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

“As Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do.” Or as the Dalai Lama put it more recently: “There isn’t anything that isn’t made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training we can change; we can transform ourselves.”

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

“Watching television is the mental and emotional equivalent of eating junk food.”

“Rituals also help us to create structure in our lives.”

“To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.”

“The simple, almost embarrassing reality is that we feel too busy to search for meaning.”

“Energy, Not Time, Is Our Most Precious Resource”

“Gallup found that the key drivers of productivity for employees include whether they feel cared for by a supervisor or someone at work; whether they have received recognition or praise during the past seven days; and whether someone at work regularly encourages their development. Put another way, the ability to communicate consistently positive energy lies at the heart of effective management.”

“The most important organizational resource is energy.”

“We live in a world that celebrates work and activity, ignores renewal and recovery, and fails to recognize that both are necessary for sustained high performance.”

“The more exacting the challenge, the more rigorous our rituals need to be.”

“Stress is not the enemy in our lives. Paradoxically, it is the key to growth.”

“Drinking water, we have found, is perhaps the most undervalued source of physical energy renewal.”

“It is a mark of courage to set aside self-interest in order to be of service to others or to a cause.”

“The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become. The more we blame others or external circumstances, the more negative and compromised our energy is likely to be.”

“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 become short-tempered and easily distracted. We return home from long days at work 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.”

“In his Treatise on Painting, da Vinci wrote, “It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation. . . . When you come back to the work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment.”

“A growing body of research suggests that as little as 5 percent of our behaviors are consciously self-directed. We are creatures of habit and as much as 95 percent of what we do occurs automatically or in reaction to a demand or an anxiety.”

“• A dynamic relationship exists between physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy. • Changes in any one dimension of energy affect all dimensions. 22. Energy capacities follow developmental lines. • First level of development is physical. • Second level of development is emotional/social. • Third level of development is cognitive/mental. • Fourth level of development is moral/spiritual.”

“Barriers to full engagement: Negative habits that block, distort, waste, diminish, deplete and contaminate stored energy.”

“America is the only country in the world in which employees work more hours per week than the Japanese.”

“The key supportive muscles that fuel optimal mental energy include mental preparation, visualization, positive self-talk, effective time management, and creativity.”

“Emotional muscles such as patience, empathy and confidence can be strengthened in the same way that we strengthen a bicep or a tricep: pushing past our current limits followed by recovery.”

“Epidemiologist David Snowden’s nuns study suggests that ongoing intellectual activity wards off deterioration. No single factor better predicted the risk of eventual Alzheimer’s, for example, than the density of ideas and the grammatical complexity of the biographical essays that nuns in the study wrote about themselves in their twenties. More compelling still, Snowden found that nuns who taught for most of their lives showed significantly less mental decline than those who had devoted themselves to less intellectually challenging forms of service.”

“The greatest geniuses,” da Vinci told his patron, “sometimes accomplish more when they work less.” In his Treatise on Painting, da Vinci wrote, “It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation. . . . When you come back to the work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment.”

“Increasing evidence confirms that the brain itself operates like a muscle—atrophying from disuse and increasing in capacity with active use, even late in life. At Baylor College of Medicine, a research team spent four years studying nearly one hundred physically healthy people over the age of sixty-four. One third of them still had jobs. One third had retired but remained active physically and mentally. The final third had retired and were essentially inactive. After four years, the third group scored significantly lower than the first two, not just on IQ tests but also on those measuring blood flow to their brains.”

“When we lack the mental muscles we need to perform at our best, we must systematically build capacity by pushing past our comfort zone and then recovering.”

“Maximum mental capacity is derived from a balance between expending and recovering mental energy.”

“As the psychiatrist Robert Assagioli puts it, we may move from a feeling of “I am overwhelmed by my anxiety” to the more dispassionate “My anxiety is trying to overwhelm me.” In one, we are victims. In the other, we have the power to make choices and take action.”

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”