Personal Energy
My friend Tom is an expert in training, personal coaching, and stuff like that. Sorry I can’t quite describe a job title for him — he’s an eclectic thinker who has always been a big help to me. We worked together about 8 years ago, and we’ve kept in touch periodically since then.
Anyway, Tom and I were talking the other day and he suggested I might read this book, The Power of Full Engagement
I’m sure many of you share this experience: you work all day. Your energy level fluctuates a lot during the day. When you get home you have no energy left, and feel like simply eating some bad food, maybe having a drink, plopping down in front of the tube, and going to bed. Repeat this process for five days.
Compared to a lot of folks I have a fairly healthy lifestyle. Not perfect, but not horrible. I practice martial arts a few times a week, do some skateboarding and cycling, and try to make sure we get some healthy home-cooked meals every week. However, there is a lot of room for improvement. At work, I sit at a desk. I like my work. It gives me a lot of room to exercise some creativity. However, it is a pretty solitary job. Sitting at a desk all day is actually exhausting. As a result, my performance at work really fluctuates.
Frankly,В I don’t think it is realistic to think any human being can work at a desk, or work period, for 8 hours a day with really high concentration for the whole time. And of course, that is why no one really does that. It simply isn’t really possible.
The authors of this book agree.
OK, so I’m into this book. The author talks about the need for people to use and renew energy in four areas of life: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. He emphasizes that there needs to be a balance between expenditure and renewal in each of these areas, and that often people are fine in some areas but way off in others, which creates problems. You need to renew your reserves during the day, not just while sleeping at night.
So I’ve started a new thing at work. I set my computer to remind me in mid-morning and mid-afternoon to get up and go for a 15 minute walk, and then drink at least one glass of water. Seems like not that much, but 15 minutes is about a mile of walking, so it provides exercise, gets my blood circulating, gets my eyes off the computer, gets me some fresh air, and of course some Texas summer heat.
Gonna do this for a month and evaluate it’s effects. I’ll continue to post some things about this book as I continue reading it.
If you have comments on this book, please submit them. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
June 25, 2010
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Bob В· 
2 Comments
Tags: personal energy, renewal В· Posted in: Book Review, Health
2 Responses
Hey there,
Don’t want to knock you off course reading the Power of Full Engagement, which I wrote — and I appreciate your comments very much. Having said that POFE is 7 years old, and I’ve just published a new book — The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which benefits from 7 more years of research and work in this area. Would love for you to take a look there, because I think you’ll get everything you would from POFE, but a lot more!
Cheers, Tony Schwartz
I will check it out. Thanks, Tony.
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