Did you know energy, not time, is the fundamental currency to high performance? Are you fully engaged and ready to become who you want to be in business and life? Most of us have aspirations to become more than we are at each stage in life. The challenge is not in wanting but in getting to that point. Let’s discuss why your energy is the fundamental currency that will help you achieve your dreams, goals, and ambitions.
A few years back, I read the book: The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, and I want to share some insights from the book. I have had points in my life where I wanted to get to a different level. Each time I sought a new level I realized it took more energy to allow me to reach the next level. We must be willing to find new ways to generate the energy necessary to achieve our goals and dreams. You have heard the saying: “Work hard and good things will happen to you.” That may be true, but to work hard you must have the energy in your tank to make your engine go. Let me share why energy is so important.
Obvious as it seems, we often fail to take into account the importance of energy at work and in our personal lives. Every one of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors has an energy consequence, for better or for worse. Performance, health, and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy. The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us are not. It is our most precious resource. The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become.
To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest. The challenge of great performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals.
Let me share with you the four principles they shared in the book that are a must to maintain full engagement in all you do.
Principle 1: Full Engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Principle 2: Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and 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 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.
The key to making this happen is the willingness to change your habits, rituals, and how you do things to become more productive in business and life. Building rituals requires defining very precise behaviors and performing them at very specific times.
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? Where are the disconnects?
How fully are you embodying your values and vision for yourself at work? At home? In your community? Where are you falling short?
How effectively are the choices that you are making physically – your habits of nutrition, exercise, sleep, and the balance of stress and recovery – serving with your key values?
How consistent with your values is your emotional response in any given situation? Is it different at work than it is at home, and if so, how?
To what degree do you establish clear priorities and sustain attention to tasks? How consistent are those priorities with what you say and what is most important to you?
After we conduct the audit we now must ask ourselves these questions about energy. If energy is your most precious resource, let’s look at how well you manage it relative to what you say matters most.
How do your habits of sleeping, eating, and exercising affect your available energy?
How much negative energy do you invest in defense spending – frustration, anger, fear, resentment, envy – as opposed to positive energy utilized in the service of growth and productivity?
How much energy do you invest in yourself, how much in others, and how comfortable are you with that balance? How do those closest to you feel about the balance you’ve struck?
How much energy do you spend worrying about, feeling frustrated by, and trying to influence events beyond your control?
Finally, how wisely and productively are you investing your energy?
You see, to reach high performance or higher levels in our business and life we must first diagnose ourselves and then we must look at what is causing our energy level to be depleted or filled up.
If you are looking for accountability to help you move from stagnant to growth in your business and life, let’s schedule a one-hour discovery session where I will help you create a roadmap for your life. Schedule your call now: https://bit.ly/GaryWilbers-HABC. Remember to reach new levels it takes others that will help hold you accountable along the way.
My question I pose to you today is: “What habits or rituals do you need to change in the next 90 days to help you achieve your goals, dreams, and ambitions?
Are you ready to go to work to make them a reality?
Make it a GREAT day!
Gary