3 ways to protect your emotional bandwidth

Do you find yourself exhausted at the end of the day? Sometimes not physically, but emotionally? It’s like your emotional bandwidth, and you just feel done. Or maybe you’ve stretched yourself too far, and don't quite know how you got there? Well, you're not alone.

Our emotional bandwidth is really important to keep in mind. Especially when we schedule things, and think about our time. There are three crucial things to remember about your emotional bandwidth, and what to do about it. These are the three steps I use, and I have found them extremely useful.

First, I check in with myself throughout the day.

Maybe it’s lunchtime, so I ask myself, “How am I doing?” Or take a moment to see do I have any voices in my head? Or am I starting to complain or get a little cranky? This is the time to check in with yourself.

I do this exercise frequently throughout the day to remind myself how I’m doing and how I’m feeling. Because otherwise at night, I’ve found this from personal experience, a lot of our emotions can bottle up inside us. Then we find ourselves realizing we didn’t even know we felt that way.

Say nice things to ourselves

Then we need to say nice things to ourselves when we check in, and find a way to comfort ourselves. I know this may sound a little crazy out loud, but you'll know what I mean once you do it.

When you find yourself saying, “I don't want to do this” or “I'm tired” you might think you sound like a little kid in your head. But if you can catch it and try using a different voice, you can say something comforting back like, “Oh, hey brain. I know you're tired, and I'm sorry you’re tired right now. But hey! We’re going to do this next task”. Think of it as the language we use with young children. Very sympathetic, sweet, and understanding. This is the type of language we want to use with ourselves.

look at your schedule at the beginning of the week and look for what you have planned.

Often, a lot of my clients don't plan the day in terms of, “Oh, I didn't quite realize that on Thursdays that was going to be an emotionally bandwidth or heavy day. This is going to take a lot out of me on Thursday”. This way I can make sure I don't go out with my friend, or whatever it is on Thursday night. Instead, I need to be on the couch by myself on Thursday night, so I can protect my time because I know I am going to be exhausted some days when it's more difficult to manage. So I'm going to check in on my schedule and make sure I have time to protect my emotional bandwidth.

Those are just three simple steps to protect it. Remember to check in with yourself throughout the day, say kind things back, and make sure you're looking at your schedule at the beginning of each week to manage what's happening and how you're going to take care of yourself. I would love to hear what's working for you with your emotional bandwidth, and what you may need help with. Feel free to share all of your emotional bandwidth thoughts with me! We can figure this out together!

How to simply plan your days to reach your goals

What are some of your daily, weekly, and monthly goals?  What thoughts come to mind when creating a plan to reach these goals?  Let's talk about the nitty gritty of planning, your schedule, and tracking. When helping my clients plan each day we focus on four simple steps: 

1. We write down what we say we're going to do. 

2. We do the actual thing. 

3. We allow the urges that come up.

4. We then repeat that process.

The fourth step is probably the most important because it takes CONSISTENCY. 

Repeating the above steps day to day, and experimenting with what works and what doesn't.  My clients have tried several different planning methods that simply didn’t work.  Many have brought me their own schedules they whipped together, they've tried creating spreadsheets, or they just weren’t taking any steps towards trying to plan their days.  

I knew I needed to help them get organized in some way, so I put together a weekly schedule worksheet that I give my clients, and that you can also download for free in my online trainings.  I also have a daily time tracker that has been very beneficial for me and those I work with!

So what’s so great about the daily time tracker? 

It’s all about your planned result and your actual result.  When we're planning our day, we're not just putting down “writing time”, right? We don’t say to ourselves “I'm just going to write that paper I'm working on between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM.” 

This is a planned result.  The point is it's not just writing time, and it's not just what we're going to do during that time. It is what we are going to achieve. What are we actually going to accomplish?

For example, I wrote 500 words or I posted that piece or I sent those emails. That's the plan result. The reason I put it in two columns on the worksheet is so that you can track your actual results. And this is the part where we can see what actually happened. 

You might say that you plan to do something at 8:00 AM over on this column, but we want to see what you actually did from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. 

Sometimes my clients will say, “I'm going to answer emails during that time, and then I'm going to answer the emails for my students”. Then they’ve spiraled into a rabbit hole, and ended up watching multiple YouTube videos or scrolling endlessly through social media. And then before they know it, it's almost 10:00 AM and they only have minutes until the next meeting. When we talk about actual results, we would mark that down. We would put on the worksheet: I went down the social media rabbit hole.

If that's true, what happened in those moments?  What urge did we have to get distracted with something else, instead of doing the tasks that we said we were going to do?  It’s time to figure this out! 

Remember, sometimes you need to focus on the daily piece, and other times you need to step back and look at the bigger picture, or monthly goal. 

What are we talking about here? It’s all of those layers I work on with my clients.  The four steps.  You can follow these steps and do them yourself, BUT I'm more than happy to talk about this process with you!  The accountability and cheerleading that you get from me is why my clients decide to hire me.  We all need support and someone we know will push us to achieve our goals!  

Are you interested in learning more about other topics I help coach my clients in?  Make sure you're on my email list if you're not already, and you can receive weekly emails with my expert advice on how you can better manage your time as a busy professor!  Believe me, you will not be disappointed!