the fourth resource

In my own business, and in coaching clients, I am frequently looking at how to resource strategic plans.  For any project to run successfully, attention needs to be paid to human resources, financial resources and time resources.  If any one of these is limited, the project will bear the strain. But there is a further consideration that often goes unheeded: I’m calling it ‘the fourth resource’. It is the flow of energy through the project that grants or withholds the will to succeed. Now, lest that all sounds a bit cosmic, consider some well-earthed examples.  You might have two seemingly identical nights’ sleep but on one day you leap out of bed and can’t wait to get going, and on the other day, nothing could persuade you out from under the duvet and everything feels like a slog. Chances are, on the day you get up with energy, you are anticipating something you enjoy doing: a day off, a meeting you’re well prepared for, an interesting conference, the next stage in a project that’s going well. And on the day you don’t want to move, there will be something in you resisting an unwelcome task: cleaning out the shed, a meeting with someone you never seem to see eye to eye with, analysing a set of figures that you know will not give you the result you’re looking for. There is an underlying ‘mood’ to the day before you even get out of bed and that will undoubtedly influence the way the day progresses.

What about when you just know in your bones that something is right or wrong? It’s not rational, you couldn’t say why, but you have a very strong feeling for or against a course of action. You have a gut reaction to something. Have you stopped to analyse what that feeling really is? Or where it comes from? It’s not coming from your head. It’s not a mind thing. It’s in your body. Our culture has privileged the head, the mind, knowledge, the known world, over the body, feelings, gut instincts, the felt sense. And yet it is there, and we do use it, in all sorts of subtle ways that we hardly stop to notice. It’s there in our physical resistance to facing an unwelcome task, it’s there when we have a hunch about the right course of action to take, it’s there in a dark alley at night when you know you’re in a dangerous space and you need to get to safety. How do you know when you’re in danger? Imagine you’re in that alley. How do you feel? It’s not a calm rational mind that tells you the statistics for muggings in dark alleys that gets you out of there. It’s the empty feeling in your stomach, your heart pumping, every nerve tingling. Your body is feeding you the information you need to do the right thing.

What is the body ‘reading’ in these circumstances when it’s feeding you information? What signals does it pick up? It’s really accessing that current of energy that exists within, around and under us the whole time. It’s always there and we are always able to read it, but we rarely do so consciously. And the reason we don’t use it is because we can only read it with our bodies. And in this society, we tend to doubt information that comes from our bodies, in preference for mind information - thoughts. And yet we are constantly being influenced by this ‘field of energy’ in which we’re situated. If we’re not consciously reading that energy we will not be aware of how it’s affecting us. But it is possible to include information from this ‘field’ in support of any kind of project you’re working on: it’s the fourth resource.

More about this later…