At Your Best

In 2006, things appeared to be going exceptionally well for the author Carey Nieuwhof. Only in his late thirties, his organization had grown bigger than anyone expected. He was happily married to his high-school sweetheart, and they had two healthy sons.

But inside, it was a different story. Nieuwhof describes the professional demands as almost unbearable, and it was taking a toll on his health and family life. He’d been sucked into a spiral of stress and began dreaming of abandoning everything for a hammock in Fiji.

There had to be another way. As Nieuwhof began to recover from burnout, he discovered three key assets to building a life he didn’t want to escape from.

The key message here is: Thriving is when your time, energy, and priorities are in sync.

In his quest to live at a pace he could sustain, he looked at what other top-performers did so well. What he found was that they didn’t only manage their time. They also had a strategy to leverage their energy and priorities, so that all three worked for rather than against them.

As soon as he brought these three key assets in sync, he not only recovered from professional burnout, but also found himself thriving physically, spiritually, and with his family.

The first key asset is focused time. One reason you never have enough of it is a failure to focus your time. You probably treat all hours equally, but they’re not. Your time gets eaten up by distractions and small tasks. The day gets away from you and you don’t get around to the important things.

While most people know they’re competing against time, few think about their energy, the second key asset. When you fail to leverage your personal energy levels, you end up squandering your most productive and valuable time, leaving you with little energy for the important tasks.

The third and final key asset is priorities. Your priorities can easily get hijacked when you allow others to determine what you get done each day, as they force you to focus on their priorities rather than your own. The key is learning to say no and feeling okay about it.

In these blinks, we’ll explore how to escape the stress spiral, and instead, live in its opposite – the thrive cycle – by aligning your time, energy, and priorities.