I was walking down the sidewalk in the West Village with my girlfriend Terri Cole complaining about something someone had asked me to do.

I really had my panties in a wrinkle about it and was feeling all righteous about my time and how their request was an infringement on it.

“So what you’re really saying is how dare this person make a request of you and put you in the position of needing to be the gatekeeper of your own time by saying no to them, which makes you really uncomfortable?”

She had me.

The person’s request was perfectly reasonable. I was blaming the requestor for the fact that I was uncomfortable setting boundaries around my own time and energy.

My discomfort setting boundaries wasn’t their problem. Nor was it their responsibility to take care of my emotions around saying no.

That was my job.

If you were raised to be a “nice girl,” saying no and protecting your precious time and energy may very well feel uncomfortable at first, as it did (and still sometimes does) to me.

But I’ll tell you what feels way worse: doing things that I don’t want to be doing and carrying around the resentment toward the people I’m doing them for, not to mention the anger I have toward myself for not having the ovaries to say no in the first place.

Listen: Your time and energy are precious because YOU are precious.

But no one ever put us on their knee when we were little to talk to us about how sacred our time and energy are and teach us how to manage and protect it (or at least they didn’t in my family).

If we want to live in a world that values women and girls, we need to begin to value ourselves first. And managing our time and energy as the valuable resources they are is a perfect, practical way to start.

There are 3 key ways that I practice this and that I teach my Origin® members to practice:

1. Understand that your creative energy and projects are cyclical, just like the female body, the moon, and the earth, and should be planned and managed as such.

2. Notice where you’re leaking your energy and plug the leaks pronto so that you have more of it for the things that matter to you.

3. Source your schedule from within so that the way you spend your days, weeks, months, and years aligns with what you need to thrive, what your business needs to grow, and what brings you the most joy and fulfillment.

All 3 of these strategies depend on one thing:

Managing your energy as a way to have more time.

We’ve been taught that the way to get more done is to manage our time by fitting more into our days.

If we want lives and businesses that fulfill us beyond our wildest dreams, we need to focus on our energy instead and find ways to fit more of ourselves into our days.

If you want to feel spacious instead of spent, pay more attention to your energy and you’ll discover the pathway to more time.

I’ll be diving deeper into how to implement the 3 strategies above in a brand-new webinar I’m teaching next week:

Spacious: 3 Life-Changing Time Management Strategies for Female Entrepreneurs Click here to reserve your spot for free.

OVER TO YOU:

What could you do today to protect your precious time and energy? Which of the 3 strategies I listed resonates the most with you? Tell me in the comments!

P.S. I only open the doors to Origin®, my membership where I teach female entrepreneurs to reclaim their time and energy, one or two times a year, and one of those times is right now! Click here to learn about joining us before we close the doors again.