Excerpts English

As an executive coach for almost 20 years, Francesca Giulia Mereu works with senior leaders and managers in global organizations worldwide. Some of her clients include: IMD Business School, COLT, Novartis, ST Electronics, the European Union and MSU (multinational special unit, Sarajevo). She graduated in Anthropology from the University of Lausanne (CH), is an NLP Master Practitioner, a yoga teacher and is certified in Kinesiology, Swedish massage, Qi-Gong and Brain Gym.In 2012 Francesca Giulia

authored: ‘Je recharge mes batteries’ published by Jouvence (France). This English edition is fully revised and newly illustrated.

USD $ 10 (RRP)SGD $ 7.50 (RRP)EU € 9.30 (RRP)

Recharge yourBatteries

REC

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E YOU

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SFR

AN

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CA

GIU

LIA M

EREU Francesca Giulia Mereu

Foreword by prof. Maury Peiperl

Be your best self more easily and more often

Recharge your batteriesHow to be your best self more easily and more often

How often do we recharge the batteries of our phone? Very likely every day or at least we check them every day.How often do we take time to recharge our own batteries?

When your batteries are too low or too charged: • Your actions are inappropriate reactions, often sabotaging your goals • You get physically run down, mentally too wired or emotionally upset,

or a mix of all three!• Your words are not helping you ideas and might upset the people

around You definitely neither act nor feel like your best self.

When your batteries are at the optimal level for you:• Your actions help you reach your goals • You easily find the appropriate words to communicate your ideas• You are vibrant and alert and also calm and groundedYou act and feel like your best self.

This book offers simple tools and practical ideas to manage your energy – based on my method that has already benefited busy professionals for almost two decades.

Copyright © 2015 by Francesca Giulia Mereu - www.pem.pmAll rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-2-9701073-1-6

Illustrations copyright © by Harry Van Der Velde - www.zicht.comFront cover design and lay out: Rosa Van Der Velde

Back cover design: Reality Premedia Services Pvt. Ltd.

This English edition is fully revised and based on the French version:Je recharge mes batteries – Jouvence Ed. 2012.

www.editions-jouvence.com

Illustrations by Harry Van Der Velde

3

To Artie Egendorf for his support and trust that

‘practice makes possible long before it makes perfect’

This book is available on Amazon as Kindlehttp://goo.gl/xFcc7HThe paper version is planned for January 2016

Preface 6

Introduction 7

Recharge your Physical Batteries 15

Recharge your Spiritual Batteries 95

Conclusion 110

Bibliography 114

Why Facts and ideas to explore

How Tools and techniques to try out

Conclusion

Recharge your Mental Batteries 42

Recharge your Emotional Batteries 67

Bibliography

Further Information



Conclusion



Conclusion



Conclusion

6

Preface

In my work with executives for over some 20 years, I have often

found that, while an individual might have great strength in one or

two resource areas, they would stand to benefit immensely from

reflecting, and then acting, on the other key parts of the self. Indeed,

it would not be an exaggeration to say that this has nearly always

been the case. Those who have had this insight about themselves

and acted on it have grown tremendously in their performance,

their health, their self-confidence, and their satisfaction. Some of my

closest friends and colleagues, as well as I myself, are examples.

Take the time to read this valuable book and to try the exercises

it offers - you will surely find something here that will contribute

significantly to your well-being, and through this, to your

performance in whatever profession you dedicate yourself to as well

as to the well-being and performance of those around you.

Maury Peiperl, PhD

Director (Dean) and Pro-Vice-Chancellor,

Cranfield School of Management (UK)

7

Introduction

Like many very busy professionals, you know that your phone and

laptop batteries must be charged regularly, but what do you do to

recharge your own batteries?

Do you often feel exhausted by the end of your day?

Do you aspire to have a healthier lifestyle… yet struggle to

change your habits?

Do you fi nd it diffi cult to “wind down” after work and to fully

enjoy your personal life?

Do you wonder if you will be able to keep up this pace for

the next fi ve years?

8

If you answered yes to most of these questions, then it is time to

consider optimizing your energy level. This book is inspired in large

part from my experience as a leadership coach. Its very existence

is thanks to the people who tested, commented on, and applied

the techniques that they have learned - for almost 20 years.

The seminars I facilitate are held in diff erent countries and in

diff erent professional circles. The participants are very busy

professionals. My challenge has often been to provide tools for

people who have full schedules and little time to practice, yet want

speedy results! The approach that I devised for my coachees,

will also help those wanting clear and achievable next steps, and

looking for concrete ideas quickly to translate into practice.

Here are two goals you can achieve with this book :

1. Increase your available energy to attain

your goals more easily and improve the

quality of your life – both over the long term

and during stressful times.

2. Learn new tools to build a ‘self-care

routine’ to recharge your batteries on four levels: physical, mental,

emotional and spiritual.

9

What is a self-care routine?

It is a customised set of habits to sustain your energy on a daily

basis. This routine prevents your batteries from getting too low,

monitors your need to rest after a ‘high’, alerts you if are overusing

or underusing the same resources and generally increases your

ability to bounce back.

We all have routines, habits and behaviors to care for our well-

being. They might have been excellent

at a given time, but they need to be

regularly updated, just like soft- ware.

Doing so on a regular basis will enable

you to further build on what you already

do and fi nd answers to questions such

as:

10

Do you have enough energy to support your needs,

priorities and goals?

How do your current habits support your quality of life?

Or, on the contrary, do some habits undermine or sabotage it?

How could you recharge your batteries more frequently, even if

you have little time to spare?

Together, we will explore four levels to further improve these

dynamics:

The physical level to increase

your amount of energy.

The mental level to lead to more

consistency and clarity between your

thoughts and your actions.

The emotional level to channel your

emotions and express them in a way

that helps, and not hinders, you.

The spiritual level to develop a strong motivation,

rooted in your values. This level refers to everything

meaningful in your life - passions, beliefs, and ethics

- and not to a particular religion!

11

You can download a Self-Care Routine template from my web site:

www.pem.pm - in the section :‘Try it out’. A final clarification about

two words that you will often see in this book: stress and resource.

The term stress is used here as a synonym for blocked energy.

The term resource means that this energy, once unblocked, may

circulate freely in the four levels with noticeable benefits.

Let me offer you an example: you just finished a meeting that did

not end as you had wished and are still feeling frustrated. The

frustration itself is a natural feeling. It becomes a problem if this

frustration gets stuck inside you and you find yourself dwelling on it

instead of moving on, blaming yourself or others for the outcomes.

Your goal should be to regain access to your patience, your clarity

or your focus ( your resources), so that you can learn, reflect and

choose what you wish to do next.

The same is true if you had a great day, but it is now late at night

and you need to lower your adrenaline level and rest. What you

want then is to access you inner place of calm and tranquility.

The key is to move more easily from one state to the other. It’s

not about denying the facts or fleeing from a problem. It’s about

observing, recognizing and accepting what is happening inside of

or around us, and responding more effectively.

In this case, more effectively means that our decisions are then

based upon a conscious choice that is better aligned with our

12

objectives, and not upon an uncontrolled, scattered reaction.

A feeling of fl uidity and clarity emerges from this new approach,

like water that fl ows and adapts to rough terrain while keeping its

identity as water, allowing you to focus on the long term.

To help you understand and use these concepts, they are depicted

in the following two images.

When you are in a resourceful state, you are likely to feel that:

You are comfortable in your mental and emotional space.

You have a comfortable buff er - like a large energy bubble

around you - that allows you to fi gure out calmly and clearly

what to do next.

Your actions are meaningful choices, conducive to reaching your

goals and aligned with your values.

You can easily access all your inner resources and feel that you

have enough time.

13

You are confi dent that you are able to deal with what happens.

In a nutshell you feel and act like your ‘best self’.

When you are in a stressed or blocked state

for a long period of time, you are likely to feel that:

Your actions are reactions:

scattered and only partially conducive to your goals.

You are physically run down, mentally too wired

or emotionally upset, or a mix of all three!

You cannot access some or most of your inner resources

and feel misaligned with your values.

You feel a low level of control over yourself and the events that

you are facing. People and situations seem to ‘hit’ you.

Your buff er seems to have shrunk, your bubble is no longer a

comfortable space to be in, especially for long periods.

You neither feel nor act as your ‘best self’.

14

Take care of your energy bubble

Throughout the day, your energy bubble is constantly changing:

it expands, shrinks and moves. These changes are normal. What is

important is both how easily your bubble rebounds to a shape and

size that you feel comfortable in and what you can learn from these

changes.

How is your bubble now?

Its size, quality, color, sound, texture, smell, taste? Regularly check

your bubble, notice the implications of its changes and decide what

you want to do about it!

By noticing how your bubble

changes,

what drains and recharge your

batteries, which techniques can

optimise your energy, you will feel,

act and be more often and more

easily your ‘best self’.

Practice makes possible before it

makes perfect - Artie Egendorf.

So, let’s start!

122

Further Information

The Writer

As an executive coach for almost two decades, Francesca Giulia

works with senior leaders and managers in global organizations

worldwide.

Her field of expertise is personal energy management: how to

sustain both performance and quality of life

Francesca Giulia left her native Italy at the age of 19 and since then

has lived and worked in various countries such as Poland, Jordan,

England, Switzerland and most recently Canada and China. She

works in Italian, English, French and is highly conversational in

German and Spanish.

Her degree in Anthropology from the University of Lausanne

(Switzerland), allows her coachees to benefit from both theoretical

and practical cross-cultural knowledge on how to lead and influence

in different contexts.

She is a certified coach from Ashridge Business School (UK)

an experiential learning trainer in team building, NLP Master

123

Practitioner, yoga teacher and is qualified in Brain Gym, kinesiology

and Qi-gong.

Some of her past and current clients include: IMD Business School,

IFRC (international federation red cross), UN-Aids, Leo Pharma,

COLT, STElectronics, Eli Lilly, NetWork Rail and ICC (international

criminal court).

In 2012 Francesca Giulia authored: ‘Accedez à vos ressources’

published by Jouvence (France), about how to manage personal

energy- based on her more than twenty years of

experience in yoga, mindfulness and emotional

intelligence. The present edition is fully revised

and newly illustrated.

Francesca Giulia can be contacted at:

[email protected]

The Team

Even if Francesca Giulia was the ‘moving pen’ that wrote it, this book

is a team-work and would have been possible without the support

and expertise of these five excellent professionals.

Claire Hellwig

Thanks to her bilingual skills Claire translated and recreated my parts

of the French edition to adapt them to an Anglo-Saxon sensibility. She

is bilingual French/English and easily navigates the cultural subtleties

of both.

[email protected]

124

Harry van der Velde

Harry hugely increased the impact and the clarity of this book with his

illustrations and made it so much more user - friendly. Indeed one of

his images is worth a thousand words.

[email protected]

www.zicht.com

Rosa van der Velde

Rosa created an ease to navigate, visually pleasing and well

structured E-book. The difference in layout between a paper book

and an E-book is remarkable it needs a lot more work than

meets the eye.

[email protected]

www.rosavandervelde.com

Jacques Maire - founder of Jouvence Edition - believed in my

very first book, encouraged me to write a second updated edition in

2012 and so generously offered my the English rights.

The French edition of this book - slightly different - can be purchased

online on paper or as a Kindle on:

www.editions-jouvence.fr and Amazon.

Heather Cairns Lee triggered the whole project of an English edition

and gave me the confidence to move from ‘thinking about it’ to ‘doing

it’. Un grand merci Heather!

Copright © Francesca Giulia Mereu - Text

Copyright © Harry Van Der Velde - Illustrations

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