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The Power
of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance
and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Energizing Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have taken
what they’ve learned from their work with athletes and other clients and tell
the rest of us how to get in touch with the natural cycles of stress and
rest. Their new book, The Power
of Full Engagement, provides lots of client examples and short personal
stories. Readers looking for the fact
base behind their suggestions will come up short, but the stories, samples
and text will resonate for many readers. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 3
(pp. 28-32): The
concept of maximizing performance by alternating periods of activity with
periods of rest was first advanced by Flavius Philostratus (A.D. 170-245),
who wrote training manuals for Greek athletes. Russian sports scientists
resurrected the concept in the 1960s and began applying it with stunning
success to their Olympic athletes. Today, "work-rest" ratios lie at
the heart of periodization, a training method used by elite athletes
throughout the world. The science of periodization has become
more precise and more sophisticated over the years, but the basic concept
hasn't changed since it was first advanced nearly two thousand years ago.
Following a period of activity, the body must replenish fundamental
biochemical sources of energy. This is called "compensation" and
when it occurs, energy expended is recovered. Increase the intensity of the
training or the performance demand, and it is necessary to commensurately
increase the amount of energy renewal. Fail to do so and the athlete will
experience a measurable deterioration in performance. Energy is
simply the capacity to do work. Our
most fundamental need as
human beings is to spend and recover
energy. We need energy to perform, and recovery is more than the absence of
work. It serves not just health and happiness, but also performance. Nearly
every elite athlete we have worked with over the years has come to us with
performance problems that could be traced to an imbalance between the
expenditure and the recovery of energy. They were either overtraining
or undertraining in one or more dimensions—physically, emotionally,
mentally or spiritually. Both overtraining and undertraining have performance
consequences that include persistent injuries and sickness, anxiety,
negativity and anger, difficulty concentrating, and loss of passion. 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, but also to build in regular recovery
as part of their training regimens. Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just
in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our
lives. When we expend energy, we draw down our reservoir. When we recover
energy, we fill it back up. Too much energy expenditure without sufficient
recovery eventually leads to burnout and breakdown. (Overuse it and lose it.)
Too much recovery without sufficient stress leads to atrophy and weakness.
(Use it or lose it.) Just think about an arm placed in a cast for an extended
period of time in order to protect it from the "stress" to which it
is ordinarily subjected. In a very short time, the muscles of the arm begin
to atrophy from disuse. The benefits of a sustained fitness program decrease
significantly after just one week of inactivity—and disappear altogether in
as few as four weeks. The same process occurs emotionally, mentally and
spiritually. Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with
others and with our own feelings. Mental acuity diminishes in the absence of
ongoing intellectual challenge. Spiritual energy capacity depends on
regularly revisiting our deepest values and holding ourselves accountable in
our behavior. Full engagement requires cultivating a dynamic balance between
the expenditure of energy (stress) and the renewal of energy (recovery) in
all dimensions. We call this rhythmic
wave oscillation, and it represents the
fundamental pulse of life. The more powerful our
pulse, the
more fully engaged we can be. The same is true organizationally. To the
degree that leaders and managers build cultures around continuous
work—whether that means several-hour meetings, or long days, or the
expectation that people will work in the evenings and on weekends—performance
is necessarily compromised over time. Cultures that encourage people to seek
intermittent renewal not only inspire greater commitment, but also more
productivity. Instead, most of us tend to live far more linear
lives. We assume that we can spend energy indefinitely in some
dimensions—often the mental and emotional—and that we can perform effectively
without investing much energy at all in others—most commonly the physical and
the spiritual. We become flat liners. THE PULSE OF LIFE Nature itself has a pulse, a rhythmic, wavelike movement between
activity and rest. Think about the ebb and flow of the tides, the movement
between seasons, and the daily rising and setting of the sun. Likewise, all
organisms follow life-sustaining rhythms—birds migrating, bears hibernating,
squirrels gathering nuts, and fish spawning, all of them at predictable
intervals. So, too, human beings are guided by rhythms—both
those dictated by nature and those encoded in our genes. Seasonal affective
disorder (SAD) is an illness that is attributable both to changes in seasonal
rhythms and to the body's inability to adapt. Our breathing, brain waves,
body temperature, heart rates, hormone levels and blood pressure all have
healthy (and unhealthy) rhythmic patterns. We are
oscillatory beings in an oscillatory universe. Rhythmicity is our inheritance. Oscillation
occurs even at the most basic levels of our being. Healthy patterns of
activity and rest lie at the heart of our capacity for full engagement,
maximum performance and sustained health. Linearity, by contrast, ultimately
leads to dysfunction and death. Just picture for a moment the undulating wave
form of a healthy EEG or EKG—and then think about the implications of their
opposite: a flat line. At the broadest level, our activity and rest
patterns are tied to circadian rhythms (circa dies, "around
a day"), which cycle approximately every twenty-four hours. In the early
1950s, researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathan Kleitman discovered that sleep
occurs in smaller cycles of 90- to 120-minute segments. We move from light
sleep, when brain activity is intense and dreaming occurs, to deeper sleep)
when the brain is more quiescent and the deepest restoration takes place.
This rhythm is called the "basic rest-activity cycle" (BRAC). In
the 1970s, further research showed that aversion of the same 90- to 120-minute
cycles—ultradian rhythms (ultra dies, "many times a
day")—operates in ourwaking lives. These ultradian rhythms help to account for the ebb
and flow of our energy throughout the day. Physiological measures such as
heart rate, hormonal levels, muscle tension and brain-wave activity all
increase during the first partofthe cycle—and so does alertness. After an
hour or so, these measures start to decline. Somewhere between 90 and 120
minutes, the body begins to crave a period of rest and recovery. Signals
include a desire to yawn and stretch, hunger pangs, increased tension,
difficulty concentrating, an inclination to procrastinate or fantasize, and a
higher incidence of mistakes. We are capable of overriding these natural
cycles, but only by summoning the fight-or-flight response and flooding our
bodies with stress hormones that are designed to help us handle emergencies. The long-term cost is that toxins build up inside
us. We can only push so hard for so long without breaking down and burning
out. Stress hormones that circulate chronically in our bodies may be
temporarily energizing, but over time they prompt symptoms such as
hyperactivity, aggressiveness, impatience, irritability, anger,
self-absorption and insensitivity to others. Override the need for
oscillation long enough and the symptoms may extend to headaches, back pain,
gastrointestinal disorders, and ultimately to heart attacks and even death. Because the body craves oscillation, we will often
turn to artificial means to make waves when our lives become too linear. When
we lack sufficient energy to meet the demands in our lives, for example, we
turn to stimulants such as caffeine, cocaine and amphetamines. When we can’t
relax naturally, we may begin to rely on alcohol, marijuana and sleeping pills
to cool down. If you are drinking several cups of coffee to stay alert during
the day and a couple of drinks or several glasses of wine to disengage in the
evening, you are simply making your own linearity. Sometime back around 1980, I recall
attending a week-long course titled, Creative Energy Management. Much of what
I heard back then was reinforced in The Power
of Full Engagement. Readers who find energy lagging may find some useful
ideas in this interesting book. Steve Hopkins, July 25, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the August 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Power of Full Engagement.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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