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Name: The Power of Full Engagement
Rating: 4.4 (84 reviews)
Author: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

4.4 (84 ratings)

22 mins

Brief summary

The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz teaches us how to manage our energy, not just our time, to be more productive and fulfilled. Discover how to improve your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy to reach your full potential.

Topics

Self-Help Effectiveness Meaningful Living Focus

Table of Contents

The Power of Full Engagement
Summary of 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? Live your life in accordance with your purpose.

How many of us believe that we’re not operating at our full potential? It always seems like there’s something we could do better, faster or more efficiently.

All too often we look to “time management” as a means of getting closer to the coveted “peak performance,” hoping – ultimately in vain – that all we need to do is squeeze more and more work into our finite, 24-hour days. If you remember the last time you pulled an all-nighter or really worked for eight hours straight, you know it’s not the right strategy.

In order to perform to our best, i.e., at full engagement, we need to focus not on squeezing more into our limited hours but finding ways to do more with the time we have. To accomplish this, we need to shift our focus to managing our energy, not our time.

The following blinks will talk about various kinds of energy, how they affect performance and what you can do to increase their capacity. In doing so, you can sharpen your focus, become more efficient and unlock your creative potential.

Furthermore, you’ll discover how to truly balance work and play, never again having to compromise your hobbies and personal relationships for your work.

In addition, these blinks will show you

how doing less work can actually help you get more done,
why your best ideas can often come to you in the shower,
why it’s better to look for land than bail out water on a sinking ship and,
finally, how to live your life according to your deepest-held values.

In order to increase performance, we need to focus on managing our energy rather than our time.

Many of us race through life without ever taking a break: we return home exhausted from a long day’s work, feeling overwhelmed with both work and our private life. And no matter how hard we try, there’s never enough time to get everything done.

But energy, not time, is the fundamental source of efficiency and high performance. Unfortunately, it’s too easy for us to forget this. Since we’re limited to 24 hours per day, we naturally focus on optimizing our time.

But time alone won’t help us achieve our goals. We also need energy – without it, we can’t perform at our potential, no matter how much time we allow ourselves to do what we want!

So rather than optimizing our schedules, we should focus on optimizing the quantity and quality of our available energy.

One way to efficiently manage energy and get more accomplished is in fact to work less and take more breaks.

When we concentrate on managing our time, many of us tend to work for hours on end without pause. But this takes a toll on our energy levels, and consequently makes us less productive.

Think about it: How do you feel after working for four hours straight? Chipper and ready for more? You probably feel totally drained, and no matter how many espressos you drink, you’re still unable to keep your concentration and maintain productivity.

Instead, try maximizing your energy (and therefore your productivity) by working less and taking lots of breaks. These breaks give you a chance to recharge your energy levels, thus allowing you to stay productive for more time.

By focusing on managing our energy level rather than trying to cram 48 hours into a single day, we not only become more efficient, but also have energy left for our private lives.

We can reach full engagement by maximizing all four of our energy levels.

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.

In order to maintain energy levels we need to train our energetic muscles and give them time to recover.

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.

To reach your full potential, you must develop and maintain good physical energy.

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.

In order to maintain positive emotional energy levels, never neglect what you enjoy or your physical health.

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.

Training your mental energy helps you stay focused and creative at the same time.

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.

Spiritual energy is the source for motivation, derived from committing to others as well as ourselves.

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?

To live at full engagement, you must find a positive and intrinsically motivating purpose.

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?

We have to connect to our deepest values to fuel the energy which gives our lives 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.

Rituals are powerful tools to effectively manage energy capacity.

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.

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What is The Power of Full Engagement about?

The Power of Full Engagement investigates the formula for peak performance by examining the causes and qualities of our many energy sources of energy. The authors offer tricks and methods on how to nurture those sources of energy in a way that helps us live fulfilling lives that adhere to our deepest values.

Who should read The Power of Full Engagement?

Anyone who wants to get more out of life, be it in their performance or happiness level
Anyone who believes there just isn’t enough time to get everything done
Anyone looking for a new and creative approach to time management

About the Author

Jim Loehr is the CEO of LGE Performance System and recognized worldwide for his contributions to the field of performance psychology.

Tony Schwartz is the founder of The Energy Project, whose mission it is to provide a better way of working by meeting the energy needs of organizations and the people that comprise them.

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