Have you ever felt like work is designed to drain your energy rather than build it? What if instead, your job could leave you feeling energized, focused, and in flow?
On this week’s episode of The Ambitious Introvert®, I’m joined by Josh Allan Dykstra, the world’s leading expert in Human Energy™ and Founder & CEO of The Work Revolution. Josh is dedicated to transforming how we think about work – from an exhausting obligation into a regenerative source of energy, performance, and fulfillment. Sounds good right?!
In our conversation, Josh shares practical insights on why knowing your strengths alone isn’t enough – you also need to understand exactly what activities energize you. We dive deep into how to identify your personal energy drivers, shift from simply avoiding burnout to optimizing your energy, and why we need a work revolution to truly transform workplaces into places that fuel us rather than drain us.
You’ll hear how to:
- Identify the specific work activities that put you into a state of energized flow.
- Understand why the current work paradigm feels exhausting, and how to shift it to one that regenerates your energy.
- Overcome the belief that work has to be difficult to be valuable, and adopt a more intuitive approach.
- Create an “energy journal” to track which tasks energize you (and do more of them).
- Experiment with your “aspirational identity” to align your work more closely with your energy goals.
If you’re ready to stop feeling drained at the end of the day and start feeling energized and inspired at work, which I know so many introverts are, this episode is for you.
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
🌐 Josh Allan Dykstra’s Website
◾️ Josh Allan Dykstra’s LinkedIn
CONNECT WITH EMMA-LOUISE:
Website: https://theambitiousintrovert.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmalouparkes/
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Episode 220: Human Energy: The Secret to Thriving at Work with Josh Allan Dykstra
Josh Allan Dykstra: People actually love meaningful work. They don’t want a job. Like who wants a job? But like if I get to work on something that feels meaningful to me, like that’s a peak flow state human experience, there’s almost nothing better. And so if we’re smart, we’ll engage this AI topic in that way also like that. How do we optimise this for human energy? Would. That would be where I want this to go, where I hope this goes.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Welcome to the Ambitious Introvert, the leading growth and development podcast for the estimated 56% of us who recharge by going inwards. Our purpose is to help you manage your social battery and own your energy so you can reach your true potential in your business, your career or your life. I’m your host, Emma Louise Parks, a former air traffic controller, entrepreneur and a success Coach with over 15 years experience. I’ve supported hundreds of introverts like you who dream big and are ready to take action towards making those dreams a reality without compromising their energy in the process.
Each week my guests and I will be sharing tips, tricks and hacks on how to build your resilience, master your mindset and cultivate self leadership skills that will help you reach your goals without trying to be someone that you’re not. We’ll also be sharing valuable lessons and insights from our own personal experiences, all focused on one thing. Helping you own, your energy to reach your potential.
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to list out all the things at work that drain your energy? But it’s actually much harder to identify what really lights you up. If that’s you, it turns out you are not alone. Most people have low what we would call energy intelligence at work. And today’s podcast guest is on a mission to change that.
I am joined by Josh Allan Dykstra. Josh is a Future of Work keynote speaker and the world’s foremost practitioner on human energy. He has spent the last two decades building five companies and working with some of the most iconic brands on earth. His clients have a combined employee count of over a million people and Josh has been lucky enough to bring this work to those people.
He’s also an author, a TEDx speaker, and the founder and CEO of the work Revolution where they fight for the future by fixing work. You will learn in this episode why knowing your strengths isn’t enough, but also why knowning what energises you is the key to performance.
Some practical tips for tracking and optimising your own daily energy and how to find flow and fulfilment at work. Now, if you have ever felt like work is taken more from you than it gives, as I say, you’re definitely not alone. And this episode and Josh’s info and wisdom is going to be a game changer for you. Enjoy.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Josh, it’s so great to see you again. Thank you for taking the time to come talk to me here on the ambitious entrovert plucker.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Totally my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Though I don’t actually know this, but do you consider yourself to be an introvert?
Josh Allan Dykstra: You know, I’m really pretty solidly ambivert. So right, right in the middle. I’ve done, you know, Myers Briggs a number of many, many times in my life because I’m kind of in that world of developments, right? So I keep taking the assessment over and over and it usually nails me right in the middle of introvert, extrovert. And I resonate with that. Yeah, that feels pretty true.
Emma-Louise Parkes: What they your mypr.
Josh Allan Dykstra: So I am definitely an N and a T. But, that. But then, right for E and I, right. I’m kind of right in the middle. And for the J and the P, I’m kind of right in the middle. So wait, no, maybe that’s not right. Hold on. I think I’m an N and a J. So. Yeah, so J is the certain one and is A, but T, T and F is right in the middle. Geez.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It’s been min. My tt is right in the middle. I tend towards N. Ah. But it’s very, very close to the T. And I think that’s really fascinating because I’m infj. I’SURPRISINGLY and I had two coaches that were intjs M and they were fantastic coaches for me because they got the introvert, you know, they had the J all that. But they chAllanged my F with the team and that felt good.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great way to think about it. Oh, yeah. Gotta dust off the cobwebs on that question.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So actually that was, anexpected place to start. But let’s go with it because with your background in strengths, et cetera, how did you start to recognise that, oh, people have these different strengths, they have these unique traits. You know, we’re all individuals and we can really use that to our advantage in the workplace.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, it really was the Gallup Strengths finder, as it used to be called back in the day. So this was 2007, I was working for a nonprofit and I had gotten to take this, this strengths finder thing and attend, a little workshop and it just blew my mind. Like this perspective of focusing more on what’s right with me instead of all of the things that are wrong with me. It just completely flipped my world around and I thought this is magic. And so I was, I was just completely sucked into it. And I ended up getting certified by Gallup through the nonprofits. You, this is before they certified coaches. They didn’t used to do that, but they would only certify people that they’re part of an organisation. And I was part of this nonprofit so I was able to go through the training and then I started coaching people. I started coaching people in my organisation and you know, anybody who would want to take the assessment and I just found it completely captivating. So there’s this idea ofe that there are, there are these, these things that meant that light us up and make us great and why in the world don’t we focus more time on that? I, I just, I still just think it’s, it’s just the most kind of counterintuitive, no brainer in the world. Right. Like we just don’t do it. But it makes all the sense in the world why we should.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It’s like so obvious but so underutilised because so many people, especially you know, my audience, have been modelled a way to behave at work or a way to be a leader or skills that are, you know, even let people write your CV and like these are good skills to product and it’s not personalised and it’s always like, oh, there’s this very narrow band of what’s good and worthy and acceptable and things falling outside of that are seen as negative. And I think like you said things like StrengthsF Finder, it’s like, oh no, these things are actually really complementary and they come very naturally to me. and they’ll be very low for someone else. So someone else will value me having that strength.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, and it’s one of the other things that I love about the strengths assessment. Right. So there’s a number of these right there. Strengths Finder. Right. There’s Via. Ah, there’s Strength Scope based in the uk, which is my favourite actually assessment in the entire world. And yes, we could talk about any of that. But what I like about the strengths approach is also that it’s so complex. Right, so Strengths finder, you get 34 possible categories. Right. Strength scope, you get 24. I can’t remember how many are in via. Right, so there’s, there’s so many versus like an, like an Amirers Briggs. Right. You get four letters. Right. And I know there’s like, you can get advanced more reports, you can go deeper with that stuff. But I think what the strengths approach does also really well is captures the complexity of humans. Right. That you can’t just put someone inside a little box. And so many assessments try to. They kind of do that, but the strength approach doesn’t. Right. It kind of blows it open and says there’s not an infinite number of possibilities, but just about like the permutations of possibilities for you to have the same strengths report as someone else’s, it’s statistically impossible. And I love that about the strengths approach.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It’s funny you mentioned that. I read a statistic about that very thing for some unknown reason quite recently. And, it’s like one in however many hundreds of million of you having the. The same thirt bo in the same order. I was like, that is mind blowing.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, really, it really is. I was just taking a peek in my notse to see if I could find the numbers. Maybe I’ll be able to locate them while. While we talk.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I can pop them in the she’notes if. If we can find them. But it was a lot. It was a phenomenal amount. And like you say, yeah, Myers BRGs. I think it stands the test of time and it’s a great way. Many people do the mers Briggs and say, I feel very seen. I know that’s how I felt when I did it was like, oh, that makes so much sense. That is how I think. That is how I approach these problems. But having this very personalised approach of strength. Okay, here’s a question for you. When I took strength, I took clipped and strengths, which I think is the old Gallup finder. Is that right? So I didn’t do it till a few years ago. And when I got my results then I. I was kind of disappointed. And, this is partly because of the way they were named, which I understand they’ve named them to be very specific. But when I. My top strength is not something that I considered myself to be particularly strong in. The more I read about it, I was like, oh, yeah, I guess. And when I told friends and clients, they were like, oh, yeah, you’re totally like, yeah, you’re great. That doesn’t surprise me one bit. So my question is, did you feel like that when you first did yours or did you feel like, oh, no. I knew I was like caome at these five things.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah. Ah, no, yeah, 100% same experienceuse I. My my number one, you, Clifton. Strength. Strength is competition. And I had this association of, you know, competition being like a sports thing, right? It’s like I’m not.
Emma-Louise Parkes: You’renna be competitive, like pushing everyone out of the way.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So had my, my first, my first strength was competition. And I was, I was really confused by it, right? I’m not a sports guy, right. I’m really a music arts guy. And so I had this association with, with the label that wasn’t correct. Because when, when I learned more about it, what I realised is that competition actually, you know, when it comes from the, the original. I think it’s Greek or Latin.
The original word competitionet. Terr actually means to strive together. And so there’s something really like pure and beautiful about like that feels like me as I think about. Cause I am always kind of like comparing myself to like where I, where I sit in the scheme of whatever I’m trying to do around me. And so that part was really true. But it took me a moment to get my, my mind around, okay, what does that actually mean?
And I had a similar experience when I took Strength Scope, which is really almost, almost a misnamed instrument. It should be called Energy Scope or something. Cause it measures what energises you. So we can talk about the. I’d love to talk about the distinction between these different strengths assessments if you want to. When I took Strength Scope, it was the same thing. I got detail orientation and I was just, I was like. Cause I’m a big picture, strategic futurist kind of guy, right? And I was like, I was confused by this.
And so I took it to my, my wife at the time and I was like, well, look at, look at this crap. Like this is total. Like, look at this. This, this report is bonkers, right? And she’s like, no, that’s you. Like have you met you? And I was like, what? And so really, right, You’ve. I love these instruments when they do that, right? When they show us, they highlight a blind spot for us. And the good ones I think do that pretty well.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Yeah, it’s funny you say that because I got strategic as my top strength. And at that period, I was moving my business away from working on more strategy with people to be more personal development, leadership, coaching. But I didn’t want to see strategy. But obviously strategic is not about like, you know, let’s build out a 90 day plan. It’s the big picture thinking. It’s connecting these dots, it’s looking at the pattern recognition and everyone was like, well of course you’re an air traffic controller. Like, of course you needed a strategic. I didn’t really think of it like that. So now I’m able to be like, oh, that is really valuable. And that is a. I know that that strategic thinking doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. Like some people that will be de to botom streands. And so as a business owner, as a coach, that’s enabled me to feel confident in that, that, oh, I’m going to think differently. These people are going to come and hire me, work with me, my brain is going to think differently and that’s going to open and unlock innovation or, you know, help them in the way that they, they need to be helped.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, that, that’s the other thing I love about this approach too is it really like, I feel like it educated me in a kind of diversity and the importance and brilliance of, of different, even different kinds of diversity. Right. So different people having different strengths, different people liking different things, different people like. Right. It’s just it, it, the whole approach I think just opened my eyes to it an entirely different way of working. Especially when I moved from the strengths approach to the energy approach. Like that one really exploded my brain.
Emma-Louise Parkes: But talk about that because anyone listening to this podcast is going to be very familiar with the concept of energy as introverts who’ve been told, you know, growing up in a very sociable world, shouldall we say that’s kind of designed for extroverts and everyy has las music and bright lights and we all need to be going out on a Friday night. You know, you can feel very others as an introvert in like, well, why don’t I feel I’ve done those things? So we’re all familiar, listening to this with the importance of our energy and starting to learn what energises us and what doesn’t. And yes, that might be time alone or it might be time in nature. It might be a really deep one on one conversation, you know, with a good friend. But your approach is that, hey, you have these strength and when you get to utilise them, on a regular basis, they actually provide you with more energy.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, yeah, to some extent. Right. So I would actually say that there’s a distinction between what I would call talents and competencies and then actually things that energise and intrinsically motivate you.
So these things live in two different camps for me and I think this helps people start to approach this topic with more Depth, because then you can start to separate skills and abilities from things that I actually like to do. And so what we say is, what you wanna do is find a place where these things overlap, where what you’re good at overlaps with what energises you. So there’s a couple of things here that I think people need to know.
One, most of us have a pretty good understanding of what we’re good at, right? you go through school and. And it’s kind of entirely competency based, right? It’s based. And you get your grades and whatever and you kind of learn what you’re good at and what you’re not.
And then you go to the workplace, and for many people, it’s the same thing, right? You get a list of competencies called a job description before you even join the company. And then once you join the company, if you want a promotion, you get another list of companies you have to be good at if you want a promotion into that next role, right? So we’re kind of competency to death, like, kind of throughout our lives. What we’re not really educated on is what brings us energy.
And to your point, I think, especially if people have gone on or on the introversion side of things, they’re probably more attuned to this, which is great. And I think there’s probably still a place to go deeper because almost to your point, there’s a whole lot of things when we think about what brings us energy, we go a lot of places, right? We go. Right. Like, I, Yeah, I can recharge by, you know, hanging out in a small group or by staying home or we, like. I really like going to the beach or I like all of these. I go all these other places when I think about what energises me, the place I don’t go when I think about what energises me is behind my desk at work.
Like, what the problem is is that most of us, when we think about the things that energise us, we don’t think about work, we think about. Right. We think about a whole host of other things at work. What we do is we create, a list a mile long of all the crap that sucks the life out of us, right? That’s what we think of when we think of work. And so most people have very low energy intelligence.
And it’s not through any fault of your own? Of our own. We just haven’t been taught to think this way. We haven’t had any chance to practise or explore or Go deeper. Because what you need to really do if you want to unlock this approach is you need to know specifically and predictably the activities at work that gets you into flow states. And most people don’t have a clue what those things are. That’s the journey.
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Emma-Louise Parkes: You worked with some pretty big companies on this Apple, Chanel, which I loved when I saw that. How you. Yeah, how did they react when you’re like hey, we need to get your people thinking about what’energiz them at work. Is it something that they are very open to or is it like. Well no, they just need to do their job.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting Em, So I’ve been doing this for so long now. It’s really like these days it’s kind of like people only engage me if they are actually interested in this. Right. So I don’t spend too much time convincing anymore. But you know, at least in the client, on the client side. But then. Yeah. And speaking engagements and stuff. Right. I’m always trying to make a persuasive case around this.
Cause I don’t think it’s understood and I don’t think people get it. I do think that there a, there’s a story, there’s a narrative that work should feel like work, right? Work is a four letter word, right? I can’t believe it’s work unless it like hurts me a little bit, right? Like people have this belief system really, it’s really deep in there for a lot of people.
And we’ve kind of been taught this implicitly and explicitly sometimes that work should feel like work, right? So, so what we have to do is challenge that belief system. So I do spend a lot of time in my talks kind of breaking this down for people to try to help them see. You know, this is, this is actually not true. This is, this is a fake story.
This is a, this is something a Billy Goods you’ve been sold. But it’s not reality because what happened is that when you’re energised by your work, you do it better. People get that right when I say that to them. Like, and you know this, like everybody knows this, right? If you love your work, if you enjoy your work, if you’re energised by your work, you bring more to it, right?
You help customers better, you’re more, you’re more, you know, functional with your teammates. You’re a better leader. Like everything works better if you optimise for human energy. We just don’t do it. It’s very, it’s very mysterious to me that this is such an under the radar thing still that we don’t understand the power of human energy at work.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I think you made a really good point about how deep those narratives run. Because as you were talking about that I thought, oh yeah, like you have to work hard to be successful. Which is, you know, very, very colon. And if I think about hard work, the vision I get is like a farmer toiling in a field or someone doing like very hard physical labour of hours and hours, fun end. And of course in my rational day to day, I don’t think, oh, I need to go and take a tool out to cut some we down to be successful. But that is this, this like fact brookaking. Hard, hard work. So interesting.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah. And it’s only gonna become more important for us to contend with this. And even just as a species, like with, with the advent of AI, right? Everybody’s talking about it, everybody’s thinking about it, but like what, what are these tools going to do to our daily work, right?
We’ve already seen what they do is they kind of bring up C players to like B, you know, A level stat, right? So like this is going to fundamentally change what it means to have a job. What does that, what does it mean like so I think what we, we’re going to, if we’re smart, we’re gonna contend more with this question. Because what the question needs to become is what do we desire as a species?
Like what do we want work to be? If all of these tools and we can kind of create them and use them the way that we want to, then what is a job about? And I think it needs to be about creating more meaningful work because people like meaningful work. People actually love meaningful work. They don’t want a job. Like who wants a job? But like if I get to work on something that feels meaningful to me, like that’s a peak flow state human experience, there’s almost nothing better. And so if we’re smart, we’ll engage this AI topic in that way also like that. How do we optimise this for human energy? That would be where I want this to go, where I hope this goes.
Emma-Louise Parkes: No, I’m not someone that’s particularly into like space or space travel as no inclination to get on a rocket and be launched into space whatsoever. But I always find rocket launches quite emotional because of the ground crew, because m of the meaning you, these people that have worked for years and years on this project and it works, it blasts off and you see them and you hear them cheering, whether it’s at NASA or SpaceX or whatever. And that’s what comes to me when you’re talking about meaningful work. They’ve done work, they love to contribute something that they care about.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Right, right. Yeah. And I think this really, this is a really important challenge for organisations to rise to, for leaders to rise to the challenge of this say what are we working on? That’s actually meaningful and important. Almost all businesses have a meaningful core. That’s why they were started by their initial entrepreneur founder. But what happens over time is that they kind of devolve. They kind of like as they grow and they scale and they kind of build more operational processes. The way that we think about building and scaling and growing operational processes is very mechanical. It’s very factory system. It’s very like 19th century.
Like it’s really like the way we grow companies is so outdated in the way that we think’s. It’s not organic, it’s mechanical. So this also becomes part of the challenge. Right. especially for, for those listeners who are, you know, inside bigger companies, what you’re, you’re probably finding is that this is making this whole task of you finding more energising work, it’s making it more difficult for You. Because the machine actually isn’t set up like that. The operating system of work is actually designed to be kind of like the Matrix movie. You remember the Matrix movie, right? Like where we, like, plug into the humans to suck out their energy as battery.
Like they’re the batteries. We suck out their energy to make the machines work. That is basically the operating system of work today. Like, that is how it’s designed. That’s not. That’s not a broken system. That’s the system as it’s designed. And so what you have to do as humans inside that system is you have to actively counteract that. You can still find a way to make meaningful work for yourself by finding what energises you. But it’s hard, right? It’s not the default path. I think that’s part of what we see too, and why this isn’t like the default way of working. We’re kind of up against a big system.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Yeah. It requires a huge paradigm shift in how many people think for it to be effective at the level that I imagine you would love to see it affected at.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, yeah. Well, this is why I talk about the. A work revolution, right? So I mean that word very literally, right? I’m not talking about, like, you know, fighting and guns and violence. What I’m talking about, the literal meaning of revolution is to turn around. Like the Earth does a revolution around the sun, right? It’s a complete turnaround. And this is what I think we need in our workplaces is right now the model is almost entirely extractive, Right. The operating system is built to extract energy out of people, purpose from lives, stuff from the planet. The entire model is extractive. We need to flip that around. It needs a complete turnaround, it needs a revolution. Because what happens is if we design organisational structures that are more organic, then they actually give energy to people, they give meaning to people, they give regenerative practises back to the Earth. Right? Like, we just need to, like, flip it around. And then business can actually be a force that heals the world instead of, you know, kind of doing what it’s doing now.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I know it’s a little bit of a buzzword, but disengagement at, Work, every client I think I’ve worked with that’s ever felt a little burnt out or, you know, wants to make a big change, always says, I just feel so disengaged, or I just didn’t feel connected to what I was doing. I was going through the motions. Which kind of ties in beautifully with what you’re saying there. So you’ve got on one hand this, understand your strengths, you’re able to work with, so you’re able to find meaning to be in this flow state and to always generate the energy that’s self propelling versus I feel connected to anything. I’m really disengaged. I hate everything that I do. Like you can just build the difference in energy from that.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah, 100%. Well I think this is one of the other interesting things about human energy and workplaces Emma is what I’ve realised. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned after studying human energy for the last 15 years, it’s that we don’t understand it at all, right? Like we don’t, we don’t especially at work, right? But in general we don’t understand human energy.
The only thing that I ve found that we understand about human energy is in the deficit of it, right? So, so what do I mean by that? Like when you’re sick, what do you want more energy, right? When you’re tired, you’re depleted, you’re burned out, you’re exhausted, what, what do you want more than anything? You want more energy, right? So we only understand energy when we don’t have it and then we understand it but all of the other times we don’t optimise for it at all.
So even in our organisations, right, we’ve got a word for this, it’s burnout, right? So we’ve been like dealing with this, right, Especially post pandemic, right? We’ve kind of had burnout reduction things happening. But reducing burnout is not the same thing as creating an energised workplace, right? like baking something less bad, right?
If the strengths movement tells us it teaches us anything, is that making something less bad is not the same. It’s completely different than making something great, even better, right? So reducing burnout is just not enough. Like if that’s your human energy strategy, sorry, you’re not going far enough. What you need to do is you need to optimise for people’s human energy all the time to get them into flow states.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I remember hearing a quote many years ago from someone in the health sphere, and they said just because you’re not sick doesn’t mean you’re healthy, right? And I feel like it’s like that, like it’s not just about let’s eradicate burnout, it’s like let’s actually make people energised and enjoy their work, not just this kind of middling neutral Ground.
Josh Allan Dykstra: No. Yeah. And they’re just completely separate things, right. This is kind of like the distinction between know, traditional psychology, which studies pathology versus positive psychology, which studies human thriving. Right. These are not, these are not in the same camp at all. Right. You cannot get a thriving life just by reducing pathology. Like that is not how this works. That is not how flourishing happens. So I think about a little bit like, like having a hole in your boat, right? Like, you know, I’m not a boating expert. should you fix that? Yeah, you probably should get that looked at, right? Like fix the hole in the boat. But does the fixing the hole in your boat win you the race? Of course not. Right. Like not having a hole in your boat. Kinda table stakes for your boat race. Right. Like fixing what’s wrong does not make winning happen. And so we’ve gotta start pulling these ideas apart.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Anyone listening that is intrigued, which I’m sure is many people if they’re not familiar with their strengths. You mentioned you’ve talked about a few different mobile there. But if they just want to dip a toe and really start to understand this, where is the best BAS programme to go and investigate?
Josh Allan Dykstra: Yeah. Best place for you to start is your own body. You have a built in energy detector. You can tell when you’re doing something that energises you and you can tell when you’re doing something that sucking the life out of you, you can tell.
The problem is that most of us have been trained to ignore that feeling. We’ve been kind of pushed our whole lives. We’ve been taught this model of work, that the way to succeed is to work harder, power through, you know, push. Right. Like so what we do is we ignore the way we feel. And so I recommend that if you wanna start going down this path, make yourself an energy journal. And all this is like take a piece of paper, make two columing and two vertical columns on it.
Put energizers at the top of one column and drainers on the top of the other and keep track for like two weeks. Like really like literally carry this piece of paper around with you with a pencil and keep track. When I. Okay, I’m in that mat meeting. That was brainstorming. I loved that. That was great. All right. I’m in this other meeting. You know, it’s like oh my.
Oh my God. That just sucked the life out of me. I can’t stand it. I need to get out. Right. Keep track of these things and like what was happening in those meetings. And eventually you will even over a couple of weeks, you’ll start to see patterns and then the goal is very simple, but it’s not easy. The goal is for you to do more of what energises you and less of what drains you. That’s it, right? It is simple, but it is not easy to do because you’ve got the entire operating of operating system of work kind of working against you on this point. But if you want this, you can do it.
Or like you can create a life that’s more energising for you. And that’s the other thing would I would recommend is like take this, take the strengths approach further. Right? You have to get, you have to take it further than just what you’re good at because you can actually be really good at things that suck the freickaking life out of you. Right? If you’re listening to this, you could probably think of something right now like yeah, I’m really good at that Josh, but you’re right, if I never had to do it again, I wouldn’t cry. But you probably think of something right now you’re like, yeah, I can think.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Of a few things for me from my previous career and now in my business that people that suck in. Oh, that looks great. You did that. And I’m like, yeah, but I was exhausted for like two days afterwards. So we didn’t do that 100%.
Josh Allan Dykstra: Hundred percent. So you gotta take this further, right? It can’t just be about what you’re good at. Take it further and make sure you’re doing things that actually bring you energy consistently.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love it. Josh, thank you so much for joining m me on the ambitiousroma. I’m gonn drop all of your links in the show notes so you can check out all of the work you do. Some m of your speeches, they can go and check out your fly trousers, which I highly recommend they do because they always look great. But before I let you go, I have a very fitting question that I always ask guests at the end of the podcast, which is what is one way that you ensure that you own your energy so that you can keep performing at your best?
Josh Allan Dykstra: I think these days for me it’s really about paying more attention to the stories that I tell myself and the kind of the framing narrative that’s rolling around in my own head. So this year at the beginning of the year I decided. So every year I kind of set goals for the year. I don’t do resolutions, but I do goals. And this year I decided to put all of my goals inside an identity. And so I have a statement. And so one of my statements is I am a health guy.
So that’s mya. For a long time I thought, you know, I’m not a health guy. I’m not a Jim bro, right? I’m not like, you know, pumping the iron and I’m not like, that’s not me. But so I disassociated myself from this idea of being a health guy. Then I realised, you know, as I’m getting older, that’s not helping me. And so this year I’m experimenting with kind of a healthy, aspirational identity. I’m a health guy. And so what does that mean then? It means that I have to do the things that a health guy does and I find myself kind of challenged by that every day and it helps me do the practises that I need to do to like, stay in the stay playing the game that I want to play and keep my energy where it needs to be. And so, yeah, that’s kind of what I’m working on this year.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love it. Identity is a big part of the work we do here at the Ambitious and dra. So that fits in beautifully. Jo, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. It’s lovely to see you again and ah, thanks for being here on the dis’entry that.
Josh Allan Dykstra: My pleasure.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Thanks.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Emma, thank you for tuning in into this week’s episode. I hope that you’re feeling expanded to what’s possible for you, motivated to take action and inspired about how you can start to own your energy. I share even more tools and resources on my Introvert’only email newsletter. By signing up, you not only get early access to the Ambitious Introvert products and services, but you also get brand new podcast episodes delivered straight to your inbox every Monday, meaning you’ll never miss your weekly dose of Introvert friendly inspiration. Sign up now at theambitiousintrovert.com newsletter or click the link in the Show Notes. See you next week.
