PNTV: The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (#57)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More Wisdom in Less time.

Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today I'm not wearing my gray jacket. I have a light blue shirt on, as you can see. And we're going to do the Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Lore. Awesome book. Powerful engagement as always. 6 page PDF Philosopher's notes in this great book, the Powerful Engagement, the subtitle is Managing Energy, Not Time is the key to high performance and personal renewal. So a lot of people talk about time management, right? Time management, this program, that program, et cetera, et cetera. These guys say no, no, no, it's not about time management, it's about energy management. This book is all about that. There are four principles to full engagement which we'll use as our guide in this quick overview of the great book. Principle number one is that full engagement involves drawing on four sources of power, right? Of energy. One physical, which is what we usually think of when we think of energy. Another one is emotional, spiritual and mental. So principle number one is we want to draw on power from all four of those domains. We want to pay attention to our physical energy, our mental energy, our emotional energy and our spiritual. I think that was one I just missed. Principle number two is that energy diminishes with both overuse and underuse. So if you're overworking, you're going to lose energy. And you're also going to lose energy if you're under working. If you're just sitting there laying on the couch like a couch potato, well, your body is going to adapt to that. Energy will decrease. And if you're training, training, training, working, working, working, always caffeinating yourself to get by day in and day out, you're going to lose energy ultimately. So what we want to do is move them to number three. We want to honor the fact that we want to find a good use of our energy where we're not underusing and we're not overusing. Principle number three is to build capacity in all four of those domains, mental, emotional, spiritual and physical. We need to train like athletes train athletes, go to their edge and just a little bit past it, right? And then something called the training effect happens, which we'll get into in a moment. We want to embrace our lives like athletes. Really cool idea. And that's how we get systematically stronger, is by consistently pushing ourselves to the edge and, and then letting our bodies gain strength and recovery. So principle number four is we want to have positive energy rituals, things that we do consistently and things that we stop doing. They talk about positive rituals and negative rituals. A theme we come back to again and again and again in all these episodes and in the notes. And they go off on really cool stuff. So a couple of things there. One, training like an athlete. They started their work studying and working with and coaching athletes. And what they discovered was actually they couldn't figure out why it was that some athletes performed at such a high level and they consistently beat those at a level just right below it. And one of the things they discovered surprised them. As they studied tennis professionals and tennis athletes, they discovered that the way that the superior athlete recovered between points was actually the highest predictor, the highest correlate to who won. The superior athlete had better recovery rituals. They both play the point really hard, but the inferior athlete wouldn't recover as well as the superior athlete. And they discovered that the superior athlete actually did the same thing between points. They bounced the ball a certain number of times, they breathed a certain way, and when they interviewed them, they realized they had certain thoughts going through their mind. And as a result, they recovered more, their heart rates decreased more. They were able to get more rest between those brief moments between the points. Now you add that up over one set, two sets, three sets, four sets, five sets, that little tiny ability to recover better in the fifth set of a grueling match is going to be huge, that difference. So they took this information and they're like, wow, this is fascinating. And they worked with their athletes and now they work with what they call kind of corporate athletes, people who are in the day to day normal lives and have embodied and brought some of this wisdom into our practical lives. And that's one of the big ideas that the book is focusing on that it's all about. So that's really cool. They also talk about this idea that you can look at a marathon runner and a sprinter and imagine them in your mind right now. Imagine a marathon runner and a sprinter. A marathon runner is going and going and going and going and going and going all the time. They don't take breaks, they run straight for 26 miles. And they say that that's a lot like how most people go through their lives and they look emaciated, they look just kind of just not well, really, right. They're not really vital and vibrant versus a sprinter, a sprinter who knows they only need to go from here to 100 yards out or 100 meters out or whatever the distance is for the race. It's a very finite period of time. And they Go all out. They put every ounce of their energy into it and then they recover and they rest. That individual is vital. They just are just a bundle of energy, right? And they say that we want to live more like the sprinter than the marathon runner. So the marathon runner in this 26 mile race never gives themselves, they never give themselves a break. Whereas the sprinter chunks that 26 miles down into very manageable parts and they fully engage in this sprint and then they fully recover. And then they fully engage and then they fully recover and they talk about that. Nature has rhythms. Everything in nature has a rhythm. And we want to model our lives in accordance with those rhythms. And there's a work phase and a rest phase in nature. It's not natural to go, go, go, go, go, go, go all the time. And it's definitely not natural to go, go, go, go all the time. And then to supplement our fatigue and to accommodate our fatigue with caffeine and sugar and all these other things that keep us up, that's the ultimately most brilliant way to destroy our overall vitality. When we're tired, there's a reason we're tired and that's because we just did our work phase. Now we need to recover. And as we embrace the recovery phase, we find a deeper vitality than if we just keep on going. Talbin Shahar, who I talk about all the time, is a big fan of this book as well. He says it's not that we work too hard, it's that we don't recover enough. So it's not that we work too hard, it's that we don't recover enough. That's a really big idea. Think about that and then think about how you can fully engage and then come off and allow for that rest rhythm. It's the day and night cycles, full moon, new moon, etc. What else do we want to check out? The training effect. So this idea I alluded to in the beginning here, where athletes train themselves, right? They go to an edge, then they go just a little bit past that, not too far or they'll injure themselves, but they go just a little bit too far outside of their comfort zone, right? Just a little bit outside their comfort zone. Well, that's called overloading your body when you go to the gym, and if you haven't been to the gym in a long time, just going to the gym and walking for 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 minutes, great. That's overloading your body in a modest way. And then your body. And if you go and if you're training for a marathon, for example, you need to consistently go to a place, or a sprint, I should say, or a triathlon or whatever it is. You need to go to a place that's a little bit past your current comfort zone, overload your body and then your body will overcompensate, it will build strength at that edge and, and it's thinking to itself in the way that bodies think to themselves. Wow. I guess he wants me to be able to do this. He wants me to be able to lift 150 or 250 pounds or ride a bike for 20 miles or swim for a mile. Apparently that's something that we're going to be doing often because he just did it and I don't want to get my butt kicked next time. So I just got overloaded. Now I'm going to overcompensate. I'm going to build strength where strength didn't used to exist. That idea is called the training effect. It's how everything is shaped in our bodies and in our mental conditions and in our emotional conditions and in our spiritual conditions. We go to an edge, then we go a little bit beyond it. It hurts a little bit, maybe at the time, sometimes we go way too far, but we go to that edge, we overload ourselves a little bit and then we get stronger. That's how strength and energy is built in every domain of our lives. And, and they say that if you want to get into the power of full engagement, you've got to train like athletes do, consciously in every aspect of your life, mental, physical, spiritual and emotional. And they have some great ideas. I'm not going to have time to get to on taking care of yourself and going to those edges. One really quick idea, drink plenty of water. All the great nutrition and energy teachers talk about that. If you're not drinking water, you're dehydrated, your energy is going to go down. It's a simple way to improve your energy. We've got some other great stuff in the note you can check out if you haven't got them yet. What are you waiting for? 100 of them. Thousand big ideas. There we go. We're running out of time, but power of full engagement. Train like an athlete and optimize your energy mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. And you will be rocking it. Alright. Hope you dug it. Share more soon. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of.

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