Are you proud of the long hours you put in at work? Do you praise employees who sit at their desks and work for hours at a time without a break? Do you measure engagement in work by how long a person persists at a task without stopping? If so, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz would tell you to change your ways. The authors are founders of and executives at LGE Performance Systems, an executive training program based on athletic coaching programs. Their full engagement training system embodies the methods of interval or periodical training used by elite athletes to maximize performance capacity. The authors urge us to approach our work activities like a sprinter, not a marathoner, balancing stress and recovery.
Loehr and Schwartz state the essence of their system in this passage: “Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our lives. Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings.” A recent Gallup poll has confirmed suspicions that the majority of workers are not deeply engaged in their work. At the same time, we keep hearing about the intense pressures on executives and resulting problems of burnout. Pushing ourselves and others to do more for longer won’t work. We will reach full engagement, say Loehr and Schwartz when we skillfully manage energy in all dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Full engagement comes when we are physically energized, mentally focused, emotionally connected, and spiritually aligned. The authors explain what each of these requires and say that the most fundamental source of energy is physical, while the most significant is spiritual. Unfortunately, most of us are undertrained physically and spiritually and overtrained mentally and emotionally.
To build ourselves up to a level of full engagement requires realizing that fully engaged energy rather than time is our most precious resource, and that energy capacity is diminished by both overuse—chronic stress without recovery—and underuse—chronic recovery without stress. Therefore, we must learn to balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal. To build capacity we must push beyond our normal limits while managing energy carefully. Positive energy rituals can help us do this.
The book’s resources include a summary of the full engagement training system, a list of the most important physical energy management strategies, glycemic index examples, and the full engagement personal development plan worksheet. Loehr and Schwartz do a good job of explaining the principles of the system, but the training program itself could be better defined. However, executives should be in their element developing and customizing the program.