Are You Fully Engaged?

How many of you feel like the demands of your life exceeds your capacity to make it all happen?

We live in a digital time. Our rhythms are rushed, our days are carved up in to bits and bytes.
We survive on too little sleep, fuel up on coffee, and go non stop from morning until night. We have demands all day and arrive home feeling exhausted and often experience the things and people waiting for us at home as one more demand instead of a place to refuel and feel renewed.

Our lives feel over burdened.

We take pride in our ability to multi task, we have cell phones, pagers, emails and pop up reminders. We use words like obsessed, stressed, crazy and overwhelmed. Feeling starved for time we feel we have no choice but to cram as much as possible into every day.

Managing time efficiently does not guarantee that we are living our lives fully engaged…it does not guarantee that we are bringing sufficient energy into whatever we are doing.


The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet, but rather how much energy we invest in the time that we have. The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and the quality of energy available to us is not.

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

Full engagement begins with feeling eager to get to work in the morning, equally happy to return home in the evening and capable of setting clear boundaries between the two. It means being able to immerse yourself in the mission you are on, whether it’s grappling with a creative challenge at work, managing a group of people on a project, spending time with loved ones or simply having fun.


I want to do something fun and compare our lives, our busy, successful, time crunched lives, to those of a professional athlete.

Think about it…
Professional athletes typically spend about 90 percent of their time training, in order to perform 10 percent of the time. Their entire lives are designed around expanding, sustaining, and renewing the energy they need to compete for short, focused periods of time.

They build very precise routines for managing energy in all spheres of their lives. Eating and sleeping…working out and resting…summoning the appropriate emotions, mentally staying focused and connecting regularly to the mission they have set for themselves.

Although most of us spend little or no time systematically training in any of these dimensions, we are expected to perform at our best for eight, ten even twelve hours a day.

Most professional athletes also enjoy an off-season of four to five months a year. After competing under extraordinary pressure for several months, a long off-season gives athletes the critical time that thy need for rest and healing, renewal and growth.

By contrast, our “off” season amounts to a few weeks of vacation a year, Even then we probably aren’t solely resting and recovering. More likely we are spending a least some of our vacation answering emails, checking our voice mail and thinking about our work.

Finally, professional athletes have an average career span of five to seven years. If they have handled their finances reasonable well, they are often set for life. Few of them are under pressure to run out and get another job.
By contrast, we can probably expect to work for forty to fifty years without any significant breaks.

Given these stark facts, what makes it possible to keep performing at our best without sacrificing our health, our happiness and our passions for life?

We must become fully engaged!

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

The challenge of great life performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals. Four key energy management principles drive this process. They lie at the heart of change, and they are critical for building the capacity to live a productive, fully engaged life.

So…to fully engage, four energy management principles will be key:

We'll look at those principles for the next 4 weeks!
Until then...be fully engaged, be in the moment.

Always encouraging you,
Letha