Are You Fully Engaged? Principle # 1

Continued from last week...

a reminder:
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 the following 4 energy management principles will be key:
This week we'll address Principle #1.


PRINCIPLE 1:

Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy; physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

The truth is that humans beings are complex energy systems. Full engagement is not one dimensional. The energy that pulses through us is physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. All four dynamics are critical. None is sufficient by itself and each one profoundly influences the others.

To perform at our best we must skillfully manage each of these dimensions. Subtract any one of these and we lose our capacity to fully engage…much the way an engine sputters when one of it’s cylinders misfires.


Energy is the common denominator in all dimensions of our lives. Physical energy capacity is measured in terms of quantity (low to high) where emotional energy capacity is measured in quality (negative to positive).

These are our most fundamental sources of energy because without sufficient high-octane fuel no mission can be accomplished. The more toxic and unpleasant our energy, the less effective we perform. The more positive and pleasant, the energy, the more efficient it is. Full engagement and maximum performance are only possible when we are living lives with high physical energy and positive emotional energy.

The importance of full engagement is most vivid in situations where the consequences of disengagement are profound.

Imagine for a moment that you are facing open-heart surgery. Where on a scale from low to high would you want your surgeon to be? How would you feel if he entered the operating room feeling angry, frustrated and anxious. How about overworked, exhausted, and depressed. What if he was laid back and slightly spacey? Obviously, you want your surgeon energized, confident and upbeat.

Imagine that every time you reacted inappropriately at someone in frustration or did sloppy work on a project or failed to focus your attention fully on the task at hand, you put someone’s life at risk? Very quickly, you would become less negative, reckless and sloppy in the way you manage your energy.

We must learn to hold ourselves accountable for how we manage our energy, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, just as we do our time.

So for this week...be fully engaged by managing your energy, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Next week we'll look at principle #2

Always encouraging you.
Letha