The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance, Health and Happiness
Author: Jim Loehr
We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid fire and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We're wired up, but we're melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. Managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness and life balance.
The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. This fundamental insight has the power to revolutionize the way you live your life. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job.
At the heart of the program is The Corporate Athlete® Training System. During the past decade, dozens of Fortune 500 companies have paid thousands of dollars to learn the Corporate Athlete training system. So have FBI swat teams, critical care physicians and nurses, salesmen and stay-at-home moms. The Power of Full Engagement lays out key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to:
- Mobilize four key sources of energy
- Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal
- Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do
- Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals
The Power of Full Engagement provides a life-changing roadmap to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job.
Publishers Weekly
The authors, founders of and executives at LGE Performance Systems, an executive training program based on athletic coaching programs, offer a program aimed at stressed individuals who want to find more purpose in their work and ways to better handle their overburdened relationships. Just as athletes train, play and then recover, people need to recognize their own energy levels. "Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our lives. Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings." Case studies demonstrate how some modest changes can have an immediate impact. Loehr (Mental Toughness Training for Sports) and Schwartz (Art of the Deal, writing with Donald Trump) also include a chart highlighting Action Steps, Targeted Muscle, Desired Outcome and Performance Barrier and apply these tenets to individual cases. A chart analyzing the benefits and costs to taking certain action shows the impact negative behavior can have on both physical and mental well-being. However, the actual "training program" whereby readers can learn how to institute certain rituals to change their behavior is less well-defined. Managers and other employees who have attended HR seminars may find this plan easy to use, but self-employed people and others less familiar with "training" may be unable to recognize their behavior patterns and change them. (Feb.) Forecasts: With dozens of endorsements from Dean Ornish, Barry Diller, athletes and CEOs, the buzz on this title is likely to be loud. Ongoing publicity should lead to strong initial sales but whether this book will replace Covey's The 7 Habits is debatable. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Soundview Executive Book Summaries
Personal Renewal And High Performance
Loehr and Schwartz, two senior partners at LGE Performance Systems, have developed a program that aims to help readers revolutionize the way they live their lives. By helping them focus on managing their energy, rather than their time, the authors offer strategies that can improve performance, health, happiness and life balance.
They start their book with the idea that the "number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not." Using this as their ideological base, the authors present a practical, scientific approach to managing energy more skillfully both on and off the job. This approach culminates in the Corporate Athlete(r) training system that has helped some of the world's greatest athletes perform more effectively under stiff competition, including Monica Seles, Eric Lindros and Grant Hill.
The Corporate Athlete training system aims to help those involved "perform in the storm" by building the capacity that is necessary to sustain high performance in the face of increasing demand. To provide readers with the key training principles of this system, the authors present a road map that can help them become more fully engaged, physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned.
Fundamentals of Full Engagement
Fundamentals contained in The Power of Full Engagement include:
- Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Without the right quantity, quality, focus and force of energy, we are compromised in any activity we undertake.
- Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy. The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become.
- 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.
- A positive ritual is a behavior that becomes automatic over time - fueled by some deeply held value.
The authors present numerous examples of engaged and unengaged individuals who reveal crucial aspects of their improvement system. By discussing the balance of stress and recovery, the body's need for oscillation, eating better, getting sufficient sleep, exercising properly, and maintaining physical energy, the authors present a game plan that reveals the optimum level of each while providing strategies for getting there. The authors also explain the importance of recovery breaks, interval training, and eating, breathing and drinking right.
The authors also show readers how they can attain better emotional balance. Their tips include ways to access positive emotions; build self-control, self-confidence, interpersonal effectiveness and empathy; minimize negative emotions; and find emotional renewal and recovery.
Realistic Optimism
The Power of Full Engagement also helps readers develop the mental capacity to organize their lives and focus their attention. The authors write that the "mental energy that best serves full engagement is realistic optimism - seeing the world as it is, but always working positively toward a desired outcome or solution." Their tips for exercising mental muscles include mental preparation, visualization, positive self-talk, effective time management and creativity.
The last element in the author's system of becoming fully engaged is spiritual energy. They write that spiritual energy provides the force for action in all dimensions of our lives, and fuels passion, perseverance and commitment. Spiritual energy, they point out, is derived from a connection to deeply held values and a purpose beyond our self-interest, and is served by character - the courage and conviction to live by our deepest values.
The Power of Full Engagement also discusses the search for meaning and purpose in one's life, and provides many examples of ways people can measure the power of purpose and find purpose through values, virtues and creating a vision statement that creates a blueprint for investing energy. From this foundation, the authors show readers how they can use rituals to effectively manage their energy and regulate their behavior.
Why Soundview Likes This Book
Loehr and Schwartz have created an inspirational guidebook that can help anyone get more from his or her life. The Power of Full Engagement shows readers how they can take a positive approach to growth and improvement by presenting dozens of solid examples of people who have benefitted from change, and provides numerous ways readers can focus and align their lives mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. By presenting performance psychology in basic terms, the authors offer accessible ways people can improve their performance at all levels of life. Copyright © 2003 Soundview Executive Book Summaries
Go to: Seasoned In The South or Old Fashioned Country Cookies
Cool Yoga Tricks
Author: Miriam Austin
Craving yoga’s benefits but unable to perform even the simplest postures? Think yoga is only for rubber-limbed supermodels?
If your yoga practice is giving you more stress than stress relief, Cool Yoga Tricks is the answer to your prayers.
Although it seems like everyone from Madonna to your eighty-three-year-old Uncle Teddy is practicing yoga, most of us are unable to do even the simplest classic yoga poses without undue stress and strain. Now in this clear, understandable, easy-to-follow book, Miriam Austin offers alternative yoga routines that help you reap the greatest rewards from your yoga practice, and she reveals shortcuts to help you perform yoga like a pro.
Using everyday items, such as chairs, walls, and blankets, Miriam Austin shows how those of us with normal flexibility limitations can experience the very real benefits of yoga—without dislocating our joints, overstretching our muscles, or giving up in frustration. She makes the basics simple, doable, and down-to-earth.
Dog Tricks—lengthen your spine more fully with these Downward Facing Dog tricks, designed to relax your neck, shoulders, and back—and make your Dog Pose much more lovable.
Befriending Backbends—increase your preztebility with a little help from your friends—and from some garden-variety folding chairs.
Tweaking Your Twists—learn the techniques that will stretch your spine and give you more life energy.
Super Stretches—feel as limber as your average bowling ball? Gently coax your muscles to new lengths by practicing the routines in this chapter.
Library Journal
Many people wonder, "How can I ever perform yoga postures?" Austin's third book (after Yoga for Wimps and Meditation for Wimps) demonstrates more than 100 techniques that may enable participants to execute traditional postures that could be too difficult to perform without various props. By using wooden blocks, yoga mats, bolsters, walls, chairs, benches, straps, and other people, students can extend their bodies' capabilities to perform these asanas safely with proper body alignment and control while enjoying the health and psychological benefits that these poses have to offer. The instructions are clear, and the numerous black-and-white photographs are easy to follow. Both yoga teachers and students can apply Austin's techniques to their routines as a way to progress comfortably toward what could have been an unattainable goal. Her user-friendly book supplements works that describe how to perform basic yoga postures and would be serviceable in both public and academic libraries wishing to expand their collections on this topic.-Deborah Broocker, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Dunwoody Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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