1. Being agile
2. Unlearning
3. Storytelling

While the world may pull you in many directions and introduce distractions, how can you cut through the noise to stay focused on taking action on what truly matters for you?

Forget time management. It’s about managing your energy — not your time.

How do you master your energy? Here’s a simple exercise to get started: 

1. First, get clear on the current reality of your energy patterns. 

Download a free app like Toggl where you can track activities offline from one activity to the next. At the end of each activity, your job is simply to record whatever activity you were doing. Be neutral and notice if you are judging yourself. Another free app is RescueTime. Once set up, RescueTime will track all the places you visit online in the course of your day. In my experience, the combo of Toggle and Rescuetime gives you the most accurate snapshot of the activities you’re investing your energy into. 

It can take one or two days to get used to tracking each activity. Initially, you may find it too hard to enter each activity as you do it. Just try experimenting and see if you can get into a rhythm where, at the end of each activity, you click stop activity and start again — this forces you to then determine what you’ll now be focusing on. If you can persevere through the learning curve that comes with activity tracking, it’s worth the insight gained.

If you have any resistance to tracking using the apps, you can always journal your main activities throughout the day or use a Microsoft Excel sheet to track every thirty minutes with a timer. While manual tracking tends to not be as accurate to reality, any method will do as long as it fulfills the purpose of the exercise to track your activities for a set number of days. 

Many of my clients expressed how, in just a few days of tracking their activities, they are more present and able to stay focused in their business and in life. See if you can do it for seven days in a row. I think you’ll be surprised even after two to three days of tracking what you’ll discover.

2. Next, reflect on your energy patterns.

What activities drained you? Which activities energized you? Put a minus sign by activities that were draining and a plus sign by activities that gave you more energy. Notice if there are any other patterns for your sleep, eating or exercise habits. 

Sleep is often an area clients struggle with. They can’t sleep deeply, get enough sleep or be consistent with bedtime. Here are some bedtime exercises I recommend by author and mind-body training expert Ilchi Lee that help quiet an overworked brain:

Rollbacks: Sitting down, pull your knees into your chest and roll backward and back up. Focus on massaging your spinal cord. Make sure you have a carpet or mat to cushion your back and be gentle on your neck. Do 10-20 repetitions to warm up your body. 

Toe-Tapping: Next, lie down on your back with your legs down and arms by your sides, palms up. Bring your heels together and tap your toes, rotating your entire thigh and leg as you touch your big toes. You’ll generate lots of heat in your legs, bringing all the distracting thoughts in your brain down to your core and legs. 

Sleeping Tiger: On your back, raise your legs in the air, making a 90-degree angle with your knees and flex your feet toward you. Lift your arms in front of you, flexing your wrists, so your palms face the sky. 

Picture the soles of your feet and palms of your hands like an energy antenna, feeling around for energy until you can find a relaxing place. With each breath, imagine breathing through the soles of your feet and palms of your hand, accumulating hot energy into your core. Hold still in this position for one to two minutes at first, focusing on slowly inhaling and exhaling like a balloon. Eventually, you can gradually build up to holding this position for 10 or even 20 minutes. All of these exercises are like taking an energy shower at the end of the day, clearing your brain of all its thoughts and to-do’s, relaxing the mind and integrating your brain with your body before bed.

3. Write down any learnings, awakenings and observations in your journal. 

You’ll naturally discover insights into how easily distractible you are, how much of your day is dictated by your environment or how you have very little rest built into your day. You take it to another level when you capture what you’ve learned on paper. This helps your brain solidify what is being learned by having to articulate your thoughts, then integrate that thought with writing on a page. Now you’re meaningfully connecting your mind and body.
 
From your learnings, choose at least one new energy habit to experiment with, such as going to bed earlier, creating a grounding morning ritual or moving your body for one minute each time you get up to go to the bathroom. Then, track your new energy habit.

Utilize a bullet journal method of drawing shapes and coloring them in when habits are completed. Or simply write the habit out on a piece of paper, put the days of the week across the top, and mark an “x” for each day you complete the habit. 

Business leaders manage what they measure and measure what matters. When you take the time to build new energy habits, you can more effectively manage your energy day to day. Focusing solely on productivity and efficiency at all costs is not as relevant in today’s times, as it fails to integrate the whole human. When you manage your energy — instead of time — you start treating yourself as a whole human being. You become more conscious, more present and focused on a more fulfilling journey.

This article was originally published in Forbes.com
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Anna S. Choi helps growing, six figure earning, over achieving, conscious business leaders–who are exhausted meeting the demands of their day–prevent burnout as they scale their impact. They want to build habits for staying happy, energized, and focused to perform at their optimum given the demands, complexities, and uncontrollable environments that suck up their energy. Learn more at www.annasunchoi.com.

What if you could find peace in any chaos? 

Day to day, you might deal with many triggers to your survival brain, unleashing a host of emotions, thoughts and body sensations each minute that can feel chaotic or out of control. 

What does chaos look like to you? 

Is it getting stressed scrolling through social media streams on conflict-ridden current events? Getting constantly interrupted by your kids on a video call while sharing space with your partner who is also working from home? Or trying to make many decisions in the face of the unknown?

Chaos often shows up internally. Maybe it’s a dull, throbbing headache, stiff neck or tight back. Or maybe it’s your constantly running mind that never shuts up, analyzing what happened or what needs to get done the next day right before bedtime. 

It may be impractical to take time off for a 10-day silent retreat or meditate for an hour, let alone 15 minutes.

Here are three quick, simple ways to find peace in chaos in any moment: 

Moving Meditations

We often focus on exercising our muscles, but what about our organs?

With your legs shoulder-width apart, gently use your fists to tap two inches below your belly button, and imagine the vibration going into your core or “gut.” This is a major energy center in your body where life is birthed, and it is also known by some as the second chakra. 

Close your eyes, and relax your mind. Focus your awareness where the vibration is on your energy center. 

Where your mind goes, energy flows. Energy travels as light, sound or vibration. This exercise utilizes vibration to help bring your awareness back into your body’s core and center. 

After 100 or so taps with your fist, now suck your belly button in to your spine, similar to a crunch standing or sitting up. Keep pumping. This is called intestinal exercise. 

Now that you’ve used vibration through tapping, you’ve brought your brain’s scattered energy from outside yourself back into your body, drawing downward to your gut. Intestinal exercise helps you keep your focus centered on the gut and heat up your core. 

Typically, we have hot heads and cold guts. By reversing this improper circulation using the “water up, fire down” principle, you can bring the “fire” in your head down to heat up your core, and bring the cold gut energy back up to your head for a calm, cool mind. 

By exercising your intestines, you’re pumping fresh oxygen, increasing blood flow, better absorbing nutrients and processing undigested waste to achieve the proper “water up, fire down” circulation. You’ll know you have proper energy circulation if you heat up, sweat or form saliva in your mouth.

Master Your Emotions

Other exercises can really allow you to master your emotions by embracing the “bad” or unwanted emotions like anger, sadness or jealousy. 

This practice takes five minutes or less and keeps your focus on observing the emotion rather than becoming or identifying as the emotion itself. There are many exercises, but here’s a sample of one exercise that has proven very powerful with my business leader clients. 

Close your eyes. Scan your body from your head to your toes. Where do you notice tension, pain or unwanted emotions? 

Ask yourself, “What color is the pain or unwanted emotion? What shape? What texture? What movement?”

Now imagine one of your happiest memories. Who’s around you? Where are you? What songs and smells surround you? How does it feel?

Saturate every cell in your body with the energy of that happy memory.

Now go back to the pain. Ask yourself, “What color is the pain now? What shape? What texture? What movement?”

My clients who practice this are able to shift their unwanted feeling’s shape, color, movement — sometimes disappearing the unwanted emotion altogether.

The more you master your emotions, the quicker you’ll be able to develop your emotional resilience as a leader. 

Listen Within 

The final exercise to access peace in chaos is listening within. 

Simply close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and ask your heart, “What’s my message for today?”

Continue asking and listening. Often, the response is simple in just a few words. 

You can not only talk to your heart, but any organ, or area of pain, as well. 

By tapping into your own inner wisdom to listen within, you’ll get very aligned answers to decisions you need to make without having to question or regret the decision.

The more you practice, the easier your body and heart can communicate clearer messages, and the more power you’ll have to simply notice your thoughts, feelings and body sensations passing through, rather than getting lost in them.

Mastery Requires Practice

Before you can experience peace, it’s critical to bring your awareness from outside yourself into your body. Then bring that energy down from your head into your core. You’ve now aligned your body, heart, mind and soul in just a few minutes.

By focusing inward, you’ll build your inner guidance system more strongly to guide you through uncertainty. You’ll be the calm in the eye of the storm, no matter how chaotic it gets inside or out. You can choose the most aligned response each moment. 

When you have the courage to practice these moments of peace of moving meditations, mastering your emotions and listening within, you will not only find peace amid chaos; you will become a source of peace in the chaos of our world.

By embodying peace in any chaos, you can access an abundant, infinite supply of energy to serve your team, your customers, your stakeholders and, most importantly, yourself. 

This article was originally published on Forbes.com here.

***
Anna S. Choi helps growing, six figure earning, over achieving, conscious business leaders–who are exhausted meeting the demands of their day–prevent burnout as they scale their impact. They want to build habits for staying happy, energized, and focused to perform at their optimum given the demands, complexities, and uncontrollable environments that suck up their energy. Learn more at www.annasunchoi.com.

Does vacation ever feel like more work — where you need a vacation from the vacation?

Many of my clients share how what vacation provides is more about the experience vacation represents:  being relaxed, peaceful and free of pending deadlines, mounting pressures, expectations or responsibilities.

In other words, time freedom: the ability to do whatever you feel like doing, whenever you want, with no consequences.

Here are three time-tested ways you can create time freedom every day.

1. Create a morning ritual.

What’s the one thing that nourishes your soul each day?

Consider that the first half hour when you wake up is the most critical time to train your brain toward nourishing habits in that half-conscious state where your brain is transitioning from theta to alpha waves.

Pick a moving meditation or mindful exercise that will purify all the stress, toxins and tension from the inside out. Start with just a seven-day challenge to do that one thing each day, track your progress and write down what you notice and observe in your body as a result.

Avoid picking something you want to fix about yourself or that you “should” do.

If you find value at the end of seven days, I recommend continuing your journey to 14 or 21 days, whichever is more motivating. If you found no difference after seven days, pick another one thing that nourishes your soul each morning.
After 21 days, you can take a break and pick one new thing that nourishes your soul — or continue to 49 days, then up to 100 days.

Know that if you skip a day, you start over. No judgment, no attachment. Just start over. You must do it consecutively to truly experience the change and be able to effectively evaluate whether or not to continue at the end of your challenge period.
Doing so will allow you to stop reacting to your head chatter, judgments, doubts and other emotions. Instead, you’ll cultivate experiencing calm during the chaos of the unknown and unpredictable.

2. Create a midday ritual.

Lunchtime is a very easy, natural time for us to take a break to nourish ourselves. If possible, try to go outside in nature to experience being part of the greater whole.

Being outside lets us connect with ourselves on a deeper level, allowing us to remember experientially that our problems are small compared to what the entire cosmos is up to.

Here’s what I recommend as a guideline to create your most effective lunchtime ritual, one that will make a world of difference, even if your ritual is just 10 minutes long:

• If possible, leave your phone at your desk so you won’t get interrupted by incoming calls or notifications.
• Experience gratitude looking at your food. Reflect how the sun helped grow the plants, which then grew from the earth, which then got harvested from humans and packaged, shipped and delivered to your local grocery store so you could conveniently eat this meal right now in a short period of time.
• Chew slowly (ideally 30 times), and mindfully pay attention to your five senses.
• Enjoy breathing and being alive.
• In short, do nothing. Just be.

I’m continuously surprised by how 10 minutes of rejuvenation allows me to have relaxed concentration and experience time freedom for the rest of my day.

3. Create a bedtime ritual.

Pick at least one thing you can do every night that has you going to bed with a smile or connected to your heart, or that can create a really good dream. Like the first 30 minutes of your day, the last 30 minutes are equally as crucial to programming your subconscious mind.

This is your time to design your life intentionally rather than by default, watching the news, answering emails or getting work done. It’s no surprise business owners can’t shut their brains off right before bed or first thing in the morning. You are the one training your brain that way. Give yourself time to transition again from the beta wave state of your brain to lower levels to ensure your body can rest deeply and reset for the next day.

Here are some ideas for bedtime rituals:

• As a family, share “acknowledgments” for each other and yourselves. Have each family member take a turn. This practice does wonders for feeling connected and managing emotions. Be sure to also include in your acknowledgment ways of being. For example: “Son, I acknowledge you for being joyful and light, especially in the way you helped your friend stay positive at camp today.”

• Read a soul-nourishing book.

• Toe tap. This acts like an energy shower to cleanse your emotions and thoughts from the day. Simply lay on your back in bed and tap your toes together, with your pinky toes tapping the bed 100 to 500 times while taking deep breaths in and out like a balloon. Doing so allows you to shift all the hot energy accumulated in your brain down to your feet and legs from the oxygen flow and blood circulation — allowing your brain to drift into a more relaxed state.

In Summary

Creating a simple, rejuvenating ritual each morning, midday and night creates microcosms of time freedom, relaxation and peace. Ten mindful minutes three times a day will go far and have lasting effects on the quality of your day-to-day life.

The key to growing your business starts with investing in your mind, body and spirit first. Intentionally creating the vacation experience of time freedom allows you to be in flow for your day, balancing your ego-based “I am my accomplishments” self with the self that simply is perfect the way it is.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

As our global economy shifts from the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the age of digital information, to the Fifth Industrial Revolution, the age of transformational impact, you and your business must evolve your consciousness within to stay competitive and relevant in the marketplace.

I’ve noticed in my work with growth-minded, conscious entrepreneurs, however, that two major pitfalls become barriers to looking deeper within.

You cannot find peace amid chaos until you avoid the pitfalls of “being busy.”

Pitfall 1: The ‘hustle and grind’ way of life has become the norm. 

The hustle-and-grind culture can often be thought of as inevitable (or very hard to overcome) to be able to meet the demands of the customer, stay competitive and grow. But does it have to be?

As a conscious business leader, you might know you need to work smarter instead of harder and longer. Yet are you in reality? If you’re like most, you might still find yourself running the endless “rat race” or the treadmill of long work hours, as a cog in our global economy, unable to escape.

You might believe that growth must come at a cost to your health, family time, social life or something else. So you give up trying to “have it all” and accept sacrificing parts of your life, while continuing to struggle in some mythical work-life balance concept. Even vacations become stressful from having to catch up when you return.

However, you always have a choice to opt out of the hustle-and-grind culture. Once you do, you must face yourself.
You may be tempted to fall into old habits watching others around you “succeed,” and you must trust in yourself that it’s possible to have sustainable spiritual and financial growth by slowing down.

Only after you embrace the chaos and messiness, have the courage to slow down and trust in the unknown can you start to practice finding peace amid chaos by simply being with your thoughts, emotions and body sensations.

Pitfall 2: You’re unclear what being present means.

When I ask clients “What does personal time look like?” they list off basic everyday activities like showering, exercise or maybe traveling to visit family. I often have to ask again, “Besides daily activities, imagine you’re not worried about anyone or anything else, and there are no deadlines or nothing to make happen. Then what would you love to do?”
I get a blank stare.

I continue pressing. “What nourishes your soul?”

At this point, clients share some long-lost hobbies they never have time for. Then I get a mountain of reasons why they can’t justify doing those things they love. No staff, no time, having to serve clients or be out of business, etc.

Are you creating time to be present in your life as opposed to being in many places at once, reacting to life’s many curveballs, always thinking about the next thing or worrying about what happened?

What does being present feel like for you? What would you be doing or not doing? What body sensations or feelings come to mind?

What if you put your own nourishment first on your to-do list? Then had a trusted advisor or colleague who can hold you accountable to making sure nourishing your soul is number one?

Crisis As Opportunity

There’s an opportunity when a crisis hits, whether it’s a global pandemic, losing your staff, the loss of a loved one or getting diagnosed with a disease. It wakes you up to what matters in life. It forces you to reach within and face your inner turmoil.
Crisis is the perfect opportunity for transformative growth — to test yourself, face your fears and experience being calm in the storms around you. Crisis is the time to practice peace whether through morning rituals, moving meditations or mastering your mood.

Until you go beyond knowing crisis is an opportunity as an intellectual concept to experiencing or feeling crisis as the one and only opportunity for transformative growth, no amount of meditation or doing more actions will make the difference.
In Summary

Don’t be like the boiling frog during uncertainty, where, slowly over time, you find yourself still constantly working, having no time to think about nourishing your soul. Working on top of a busy, distracted, exhausted soul now only deepens that habit post-crisis.

The number one skill you need to master is managing your energy from the inside out to find peace amid chaos. It’s during a crisis that you can develop the courage to face the layers of emotions, previously ignored, now bubbling up.

By learning to navigate your inner world effectively, you’ll strengthen your innate power of resilience, embodying being a peaceful leader amid the chaos.  You’ll learn how to harness the power of being present in the now, trust yourself to navigate through uncertainty and experience being peaceful amid chaos.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com here. 

Why I love working with conscious entrepreneurs is because they are willing to be uncomfortable, take risks, fail, find their voice, and innovate ways to impact their communities and beyond.

As conscious entrepreneurs, you have an opportunity here to demonstrate real leadership in the face of the chaos.

The last two weeks I’ve been deep diving into learning about the Black Lives Matter movement. Being silent in my business was not a message I was willing to convey.

The entrepreneur traits of being willing to be uncomfortable, take risks, fail, and find their voice are what’s needed to lead the way in supporting the Black Lives Matters Movement.

Here are 4 entrepreneurial principles you can use to support #BlackLivesMatter:

1. Commit to taking a stand.

What are you committed to? What’s your why? How does engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement align with your values in your life and business?

For me, my mission is to empower the next generation of leaders to cause a tipping point in humanity’s consciousness. I cannot do that if such a large majority of humans in my country and neighborhoods are getting shot because the color of their skin. I also cannot do that if there are scared folks committing the acts of violence. A change of consciousness must first happen.

I committed to showing support and taking a stand (literally!) by attending a peaceful protest (outdoors with masks staying 6 feet apart).