I recently had a friend of mine tell me a great analogy about how our minds and bodies work. He was talking about how we tend to think we can get more out of ourselves than what is realistic. His analogy involved the idea of the 13 amp battery. He explained that the 13 amps are the stored mental and physical powers we have and can use. No more than that. That’s the key…no more than that. We tend to try to get more out of our 13 amp battery than we can. The end result is what a lot of people call “burn out.”

The break down that he gave me was like this: First we use a bunch of the amps at work, let us say 6 of the amps. So with 6 amps used at work, we have a remaining 7 to work from. We get home and have to deal with bills, chores and other house hold issues. So that takes another 4 amps out of us. That now leaves 3 amps for us to work with. In my own personal case, that leaves me 4 amps for my relationship and my quest to start my own business. 4 amps…that’s it?! Sure isn’t a lot.

Well this is the thing. At least I have four amps at that point. What if this scenario happens: Work is horrible and the boss is on your case to get a project done. Now instead of 6 amps being used at work, you are using 10 amps. Now you only have 3 left. 3 left to deal with the house stuff, relationships and in my case, the quest for a
business. That sure doesn’t leave me with a lot. Again though, it could be worse.

An even worse situation is when something causes us to burn all 13 amps at work or in any one situation. Well if they are all burned then we have nothing left for the other stuff in our lives. That doesn’t work very well. The rest of your life becomes deprived of the amps. The house starts to fall apart, your relationship becomes shaky and in case of the business, NOTHING gets accomplished. This situation is what causes burn out.

Burn out is when any one thing in your life draws so much attention from your amps that nothing else has any energy or attention put towards it. There is no energy left to feed the other important things in your
life. The battery is drained. You become irritable, frustrated and sometime even angry that you don’t have more amps. No matter how much you want the amps to be there, they can’t become useable until the battery is
recharged.

Learning how to spend your amps evenly over different parts of your life is the key to finding balance. It is important to find balance so you can keep yourself from burning out. Balance also enables you to recharge faster. Burn out tends to cause needs for longer recharging periods.

I thought this was a great way at looking at how important it is that we balance our lives and don’t let any one thing because the sole focus of our energy.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.