The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, 2003
You cannot add hours to the day, but you can add energy. Sports psychologist Jim Loehr and journalist Tony Schwartz carried what they had learned from the world's best tennis players into offices and families. This book will teach you to alternate effort and rest, to protect four sources of energy, and to build rituals that work without willpower.
Who it is for
For those who work more and more but get less and less done. And for everyone who, by evening, has no strength left for either the people they love or themselves.
The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the amount and quality of energy available to us are not.
Roger, Who Worked More and Got Less Done
Picture a man who has just been promoted. Not long ago he was one of the best in his sales department, but now, by his boss's assessment, he is working at best at a solid C-plus. His name is Roger B., and his story is told by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. Roger lives from one email to the next, from one request to the next, from one fire to the next. He hardly takes any breaks, and the closer it gets to evening, the harder it is for him to concentrate. It is his boss who sends him to the authors' programme.
Sound familiar? At such a moment most of us decide that the problem is time: get up earlier, plan more tightly, rest less. Loehr and Schwartz argue precisely against this. For many years Loehr worked as a sports psychologist with tennis players and other world-class athletes. Later, together with Schwartz, a journalist and writer, he carried what he had learned on the court into offices and families.
Their central idea is this. The number of hours in a day cannot be changed, but the amount and quality of energy a person has can. So it is energy, not time, that must be managed. An hour lived in fatigue and irritation and an hour lived focused and interested are the same by the clock, but wildly different in result. So it matters not only how many hours you work, but with what energy you live them.
The state the book leads toward, the authors call full engagement. It is when the body is full of strength, the feelings are switched on, the mind is focused, and it is clear what all this is for. Ahead lie six chapters. You will see what the best tennis players do between points, why an office worker should train like an athlete, where energy comes from, and how Roger finds his way back. Let us start on the court.
The Champion Shows in the Pause Between Points
Loehr started not in offices but on tennis courts. For hours he watched matches and recordings of games, trying to understand what sets the world's best players apart from those who are merely strong. During a rally the difference is barely visible: everyone hits well. So Loehr began to look where no one usually looks, at the short pauses between points.
There he found the key. Almost all the best players had developed the same order of actions. After a point, they hold their head and shoulders the same way, direct their gaze the same way, breathe to the same rhythm and talk to themselves in the same way. In those few seconds they manage to recover from the point just played, and they come to the next one fresh. For them the pause is not empty time but part of the game.
The whole book grew out of this observation. Energy cannot only be spent. Expenditure and recovery must alternate, like breathing in and out. The authors call this alternation oscillation, meaning a swing. They call an even mode, without rises and falls, linearity, and they consider it a trap in which very many people live.
Linearity comes in two kinds. If you spend strength all the time and never recover, you arrive at burnout. In the authors' observation, what destroys people is not the intensity of a load but its length without a break. And if you only rest and demand nothing of yourself, atrophy sets in: what is not used weakens. It turns out that stress is not the enemy in itself. The danger is stress that is not followed by recovery.
Now think about your ordinary day. How many pauses does it hold, like the tennis player's between points? For many people the day is built as one endless rally: a meeting runs into email, email into a call, and lunch is eaten in front of a screen. The authors suggest learning from the court and building short breaks into the day itself, rather than waiting for a holiday. Stand up from the desk, breathe more slowly, look not at the screen but out of the window: in the book's logic, that is the same pause between points. Recovery does not have to be long. A tennis player needs only a few seconds, provided they spend them well.
About the author
Jim Loehr is an American sports psychologist who worked for many years with tennis players and other world-class athletes, and later began coaching company executives. Tony Schwartz is an American journalist and writer who later founded the consultancy The Energy Project.
All books by this author: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
Terms from the book
- Empathy
- supercompensation
- Burnout
- Self-control
- Vision
- Ritual
- Roger: Roger B., a sales manager at a large company. His story runs through the whole book: first his life without energy, then the way back.
- Full engagement: The central concept of the book, the authors' own term. A state in which a person is physically energised, emotionally involved, mentally focused and acting for a purpose larger than themselves.
- Oscillation: A swing, a rhythmic alternation of rise and fall. For Loehr and Schwartz, the alternation of spending energy and restoring it.
- Linearity: The authors' term for a mode with no alternation, when a person either spends strength without rest all the time, or rests all the time without any load.
- Atrophy: The weakening of an organ or ability that is not used for a long time. The authors apply the word to muscles, the mind and the feelings alike.
- Stress: In the book, any load on which energy is spent. The authors consider it necessary for growth if it is followed by recovery.
- Off-season: The time between competitive seasons, when an athlete does not compete but rests and trains.
- Corporate athlete: The authors' term: a person who works in a company rather than in sport, but who needs the same system of load and recovery as an athlete to get consistently good results.
- Interval training: Training in which short bursts of high effort alternate with periods of rest or light work.
- Ultradian rhythm: A cycle in the body's work that repeats several times a day. In the book it means cycles of about an hour and a half or two, after which the body needs a break.
- Spiritual energy: The authors' term, not tied to religion. The strength a person gets from living in line with deep values and for a purpose greater than personal interests.
All terms
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