Fuel Your Business: How to Energize People, Ignite Action, and Drive Profits

By Gina Soleil

“The next generation resource for leaders . . . demonstrates the need for the intersection of human energy, overall well-being, and value-based leadership.” —Jean Nitchals, partner, Niche Solutions, LLC

Gina Soleil takes you through a thought-provoking journey on how to transform your business into a haven of productivity. Using the science of energy, Gina gives you a step-by-step roadmap for building a business that’s fueled to win in today’s market. Soleil reveals the intersection between human energy and business, exposing the truth about how to attract what you want—energy, action, and profits.

Human energy is the door of opportunity for business. As the demands of our connected world increase, people no longer have the energy they once had to be fully engaged, productive, and innovative in the workplace—leaving business leaders in search of a solution.

In Fuel Your Business, you will discover life- and business-changing keys to success, such as:

• How the science of energy is the secret to profit
• How to free your business from toxic energy that wants to hold you back
• How taking the assessment and knowing your score will put your business on the performance fast track
• How to attract the energy you want—now!

“Brilliant in the way few books are . . . These ideas will revolutionize how we look at business, economics, public policy and so much more.” —Jennifer Hovelsrud, corporate communications, UnitedHealth Group

“When business leaders escape their preconceptions and embrace her energy-centered approach we’ll all enjoy a transformation in American business culture.” —James Matheson, president and partner, Network Medics, Inc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781601634955

Book preview

preface

The Eight Principles of Business

Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.

—Albert Einstein

Understanding the truth of human energy, and the power it has in this world, changed my life. It has allowed me to move forward in this world fearlessly and with heart, and it also made my business stronger. The knowledge of human energy is transformative, and it opens doors of exploration, discovery, and profound experiences that will catapult you and your business into a new reality—a reality that fuels people with the energy they so desperately need, ignites action, and drives business profits to new levels.

This book is the result of my research findings on human energy, and my experience in business and in life throughout the years. It’s for leaders who understand that people are the engine of their business, and who are ready to embrace new principles and truths about what drives energy, action, and profits. I’m going to take you on a journey, give you an inside tour of your business and the minds of the people who work in it, and show you exactly how to create a culture that fuels the greatest resource of our time: human energy. This book is your guide to creating a high-performing business that gets results, by creating a business culture that’s fueled with healthy human energy. It’s your pathway to greater levels of growth and innovation. This book is the new engagement and performance strategy for business in today’s world.

Introduction: The Journey Begins

The Introduction introduces you to the human energy crisis, and explains why people are so exhausted and energy-depleted in today’s world. It reveals the business chakra system, and introduces you to the Eight Principles of Business—a framework that sets the stage for the entire book.

Chapter 1—Principle #1: Functional Leaders Drive Profits

Chapter 1 exposes the truth about dysfunctional leadership in business. You’ll have an opportunity to take the Toxic Leadership Quiz to see if your business is suffering from unhealthy energy, and you’ll get a step-by-step leadership development plan that is guaranteed to start fueling leaders with healthy energy that gets results.

Chapter 2—Principle #2: Vision and Purpose Ignite Forward Momentum

Chapter 2 is all about getting your business to its ultimate destination: a healthy bottom line. You’ll learn how to create a destination map, and leverage your map to inspire people in a way that ignites profitable action from part-time Joe all the way through to the CEO.

Chapter 3—Principle #3: Truth and Clarity Motivate Action

Chapter 3 reveals how truth and clarity ignite the must-have action businesses need to achieve sustainable profitability. You’ll learn the communication techniques that inspire and motivate, and what traditional techniques to stay away from—techniques that demotivate people and derail the most well-thought-out business strategies.

Chapter 4—Principle #4: People Are Driven to Live Out a Purpose

Chapter 4 is about individual purpose and how creating opportunities for people to be part of something greater than themselves ignites the drive that every business needs to move forward. You’ll learn how to harness individual purpose to take your business to the next level.

Chapter 5—Principle #5: Freedom Turns Ideas and Vision Into Reality

Ideas and vision are attained through attitude—also called an internal brand. Chapter 5 addresses the internal brand of your business, and shows you how ideas and vision are attained through an anything is possible attitude; you’ll learn how to get everyone in your business living an anything is possible attitude within every area of your business.

Chapter 6—Principle #6: Creative Expression Fuels Change and Growth

Change and growth are propelled forward by environment, and it’s the environment that fuels people to move the business forward. Chapter 6 addresses personal power, boundaries, and how understanding the term energy vampire will automatically transform your business environment into a haven of productivity.

Chapter 7—Principle #7: Human Connectivity Is the Source of Energy

We are all one, interconnected through energy. Chapter 7 addresses how owning our own story, putting people first, and running a business on the philosophy of DO NO EVIL will turn energetically toxic business environments into energetically healthy ones.

Chapter 8—Principle #8: Humanity Is the Future

Improving the health and well-being of humanity is the only answer to preserving a world that will continue to fuel business. Chapter 8 addresses the concepts of collective responsibility, collective strength, and both internal and external social responsibility. You’ll get the plan for how to fuel the energy of your business by taking care of the basic needs of humanity.

Conclusion: A Letter to the World

The book concludes with a letter to the world, a letter that encourages and inspires every reader to take each of the Eight Principles of Business forward into their business.

Appendix: The Energy Assessment

At the back of the book there is an energy assessment that allows you to measure your own businesses energy level. Is it toxic? Is it healthy? What work can you do right now to start getting the results you want? Take the assessment and find out your next steps.

Let’s Get Started

By reading this book, you’ll learn how to harness energy for yourself and the people who make up your business. You’ll learn how to build a strong business culture that energizes people, ignites action, and drives profits by applying process and systems thinking, as well as energy-producing best practices, to everyday operations.

For every action there is a reaction in our world. My hope is that you’ll use this knowledge to create the change inside your business that will impact humanity for years to come. With that, my friends, let’s get started.

introduction

The Journey Begins

With a coffee, a smartphone (sometimes two), keys, and a bag of some sort in hand, Michael enters my office with a look of exhaustion and sinks into a chair with a sigh. He begins sharing his typical day. Walking into his office each morning he thinks, Here I go again—eight meetings, seven critical e-mails, 30 other e-mails awaiting my response, and a personal life that’s falling apart. Barely able to make it from one meeting to the next, he’s exhausted, and his lack of energy is impacting his focus, drive, and confidence. The 14-hour days are becoming unbearable, and his tolerance for dealing with minutiae is decreasing each time he walks through the doors of his office. His performance is on the downslide.

The image of Michael represents most people working in your business. Exhaustion is a trend that’s growing so fast that we now have a name for it: the human energy crisis. From the United Nations to the Ivy League, human energy is becoming the hot topic of discussion and research. This crisis is impacting our relationships, our physical bodies, and the perception we have of the world. This energy crisis has now crept into business like termites seeking out their next home. People no longer have the energy they once had to be fully engaged, productive, and innovative. Bottom line? People are exhausted.

So what’s causing the energy crisis? Let’s face it: Life is tough, and our technologically connected, plugged-in world doesn’t make it any easier to stay on top of our game. In fact, this connected world of instant gratification that fuels our addiction for information is often the very reason we can’t seem to pull ourselves out of bed in the morning. I call this the morning ugh syndrome. The increase in demand for our attention often becomes overwhelming. We desperately try to catch our breath as the five e-mails that just came through crush any hope of having free time for the next month. Then there’s the pressure of society. We’re running kids from one activity to the next, getting multiple degrees, and buying bigger, buying more, and buying better things to show the world we have arrived. Then there’s what you call relationships. Wait, those still exist? We’ve become experts at going through the motions, staying in relationships that are safe and status quo, because we’re too exhausted to do anything about them. And if we’re not in a relationship, we’re on a constant online search for big love. Oh, did I mention that all of this happens in just one day? So, in complete exhaustion, we give ourselves a pep talk and keep on keepin’ on.

When we get into the office each day, it’s game time. As we are battling exhaustion, we must ensure that we fit in, play by the rules, follow unsaid, unwritten cultural norms, engage in politics, package our words appropriately, and don’t ever screw up! I haven’t even touched on the challenges of egos, diversity, working with people we don’t like, or leadership dysfunction. We spend our days thinking, I want more in life, but we stay put because of the golden handcuffs, security, and the fact that we’re too tired to make a change. It’s no wonder that after a day’s worth of work we’re exhausted.

Then people arrive to work, and the business asks them be more engaged: Give us more of your discretionary energy; be more involved, productive, creative, and strategic. In frustration the business asks people, Why won’t you participate? Why don’t you listen? Why won’t you perform? Damn it, we have strategic plans that need to be executed. The answer: your people are tired, exhausted, beat up, and they don’t have any more energy to give.

Welcome to business in today’s world. The energy crisis breeds self-doubt, hinders focus, prevents people from accomplishing their best, stifles creativity, dissipates tolerance, and drives healthcare costs through the roof. In the United States alone, workplace stress is a $300 billion cost to the healthcare industry (American Institute of Stress), obesity is another $192 billion (Trust for America’s Health), and chronic disease, including heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, is a $616 billion cost to healthcare (WebMD). People are tired, sick, and dying. That’s not harsh; that’s reality. (I should warn you: I will never package things in pretty bows, and I will always call a spade a spade.) This reality is the baggage every one of us carries to work each day. If you’re running a business, small or large, this reality is your greatest threat. If this doesn’t describe your business, congratulations! Now I would ask you to question whether that’s truth or denial. The brutal reality is that this is the truth for 99 percent of businesses today. The energy crisis is resulting in mediocre strategy, decreased engagement, and less-than-stellar profits. Businesses are wasting thousands, if not millions, of dollars on engagement and management strategies in an effort to revive and refuel performance, only to find that they keep getting more of the same: a big fat bill for strategies that aren’t working.

Before we go too far into doom and gloom, let me tell you there is a solution. If you can refuel your people with the energy they so desperately need, you’ll revive your business tenfold. It’s not difficult—it’s just energy. According to Einstein, Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics. I have to say, I am in love with Einstein—partly because of his hair, but mostly because of his audacious brilliance that he fearlessly brought to our world in order to prove us all wrong.

Let me be clear on the topic of energy: I’m not talking about eating better, sleeping more, working out, or adding another must do to your schedule. Yes, all those things are important to being a healthy human being, but when I’m addressing human energy, I’m addressing the energetic frequencies that radiate from your body and impact those around you and the rest of the world. Modern science has proven that we are all made of energy. No longer can we argue the fact that we all have energy that radiates from our bodies like exhaust fumes from a truck, or like the steam from a freshly baked apple pie; you can’t see or smell it, but it’s everywhere, evoking emotions and thoughts of either disgust or delight. We can compare your personal energy to garlic, an herb that has the ability to seep through the pores of our skin, filling a room with its aroma. People either love you or hate you for it; they run toward you or can’t get away from you fast enough.

Here’s an example of how unhealthy energy looks in your everyday life. Think about that person you know who, for some reason, makes you want to run for the hills as soon as she comes toward you. This is a person, when you’re around her, who makes you feel as though you just got slimed. Her presence makes you feel suffocated, depleted, and exhausted. It’s as though this person has the ability to take any negative emotion she might be thinking or feeling in the moment and dump it over your head until you have to jump around and shake it off. Ugh! Some of you might be thinking about your mother (just kidding, Mom), or that colleague you dread having on team projects. But I have bad news: The brutal reality is that for some people, this person is you! Fact. And if you’re exhausted, and being ruled by sabotaging thoughts and emotions, the energy you’re giving to other people is toxic and is wreaking havoc on everything within your world.

Science has proven that energy is inside us and all around us. Amazing technological advances have even given us the ability to physically measure human energy: ECG (electrocardiogram) measures electrical energy currents from the heart; EEG (electroencephalogram) measures energy currents from the brain; lie detectors measure energy from the skin; the SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) measures energy fields around the body, not even touching the person being measured. (Hands of Light by Barbara Brennan) Science has even gone a step further and theorized the butterfly effect: the idea that the energy frequency from one thought, word, or action has the ability to create a natural disaster on the other side of the world. How many of us wake up each morning and say, I have to be aware of what I think today because I don’t want to cause a tsunami in Indonesia? But according to science, that is a reality. More obvious is the fact that our thoughts can cause a tsunami in our own lives.

Through energy, everything in our world is connected and one. For those of you who like analogies, this can be compared to a body of water: Your business is like a flowing river, and every person inside your business is a water molecule that makes the river whole. Every thought, word, action, and emotion from each person changes the molecular structure of the river. Now, if you have a bunch of Yodas working for you, this can be absolutely fantastic! If you don’t have Yoda on the payroll, and you’re like most businesses that have normal human beings who are exhausted working for you, your river is polluted with the same green slime from the previous example—and you can’t eat the fish! If you want to drive profits and improve business efficiencies and morale, you have to figure out how to get every person inside your business operating on healthy human energy. It doesn’t matter how tight your process, systems, and management structure might be, if you have toxic human energy being dumped into the river, and people don’t have the energy to perform, you won’t achieve squat!

I know you didn’t buy this book to get a science lesson on the theory of relativity and the butterfly effect. You want to know how to fuel your business, how to energize people, ignite action, and drive profits. You want your business to perform at higher levels—make more, do more, be more. Let’s quickly align on the word business.

Business is a word that is applied to politics, religion, and private or public commerce. I use the word business to describe any entity trying to drive profits into an organization. Profits are dollars or participation from people outside the business that generate what a business needs to move forward. If you’re reading this book, you want more profits. If you want more profits, your biggest ally is the science of energy. The truth of the matter is, business is science. In fact, your business is a giant Petri dish for proving the accuracy of physics—energy. Your business is all about cause and effect. You perform experiments every day by changing processes, introducing initiatives, bringing different people into the equation, moving people around, and inventing new products—all scientific experiments intended to prove out your hypothesis of how to make more money!

You most likely already get the fact that we are all made of energy, that we are all energetically interconnected, and that human energy has the ability to make or break profit. In fact, as an intelligent human being, you may also follow many advances in modern-day science and say, Makes sense. I call this the get it factor. But here’s the crazy thing: The minute we step into a business it’s as though we step into a time machine and begin thinking like we’re Isaac Newton—everything is solid, individual, and systematic. Quite frankly, it’s amazing that we get anything done or make any profits at all. It’s as though someone is standing at the doors of every business waiting to zap us with a neuralyzer while saying, You will not remember anything that makes sense for how to run a business in the current world. Welcome back to 1885. (Thank you, Men in Black, for help with that analogy!) For some reason, while inside the business, we completely forget about human energy and modern-day science. We start thinking that people are solid cogs inside a giant machine. We have strategy meetings to talk about human capital processes, systematic approaches to engagement, and linear initiatives to build morale and communication platforms. Wow, that’s a mouthful! We pride ourselves on building PowerPoint presentations, having top-secret management sessions, and implementing complex talent development systems to get people to behave the way we believe will drive results. Even approaches to culture are systematic: Let’s get a bunch of leaders together in a room and teach them how to say this, do that, say this, do that. Then we ask ourselves, why are we consistently spending thousands, if not millions, of dollars on trying to improve our business and drive profits? Sweetheart, this ain’t rocket science. All you have to do is turn around and see that you have human beings running your business—not cogs.

Let me be clear: Process is important and critically necessary. I’m not proposing that we do away with the structure needed to keep a business moving forward. I am stating that businesses today are suffering from a severe case of analysis paralysis (a.k.a. overkill), and neglecting their most valuable resource: human energy. Just ask yourself, when was the last time you spent countless hours working on a presentation or project to see it go absolutely nowhere? Part of the problem is that exhaustion is inhibiting us from making thoughtful decisions. We’re all on autopilot. Let’s do it this way because this is how we always do it, and we’re too tired to change, too exhausted to fight the culture. A business will inevitably spend less, become more efficient, and make more money if it starts refueling the energy of its people from the inside out. Process for process’s sake does not drive financial accumulation, people do. If people have no energy to make process happen, all you have is a bunch of words and symbols on paper that result in frustration, disappointment, and a lack of trust. Sound familiar?

Now let’s go back to science. Remember the fundamental principle: We are all interconnected, and the energy created by our thoughts and emotions has significant power over our business and our lives. So, to fuel your business, you have to address the thoughts and emotions driving your business. Your business runs on people, and the emotions and thoughts of the people who work for your business drive every action, process, and profit opportunity your business has. If this seems too touchy-feely, think about a time when you did something, anything at all, that had absolutely no thought or emotion involved; a time when you had no thoughts or emotions running through you. If you’re human, it’s not possible. Even the state of simply being is a state of emotional recognition that you are present with what’s going on around you in the moment. Thoughts and emotions drive all aspects of our reality. Every word and every action that is used to run your business is driven by human thought, emotion, and energy. Again, this is great if you have Yodas running your business, but remember the Michael story from the first paragraph. It’s Michael whom you have on your payroll. Here’s another fact: You