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

Rating:
Summary: Good book for managers and others who need to relax more.
Review: "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal" is a good self-help book for business executives, managers, athletes, and others who feel overwhelmed by the demands of their jobs and who want to improve their effectiveness.

Loehr and Schwartz argue that life isn't a marathon, rather it's a series of sprints. To be successful, individuals need to balance recovery time with actual sprinting. A tired sprinter probably won't win the next race. And, most of us treat life like a constant race with no downtime.

Loehr, a performance psychologist, came upon these observations while he was studying professional tennis players to learn what separates the greatest players from the less successful players. Loehr discovered what separated the greatest players, such as Ivan Lendl, from the less successful players wasn't how they played tennis points. Rather, it was how they behaved between playing points.

The greatest players developed rituals to help calm and relax themselves in the short time between points.

When Loehr used EKG telemetry to monitor player heart rates, he discovered that: "In the sixteen to twenty seconds between points in a match, the heart rates of top competitors dropped as much as twenty beats per minute. By building highly efficient and focused recovery routines, these players had found a way to derive extraordinary energy renewal in a very short period of time."

The less successful players, on the other hand, 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.

Similarly, Loehr and Schwartz say many managers and executives don't have rituals to help them relax and remain effective. The authors argue that rituals help us connect to our values and what we hold most dear. Rituals assure our effort is directed to serve our most important goals.

Loehr and Schwartz write: "We hold ourselves accountable for the ways that we manage our time, and for that matter our money. We must learn to hold ourselves at least equally accountable for how we manage our energy physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually."

To help managers balance production with recovery, Loehr and Schwartz developed The Complete Corporate Athlete Training System. (Loehr and Schwartz are partners in LGE Performance Systems, which works with executives and managers.)

Loehr and Schwartz tell us physical energy is crucial, even for those whose work is sedentary. If we don't take care of our health, everything else will become more difficult.

Loehr and Schwartz say the specificity of goals is important to success. We can't spend too much time thinking about our rituals or they'll become equivalent to New Year's resolutions that are quickly dropped. Rituals must be nearly automatic. For example, it's probably good to have fixed times for exercise.

In addition to the physical realm, Loehr and Schwartz argue we must similarly develop rituals to develop personally on emotional, mental, and spiritual levels.

Rating:
Summary: The Personal Rocketry: a Great Read to Get High
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: You won't regret buying this.
Review: If you like to find real reason's for improving and growing your ability this is a great book to help with it. They base their ideas on values and on coaxing readers to solving their problems with real world solutions. The concept of building rituals into your daily life is very helpful and the tools and ideas are presented in a logical fashion with good examples from recent times. Hearing the examples of people involved in the attack on the World Trade Center was very influential.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best business/self-help books of the year.
Review: THE POWER OF FULL ENGAGEMENT has the potential to change your life with one single insight: that managing ENERGY, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal. While I have as many hours in a day as I had in my 20s, I have to admit that my energy and productivity levels had dropped over the years. This book explains how to increase your energy levels through tapping four primary sources of energy: physical (and includes strategies for "fueling the fire" through exercise, nutrition, and sleep), emotional ("transforming threat into challenge"), mental ("appropriate focus and realistic optimism"), and spiritual ("having a 'why' to live"). The training system this book espouses asks the reader to define their purpose, to face the truth about how they're managing their energy now, and to take action through positive rituals. Since learning and putting into practice some of the ideas in this book, I have managed to at least DOUBLE my energy level during the day as well as my effectiveness in accomplishing the things that are most important to me. You can't put a price tag on results like these -- but if you could, [the price] seems like a miraculous bargain to me.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Theme. Practical. Ideas may sound Ordinary.
Review: Theme: Time is limited (365days, 24hrs) to handle increasing demands in life. We can manage this by increasing our energy in four aspects: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. The key is to challenge our energy limits to expand our energy capacity, and to recover afterwards before the next challenge.

This energy management concept does give you hope after so many futile efforts in putting our life in order. The theme is intellectually sound, and the coverage (4 dimensions) is comprehensive. The tone is motivational: It encourages us to challenge ourselves, while advises us to take a break despite some societies admire hard work and busy schedule.

The authors are consultants with actual experience in enhancing sports people and business executives' energy performance. They are able to provide a lot of cases to illustrate ideas, plus useful details what can be done for specific problems.

This book is useful only to people who are determined to act to improve his/her energy.

The book is easy & light to read.

The context of energy is new, but the ideas inside (e.g. balanced diet, physical exercises, positive thinking etc.) may sound ordinary to some people. You can interpret "energy" as "health" actually. The scope of four dimensions are wide, so the contents are only quick overviews. Some of the points are repetitive while some sound detached from main theme. This is particularly noticeable in later sessions (Chapter 9 and 10.)