30 Books in 30 days – Remembering 15 years of the 1st Friday Book Synopsis – (The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr)

{On April 5, 2013, we will celebrate the 15^th Anniversary of the First Friday Book Synopsis, and begin our 16^th year.  During March, I will post a blog post per day remembering key insights from some of the books I have presented over the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis.  We have met every first Friday of every month since April, 1998 (except for a couple of weather –related cancellations).  These posts will focus only on books I have presented.  My colleague, Karl Krayer, also presented his synopses of business books at each of these gatherings.  I am going in chronological order, from April, 1998, forward.  The fastest way to check on these posts will be at Randy’s blog entries — though there will be some additional blog posts interspersed among these 30.}
Post #11 of 30

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Synopsis presented May, 2003
The Power of Full Engagement:  Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. (Free Press, 2003).

“Energy is simply the capacity to do work.  Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend energy and recover energy.”
From The Power of Full Engagement

After Getting Things Done, and Execution, which I presented in 2002 (and wrote about in two previous blog posts in this series), here is one more book to put in the “how do I get more productive?” mix.

Tony Schwartz has written at least one more book on this theme:  my colleague Karl Krayer presented his synopsis of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance, co-authored by Schwartz, at our October, 2010 First Friday Book Synopsis.

At the beginning of The Power of Full Engagement, we read this description of modern life:

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.   

And the problem is not really a “time” problem, it is an “energy” problem:

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

The author has trained professional athletes on energy management, and this line from the book is telling:  “The performance demands that most people face in their everyday work environments dwarf those of any professional athletes we have ever trained.”  
Thus, “We must learn to hold ourselves accountable for how we manage our energy…”

The process goes something like this:  build up energy, expend energy, recover, repeat.  From the book:

We need energy to perform, and recovery is more than the absence of work.
It is in the spaces between work that love, friendship, depth, and dimension are nurtured.  Without time for recovery, our lives become a blur of doing unbalanced by much opportunity for being.
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. 

And, so where does the energy come from?  It starts with a deep and abiding sense of purpose.

Purpose creates a destination.  It drives full engagement by prompting our desire to invest focused energy in a particular activity or goal.  We become fully engaged only when we care deeply, when we feel that what we are doing really matters..  Purpose is what lights us up, floats our boats, feeds our souls. 

But it is genuinely hard work to search for, and find, great purpose.

We feel too busy to search for meaning.  Many of us sleepwalk through our lives, operating on automatic pilot most of the time.  We meet our obligations but rarely question whether we could be reaching for something more…”You can work long hours but still be slothful,” writes Joanne Ciulla.  “The things that keep us from finding meaning are failure to actively engage in life and a certain laziness of lack of caring that allows us to let others make our decisions and tell us what things mean.”  (R.M. – Reminds me of Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled).

Here are a few excerpts from my synopsis, highlighting key sections of the book:

Assertions:
#1 — Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.
• the “productivity” of time invested, with no energy or, constantly draining energy.
#2 — Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.
#3 – Leaders are the stewards of organizational energy.
• They either inspire or demoralize – by how they manage their own energy, and then how they lead.
• The skillful management of energy makes possible something that we call full engagement.
#4 — Fully engaged requires these four realities:
1)    Physically energized.
2)    Emotionally connected.
3)    Mentally focused.
4)    Spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.

The Power of Full Engagement:

Old Paradigm	New Paradigm
Manage time	Manage energy
Avoid stress	Seek stress
Life is a marathon	Life is a series of sprints
Downtime is wasted time	Downtime is productive time
Rewards fuel performance	Purpose fuels performance
Self-discipline rules	Rituals rule
The power of positive thinking	The power of Full Engagement

And…

Define purpose: — “How should I spend my energy in a way that is consistent with my deepest values?”
Face the Truth: — “How are you spending your energy now?”
Take action:  — “Build a personal-development plan grounded in positive energy rituals.”

I presented this book years ago, so I may or may not remember correctly.  (For these blog posts, I rely on my handouts which I prepare for each synopsis.  They do not include many stories with details).  But I remember this simple story, that I think was in this book.  This is a terrific story about how to build rituals into your life.  The authors described a man with a high-stress job, who would walk into his home after work cranky, irritable, and generally unpleasant.  So, one day, he decided to stop at a nearby park, and just walk around in the park for a few minutes to “unwind, and recover” before he went on home.  This became a near-nightly ritual, and it definitely helped him, and his family.

Energy management.  A must-learn/must-do practice in this high-stress, always on/always-at-work world.