At 17, I was summoned to the headmaster’s office during a science class where we were exploring the wonders of quantum physics.
I was very shy then and avoided trouble as best I could, and so the long walk to his office heightened my anxiety. And it didn’t help when he started by telling me to take the rest of the week off. I remained silent – my heart racing as my mind became paralysed by thought – waiting to hear what crime I had committed. He leaned forward and as soon as he started speaking again, I saw my dad in the corner of my eye through the room’s windows being asked to take a seat. My dad looked far from his usual self, and it was at this point that I sensed this was going to be far worse than simply being punished for bad behaviour.
As I turned my attention back to the headmaster, his words confirmed my suspicion. My mum had slipped into a coma following an unfortunate accident and hospital staff were uncertain as to whether she would survive. I remember sitting next to her bed holding her lifeless hands just an hour later after leaving school with my dad and despite our best prayers, she didn’t make it.
I was an emotional wreck. It was a powerful lesson on the fragility of life - this rarest of gifts that we must never take for granted. And the greatest takeaway from this was: “Don’t wait.” These two words, when fully embraced will be your antidote to regret and set you on the path toward fulfilment. We have two lives and that second one begins the very moment we appreciate and understand we have only one. By embracing them, I began to collapse that gap between insight and action, build my life around what mattered most and focus my attention on what gave me energy over what didn’t.
Fast forward 18 years to early 2020 and after being set up with an earpiece and microphone, I was ushered to a waiting room and told I would be going live on Sky News in 10 minutes. As I sat, waiting to be brought onto the screen to be interviewed about important life lessons, I closed my eyes and began to reflect on just how far I had come since the loss of my mum to be sitting here in a national broadcasting studio. She would be so proud I thought as I reminded myself how I went from feeling like a hopeless victim to feeling empowered, from simply wishing things to be better to taking consistent action however small, and from feeling exhausted to feeling the most energised I have ever felt.
This personal metamorphosis of mine demonstrated that it’s often in our hardest moments that we discover the wisdom to create the best moments of our life. Because it’s not what happens to us that determines the trajectory of our life, but how we choose to respond to what happens to us. Obstacles, it seems, can act as fuel towards unleashing your genius into the world. In fact, the tougher the times, the more clarity you gain about what really matters.
The wisdom my journey taught me – from the inevitable obstacles to incredible successes and from the moments of burnout to periods of flow - is that energy really is everything. In fact, it is the gateway drug to productivity.
Without energy, we can’t get much done.
Without energy, we don’t follow through with our intentions.
Without energy, a better life will remain a distant dream.
Since everything is either giving us energy or taking it away, our approach to managing our energy is what leads to a happier, healthier life; one that forms the very foundation of functioning at our most productive selves.
Visualise your energy like a fire of aliveness and imagine what would be possible for you as you begin to live with greater energy. Energy is life force. And the more you nurture and protect it, the greater that fire grows. Flooding through every cell and atom of your body, your energy fuels your ability to become an alchemist: turning the invisible into the visible and the impossible into the possible.
One exercise that will help to lift your energy, or clients that you are coaching, immediately is the following, which taps into the fact that gratitude is the gateway drug to abundance and a way of living that heightens our feelings of joy and happiness:
Most allow their lives to simply happen to them. Don’t let this be you. As the loss of my mum taught me: “Don’t wait.”
Simon Alexander Ong is a qualified TCA Coach, personal development entrepreneur, public speaker, author and winner of our Coach of the Year Award. His work has seen him invited onto Sky News and BBC Radio London to be interviewed, while Barclays UK featured him in a nationwide campaign on how families could embrace better lifestyle habits.
If you'd like to find out more about energising your life, Simon’s first book ‘Energize’ was recently published by Penguin and has received endorsements from the likes of New York Time bestselling authors Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Dr Marshall Goldsmith.
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