I've been thinking a lot lately about something Phil Stutz calls our Life Force. If you've seen Jonah Hill's documentary Stutz, you'll know the idea.
Listen to the blog here.
He describes it as the energy that animates us, the vitality that allows us to engage fully with our lives and our work. When that force is strong, we feel present and available. We are more curious, more generous and somehow more ourselves. When it is depleted, everything can begin to feel a little heavier and more effortful.
As I was watching, I found myself thinking about our work as practitioners.
Over the years, I have seen people with extraordinary intellectual property struggle to create much impact and I've seen others with comparatively simple ideas create a remarkable connection with the people around them. I don't think the difference is simply content, experience or confidence. More and more, I think it has something to do with the quality of energy they bring into the room.
In a yourname.com business, your energy is not separate from your work. It becomes part of the offering itself.
People are certainly interested in your models and frameworks and they may eventually engage your programs and products, but before any of that, they experience something much more immediate. They experience what it is like to be with you. They notice your presence. They sense whether you are interested and engaged. They feel whether you are alive to your work or simply delivering it.
You and I have probably both had the experience of sitting with someone who left us feeling more optimistic, more capable or somehow more awake to possibility. Equally, we've all spent time with people who seem to drain the energy from a room. Neither of those experiences has much to do with intellectual property.
For years in our Speakership work, we've taught the idea of state over script. Preparation matters and structure matters, but state amplifies or diminishes everything that follows. The same words can land very differently depending on the energy from which they are spoken.
Lately, I've been wondering whether state over script is not simply a lesson in speaking but a lesson in practice.
Perhaps people buy your state before they buy your strategy.
Perhaps they trust your presence before they trust your proposition.
Perhaps they experience your energy long before they understand your ideas.
If that's true, then our responsibility as practitioners extends beyond creating better products and more elegant frameworks. We also need to become students of our own Life Force and pay attention to the conditions under which we come most fully alive.
For some of us, that means moving our bodies more often, sleeping a little longer and spending more time outside. For others, it means protecting time to think, reading things that stretch our minds or creating more space between one commitment and the next. And for many of us, it means reconnecting with the things that nourish our spirit, stillness, gratitude, friendship, purpose and contribution.
None of these things are separate from our work. They are part of the ecology that allows our work to have impact.
The practitioners I admire most are not necessarily the most informed or the most articulate. They are often the people who seem deeply connected to themselves and deeply interested in others. There is a vitality about them that is difficult to measure and impossible to miss.
Perhaps that is what Stutz means by Life Force.
And perhaps looking after it is not merely an act of self-care. Perhaps it is one of the responsibilities that comes with building a practice around who we are and how we serve.
Three questions come to mind.
Where in my work do I feel most alive?
What activities and relationships strengthen my Life Force and which ones quietly diminish it?
If my energy is one of my products, what would it look like to care for it as deliberately as I care for my expertise?
Some ways we can help?