The Power of Full Engagement by Jom Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Notes from the book The Power of Full Engagement by Jom Loehr and Tony Schwartz.

We live in digital time. Our rhythms are rushed, rapid fire and relentless, our days carved up into bits and bytes.

We celebrate breadth rather than depth, quick reaction more than considered reflection. We skim across the surface, aligning for brief moments at dozens of destinations but rarely remaining for long at any one. We race through our lives without pausing to consider who we really want to be or where we really want to go.

We’re wired up but we’re melting down.

Easily distracted… feeling exhausted. We walk around with day planners and to-do lists.

Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

This insight has revolutionised our thinking about what drives enduring high performance.

Everything they do, from work to play, requires energy.

Without sufficient quantity, quality, focus, force of energy, we are compromised in any activity we undertake.

Every one of our thoughts, emotions and behaviours has an energy consequence.

Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skilful management of energy.

Leaders are the stewards of organizational energy – in companies, organizations and even in families.

To be fully engaged, we must [This content is protected under Free membership.]

Immerse yourself in the mission.

Gallup found that after six months on the job, only 38 percent of employees remain engaged. After three years, the figure drops to 22%.

Energy is the X factor that makes it possible to fully ignite talent and skill.

To manage their energy more effectively… They seek measurable, enduring results. They care about batting averages, free-throw percentages, tournament victories and year-end rankings. Anything else is just talk.

The performance demands that most people face in their everyday work environments dwarf those of any professional athletes we have ever trained.

Professional Athletes

Pro Athletes typically spend about 90% of their time training, in order to be able to perform 10% of the time. Their entire lives are designed around expanding, sustaining and renewing the energy they need to compete for short, focused periods of time.

They [This content is protected under Free membership.]

You must become a corporate athlete.

Four key energy management principles drive this process.

Principle 1: full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Energy is the common denominator in all dimensions of our lives.

Principle 2: [This content is protected under Free membership.]

Primary markers of physical capacity are strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience. These are precisely the same marketers of capacity emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

To maintain a powerful pulse in our lives, we must learn how to rhythmically spend and renew energy.

Riches happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal. Instead, many of us live our lives as if we are running in an endless marathon, pushing ourselves far beyond healthy levels of exertion. We become flat liners mentally and emotionally by relentlessly spending energy without sufficient recovery.

Think for a moment about the look of many long-distance runners: gaunt, sallow, slightly sunken and emotionally flat. Now visualise a sprinter such as Michael Johnson.

The finish line is clearly visible.. we too must learn to live our own lives as s series of sprints.

Principles 3: To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do

We build emotional, mental and spiritual capacity in precisely the same way that we build physical capacity

We grow at all levels by expending energy beyond our ordinary limits and then recovering.

Principle 4: Positive energy rituals – highly specific routines for managing energy – are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

Conscious effort can’t be sustained over the long haul. Will and discipline are far more limited resources than most of us realize.

A positive ritual is a behaviour that becomes automatic over time – fueled by some deeply held value.

Brushing your teeth is something to which you feel consistently drawn, compelled by its clear health value.

The power of rituals is that they insure that we use as little conscious energy as possible where it is not absolutely necessary, leaving us free to strategically focus the energy available to us in creative, enriching ways.

Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.

The Change Process

Making changes that endure is a 3 step process we call [This content is protected under Free membership.]

Building rituals requires defining very precise behaviours and performing them at very specific times – motivated by deeply held values. We are what we repeatedly do – Aristotle.

Dalai Lama “There isn’t anything that isn’t made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training we can change; we can transform ourselves”

——

Chapter 3

The concept of maximising performance by alternating periods of activity with periods of rest was first advanced by Flavius Philostratus (AD 170-245) who wrote training manuals for Greek athletes.

Russian sports scientists resurrected the concept in the 1960s and began applying it with stunning success to their Olympic athletes.

Energy is simply the capacity to do work. Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and recover energy.

Emotional depth and resilience on active engagement.

Balance between the expenditure of energy (stress) and the renewal of energy (recovery) in all dimensions.

Nature itself has a pulse, a rhythmic, wavelike movement between activity and rest.

Somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes [of focussed concentration and work] the body begins to crave a period of rest and recovery. Increased tension, difficulty concentration, and inclination to procrastination or fantasize, and a higher incidence of mistakes.

Self-absorption and insensitivity to others.

The Time Between Points

Whilst most of them were not aware of it, the best players had [This content is protected under Free membership.] These included the way they walked back to the baseline after a point; how they held their heads and shoulders; where they focused their eyes: the pattern of their breathing; and even the way they talked to themselves.

Highly efficient and focused recovery routines.

The more linear or unvarying players heart rates became, the worse they tended to play.

Sounds become music in the spaces between notes, just as words are created by the spaces between letters.

Time is a finite resource and we all place infinite demands on it.

We progressively lose the capacity to shift to any other gear. Our natural inclination is to push harder when demand increases. Over time we resist precisely what would make us more effective: taking breaks and seeking restoration. In effect, we get stuck in overdrive, unable to turn off the engine.

More and more what I find is that you don’t really live in the present anymore, he explained.. You’ve never fully engaged in what you’re doing at any given moment, because what you really want to do is finish it in order to get on to something else. You kind of skim along the surface of life. It’s very frustrating…

In Japan, the term karoshi can be translated literally as ‘death from overwork’.

To build capacity, we must systematically expose ourselves to more stress – followed by adequate recovery.

Expanding capacity requires a willingness to endure short-term discomfort in the service of long-term reward.

…

If positive emotion more efficiently fuels individual high performance, it also has a profound organizational impact. After interviewing a large samples of mangers and their employees, the Gallup Organization found that [This content is protected under Free membership.]

More specifically, Gallup found that the key drivers of productivity for employees include [This content is protected under Free membership.]

Enjoyment and Renewal

How many hours a week do you devote to activities purely for the pleasure and renewal they provide?

Traing the time that you invest in them as sacrosanct.

Gallup also found that one of the key factors in sustained performance is having at least one good friend at work.

To be fully engaged emotionally requires celebrating what the Stoic philosophers called anacoluthia – the mutual entailment of the virtues. By this notion, no virtue is a virtue by itself. Rather, all virtues are entailed. Honesty without compassion for example, becomes cruelty.

The ultimate goal is to move more freely and flexibly between our opposites.

The key muscles fuelling positive emotional energy are self-confidence, self-control, interpersonal effectiveness and empathy.

Realistic Optimism

Nothing so interferes with performance and engagement as the inability to concentrate on the task at hand.

Realistic optimism, a paradoxical notion, that implies seeing the world as it is, but always working positively toward a desired outcome or solution.

Key supportive muscles that fuel optimal mental energy include mental preparation, visualisation, positive self-talk, effective time management, and creativity.

We must build capacity by training systematically.

Key to mental recovery is to give the conscious thinking mind intermittent rest.

Numerous catnaps.

The greatest geniuses, da Vinci told his patron, ‘sometimes accomplish more when they work less’.

To remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgement.

Right hemisphere is less linear and time-focused than the left, it is more inclined to solve problems by intuitive leap and sudden insight.

Creative process itself is oscillatory. Hermann Helmholtz showed the creative process as oscillatory: 5 stages: insight, saturation, incubation, illumination and verification.

Creativity involves cycling between the left and right hemisphere modes of thinking.

The Plasticity Of The Brain

“we needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – hourly and daily. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual – Viktor Frankl

As Frankl saw it, ”Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task“.

Continue to notes from the second half of the book.

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Tagged as: day planners, energy, energy balance, energy leaders, health and happiness, increasing productivity, organizational energy, productivity, tony schwartz, vitality, work environments