Why Managing Your Energy Instead of Time Reduces Stress?

4 principles To Focus Your Energy, Not Time,is the

Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

  

This is a excerpt from the book ,The Power of Full Engagement,by James E Loehr, Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz. Energy, not time, is our most precious resource. Energy is the fundamental currency of high performance. Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy. Leaders are the stewards of organizational energy—in companies, organizations,and even in families.

They inspire or demoralize others first by how effectively,they manage their own energy and next by how well they mobilize, focus, invest and renew the collective energy of those they lead.

The skillful management of energy, individually and organizationally, makes possible something that we call full engagement.

Full engagement is the energy state that best serves performance.

Principle 1: Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related

sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

Principle 2: Because energy diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we

must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

Principle 3: To build capacity we must push beyond our normal limits, training in

the same systematic way that elite athletes do.

Principle 4: Positive energy rituals—highly specific routines for managing

energy—are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

   Energy is simply the capacity to do work. Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and recover energy.

   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.

   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.)

   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.

  Intermittently disengaging is what allows us to passionately reengage. It is not the intensity of energy expenditure that produces burnout, impaired performance and physical breakdown, but rather the duration of expenditure without recovery.

Expert Bio:

Tony Schwartz is the President and CEO of The Energy Project, which helps individuals and organizations perform at their best. Tony's last book, The Power of Full Engagement, co-authored with Jim Loehr, was a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 28 languages. Tony's article "Manage Energy, Not Time: The Science of Stamina," co-authored with Catherine McCarthy, was published in the October, 2007 Harvard Business Review. Tony co-authored the #1 worldwide bestseller The Art of the Deal with Donald Trump and also wrote What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America.

Dr. Jim Loehr is a world-renowned performance psychologist,Co-Founder of the Human Performance Institute, and author of 15 books including his most recent, The Power of Story. He also co-authored the national bestseller The Power of Full Engagement.

Dr. Loehr’s ground-breaking, science-based energy management training system has achieved world-wide recognition and has been chronicled in leading national publications including the Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Fortune, Newsweek, Time, US News and World Report, Success, Fast Company and Omni. He has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel, The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and CBS Morning News and the Oprah Winfrey Show.