Batteries Flat?

I’m writing this to the background noise of the ‘please hold’ music at my vacuum cleaner manufacturer. Last week they sent me a replacement part for a power issue and it’s a little better, but still not sufficient to get the job done properly. It started me thinking about how we keep our batteries charged when we’re in the dead of winter (c’mon Spring..)

Thinking about what we can do for free to keep well charged, there’s an opportunity to stop and review what we are taking in, what we’re consuming.

For a lot of us media consumption is a great place to start. How many times a day are you exposed the news? It’s hardly uplifting stuff is it? You could limit your exposure to once a day (or less) and clear up some headspace. Now to the TV we watch. 25 years ago I made a decision, prompted by seeing my toddler sat goggled eyed involved in one of the more hideous story lines in Eastenders… soaps were going to be

turned off until she got to an age when she could distinguish reality from drama. At the time there was enough drama happening between our own four walls, without supplementing it by the goings on at The

Queen Vic.

When it comes to what we watch, a line in a Robbie Williams song made we think about this many years go, it goes, “Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake teach me things that I don’t need to know”. It may satisfy a salacious streak in us, but watching other people’s real life dramas in the raw, gives us little else; it actually desensitises us a little and that’s never a good thing.

Listen to the people you’ve got around you: are they always ready to talk something or someone down? If so, take a break from that ‘noise’, physically remove yourself if you can… go and find something or someone who recharges your batteries instead.