Partners in Learning
Learning to Lead Change: Building System Capacity

Leadership for Change Library

The Power of Full Engagement
Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz
New York: Free Press, 2003
245 pages

Loehr and Schwartz make the fundamental point that energy, not time, is our most precious resource. This book is about the sources of full engagement and how to cultivate them. The authors identify four major sources of engagement: physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy.

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose and immediate self-interest.

Four principles are identified:

Principle 1: Full engagement requires drawing on the four related sources of energy;

Principle 2: Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal;

Principle 3: To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do;

Principle 4: Positive energy rituals — highly specific routines for managing energy — are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

The book contains several personal case examples of individuals who exemplify low and high use of energy and the four sources on which it is built.

Why We Like This Book
This book takes a lot of the excuses off the table. It takes as a given that we are all overloaded in today's complex world. It then shows that we have choices which we can exercise in order to get at the four key sources of energy and continuous renewal. The ideas are powerful and accessible in our daily lives. Instead of looking for surface solutions that deal with symptoms, the authors take us to the basic sources of full engagement. We like the book because its ideas are most usable when the stakes are high. It shows how we can expand our capacity to move in and out of stress and recovery.