by Kathleen Bradley

Most of the lawyers that I know complain that there are just not enough hours in the day for them to meet their billable hour requirements, meet non-billable firm obligations, spend time on business development, and meet their family and personal obligations – let alone have any fun!  They start with the “what if’s” – “if only I had more time.”  Well, guess what?  The number of hours in a day is fixed, and there’s only so much that can be accomplished in a 24-hour period.

We need not, however, despair.  In their groundbreaking bestseller, The Power of Full Engagement performance psychologist, Jim Loehr, and athletic coach, Tony Schwartz, teach us that managing our energy, not our time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal.  Their system is being used by practitioners ranging from Fortune 500 companies to critical care workers and even stressed out stay-at-home parents.  There’s much to be learned here for lawyers.

Here’s what they have to teach us.  In order to achieve the high performance of a “corporate athlete” while also achieving health, happiness, and life balance, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest. When we are eager to get to work in the morning and equally happy to return home in the evening, and are able to set clear boundaries between the two, we are able to feel fully engaged in our work and in our lives.

The four key energy-management principles defined by Loehr and Schwartz are the following:

1. The four dimensions of energy, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, are separate but related.  None is sufficient by itself and each profoundly influences the others.
2. Energy capacity diminishes with both overuse and underuse, so we need to balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.  Break down or burn out occurs when we spend more energy than we recover.
3. In order to build our capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.  Stress is not our enemy, but rather a key to growth.  Like an athlete, we can build muscle in each of our energy sources by systematically stressing it, and then resting, allowing it to recover so that it grows stronger and is better able to handle the next stimulus.
4. The key to full engagement is to create positive energy rituals – highly specific routines for managing our energy.  Since we are creatures of habit, change is difficult.  We automatically and unconsciously engage in practices that do not serve us.  Positive rituals help us to replace those habits and, in due course, they themselves become automatic over time, serving us rather than depleting us.