Renewable Energy: A Personal Challenge

As I spend time with people who aspire to healthy lifestyles, the concept of personal energy is a recurring theme. We want more. We are not sure how to get it. We read books and magazine articles. The advice doesn’t work. Energy is elusive. It is not just about hydration, the right vitamins, or a good night’s sleep. Too much coffee is worse than too little. Exercise helps, but can also hurt.

In The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz assemble the elements of optimal energy into a simple but comprehensive whole. They describe energy as engagement with life, and they conclude: “To be fully engaged we must be physically energized, emotionally committed, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.” I will reflect on each of those four dimensions in coming weeks.

For now, I want to begin with an over-arching theme from the book. Drawing from the field of sports performance, Loehr and Schwartz describe the training cycle of exertion and recovery. When building strength, endurance, and flexibility, an athlete pushes the body slightly past its limits. For performance to improve, the extra effort must alternate with strategic periods of rest and recovery. Fatigued muscles need to rebuild. Depleted cells need to replenish.

Mental, emotional, and spiritual performance also benefit from cycles of exertion and recovery. We tend to run our daily lives on the model of a marathon, which calls for sustained effort at a constant pace over long hours and miles. These authors recommend the model of a sprint, with its burst of high energy followed by recovery; engagement followed by disengagement. Their experience shows that the “corporate athletes” they work with perform best when 90-minute chunks of concentrated effort alternate with strategic changes of scene and pace. They call the process “oscillation.”

How does your energy hold up when you spend long hours working without a break? How does it feel when you skip from task to task without finishing any one of them? Does the idea of oscillating between focus and recovery intrigue you? Give it a try.

Until the next time, be well.

Pam