Are You Fully Engaged? Principle # 2

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 #2

PRINCIPLE 2:
Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with under use, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

We rarely consider how much energy we are spending because we take it for granted that the energy available to us is limitless. In fact, increased demand progressively depletes our energy reserves, especially in the absences of any efforts to reverse the loss of capacity that comes with age. We can dramatically slow our decline both physically and mentally, and we should actually deepen our emotional and spiritual capacity until the very end of our lives.

When we spend far more energy than we recover and the eventual consequence is that we break down, burn out, atrophy, lose passion, get sick and even die prematurely. Sadly the need for recovery is often viewed as evidence of weakness rather than as an integral aspect of sustained performance. The result is that we give no attention to renewing and expanding our energy reserves, individually or organizationally.

The richest, happiest, and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also disengage periodically and seek renewal. Instead, many of us live our lives as if we are running in an endless marathon, pushing ourselves far beyond healthy levels of exertion.

We become flat lines mentally and emotionally by spending energy without sufficient recovery. We become flat lines physically and spiritually by not expending enough energy. Either way, we slowly wear down.

Think for a moment about the look of many long distance runners. Gaunt, sallow, slightly sunken and emotionally flat. Now visualize a sprinter. Sprinters typically look powerful, bursting with energy and eager to push themselves to their limits. The explanation is simple. No matter how intense the demand they face, the finish line is 100 or 200 meters down the track.

We, too must learn to live our lives as a series of sprints. We must fully engaged for periods of time, then fully disengage and seek renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confront us.

Here's to a week with a series of sprints!
More next week.

Always encouraging you,
Letha