The Power of Full Engagement summary

In order to make use of our energy, we must first understand what it actually is. We’re all familiar with physical energy, i.e., what we use to get around, but there are three additional sources of energy – emotional, mental and spiritual – that also require our attention.

Luckily, we can use the same language as we do with physical energy – e.g., flexibility, endurance and strength – to describe the qualities of the other energies.

Unfortunately, our energy reserves are not unlimited, and we tend to expend more energy per day than we recover, which eventually results in a burnout.

In fact, recovery is an integral part of sustaining high levels of energy and thus high performance. Indeed, all organisms must recharge their batteries by following life-sustaining rhythms, i.e., patterns of behavior that help them stay alive and kicking. For humans, this includes the need to rest every 90 to 120 minutes.

It’s obvious that without the physical energy required to move or think, we wouldn’t get much done. In fact, our physical energy is our most important fuel. If we want to reach our potential, then we have to maximize our physical energy. But how?

Our physical energy capacity is dependent upon how we eat, sleep and recover. Since the fundamental source of our physical energy comes from food, we should therefore look for foods that maximize our energy capacity, such as nuts, leafy green vegetables and yogurt. These foods provide the slow release of energy to our bodies, thus providing us with more sustainable energy.

When was the last time you did something simply because you enjoyed it, and not because you were obligated to? In a frantic effort to maximize our time, we tend to choose “useful” activities over “enjoyable” ones. As we will see, prioritizing work over play can have powerful negative consequences.

That’s because we derive positive emotional energy from doing things we enjoy and find relaxing. In fact, it’s positive emotions, like enjoyment, feeling challenged, experiencing adventure and seeing opportunities, which fuel performance. Activities that inspire these emotions are enjoyable and fulfilling, and thus a source of emotional renewal, which helps us replenish our emotional energy.

In order to compete in this ever-changing world, we need to be creative while maintaining as much efficiency and focus as possible. Counterintuitively, the harder we try to achieve all this at once, the less of each we seem to have. So how can we balance them all? 

The key lies in using your mental energy.

While most of us don’t consider ourselves spiritual, we nonetheless all have spiritual energy. Spirituality doesn’t necessarily mean adhering to a particular religion but describes a commitment to a set of personal values that give us purpose as individuals and so compel us to act.

Indeed, spiritual energy is very important and provides us with our drive and motivation. But where does it originate?

The search for meaning is among the most powerful themes across all the world’s cultures. As we saw in the last blink, a sense of purpose is the motivation behind our engagement and commitment to what we do. 

But what constitutes a “good” purpose?

Sure, social status or how many Facebook “likes” we get every day might be important to us, but values that really matter have an intrinsic worth. They provide us with a source of our life’s meaning, which can’t be taken away from us, regardless of whether someone “de-friends” us.

Our values provide the framework for how we would like to behave. If you want to find out what your personal values are, ask yourself what matters most to you. To give an example, one of the authors’ clients identified the following values: family, respect and kindness towards others, excellence, integrity, and health.

People often consider “rituals” to be relics of a lost time – certainly not something relevant to our flexible, ever-changing modern lives. Not so! Rituals are positive, consciously acquired behaviors that we perform without thinking, thus saving energy and time.

In fact, most of our actions are driven by rituals, thus helping us perform more efficiently. According to research, only about 5 percent of our behavior is consciously performed, meaning that 95 percent of our actions occur automatically, out of habit.