THE POWER OF ENGAGEMENT!
To be fully engaged, we need to be fully present. To be fully present we must be "physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest."
Jim Loehr
COVID and other global factors have given clients the control to be much more specific during the buying process, and marketing to this audience with empathy and purpose is the best way to build a strong connection.
We live in advanced times. Our rhythms are hurried, rapid-fire, and relentless. Our days are carved up into bits and bytes. We celebrate breadth instead of profundity, a fast response more than considered reflection. We skim over the surface, landing for brief minutes at handfuls of goals but seldom remaining for long at anyone. We race through our lives without stopping to consider who we want to be or where we want to go. We’re wired up but we’re melting down.
Everyone is trying to do their best. When demand exceeds our capacity; we begin to make expedient choices that get us through our days and nights, 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.
We walk around with day organizers and to-do records. We walk around with day organizers and to-do records, Palm Pilots and Blackberries, moment pagers, and pop-up updates on our computers— all outlined to assist us to oversee our time way better.
Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. This is the power of full engagement. “Every one of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors has an energy consequence,” “The extreme degree of our lives isn't how much time we spend on the planet, but or maybe how much energy we contribute within the time that we have.” There are the irrefutably terrible boss, toxic work environments and relationships, and real-life crises. Nonetheless, we have far more control over our energy than we ordinarily realize. We have 24 hours in a day, but the quantity and quality of resources available to us are not. It is our most precious resource. The more we become responsible for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become. We need to stop blaming others or circumstances. It brings out negative energy and compromises our productivity.
Conventional wisdom holds that if you find talented people and equip them with the right skills for the challenge at hand, they will perform at their best. In our experience that often isn’t so. Energy is the X factor that makes it possible to fully ignite talent and skill.
Here are the four key energy management principles that drive performance.
Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Human creatures are complex energy systems and full engagement isn't essentially one-dimensional. The energy that beats through us is physical, enthusiastic, mental, and otherworldly. All four flows are basic, none is adequate by itself and each significantly impacts the others. To perform at our best, we must skillfully oversee each of these interconnected dimensions of energy. Subtract any one from the equation and our capacity to fully ignite our talent and skill is diminished, much the way an engine sputters when one of its cylinders misfires.
The significance of full engagement is most distinctive in circumstances where the results of withdrawal are significant. We hold ourselves responsible for the ways that we manage our time, and for that matter our money. We must learn to control ourselves at least equally accountable for how we oversee our vitality physically, sincerely, rationally, and profoundly.
Because energy capacity decreases both with abuse and with underuse, we must adjust energy consumption with irregular vitality reestablishment.
We never consider the amount of energy we are consuming. We take it for granted. The richest, happiest, and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal.
Instead most of our lives, as in the case we are running in an unending marathon, pushing ourselves distant past sound levels of effort. We, as well, must learn to live our possess lives as an arrangement of sprints— completely locks in for periods, and after that completely withdrawing and looking for reestablishment sometime recently hopping back into the shred to confront anything challenges stand up to us.
Positive energy rituals—highly specific routines for managing energy— are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.
Change is difficult but necessary. We are the creators of our habits. Most of what we do is programmed and no conscious. What we did recently is what we are likely to do nowadays. The problem with most efforts at change is that conscious effort can’t be sustained over the long haul.
Will and discipline are far more limited resources than most of us realize.
In case you have got to think about something each time you are doing it, the probability is that you just won’t keep doing it for exceptionally long. The status quo includes an attractive drag on us.
Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.