Be Your Best: ‘In less than a week, my energy has really improved’

Laura Gaynor, 20

Film student

When I started Be Your Best, one of my main goals was improving time management. I’m pretty disorganised!

Until now, I have shifted the blame on time itself. And yet, Potential Life suggest something I may have known for years, it is very difficult to manage time. You can look at it, write it down and count it up – but ultimately, life happens and it is unpredictable.

Besides that, the correlation between time spent working and actual work done can be very different things. Potential Life say managing your energy is a much better option.

This seemed great, I’m usually fairly energetic. However, when I got my results from the “Life Map” app, I was quite disappointed. The app measures your behaviours and found my activity levels to be at a mere two percent.

You may remember in my last blog [link http://goo.gl/pPhR3O] , I mentioned a two-year lapse from exercise. For the last few months I’ve been trying different ways of getting fit. My first attempt, jogging.

Admittedly, the idea of jogging was daunting at first. As a younger teenager, myself and my Dad got great amusement from blowing the horn at joggers on the Strandhill road. Laughing like kids and hopefully not deterring the locals from exercising.

So I’ll be completely honest when I say that, starting jogging, I had the vision of me sprawled on the smooth tarmac in Sandycove. Begging for my iPad and something else requiring no cardio activity whatsoever. Seeking to bask in the familiar light of a screen. As a car drives past, blowing the horn.

This helpless exhausted image was far from reality. Jogging is very popular and much less awkward than you’d imagine. However, I soon became bored of this pursuit. I found it quite time consuming between changing into gear, panting around my street and recovering afterwards.

I decided to return to a sport I’d almost forgotten about; skateboarding. It was my secret teenage hobby and involved borrowing my brother’s boards without his knowing. Although, since I moved to Dublin, I’ve barely done it at all.

Last week I bought a Pennyboard. To describe it to a stranger, it’s a red plastic skateboard 27 inches long. Since I’ve gotten it, I can’t stop coming up with excuses to use it. I’ve even started getting off the bus a stop early so I can skate home.

It is perhaps the risky charm of skateboarding that interests me.

Where jogging is predictable, skating isn’t at all. You never know what you may encounter; and the whole sport seems to revolve around coming up with cool ways to get over obstacles. If you fall - you get back on it and keep going.

It’s not unlike the world of business.

In less than a week, my energy has really improved; it’s great to put leanings from Be Your Best into action. Exercise is a great way to punctuate your work and energize you. In fact, the Potential Life leaders suggest that even how we view our work can determine if it is life-leeching or invigorating.

Besides that, I am now one step closer to becoming an authentic Dublin hipster. Next I’ll need to become a vegan or join a band.

The Be Your Best programme sponsored by the Irish Times is being delivered by Potentialife, a nine-month leadership development programme that incorporates the latest in technology and behavioural science. See more at www.Potentialife.com