Where Awareness Goes, Energy Flows: Dandapani on Founder Focus

Nov 11, 2013

5 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Most owners watch where their money goes. Very few watch where their energy goes. Dandapani, a former Hindu monk who now speaks to entrepreneurs around the world and runs his own business, wrote this on his napkin. Everything is energy. Get to know it, understand it, and learn to channel it. His point for leaders is practical. Each day you wake up with a finite amount of energy, and by late evening it is spent. What you put energy into grows. What you take energy out of falls apart. And your energy follows your awareness, not the clock. Sit with an employee while checking your phone, and nothing flows to that person. The relationship weakens, and the same conversation keeps coming back. Here is how he suggests you spend energy like money, spot the people who drain it, and gather it back when the day scatters it.

Inspired by Paper Napkin Wisdom Episode 11 with Dandapani.

Why should a business owner treat energy like money?

Dandapani asks people to treat energy the way they treat money. If he gave you $100 and said it had to last the week, you wouldn't spend it on a five star dinner. You would buy rice, flour and potatoes, something that stretches. People stay conscious of where money goes no matter how wealthy they are. Almost nobody is that conscious about energy.

The law underneath it is simple. If you want something to grow, put energy into it. If you want something to die, take energy out of it. Energy is like water from a bucket poured on a garden. It can't tell the weeds from the flowers. Everything it reaches grows.

So the choice of where to invest matters. A relationship, a client, a part of the business. Whatever you feed will grow, and whatever you starve will fall apart.

Where awareness goes, energy flows

Energy is not the same as time. Dandapani is clear on this. Energy follows your awareness, where your mind is.

His example is dinner with your spouse. You can sit there for two hours and tick the box. But if your awareness keeps going back to work, your energy is going to work. Work flourishes. The marriage gets nothing, even though you are physically at the table.

The same thing happens at the office. Sit with a team member while you are distracted by your phone, and no energy flows between you. Do that often enough, and the relationship starts to fall apart. People feel it fast. Children know right away when a parent isn't present, and employees and clients are no different.

How a distracted CEO becomes the energy vampire

Dandapani calls the people who drain you energy vampires. You talk with someone for half an hour, walk away and feel completely drained. They can be clients, employees, business partners or family. If a vampire takes $20 out of your $100, that is $20 you can't put into your spouse, your children, your clients or your business. So he asks a hard question. Why is this person still in your life?

Then he turns it around. Sometimes the vampire is the owner. He worked with a business owner in Australia, a YPO member with about 70 employees. When an employee came in with a question, the owner kept typing and answered over his shoulder. The employee would come back five minutes later for more detail, often two or three times. If the owner had stopped, turned to face the person and given two minutes of full attention, the whole thing would have been done.

Text message ping pong is the same leak. Twenty messages over ten minutes, each one interrupting what you were doing, could have been a one or two minute phone call. He once told a room of 700 entrepreneurs to stop treating being an entrepreneur as an excuse to be distracted. A concentrated owner builds richer relationships with employees, clients and family.

How to give people your undivided attention

Noticing the habit is the first step. After that it comes down to practice. Dandapani does one thing at a time all day. When he talks with someone, they have his undivided attention. When his awareness drifts, he brings it back to them.

That feels inefficient to many entrepreneurs, who believe doing many things at once gets more done. His view is that multitasking is a myth, and the efficient path is one thing at a time. When you're driving, drive. When you're on the phone, be on the phone.

He credits his own business growth to the attention he gives clients. They notice, and they appreciate it. A conversation with an employee also gets shorter when you are concentrated.

Irritability is a useful signal. Most people, him included, get annoyed more easily when their energy is low. When something small sets you off, that may be the cue to look at where your energy went.

How to reset your energy in the middle of a draining day

After a busy morning, your energy is scattered. You have been reacting to email, phone calls and social media. Dandapani's fix borrows from how a business runs. Teams scatter when they never meet. A coach calls a time out to get players back on the same page. So hold a meeting with your energy.

Every meeting needs a place and a time. The place is your spine, which he calls the boardroom for your energy. Lie on your back on the floor, or sit in a comfortable chair. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Picture the energy from all over your body moving in toward your spine. Hold it there for a few minutes, then send it back out.

It takes about five minutes. He suggests owners do it twice a day, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, with the door closed and a do not disturb request to the team. It sounds almost too simple. His answer is that we like to complicate things, and over time the body learns to hold more energy. I was struck by how easy this is to overlook. We make time to meet with our teams every day, and almost never make time for our own energy.

How to apply this in your business this week

Start with one change in how you spend attention.

List the people and situations that leave you drained after half an hour. Ask why each one is still on the list.
In your next conversation with an employee, stop typing and turn to face them. Notice how long it takes.
Replace one long text thread with a short phone call.
Block two five minute energy meetings in your calendar, one mid-morning and one mid-afternoon.
When you feel irritable, take that as a sign your energy is low, and reset before your next conversation.

Then watch which relationships grow when they get your full awareness.