wellness. Energy management is obedience to the word of God. To be on a regular cycle of rest. Before we finish up, uh, I want you to reflect and I also want to give you guys a practical challenge. I want you to reflect and answer the following questions. What is your body trying to tell you in this season of your life? Where are you ignoring rest? Are you managing your calendar which is time but neglecting your capacity, which is energy? Reflect on those questions. I'm going to repeat them. What is your body trying to tell you in this season? Where are you ignoring rest? Are you managing your calendar, your time, but you're neglecting your capacity which is your energy? And here's the challenge. I want us to focus on this week and I only want you to choose one. One non negotiable habit this week. Just choose one. Because you can't do everything at the same time. Your habit could be around sleep, increasing it to seven hours. It could be around movement. Take a daily 20 minute walk. If you've never walked, guess what? Five minutes is okay. Guess what? Three minutes is okay. Okay. No emails before you pray. Okay. And hydration. Hm. Set yourself a hydration goal. You already know that it's recommended that you have half your body weight in ounces on a daily basis. Set yourself a goal again. You can start small and then there's screen cutoff time. You don't have to be consuming all day long. You should have quiet time for yourself. Small disciplines compound. Don't believe the lie that that's not enough. Just start small and Keep going. For those of you who like to journal, here's the journal prompt. The question is, when I honor my body, how does my leadership shift? And I know it shifts because I've experienced it. If you don't remember anything else from today, I want you to remember that fitness is not vanity. It's managing your energy. It is vessel stewardship. So today I'd like to say that we strengthen the live pillar, and we strengthen it by focusing on our fitness. Because you can lead yourself down a black hole or you can lead yourself to fitness excellence. Before you can lead your family, before you can lead a team, before you can lead a community, you've got to lead and manage your energy. You're not a machine. You have only one body. So honor it. You are a vessel. Now, if this episode resonated with you, I ask you share it with a leader who look strong, but you know they feel tired. Because over here, we're building sustainable leaders one episode at a time. Let's close in prayer. Father. God, we repent. Forgive us for glorifying exhaustion. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Spirit, we declare that the life of Christ flows through our bodies from the crown of our heads to the soles of our feet, restoring and energizing us completely. Lord, teach us to honor the bodies you've entrusted to us. In obedience to you, Father, help us to build rhythms of work and rest. Correct our pride and our ego when we try to carry what you never assigned us to do alone. Help us to recognize you gave us a helper. Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, you are welcome into our lives. Lead and guide us. Give us discipline and rest and strength and stewarding our bodies, our minds, and our emotions. Let our energy reflect your peace as we receive divine wholeness. In the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Amen. You're listening to Leadership by Faith with Miye Allen. Thank you for tuning in. In this episode, we explored managing energy as our leadership, responsibility and the fuel to our fitness. Faith is the foundation. Fitness is the fuel. When both are strong, you can lead yourself and others with clarity, courage, and consistency of purpose. Be blessed and encourage encouraged. Make sure you leave a review, follow and subscribe. Share this podcast with someone who's ready to grow in faith and leadership. Now in our next episode, we move from pillar one live into pillar two lead, which includes the third and and the fourth Fs, which are family and finance. And we're starting at home with family. Many leaders have public success, but it means nothing if private alignment is missing. I believe Family is your first leadership laboratory. So meet me there in the next episode. In the meantime, remember, faith and service first. Leadership always. Because when faith and service leads, leadership follows. Until next time. Keep leading by faith. Keep living by faith while we journey to leadership excellence together.