A life skill coach personal development idea:

Managing Energy Skillfully On and Off the Job

BY CHRIS BURDETT-PARR

An insightful, illuminating and extremely well-written book.

Book Review of The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Free Press: 245 pp.

The Power of Full Engagement is an insightful, illuminating and extremely well-written book. Addressing the modern problem of over-extention in so many areas of our daily existence, it demonstrates that managing our energy, not time, is the key to successfully balancing our lives — as this excerpt illustrates:

We live in digital time. Our rhythms are rushed, rapid fire and relentless, our days carved up into bits and bytes. We celebrate breadth rather than depth, quick reaction more than considered reflection. We skim across the surface, alighting for brief moments at dozens of destinations but rarely remaining for long at any one. We race through our lives without pausing to consider who we really want to be or where we really want to go. We're wired up but we're melting down.

Most of us are just trying to do the best that we can. When demand exceeds our capacity, we begin to make expedient choices that get us through our days and night, but take a toll over time. We survive on too little sleep, wolf down fast foods on the run, fuel up with coffee and cool down with alcohol and sleeping pills. Faced with relentless demands at work, we become short-tempered and easily distracted. We return home from long days at work feeling exhausted and often experience our families not as a source of joy and renewal, but as one more demand in an already overburdened life.

Containing research-related information ranging from findings regarding the glycemic index, to discussing circadian and ultradian rhythms, to the importance of incorporating spiritual energy into the corporate setting, this book contains some profound yet lucid explorations of our personalities, habits, and ways to attain “full engagement” with our lives.

Examining several cases of professionals who hold a wide variety of positions, the authors analyse work performance problems the individual is experiencing, and create a personal plan for addressing the changes needed to maximize performance. As these changes are of an intrinsic nature, the effects of these changes also radiate into, and benefit, personal lives.

The authors and their team are the originators of the “Corporate Athlete”® training system, and their clients for this program have included many household-name public figures, Fortune 500 companies, and individuals in every type of profession.

As described, the system provides a step-by-step program that helps you:

• mobilize four key sources of energy
• balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal
• expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do
• create highly specific, positive energy management rituals

I highly recommend The Power of Full Engagement as a valuable resource for improving performance professionally, and improving one's overall quality of life.