The Power of Full Engagement (Loehr, Schwartz, 2003)

Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

Combines the gritty tough-mindedness of the best coaches with the gentle but insistent inspiration of the most effective spiritual advisers. - Fast Company

How can one expect to achieve high performance and personal renewal without energy? Energy is a basic aspect of existence that is not well understood in relation to individual and corporate performance. To realize your energy you must point on the idea "We become what we think." Only in developing, supporting, and applying your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual "muscles", you become "fully engaged." This is the only way of programming your mental computer.
Your life isn't a persistent marathon, it's rather a series of sprints. To be successful, you need to balance recovery time with actual sprinting. The greatest players developed rituals to help relax themselves in the short time between points. The less successful players 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.

After reading just the first chapters, I found Loehr and Schwartz to be full of wonderful knowledge. The reading alone caused my energy to increase. This book will give you real tools to manage effectively your energy. With simple explanations and stories that every reader can relate to. So everybody should read this book. You'll be amazed at all the unproductive thinking habits you have developed.

I highly recommend it to those who wants to improve the quality of their professional and personal lives.

Alexander Petrochenkov

p.4 Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

p.4 Without the right quantity, quality, focus and force of energy, we are compromised in any activity we undertake.

p.5 Performance... [is] 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.

p.6 Learning to manage energy more efficiently and intelligently has a unique transformative power

p.9 You must become fully engaged. The challenge of great performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals.

p.11 The primary markers of physical capacity are strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience. These are precisely the same markers of capacity emotionally, mentally and spiritually... In short, to be fully engaged requires strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience in all dimensions.

p.18 Full engagement is the energy state that best serves performance.

p.18 Making change that lasts requires a three-step process: Define Purpose, Face Truth and Take Action.

p.28 Energy is simply the capacity to do work.

p.29 We achieved our breakthroughs with athletes by helping them to more skillfully manage energy - pushing themselves to systematically increase capacity in whatever dimension it was insufficient... Full engagement requires cultivating a dynamic balance between the expenditure of energy (stress) and the renewal of energy (recovery) in all dimensions.

p.94 Nothing so interferes with performance and engagement as the inability to concentrate on the task at hand. To perform at our best we must be able to sustain concentration, and to move flexibly between broad and narrow, as well as internal and external focus. We also need access to realistic optimism, a paradoxical notion that implies seeing the world as it is, but always working positively toward a desired outcome or solution. Anything that prompts appropriate focus and realistic optimism serves performance.

p.108 The mental energy that best serves full engagement is realistic optimism - seeing the world as it is, but always working positively towards a desired outcome or solution.

p.145 The next step in defining purpose is to create a vision for how we intend to invest our energy. A compelling vision statement strikes a careful balance. On the one hand, in order to provide inspiration it needs to be lofty, ambitious and even a bit overreaching. On the other hand, in order to have teeth it needs to be realistic, specific and personal... Either way, defining a vision becomes a picture of the possible, a blueprint for action, and a buffer against the inclination to make energy choices reactively rather than reflectively.

p.146 A vision statement is a declaration of intent about how to invest one's energy. Regularly revisited, it serves as a source of sustaining direction and a fuel for action.

p.147 A vision statement, grounded in values that are meaningful and compelling, creates a blueprint for how to invest our energy.

p.156 Facing the truth requires making yourself the object of inquiry - conducting an audit of your life and holding yourself accountable for the energy consequences of your behaviors...

On a scale of 1 to 10, how fully engaged are you in your work? What is standing in your way?
How closely does your everyday behavior match your values and serve your mission? What are the disconnects?
How fully are you embodying your values and vision for yourself... Where are you falling short?
How effective are the choices that you are making... serving your key values?
To what degree do you establish clear priorities... How consistent are those priorities with what you say is most important to you?

p.158 Another way we deceive ourselves is by assuming that our view represents the truth when it is really just an interpretation, a lens through which we chose to view the world... The facts in a given situation may be incontrovertible, but the meaning that we ascribe to them is often far more subjective.

p.161,163 Facing the truth requires that we retain an ongoing openness to the possibility that we may not be seeing ourselves - or others - accurately... If the truth is to set us free, facing it cannot be a one-time event. Rather, it must become a practice.

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