The Internal Leadership Series

There Is Only 100% of You

I regularly hear people talk about needing more time.

More time to think. More time to spend with the people who matter. More time to look after themselves, work on the business rather than in it, develop their team or finally get to the things that have been sitting at the bottom of the list for months.

I understand the feeling. I've had it myself. Yet I've shifted my interest to whether time is actually the thing we're short of.

There have certainly been periods in my own life when my diary has been full, but there have also been times when something has taken very little of my actual time and an enormous amount of me. A conversation I've continued thinking about long after it finished. A problem I've been trying to solve despite having no immediate way to change it. Something I've agreed to do that has sat in the back of my mind, quietly taking attention even when I'm doing something else.

None of those things necessarily shows up as a significant block in a diary.

They still take something from us.

That's why I've started thinking less about how we spend our time and more about how we invest ourselves.

There is only 100% of you.

That 100% includes your time, but it also includes your attention and your emotional and physical energy. It includes the things you actively choose to do and the things you continue carrying when you're doing something entirely different.

Once I started looking at capacity in this way, I noticed how easy it is to treat ourselves as though that 100% is somehow expandable.

Something new needs doing, so we add it.

Someone needs our help, so we give it.

An opportunity appears, so we try to make room for it.

Something matters to us, so we decide that deserves some of us too.

Individually, each decision may make complete sense. The difficulty is that every investment comes from the same place.

There isn't another 20% waiting somewhere for when something important comes along.

This is where I think the language of investment becomes useful.

Most of us understand that we have a finite amount of money, so choosing to invest it somewhere means it isn't available to invest somewhere else. We might decide that the return makes that choice absolutely worthwhile, but we still recognise there is a choice being made.

I'm not sure we always extend the same thinking to ourselves.

We can continue giving attention to a problem we cannot currently solve while also wanting more headspace to think strategically. We can keep saying yes because we're capable of helping while wondering why we have so little energy left for ourselves. We can spend an evening with somebody we care about while allowing part of our attention to remain invested in something that happened at work.

The question isn't whether any of those investments are right or wrong.

Some things simply need doing. Some responsibilities aren't optional. Some of the people and things we care most deeply about will ask a great deal of us at different points in our lives.

Self-leadership doesn't remove those realities.

What it can do is help us see more clearly where our 100% is actually going.

That distinction matters because our visible commitments are only part of the picture. Some of our biggest investments never appear in the diary at all.

The frustration we keep replaying.

The person we're worrying about.

The expectation we're trying to meet.

The decision we haven't made.

The responsibility we continue carrying because we've always carried it.

They all receive a share of us.

And sometimes I think we're so busy trying to find more capacity that we don't stop to notice the capacity we're already investing.

This isn't an invitation to audit every hour or make every part of our lives productive. I don't want to squeeze more from my 100%, and I certainly don't think the answer to feeling stretched is becoming more efficient at filling every available space.

I'm much more interested in discernment.

Where am I investing myself?

What is receiving more of me than I realise?

What isn't receiving enough?

Those questions feel particularly relevant as I come towards the final part of this Internal Leadership Series.

Over the previous months I've explored what happens when we become more aware of our strengths, feelings, stories, expectations, boundaries and choices. Each gives us greater awareness of how we lead ourselves.

But awareness also gives us something to work with.

If there is only 100% of me, where do I choose to invest it?

That's the thinking behind Investing for Impact, the latest tool in my Self-Leadership Playbook. It starts by helping you look beyond the obvious demands on your time and notice what is actually receiving your time, attention and energy.

So you can become more intentional about where it goes next.

Because creating greater impact doesn't necessarily require more of us.

Sometimes it requires us to invest what we already have differently.