How energized are you when you're reading this? Do you feel in balance, on top of your life, tasks and goals--or stressed, overwhelmed and guilty for not doing more? We need energy to be creative, and too many of us are pretty maxed out.
The Way We're Working is not Working, the new book from Tony Schwartz, human performance expert and founder of the Energy Project, explores this compelling and too-often-ignored topic of personal energy. "The relentless urgency that characterizes most corporate cultures," he writes--and, I would add, organizations of all stripes and many personal lives of Americans as well--"undermines creativity...and, ultimately, performance." Schwartz has focused on how mismanaging our energy has impacted engagement in organizations (see his previous best-seller The Power of Full Engagement). His new book cites a meager 20% global workforce level of full engagement (those who consider themselves "fully engaged" at work, according to Towers Perrin) even before the recession fully hit. 57% of people work on evenings and weekends. 37% take 20 minutes or less for lunch. It's hard to be fully engaged when you're running on fumes. Creative? Forget about it.In my role as a consultant I get to take a peek into the work lives of many different people in various industries and organizations--and it's not pretty. Almost everyone is stretched and overwhelmed, and the people who thrive tend to be those who have learned how to ignore personal needs and jump from one urgent demand to another. (Pardon me as I take a moment to vent. Perhaps I experience this more than others because of my outsider role, but it's shocking how many "successful" people cancel meetings at the last minute, don't return phone calls and don't keep their word. These integrity gaps have only widened in the past few years.)
Schwartz offers a better, and ultimately more productive, way of excelling in our ratrace world. It's by understanding and respecting the way personal energy works (see 10-minute video below for a good synopsis). Yes, high performers work hard, but they also recover their energy more than others. Humans are not unstoppable computers. We function in waves and pulses, like the heart beat, and sleep, breaks and renewal are essential for our productivity. "As addicted as we can become to the speed and intensity of our lives," Schwartz writes, "we're more creative an productive when we move intentionally between effort and renewal, action and reflection." Organizations, Schwartz explains, need to meet core energy needs of employees so that they are "freed, fueled and inspired" to bring the best of themselves to work. Those energy needs are sustainability (physical), security (emotional), self-expression (mental) and significance (spiritual). You can take the energy audit on the Energy Project website to see how well you are meeting your own energy needs.
I saw Tony at this week's international American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) conference here in Chicago, where we all ran like panting dogs from one breakout session to another, from one Expo booth to another, trying to network and learn and push ourselves to swallow everything we can (sorry, energy...though all conferences are like this, right?). I originally met him in San Francisco in the 1990s when his book, What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America, made a particular impact on me. That book described his own five-year journey across America seeking out mystics, philosophers, physicians and psychologists--an amazing feat--to understand what makes humans thrive. While his focus is a bit more on the corporate world these days, it's great to see that he continues his commitment to helping us all live a little better. And I have no doubt that our understanding of "energy"--long a buzzword in California ("You have good energy")--will become more more crucial in helping us navigate our world in the decades to come.