Tag Archives: The Power of Full Engagement
Energy Management and Full Engagement — insight from Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
The range of what we think and do
Is limited by what we fail to notice
And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds
• Psychiatrist R. D. Laing (quoted in The Power of Full Engagement)
I spoke at the second Take Your Brain to Lunch session today in Dallas, hosted and organized by our blogging colleagues Sara Smith and Cheryl Jensen. I presented my synopsis of The Power of Full Engagement, (The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz). It is a book that I have not revisited for quite some time. It is quite a book! A good book – useful helpful, clear.
Here’s a key quote:
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, alighting 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. We survive on too little sleep, wolf down fast foods on the run, fuel up with coffee, and cool down with alcohol and sleeping pills. Faced with relentless demands at work…, we return home feeling exhausted and often experience our families not as a source of joy and renewal, but as one more demand in an already overburdened life.
We walk around with day planners and to-do lists; Palm Pilots and BlackBerrys, instant pagers and pop-up reminders – all designed to help us manage our time better. We take pride in our ability to multitask, and we wear our willingness to put in long hours as a badge of honor. The term 24/7 describes a world in which work never ends.
As productivity rises even as unemployment rises, more and more people are having to accomplish more and more in essentially the same amount of time as before. Using time well is truly a survival skill. But the authors of this book argue that energy management is really the secret behind good time management.
The authors recommend that we all seek to become “corporate Athletes.” Here is what such a person focuses on:
• YOU MUST BECOME A CORPORATE ATHLETE®
1. Principle 1: Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
2. Principle 2: Because energy capacity diminishes with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
3. Principle 3: To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
4. Principle 4: Positive energy rituals – highly specific routines for managing energy – are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.
If you are feeling a time squeeze, it is likely that you are actually experiencing an energy squeeze. Check out this fine book – it could be quite helpful and useful.
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You can purchase my synopsis of this book, with audio and handout, from our companion web site at 15minutebusinessbooks.com.
Take Your Brain to Lunch
Cheryl: On August 12, 2009, over 90 women and men attended the inaugural event of Take Your Brain to Lunch focusing on women’s business topics. We were honored by the positive and insightful survey results at the conclusion of the event and will host these every other month starting in January 2010.
Today we announced our second event in 2009 where we will review 2 relevant business books on the consuming theme of work/life balance. This program is open to everyone, not just women. We will continue to focus on the topics which seem top of mind for today’s women; so guys, come on over and hang out with us to learn the inside scoop! On November 11, 2009 Randy Mayeux will deliver 2 books synopsis over lunch at the Park City Club, Dallas TX. The books are The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stressfree Productivity by David Allen.
While I haven’t read David Allen’s book, I read The Power of Full Engagement a few years ago and have frequently recommended it to coaching clients. When I read books, I use a yellow highlighter. On page 5, I found “To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.” You can tell I was hooked right from the beginning; this truly resonated with my own experience. When I’ve found myself “in the zone” so to speak, these characteristics have been present in spades. Perhaps my favorite toward the end of the book is “When we have blind spots, we can blind side others without even being aware that we are doing so.” How true this has been when I was open to feedback regarding my blind spots, ouch! I loved the stories of “corporate athletes” and found much of the advice regarding changes simple, straight forward, and common sense; and of course, challenging! Simple does not mean easy. Come join us for lunch on Wednesday, November 11 to hear the wisdom in this book along with what Randy will share from Getting Things Done. Networking, good books, dialogue with smart professionals, and lunch, YUM!
Sara is taking some well deserved vacation this week. She will be at Take Your Brain to Lunch!
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Click here to register for the November 11 event.
Is Everybody Tired, or is it Just Me? — Energy and Time Management in the Midst of Challenging Times
Recently, Slate.com ran a test on who is better informed: newspaper readers exclusively or internet readers exclusively, in its News Junkie Smackdown. The winner seemed to be neither, with both sides wanting and missing the other side’s sources. But as I read the multi-entry series, I realized how tired I felt just from the task of reading the news. I read the news constantly – as do so many of us these days. And I feel that if I miss a story, then somehow I have fallen behind in the universe. Keeping up is wearing me out.
There are other tasks that are wearing us out – I think we are a tired people, collectively. Many of my friends now work as “independents,” perpetually scrambling for the next financial possibility, feeling the pressure constantly. Those who work for large organizations are feeling the pressure also. The next round of layoffs seems to be right around the corner. (How many of us personally know someone who has been laid off?) The strain of the economy seems to fill many with a deepening, underlying, constant uncertainty – about nearly everything. And such uncertainty, such insecurity, is very, very tiring. Not to mention that financial pressures are equally very, very tiring, and many face these on a regular basis.
Two books to help you find your energy and maintain balance in your life...
Are there books to help? I think so. Two that I have read, neither “new’ but both still valuable, are The Power of Full Engagement and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Of course, everyone knows about David Allen’s best seller. An entire industry has been created providing GTD aps for the iPhonie, following Allen’s principles. He is so right that any thing that clutters the life or the mind is burden producing and burden sustaining. Getting it off of the mind and into a place where it can be retrieved when needed is critical to one’s sanity, and energy level. Here are a few key quotes:
• Almost everyone I encounter these days feels he or she has too much to handle and not enough time to get it all done.
• In the old days, you knew what work had to be done – you could see it. It was clear when the work was finished, or not finished. Now, for many of us, there are no edges to most of our projects. Most people I know have at least half a dozen things they’re trying to achieve right now, and even if they had the rest of their lives to try, they wouldn’t be able to finish these to perfection.
• “This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.” Kerry Gleeson.
• We all seem to be starved for a win.
The other book, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, may be less well known, but it is a great and valuable companion volume for Getting Things Done. Consider these quotes:
• 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, alighting 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. We survive on too little sleep, wolf down fast foods on the run, fuel up with coffee, and cool down with alcohol and sleeping pills. Faced with relentless demands at work…, we return home feeling exhausted and often experience our families not as a source of joy and renewal, but as one more demand in an already overburdened life.
We walk around with day planners and to-do lists; Palm Pilots and BlackBerries, instant pagers and pop-up reminders – all designed to help us manage our time better. We take pride in our ability to multitask, and we wear our willingness to put in long hours as a badge of honor. The term 24/7 describes a world in which work never ends.
• Fatigue has a cascade effect – fatigue leads to negative emotions leads to muscular tension leads to lack of focus/concentration.
• We need energy to perform, and recovery is more than the absence of work.
I realize that we are too busy to read these books about dealing with the stress of being too busy. But these quotes should whet your appetite while reminding us all that the problem of fatigue is real. It will take a lot of effort to become effortless in our work and life and emotional balance.
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• You can order synopses of my presentations for both Getting Things Done and The Power of Full Engagement, at our companion web site, 15 Minute Business Books.
Build Your Own Strategic Reading Plan — or, How Should You Pick Which Business Book(s) to Read?
So, I’m sitting in front of my television set. “Nothing” is on, and I simply spend some time “surfing” in hopes of finding something that will grab my interest. I don’t do this often, but to unwind, I do it occasionally. I much prefer my “appointment” television — you know, when I want to watch television with a plan in mind, like — when I want to watch House, or a football game.
I wonder if my purposeless surfing has a parallel in our reading habits. How do you pick business books to read? Do you just grab the latest title you’ve heard of: if there is buzz about a specific book, do you say to yourself, “I want to be in on the know about that book?” I can understand that. If everyone seems to be talking about Outliers, or The Black Swan, or Good to Great, we all want to be in on the conversation. But I have a hunch that even then, the books we choose may not always be dealing with the issues we are dealing with at the moment. Or the skills we need to develop. Or the information gaps we need to fill.
Yes, it is true that reading almost any book will help us in our never-ending pursuit of excellence and success. “The more you know, the more you know.” But if our hours are precious, and already full of things to do, not only do we need to read to learn and grow — we need to read the best books, the right books for us, for us to learn and grow.
So, I have a suggestion — why not develop your own “strategic” business book reading plan. You can still read those popular books, but maybe you could always keep one book going that fits your needs, fills your gaps, deals with issues that you are actually dealing with. Just a few minutes a day, or one focused block of time during the week, will help you knock off that book that can genuinely help you with what you need the most.
So – how do you find which books will meet your needs? One way (forgive the self-serving comment here) is to read this blog. Bob Morris, and our entire blogging team, will help you filter out books that don’t fit the bill, and help identify the books that would be most useful. I warn you – reading Bob’s posts will make you wish you had time to read all of the books he refers us to. Few of us would have the time to do so. But use his posts as a filter, to help identify the books that would be most useful. Another way would be to attend the First Friday Book Synopsis (if you live near DFW). We present two synopses every month of best-selling business books. Our synopses can give you enough content to know the key themes and ideas of a book, help you filter out what does not fit your needs, and whet your appetite for a deeper dive into those books that you would find most valuable.
But to help you get started with your own strategic business book reading plan, I have started a chart. This is my first draft, and it includes, primarily, books that I have presented at the First Friday Book Synopsis. My colleague Karl Krayer would include different titles, and maybe all of us could help identify additional and different titles and business issues. So — here it is. I can say, with certainly, that each of these books was worth my time. Maybe this could help you start a strategic business reading regimen of your own.
A Strategic Business Book Reading Plan
|
If you need to: |
Then you might want to read: |
| Aim higher – personally | The Other 90% |
| Think/work like an athlete in training | Outliers
Talent is Overrated |
| Think like an innovator | The Creative Habit
The Art of Innovation |
| Get better at time management | Getting Things Done
The Power of Full Engagement |
| Become a better servant leader | Servant Leadership |
| Nurture and build your people | Encouraging the Heart |
| Market more effectively | Waiting For Your Cat to Bark
The Tipping Point The Long Tail |
| Get better connected | Wikinomics
Groundswell |
| Network more effectively | Never Eat Alone |
| Communicate more effectively | Words that Work
Made to Stick |
| Be a (very good) generalist | Reality Check |
| Negotiate more effectively | Women Don’t Ask
Ask for It |
| Play well with others | The Five Dysfunctions of a Team |
| Learn to learn | The Opposable Mind |
| Learn to tell the truth | Crucial Conversations
Winning |
You can try this list, or develop your own. You can start slow – with one book a month. In a year, you will have made great progress working through your strategic reading plan, and, more importantly, you will have learned more, you will know more, and I suspect you will be able to do more.
{To purchase my synopses of many of these titles, with handout + audio, go to our 15 Minute Business Book site}.
