The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

by Jim Loehr

Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and recover energy. We call this oscillation. The opposite of oscillation is linearity: too much energy expenditure without recovery or too much recovery without sufficient energy expenditure. Balancing stress and recovery is critical to high performance both individually and organizationally. We must sustain healthy oscillatory rhythms at all four levels of what we term the “performance pyramid”: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. We build emotional, mental and spiritual capacity in precisely the same way that we build physical capacity. We must systematically expose ourselves to stress beyond our normal limits, followed by adequate recovery. Expanding capacity requires a willingness to endure short-term discomfort in the service of long-term reward.