Customer Reviews

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

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Most reviewers will be men as opposed to Stephen Covey's 7 Habits where many women and child care providers can relate better. I have worked inside large companies and small ones with extensive sales training. I see this as a book for people who can pick up company training programs, grasp opportunities and run with them on their own. But, what about the rest of us who have been out of the business loop? I am now a mom who stays at home with my children by choice and would love to have nonprofessional mumbo jumbo for energy applications. Out of the work force for several years and a different path chosen makes
this book not such a good read for moms (who stay home or who work outside) and families. It leaves out anyone who has not
been chosen as one of the worthy people to embrace "company
political training." The authors and the publisher have left millions out - so don't say it's for everyone. It's not. For moms and anyone in the family/kid role who are in great need of much "energy" to prevent Mommy Melt Down or even Life Melt Down, my first love is still Stephen Covey, 7 Habits, and Jodie Lynn's, Mommy-CEO (Constantly Evaluating Others) 5 Golden Rules. Here are two books almost everyone can understand and get on with positive energy and organization while keeping sanity. Another favorite specifically for parents would be Best Friends Worst Enemies, by Michael Thompson. The world would benefit in personal and family relationships, and embrace life building skills in the coorporate world too, from reading these books.

Those of us who are retired and not living with others are a perfect market for this book. Without jobs or family members making demands on us, with most of our time our own, we can fall into habits that work against us: watching TV at all hours of the day and night, sleeping erratically and at all hours, napping during the day even when we're not tired.

This book provides us with both the rationale and the know-how for setting up routines that can transform our lives. After decades of productivity, I found myself rattling around the house wondering,"What am I DOING with my life?". With nothing pressing, my "well-earned rest" turned into an unfocused waste of time and an uncomfortable feeling that I was wasting my life. My mood started to sink, as did my energy.

This book has galvanized me to action. I started with bedtime and arising routines, which quickly led to an exercise routine, then regularly scheduled meals. My energy has returned - I feel like the "old me"! - and my time is now filled with pleasurable and stimulating activities. This book has stopped me from growing old, and I am extremely grateful.

"The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal" is a good self-help book for business executives, managers, athletes, and others who feel overwhelmed by the demands of their jobs and who want to improve their effectiveness.

Loehr and Schwartz argue that life isn't a marathon, rather it's a series of sprints. To be successful, individuals need to balance recovery time with actual sprinting. A tired sprinter probably won't win the next race. And, most of us treat life like a constant race with no downtime.

Loehr, a performance psychologist, came upon these observations while he was studying professional tennis players to learn what separates the greatest players from the less successful players. Loehr discovered what separated the greatest players, such as Ivan Lendl, from the less successful players wasn't how they played tennis points. Rather, it was how they behaved between playing points.

The greatest players developed rituals to help calm and relax themselves in the short time between points.

When Loehr used EKG telemetry to monitor player heart rates, he discovered that: "In the sixteen to twenty seconds between points in a match, the heart rates of top competitors dropped as much as twenty beats per minute. By building highly efficient and focused recovery routines, these players had found a way to derive extraordinary energy renewal in a very short period of time."

The less successful players, on the other hand, didn't have rituals to help them recover between points. Their heart rates remained high between points, and they couldn't seem to calm their stress.

Similarly, Loehr and Schwartz say many managers and executives don't have rituals to help them relax and remain effective. The authors argue that rituals help us connect to our values and what we hold most dear. Rituals assure our effort is directed to serve our most important goals.

Loehr and Schwartz write: "We hold ourselves accountable for the ways that we manage our time, and for that matter our money. We must learn to hold ourselves at least equally accountable for how we manage our energy physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually."

To help managers balance production with recovery, Loehr and Schwartz developed The Complete Corporate Athlete Training System. (Loehr and Schwartz are partners in LGE Performance Systems, which works with executives and managers.)

Loehr and Schwartz tell us physical energy is crucial, even for those whose work is sedentary. If we don't take care of our health, everything else will become more difficult.

Loehr and Schwartz say the specificity of goals is important to success. We can't spend too much time thinking about our rituals or they'll become equivalent to New Year's resolutions that are quickly dropped. Rituals must be nearly automatic. For example, it's probably good to have fixed times for exercise.

In addition to the physical realm, Loehr and Schwartz argue we must similarly develop rituals to develop personally on emotional, mental, and spiritual levels.

If you end each day exhausted, I urge you to read this book. If you already (or wish to) maximize your tasks by agressive time management or productivity tools, you may be forgetting a critical component.

My full review and personal extracts combining a variety of ideas is located at --> [...]

Grounded in the research and consulting they've done with the world's greatest athletes, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz provide a set of ideas and tools to help "Corporate Athletes" function at optimal levels of performance. At the heart of their research is the fact that: "Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance." Time is finite, but the way in which we as humans exert "work" and recover, is about ENERGY.

Many of us approach work like a marathon runner. However, the authors have proven that we as humans, corporate worker or professional atheletes, have natural rhythms and is best to follow interval work and training. Best to think like a sprinter, or high jumper between jumps, or tennis player between points. High output periods at optimal performance levels, followed by smaller periods of recovery.

I am not sure if I would have included in the book's title the word "engagement"... its a bit overused like "empowerment"--a nice way of managers/leaders/organizations to say "when you are at work, we want you to like to be at work". However, if you take "engagement" from a personal perspective it's not about work, but rather about having an engaged life--being fully engaged with your family, community and those you work with. Engagement is when:

What we do
is in complete alignment with
what we believe
and
has a purpose
in meeting our needs
which are defined by our deepest values.

Not building intervals into your work or person life leads to less optimal performance and normally burn out, both at work and home. A key "negget" the authors make early in the book: "To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest. Full engagement begins with feeling eager to get to work in the morning and equally happy to return home in the evening and capable of setting clear boundaries between the two."

Some interesting statistics, as extracted from "The Energy Project" white paper, which is Tony Schwartz's consulting firm:

- Physical: 62% of people that do not take regular breaks tend to become less productive, less engaged, less efficient and less focused.
- Emotional: 80% of survery respondents agree with the statement "I frequently find myself feeling irritable, impatient or anxious at work, especially when demand is high."
- Mental: 80% of survery respondents agree with the statement "I spend much of my time reacting to immediate demands rather than focusing on activities with longer-term leverage."; 72% of employees have difficulty focusing on ONE thing at a time and I am easily distracted during the day, especially by email {yup... sounds like me!!!}
- Spiritual (not a big fan of the word; but it links to "our reason for being; our purpose"): 66% of survery respondents agree with the statement "My decisions at work are often more influenced by external demands rather than by a strong, clear sense of my own purpose."

The premise of the argument that, employees, like the companies they work for {after all, some of us employees are charged with leading these same employees}, are largely unaware of the price they pay by neglecting their core energy needs. Distracted and overwhelmed, they become increasingly burned out, de-motivated, and disengaged.

At the same time, companies continue to implement policies and procedures, and foster social norms and expectations, which prohibit or undermine the very behaviours that would most help to build and support sustainably high performance cultures. The casualties are efficiency, productivity, creativity, employee satisfaction, and ultimately, the company's bottom line.

Rather than trying to get more out of their people, organizations seeking competitive advantage are best served by systematically seeking to meet the four core energy needs (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) of their employees in order to free, fuel and inspire them to bring the best of themselves to work every day -- a group of Corporate Athletes.

HEREIN lies the dilemma --> "WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT IT?"

SOLUTION --> "TRAIN and BECOME A CORPORATE ATHLETE"... more at the end of the book including worksheets.

I recently re-read this book and was curious to know to what extent (if any) it has lost any of its relevance during the years since it was first published, in 2003. My conclusion? If anything, it is even more relevant now than it was before. However, that said, I still presume to suggest to those who are thinking about reading that they ignore the title and focus on the methodology that Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz introduce and then explain. Of course, full engagement has power. However, I cannot think of even one company among those annually ranked by Fortune to be the most highly admired, the best to work for, etc. that has full engagement. In fact, the results of recent research by the Gallup Organization and Towers Perrin clearly indicate that, on average, about 25-30% of employees are actively and productively engaged, about 35-40% are passively engaged (doing as little as necessary to stay employed), and about the same percentage are actively disengaged, with many of them hostile and having a toxic effect within their workplace.

Obviously, the challenge for business leaders in all organizations (whatever their size and nature my be) is to increase the percentage of those workers who are actively and productively engaged. What do Loehr and Schwartz suggest? All of their insights and recommendations are based on a vast amount of real-world experience with all manner of organizations. What they offer in this volume is the Full Engagement Training System®, a comprehensive and cohesive program that enables us to manage energy efficiently. The methodology is based on four separate but interdependent principles:

1. Full engagement requires drawing on separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. "All four dynamics are critical, none is sufficient by itself and each profoundly influences the others [for better or worse]. To perform at our best, we must skillfully manage each of these interconnected dimensions of energy."

2. Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal. "We rarely consider how much energy we are spending because we take it for granted that the energy available to us is limitless. In fact, increased demand progressively depletes our energy reserves - especially in the absence of any effort to reverse the progressive loss of capacity that occurs with age."

3. To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do. "Stress is not the enemy in our lives. Paradoxically, it is the key to growth. In order to build strength in a muscle we must systematically stress it, expending energy beyond normal levels. Doing so literally causes microscopic tears in the muscle fibers. At the end of a training session, functional capacity is diminished. But give the muscle twenty-four to forty-eight hours to recover and it grows stronger and better able to handle the next stimulus."

4. Positive energy rituals - highly specific routines for managing energy - are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance. "Change is difficult. We are creatures of habit. Most of what we do is automatic and nonconscious. What we did yesterday is what we are likely to do today...A positive ritual is a behavior that becomes automatic over time - fueled by some deeply held value."

As indicated earlier, Loehr and Schwartz have devised what they call the Full Engagement Training System® and one of several key points they make is that both supervisors and those for whom they are directly responsible are active in this program, one that involves a shared journey of observation, revelation, and increased understanding. Another is that there are continuous role reversals for both "students" and "teachers" during frequent knowledge exchanges. Still another key point is that one of the most important drivers is the human need to find meaning, "among the most powerful and enduring themes in every culture since the origin of recorded history." And still another is that those who are purpose-driven must also constantly nurture and regularly renew their "most precious resource," energy, and expend it only in the service of what matters most.

Forget about having a workforce with full engagement concentrate on increasing the number of workers who are fully engaged. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz can provide invaluable assistance to those who are now planning or who are only recently embarked on efforts to achieve that worthy objective.

For those that have practiced any sport, it is obvious that energy is what makes people succeed. However, based on my experience in corporate America, this book will be very useful for most, since it provides a nice well-balanced approach to managing the daily stresses of life. Regretably, most of the discourse focuses on common sense, and there are not many practical tips and suggestions fr putting the book's insights into practice.

I started life as an energetic optimist, but after many disappointments, my energy and enthusiasm waned. This book shows you how to reverse this downward trend and optimize your energy. With more energy available, you are more inclined to express your talents, and experience greater success. The strategies offered in this book will increade the quality of your life. To learn how to be use your disturbing emotions as optimization signals and optimize your emotional, personal and business life, read Optimal Thinking: How To Be Your Best Self as well.

If you like to find real reason's for improving and growing your ability this is a great book to help with it. They base their ideas on values and on coaxing readers to solving their problems with real world solutions. The concept of building rituals into your daily life is very helpful and the tools and ideas are presented in a logical fashion with good examples from recent times. Hearing the examples of people involved in the attack on the World Trade Center was very influential.

We only have a certain amount of time and energy every day to do the things that are most important to our happiness and productivity. Most books talk about effective time management but this book takes a different approach -- how do you manage your finite level of energy? If you can't seem to get everything done as you race from one task to the next then this book can show you how to stop wasting time by consistently managing your energy.

Check out Rat Race Relaxer: Your Potential & The Maze of Life by JoAnna Carey which also has practical tips for setting priorities, living a more fulfilling life and getting what you really want.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz offer a lot of solid, common sense advice. The authors recommend going to bed and getting up at a consistent time - not exactly Ben Franklin's "early to bed, early to rise," but close. They recommend regular exercise. They say it's good to work and to rest, and each has its place. They say to examine yourself and try to see yourself as others see you. In other words, they recommend many time-honored techniques of physical, mental and spiritual growth,combined with prioritizing how you use your energy and how you recharge your batteries. This attitude makes the book unique. The principles may be ancient, but we find the vehicle distinctly contemporary, a combo of New Age jargon and workout-style performance charting, with (at last) a key to time management that makes sense and captures all areas of one's life. Some readers will find that thrilling, others will groan.