Tony Schwartz | Life-Built Poems

Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): an understanding that energy, vitality and passion cannot be given; they can only be found. [Your liveliness comes from inside you. No amount of urging by outside forces can make you vital, can make you care. You have to find it in yourself, for yourself.]

Here’s the thing: If you don’t really care whether some idea or conceptualization becomes a reality, if the process of getting to the finish line only induces a body-shuddering yawn, then it’s unlikely that you are going to convince your Inner Two-Year-Old that this boring, seemingly unending bit of road you’re walking is any kind of fun.

There’s going to be a lot of foot-dragging, whining, whimpering, time-wasting, and all-out, go-for-the-gold tantrum-tossing.

If you’re physically exhausted, if your mind is whirling around totally confused, if your heart is muddled and your spirits are low, you are just not going to be able to move effectively. It all gets very, very disheartening and none of this is at all conducive to the good stuff like “mastery,” “achievement,” “leadership,” and “peak performance.”

It really does seem that in order to actually have more than ho-hum and humdrum in your life, you do have to learn how to find and nurture your own kind of lively.

COMES A BOOK

In 2015, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, world-renowned self-development experts focused on performance, motivation and self-generated personal energy who spent their careers working with super-athletes and other high-performing individuals and organizations, put out a book, THE POWER OF FULL ENGAGEMENT: Managing Energy, Not Time Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.

The book laid out the principles behind their “Corporate Athlete Training System,” a practical, highly effective program that developed out of their work helping clients perform more effectively under brutal competitive pressure that very often led to meltdowns and assorted other forms of implosion. It wowed the business world, that book.

TIME MANAGEMENT? HA!

It also put the kibosh on the notion making the rounds at the time that all us busy, busy people have to do is somehow manage our Time properly and, by golly, we too can reach the ever-receding end of our ever-evolving To-Do List and achieve all of our dreams and goals as well as happiness, joy, and The Good Life.

no-time-for-the-dying — “No Time For the Dying” by Lorenzo Blangiardi [CC BY-ND 2.0]

As most of us have discovered (if we’ve spent any time in the world), Time doesn’t take to herding very well. (Frankly, neither do we.)

As Loehr succinctly puts it, “It’s not about time! Time management is crap….It is about energy management.”

IT’S ALL ABOUT ENERGY!

The authors lay out the Real – that human beings are complex energy systems and the only thing we’ve got to fuel this journey we are making through the world is our own innate, self-generated energy.

dive-in — “Dive In” by Beth Scupham [CC BY-2.0]

The wise guys through the ages have always said that our personal energy comes from four separate but interconnected dimensions of our lives that are all a part of every one of us. Our bodies, our emotions, our minds and our spirits affect the amount of energy we are capable of producing.

This energy has cycles – sometimes there is a lot of energy available, sometimes not so much. How we use our energy affects how much energy we have available to us when life demands that we move. How we nurture ourselves also affects our energy reserves.

Loehr and Schwartz tell us that if we understand how our personal energy systems work, we can develop supportive and nurturing methods and techniques that allow us to grow our energy output exponentially. Doing that, as their work with their clients have shown over and over again, allows us to do amazing things.

Since a lot of the work by the authors has been done with super-athletes and others who are pushing themselves to greater performance levels in sports, in business and in everyday living, many of their metaphors and methodologies are easy to understand (unlike some bits from more esoteric sorts).

“Full engagement,” according to the authors, means using all the dimensions of your being to produce and to maintain and nurture the energy you need to get to whatever goal you’ve set for yourself. In this book, there are many suggestions and lifestyle hacks that can help you do it better.

One of the best animated video overviews I’ve seen about this book was published by Callibrain on YouTube shortly after THE POWER OF FULL ENGAGEMENT was released.

Callibrain, it says here, is a software platform offering tools and such for corporate leaders, managers, and corporate employees to “enhance employee engagement through social collaboration and execution discipline.”

(All I really know about them is that they have produced some excellent animated reviews of books that explore thought-provoking concepts that are very useful for those who are interested in developing themselves in ways that help them reach their own excellence.)

FINAL THOUGHTS

On re-reading this book, I was struck by the number of similarities between the practices Loehr and Schwartz advocate and those that are suggested by other teachers exploring the human condition and how we can best deal with the world as it is and as we are.

My own favorite riff is the one about how the primary markers for physical capacity are the following: strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience. Those same markers can be used to measure capacity in the other dimensions of being as well.

For example, physical flexibility means that your muscle has a broad range of motion. Emotional flexibility means you can move freely and appropriately along a wide range of emotions rather than responding rigidly or defensively. Mental flexibility is the ability to move between the rational and the intuitive and to look at other points of view. Spiritual flexibility is the ability to tolerate values and beliefs that are different than your own.

An interesting exercise is to find the equivalents for each of these markers – strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience – in the areas the authors examine – body, heart, mind and spirit. Developing and expanding your capacities in each of these areas will give you a better chance of reaching “full engagement,” they say.

perserverance — “Perseverance” by David Yan [CC BY-2.0]

I find it interesting that these capacities also seem to be the same ones that many wise guys encourage you to develop and expand as you work on living a life with meaning and mana.

Hmmm….

Here’s a poem:

I KEEP DANCING

I keep dancing.

(It’s what I do.)

So my feet swell up…

My legs get tired…

My arms feel like lead…

And my head’s been gyred.

I keep dancing.

(There’s really no other choice.)

For me, my dance is all

About timing, rhythm and space,

About heartfulness,

About place.

I keep dancing.

I see you’re dancing too.

Maybe your song’s different

And our moves don’t synchronize.

Still, it’s cool to know

You’re dancing just as strongly as I do.

And it pleases me to think you’re dancing

To the song that is just you.

Header photo credit: “West Maui Mountain Windmills at Sunrise” by Mike [CC BY-SA 2.0]

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RUBBING TWO TRUTHS TOGETHER

Netta Comments 10 comments

Sometimes rubbing together two truths could produce a whole other way of seeing that might lead to new ways of thinking. It’s sort of like rubbing two sticks together to make a fire, another way of Un-Seeing.

One natural progression brought on by rubbing together two equal and opposite truths is this:

CONFLICT –> PARADOX –> REVELATION

Think about it. It is how new hypotheses are formed and how new business deals (and art and poetry and all kinds of gadgetry) are made. A new construct that’s built on the tension between two or more very different or even opposite ideas can lead to a new way of walking for you and, perhaps, different results in your life.

Need a concrete example? There’s this:

THINKING ON BUILDING RITUALS

Working on “building rituals” à la Tony Schwartz, THE WAY WE’RE WORKING ISN’T WORKING: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance is supposed to mitigate that godawful feeling of being in Overwhelm. The idea is to ritualize certain practices so that they become an automatic part of the way you go through your day.

The theory is that if you can make it automatic, then it just is part of what you do and you don’t have to spazz about doing it or not doing it and your head doesn’t seize up from all the push-me/pull-you that happens when you’re in transition and trying to change.

Here’s a YouTube video, “Tony: The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working” put together by Schwartz’s own company, The Energy Project. It’s a snippet of one of his speaking engagements, that explains the premises from which he operates.

HERE’S THE HOW-TO

Start small and build incrementally. Undertake to add no more than one or two rituals into your day a time. Once they’ve gotten set into your day, you can add a couple more.
- Schwartz says, “Embedding any ritual can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months. Even then, it’s possible to build several rituals over the course of a year, one at a time.”
Aim for precision and specificity. Define precisely when you’re going to do something (i.e., “It’s Thursday; I water houseplants.”)
- “If you have to think for very long about doing something, it’s unlikely you’ll end up doing it for very long,” Schwartz says.
Focus is important. Make sure you’re focusing on something you are doing rather than focusing on something you are trying not to do.
- A real-life example of a failure to focus properly is my 50 or so aborted attempts to quit smoking. Every time the attempt has been about not-smoking. Success has been limited to avoiding the expansion of a bad jones.
- I was disappointed to learn that I am not quite Gandhi enough to “be the change I want to be.”
Recognize when and why you sabotage your own change. Schwartz says that even the most passionate commitment to a given change is always balanced by an equally powerful, often unseen commitment not to change. The only way to change it is to admit it, accept it, and then change anyhow.
- One tool to use is asking a series of questions:
  - QUESTION 1: What do I want and what will I do to avoid getting it?
  - QUESTION 2: What am I currently doing or not doing that undermines my commitment to changing?
  - QUESTION 3: What is my competing commitment that urges me to not-change?
  - QUESTION 4: What’s the Big Assumption behind the competing commitments?
- Schwartz says you need to take a look at your shadows.
  - Ask yourself what you fear might happen if you actually followed through on your primary commitment and changed your behavior.
  - Are these fears realistic ones?
  - If they are, then how can you design the ritual so you enjoy the intended benefits but also mitigate the costs you are fearing?
  - I am still working on this one.
Notice the positive effects of the new ritual as you continue to do it. Are other people seeing any positive changes in you? Can you ask them for help and support if you need it?
Honest self-observation is the antidote to unwitting self-deception. It’s a good thing to check out whether the new way of doing stuff is actually”better.” If you’re not happy with the results or if the benefits are not what you thought they’d be, it could be time to re-think the thing.

CHANGING UP THE SAME-OLD

Okay. So you’ve built up all your routines and are flying on automatic pilot. You make up routines as you go along because it gets to be a pain always thinking, thinking, thinking about your next move. Doing a routine makes it easier to slide through the days.

But, it also lets the days slip away from you and everything tends to get a little bit blurry as a result. After a while that gets…unsatisfactory.

Deliberately changing the routines of your life and paying attention to everything you can learn about people, the world around you, and your own self seems to make the days more real somehow. They also tend to help you find better ways to do the stuff you have to do. A different cool thing.

Maybe it can result in a thing like Sarah Kay’s beautiful spoken poem, “If I Should Have a Daughter.”

(That YouTube video was produced by So much Noise. It’s one of the more beautiful versions of Sarah Kay’s work.)

Changing up the same-old that grew out of your routine-making can lead to wondrous things.

MEETING IN THE MIDDLE….

So there it is: all I know about routines. You make them to give yourself space to do all the stuff you need to get done to get to where you want to go. But, then you need to break up the routines to give yourself the ability to enjoy your life. It just goes ’round and ’round, that.

How much routine you choose to have in your life depends on how much you can stand zombie-ing out, I suppose. Me, I get a bit paranoid when things get too routine. (That may be the result of reading too many spy thrillers. “Predictable” is never a good thing in those stories.)

And here’s a poem:

SCRAMBLING

Feeling BEHIND.

Why am I thinking this is a race?

Where is the course?

What is the pace?

Time goes flitting by

On a crazy butterfly course,

Flowing outward….

Outward from the source.

What am I trying to reach

In my mad and scattered way?