Interview: The Energy Project with Tony Schwartz

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Tony Schwartz. Among many other things, Tony is the CEO of the Energy Project where he and his team work with some of the world's top companies to help them optimize their energy and as a result, their bottom line. He also wrote the great book. He's written a number of books, but one of my favorite books ever, the Power of Full Engagement. And just really excited to be chatting today, Tony, and excited to explore some of my favorite big ideas and help people optimize their energy.

Great.

So let's start at the top. Energy. Can you, we all know kind of broadly speaking what that is, but can you define energy for us and then tell us why it's so important?

Yeah. Energy is the capacity to do work. That's the definition in physics. So it's not some soft or woo woo definition. It's very, very much what's the fuel you have in your tank and how do you get the right fuel so that you can bring the full range of your skill and talent to life? And you, you can imagine without thinking much further why that's important, but it's particularly important in the moment we live in, which is one of extraordinary demand from every possible angle, I would say exponentially increased by all that's happened in technology over the last 10 to 20 years. So that simply being skilled and competent, even passionate, is no longer sufficient to ensure that you're going to bring the best of yourself to whatever it is you do. You also need to be focused on energy. And I would say that energy, based on the definition I just gave you, is synonymous with capacity. So there's competency, which everybody has focused on using different words forever, meaning what's your skill? And now for the first time, people are compelled to think about something underneath capacity, which. I'm sorry, underneath competency or skill. And that's capacity. And energy is the form that capacity takes when it drives whatever it is you want to do.

That's so good. And one of the phrases that I just love of yours is that we need to manage energy, not time. We need to, in addition to optimizing our capacity, we got to take, take care of that energy. Tell us about that and tell us how we go about doing that on a high level.

Well, first of all, I've evolved in that perception and I now would say we have to learn to manage energy and time. One of the big insights that I've had over the last three or four years is that one of the biggest things standing in the way of our capacity is our tendency to choose upsides. So I'll give you an example. We call honesty a virtue, but honesty, when it's overused, is actually cruelty, and it no longer is an honorable virtue or an honorable value. It's only when honesty is balanced by compassion that you get the mix that makes it possible to. To operate in the most skillful way in the world. And we don't tend to see the world in that complex way, and it's costly to our capacity. So you get some people who are great at telling it like it is, and you get other people who are wonderfully empathic. But if you don't have both, you're going to run into trouble somewhere along the way. So time and energy are, are both important. The problem is that time has been the resource that we've relied on for thousands of years as the way in which to get more done. So if you have more to do, you put in more hours. What that never anticipated was that not only is time finite, but demand over time has dramatically increased. So if time is finite, there comes a point where time is actually no longer useful or serving you well. So what I mean by that is, first of all, if the number of hours you're working exceeds a certain number, particularly if they're continuous, you get a gradual and sometimes a steep decline in output and quality. And at a certain point, you actually begin to get collateral damage. So you put in too much time, you begin to burn out and break down. And not only are you less effective, but you may have that impact on other people. So energy has been the undervalued opposite, if you think of this as I use the word entailed of these as entailed qualities, time and energy, you need to find the right balance between time and energy. We have given much too little attention to energy. So what does managing energy mean? Well, managing energy means that you are regularly not only spending energy, which is another one of those qualities, another one of those opposites that we've given undue emphasis. We value spending energy in the working world, more, bigger, faster is better. And that's been the prevailing mantra in business as long as there's been business, but it fails to take into account that you can't just spend energy. You also have to renew energy. You have to regularly refuel the tank. In much of American business, in fact, in many industrialized countries, the assumption is that all you really are valued for is how much energy you can spend. And renewal. Refueling is actually just evidence that you're a slacker. Well, the sophisticated view, the 2015 view, the view of a world in which our resources, including time, are at risk, is that you need to be as focused on the recovery and renewal of energy as you do on the spending of energy in order to be able to be a sustainable, high performer.

I love it. And you talk about your four. Drilling into that a little bit more. The four dimensions of energy. Can you walk us through those?

Sure. So, unlike a computer or a refrigerator or a car, which really only requires one source of energy, human beings turn out to be much more complex and require the way we've mapped it. And you could map it in other ways, but the way we've mapped it. Four sources of energy. So you need the obvious one, which is physical energy. Physical energy is really a function of very obvious things. Fitness, sleep, rest, and nutrition. Then you need three other ones. So you need emotional energy. You need to feel a certain way to perform at your best. If you're not feeling that way, you can't perform at your best. Then there's mental energy, which is the energy of focused attention, the ability to focus in an absorbed way on one thing at a time for a significant period of time. Because what we know is the more fractured your attention is, the less deeply you think and the less efficiently you get things done. So if you move between two tasks, the obvious would be an email or a text and a primary work project back and forth. It will take you longer to finish that primary task than if you simply focused on that task singularly till it was done and then answered your email. And then the fourth one is spiritual energy. Spiritual energy is really just the energy derived from the experience that what you do matters, that it serves something larger than yourself. Because what we know. And again, most of what I'm telling you, Brian, possibly all of what I'm telling you, is common sense. It's just we lose contact with it in the speed of everyday life. So this simple concept here is that when something really matters to you, you bring more energy to it. So having connection to what matters is another powerful source of energy. Physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.

So this is again so powerful. Physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. I would love to take what may be common sense and help our listeners make it more of a common practice. I'd love to go back to the top and start at physical. And then just. If you can highlight your favorite kind of universal look, this is just A really solid practice in each of those. I think that'd be awesome.

So I'll do my best to run you through my favorite four practices according to the dimension of energy. So physical, really undeniably, the most important thing you can do is get enough sleep to feel fully rested. Talk about something obvious, but you know what? Sleep is the first thing we're willing to give up in order to get more stuff done. The problem is that you don't get more stuff done. Ultimately, if you do it from fatigue, you do it in a lower quality way, you do it slower, and you overall feel worse. So sleep is the number one thing to do. But as a practice. So beyond saying to your listeners, look, if you think you can get away with fewer than seven to eight hours of sleep and feel fully rested, you are part of less than 3% of the world's population. And therefore, statistically the likelihood is that you've lost connection to, to what it feels like to be fully rested. And it's worth an experiment in even staying in bed until you hit at least seven hours and see what happens to your overall feeling. The other one, I would say physically, that's sort of simpler and a little bit more counterintuitive is that the body wants to rest, it turns out, every 90 minutes. You can only work intensely at the highest level of intensity for 90 minutes without calling on the body's sympathetic reserves, the stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol and noradrenaline. You can call on them under emergency conditions and keep going beyond 90 minutes. And many of us do precisely that. But it's not in your long term interest to do that. And the best way to manage energy physically is to oscillate between short periods of intense focus. 90 minutes, it's fine if it's less, but no longer than 90 minutes with a period of renewal and recovery. And I'm not going to go into great detail on what you should do during renewal and recovery, except to say that there is no rule about it. It's what makes you feel renewed and as if you've recovered. So that might be listening to music for one person, meditating for another, taking a walk for another. And you've got to experiment with that to find out. So that's physical, emotional, so emotional. The most important thing is to be able to land yourself in the emotional state that serves performance best. And all I have to do is ask you, how do you feel when you're performing at your best? Or ask your listeners to ask themselves that question. And the set of adjectives that you come up with are how you actually have to feel to perform at your best. And I'll just give it away, you know, it's excited, engaged, happy, optimistic, positive. In the zone, it's all high positive adjectives. So anytime you're not feeling that way, the most important thing you can do is to shift your emotional state. But that sounds like something that we can't do. We think emotions happen to us. Well, it turns out that you can have a huge effect on your emotions. And so the number one thing I would tell people to do when they start to lose the feelings that serve them best when they move out of what we call the performance zone, or another way of looking at it, is when you start to feel negative emotions, particularly strong ones. The first thing you want to do is shift your physiology. It's not shift your mood, it's not shift your thoughts, it's shift your body. Because what you need to do is you need to quiet your body down. And the best way I know to do that is to breathe deeply. In through your nose to a count of three, out through your mouth to a count of six, for one minute. In through your nose through a count of three, out through your mouth to a count of six. Long recovery breath is as a way to relax your physiology. When you get good at doing that, you will have taken yourself out of the stressed physiology state that so badly serves the ability to think clearly and to make choices that serve you well. Mental. So the most important thing I could say mentally and I really read more. I know that sounds very silly and maybe even simplistic, but I took a month off, as I do every summer, feeling that my own ability to control and manage my attention, to stay focused on one thing at a time, had never been challenged as intensely as it was during the preceding 12 months. And I decided that I was going to literally take the entire month. So I'm not suggesting to people that this practice requires that you take a month off, but what I am suggesting is that we are losing control of our attention because it's interrupted so much. And what happens is it almost trains add. And anybody out there who's listening to this and has had the experience that, wow, this is a complicated piece of reading and I just can't keep my attention on it, knows what I mean? So I would say that a fabulous practice for every single person out there would be to find something to read that requires continuous attention, preferably a book not online in print, and build a practice of at least let's say 15 to 30 minutes every day where at a certain time where you do that reading. Because what you're doing then is you're training absorbed attention, so you're offsetting all of the other forces that otherwise are overwhelming your ability to focus your attention. So that's mental, spiritual. That's the most complex one. That's the one that has to do with why are you, you know, who am I and why am I here? But here's what I know. The more clearly you can define it is that you're trying to serve, or put another way, who is the person you're trying to be? The more that that you can clarify that for yourself. I'm a person now, by the way, it turns out that everybody comes down to some version of the same sentence when you ask them what's their higher purpose in life. And that sentence is something like, I want to help people. I want to serve something larger than myself, or I want to be a contributor, or I want to make the world a better place. They're all essentially the same thing. It's the how that's differentiating. So in the context of the life I'm leading, within the framework of what's possible for me to influence, what is the unique way that I can serve my own purpose, my own sense that I'm contributing to something larger than me. Because if you can do that, as I said earlier, that's an incredibly powerful source of energy and of a feeling of the capacity to feel good about yourself. And by the way, before I finish this, it's different to feel good about yourself than it is to feel good. You can have two beers or five martinis at the end of the day and feel good. It's quite something else to feel good about yourself. And so that's what I'm referring to in the spiritual practice.

Phenomenal job walking us through those four with the top one, we can talk about all of that stuff for a weekend and a half. I want to go back through, and I'd like to shine a light on your personal practices. As we talked about a little bit before we jumped on, I and our audience get a ton out of just hearing, well, what are you doing to implement these ideas? So let's start back at the top physical I shared with you in our chat before that, when you presented at the Conscious Capitalism event that I attended your keynote and then you did a breakout. I forget which one it was. But you talked about the fact that one of your personal goals is 9 hours of sleep a night and I wrote that down. And I happen to be like you, a guy that I really thrive with more sleep. I get less, I just don't thrive. Can you talk to us about that?

Well, I mean, it's a real simple one on sleep, you know, I always have slept more than most people. So all my life, until I really understood the incredible importance of sleep, I still was sleeping most days, eight hours. Then I read this great study by a woman named Sheri Ma at Stanford about what happened when she asked athletes in various sports at Stanford to sleep 10 hours a night for a period of weeks. And she discovered that every single group of people on a team overall had significant, in some cases dramatic improvements in their performance when they slept 10 hours a night. And I thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. I also know from Anders Ericsson's research, a great performance researcher, that the greatest violinists in the world sleep an average of 8 and a half hours a night, compared to 7 and a half hours a night for the kind of control group of less skilled violinists that he studied, and under seven hours a night for the average American. And you take those two studies together and it's saying to you, oh my God, the people who perform it the best sleep the most. So I increased my sleep to nine hours. How did I do it? Well, no magic. I went to sleep earlier. So, you know, I basically figure out what the earliest latest time I can possibly wake up is. Because nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna set a practice where they, you know, I don't think where they wake up later. You know, we're already waking up at the latest hour that we think it's okay to wake up. So the only real challenge, the only real possibility is in the evening, go to sleep earlier. So I just figure out in any given day what time do I need to go to sleep by in order to get my nine hours. Sometimes, to be honest, I will come home, have a glass of wine and I'll take a 20 minute nap or a 30 minute nap, never more than that. And that I'll count toward my sleep later in the evening. I don't necessarily recommend a six o' clock nap for people who have any trouble sleeping, because then you'll have even more trouble or you could have more trouble. Anyway, that's a physical, Brian. That's in the physical category. How I do sleep.

That's great. I'd like to. We were chatting a little bit before just about the recent research that came out in the last few weeks, talking about a much smaller number of sleep observed in kind of modern hunter gatherer populations, if you will. Can you talk to us about your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I started to mention it before I kind of rushed through it, but yes. So that's this evidence in these two African, you know, very, very hunter gatherers. You say hunter gatherer, two hunter gatherer tribes, where they went and studied them and they were sleeping less than seven hours a night. And they said, well, actually if they're sleeping that number of hours, that must mean that that's sufficient for the rest of us and that it has historical meaning. And there are a couple things to me that are problematic about that study. The first one is that they also discovered that those tribes lie in bed for eight or more hours total. So some part of it they're awake, but they're probably pretty deeply resting. So that changes to me the meaning of saying, oh, they're fine with six hours or six and a half hours. The other thing is that I don't think the societies are comparable. What organ in the body uses the most glucose, in other words, needs the most energy? And the answer, of course is the brain by far. Well, do the hunter gatherers use their brains in the same way that the modern worker does in a developed society? And I'm going to say no, it's much less taxing to the brain to be a hunter gatherer than to be any of a thousand skilled occupations that we have now, then you add to that the intrusion of technology and all of the forces that are exhausting us in our waking day, and would it be any surprise that we need more sleep now, not less? That's my take on that study, so I wouldn't take it overly seriously.

Yeah, that was in addition. Yeah, go ahead, you go ahead.

Well, I'm just going to say that, you know, if you go four or more days with five or fewer hours of sleep and we start testing your level of acuity and your ability to stick to a task, all these kind of classic mental tests that they do. You're going to be about at the same level as somebody who's mildly intoxicated. And that's well established. So the really, really the people in real trouble are the people who are sleeping less than six hours. The people who are in six to seven hours are in moderate trouble, or put it this way, they're suboptimal relative to the highest level of performance. They're not yet in total crisis.

Yeah, I think that's really powerful and I appreciate your distinctions and it's kind of for Me, it's. Yeah. Okay, well, if we had perfectly, you know, living in an environment with clean air, no technology, we were actually honoring the circadian rhythms and eating pure food. We have a conversation about it, you know, but we don't, aren't in quite that situation, let alone the mental taxing nature of what we do day in and day out. That's fantastic. And then of course, it comes down to, well, experiment and see what your level of optimal is. And are you even aware of what that feels like? Right.

Yes, absolutely. And if you, you know, and if it's under, you know, know seven hours, test more and see over a period of, let's say, give yourself seven days, see if you notice a difference.

Yeah, that's great. And then in the emotional realm, I'd actually love to hear you describe how am I that that was one of the things from your work that has most influenced me. The shadow work of when we find ourselves triggered and annoyed to stop and do the how am I that? Would that fall under the emotional side of things? Or is that definitely.

It definitely would. It definitely would. What I would say to you, Brian, about the emotional dimension is that as the years have gone on, I'm in year 17 of doing this work. With each passing year, I come to believe, you know, you never want to have a favorite child. That would be kind of an awful thing. But you can't in some way, for me in this case, resist a favorite among the four energy dimensions. In terms of what I think influencing has the most effect on your overall performance and well being, it would be the emotional. So the emotional is really the experience of an inner sense. This is what drives positive emotion and that's what serves performance best. The most powerful thing that drives that is a sense of feeling valued and valuable. And what happens is that we often get triggered during the day by various things that happen to us. And I invite your listeners to think of the last time they got triggered, the last time that somebody said something to them or did something that pissed them off, and write it down and then ask yourself the question, how was my value at risk here? And that person who triggered you, who pissed you off, said or did something that I will argue you end up feeling devalued by. So the how am I? That really, Brian, simply means, and we were in a short period. So I'm going to try and make it very simple. It really means in what way might what that person said to me or did be true? Not again. Choosing upsides. That person is right. Or as we Usually do, that person is wrong, but it's complex. And in what way can I understand and learn from what that person did, even though it irritated me? That's really the beginning of challenging our own inclination to feel devalued.

That's great. Just to bring that clear awareness to it where rather than rejecting it out of hand or taking it overly personally or a combination of the two, we can step back, look at it, and say, well, okay, well, how am I that? What's the partial truth in that? I found that to be a really, really powerful.

We call it, by the way. We call it, by the way, Brian, the reverse lens. It's really the lens of empathy. It's the recognition that when somebody does something that really irritates you and you get that dynamic going because you're probably going to react and respond, that there is more than one perspective to be seen about it. And one of the ones we tend to miss is what's logically, understandably prompting that person from his or her point of view to do what they did or say what they said.

So powerful to recapture that energy. This being your favorite child, what's your favorite personal practice in this domain?

In the emotional domain. Yeah, you know, it's not far from what we were just talking about. I guess the one that I like the best is it's another lens which is in the face of either feeling triggered or disappointed or as if I didn't get what I wanted. Anything that can push you into negative emotion. The question I like to ask myself instantly is, how can I grow and learn from that? In other words, to shift the attention from, oh, my God, what was me? And maybe I'll strike back to what's the value I could derive? What's the learning here that could serve me going forward? So, you know, I just had a very, very difficult experience in my company where we had to let someone go and we had no choice. But it's always painful with somebody I cared about, somebody other people cared about. And, you know, the question I was asking myself in the middle of that pain was, how can we as an organization learn and grow from this experience? And I always feel restored emotionally to some degree, if I can see a learning in it.

I like to conclude these chats with one final question, which is, if you could only share one piece of wisdom with someone passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

It would be a distillation of a quote from famous, once famous, no, still famous, but no longer alive. Jungian psychologist named James Hillman and I'm gonna not do it full justice. But it's something like life is a paradox and on the one hand, we must learn to accept ourselves joyfully exactly as we are and never stop trying to grow and change. So it's holding those opposites. It's saying I am truly okay as I am and able to take delight and joy in what I have and what I'm capable of. And I don't for a moment think that that's all there is. And I still have the responsibility to push myself, challenge myself to get better, see more and have a more, you know, create more value in the world.

Yes, and right where we started, right?

Yep.

Powerful stuff. You. I appreciate your palpable embodiment of your commitment to this work and your energy. Where can people learn more about you and everything you're up to?

Yeah, I mean, very simply on theenergyproject.com we've got a very rich site that provides a lot of stuff, free stuff for people and tells them about what we do. And delighted to have people go and make their way through it.

Fantastic. Theenergyproject.com Tony, I appreciate you. Thank you.

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