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Thank you. Good afternoon. So, Im here to add energy to the list of love, fear and self determination.

So, Im going to jump right in with a question for all of you and you can raise your hands to answer it. So, the question is how many of you would say that over the past several years the demand in your life has gone up? Okay, it looks like pretty much everybody. And how many of you would say that you expect in the year ahead that itll most likely continue to rise? Again, probably three quarters of the room. Does anybody feel like its going to go down? No, okay. So now, the question is how many of you expect your capacity, thats literally the energy you have, the fuel in your tank, is going to automatically rise along with the demand? Okay, no one. So, this is the problem. This is precisely the problem. We are living in extremely challenging times and not only is demand on the rise, but the complexity of the demand has changed and the sheer speed at which were moving has just gotten faster and faster largely due to technology.

So, we have largely taken our capacity for granted and we have a demand capacity curve, which shows the demand starting relatively low. Thats usually about five or six when were in kindergarten and its a pretty steady climb from there on out. If you notice the capacity curve, theres a very clear point at which our capacity naturally starts to diminish. So, at what age, and you can just yell it out; what age do you think our physical capacity naturally starts to decline. Twenty-five, 40, 60, we have an optimist in the group. So, its 30. So, after the age of 30, in the absence of any intervention, we lose a half a pound of lean muscle mass per year. So, thats the bad news, but the good news is it absolutely doesnt have to be that way. There are strategies that we can apply to systematically build our capacity throughout our lives.

So, we dont think much about capacity as long as you have enough to meet your demand, right? But, the minute that the demand starts exceeding it then it becomes critical to think about this issue of capacity and we think of capacity as the foundation upon which you do everything else. We really feel that its a competitive advantage in these times to be training your capacity, to really start thinking about it much more strategically and intentionally. So, up until now, what would you say is the primary resource that you rely upon to get your work done besides caffeine? So, when the demand goes up, what do you do - work longer, exactly. So, whats the resource involved in working longer - time, right. Whats the problem with time? Its finite. So, theres 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, and were never going to have more than that. Its capped out. My guess is that none of you are having difficulty figuring out how to fill your time. Most of our dance cards are pretty full.

So, weve maxed out on this issue of time. So, what we want to shift your thinking to is energy. Energy can be systematically expanded and it can also be renewed. But, theres more problems with time. So, where does time reside? Is it internal or external - external, right? It lives outside of us. So, its a lot like a train thats whizzing by and once its gone, its gone and you can never get it back. How about energy? Where does energy reside - internal. So, therefore we can absolutely have an impact on how much energy we have, but theres a third problem with time. So, I have all of your time. Youre all here. Its been scheduled. Everybodys shown up, but my guess is I might not have all of your energy. Maybe you didnt

eat enough at lunch and youre a little hungry and youre wondering when the next break is so you can get something to eat, or maybe you had a horrible night sleep last night and youre tired and youre having trouble focusing, or perhaps theres a big project deadline thats awaiting you when you return to work thats on your mind. Or, maybe you had an argument with a loved one or a spouse and youre still ruminating about that, but the point is that energy is complex. So, simply having someones time doesnt guarantee that you have their energy or their engagement.

So, we want to make a paradigm shift away from time to time plus energy. And if you think about the way that value is currently measured at work, its largely by the number of hours people sit at their desk. We know in terms of energy that the longer you work theres a very distinct point of diminishing returns. So, we want to shift that paradigm as well to measuring value by how engaged people are while theyre working.

Okay, so what is energy? So, the way we define energy is as its defined in physics, which is simply the capacity to do work. So, with more energy, you can get more accomplished. These are our objectives for our full 16 hour curriculum that with more energy you can get more done in less time. You can be more efficient at a higher level of engagement and a better quality of life. The last line, the better quality of life is something that gets bantered around quite a lot, but we really believe at the Energy Project that in terms of our energy your personal life and your work life are inextricable. We are integrated beings. So, we dont check pieces of ourselves at the door when we arrive at work or while we arrive at home. So, we really need to look at the entire system in order to perform at our best and in order to sustain it.

So, there are four types of energy. The first is physical. Physical energy is the quantity of your energy. Its literally how much fuel you have in your tank and there are four components that factor into how much physical energy we have. So, what do you think the four are? Nutrition, sleep, exercise, whats the fourth? So, the fourth is the one that-- you know, I deliver this content to thousands and thousands of people and the fourth is the one that most groups dont get and they dont get it because we dont do it. Its rest. Remember that - rest? So, thats what you do during the day when youre not working is you rest. So, its the daytime analogue to sleep. So, were going to talk a lot more about rest in a few minutes. But, we think of physical energy, as I said, as foundational. So, if your physical energy is compromised, every other dimension of your energy is going to be affected. So, all four dimensions of energy affect each other and none of them are sufficient on their own. The second is emotional energy. Thats the quality of our energy. So, thats the difference between a low grade fuel and a high grade fuel, and we all know that theres certain feelings that we have when were performing at our best and theyre positive. And again, we largely take it for granted that these feelings are just going to show up whenever we need them and nothing could be further from the truth.

So, the emotional work that we do is about two things - awareness. So, you cant change what you dont notice. So, the first component is to become more aware of what emotions youre having at any given moment and the second element is intentionality, to be much more intentional about what you do to fuel

yourself with positive emotions, which in turn fuel performance. The third dimension of energy is mental or has to do with our focus. So, how we apply our attention at work is the primary way that we add value to work. And we are talking about being more intentional with our attention at a time when our attention is under siege. There are more choices than ever of where you could possibly place your attention. So, the capacity for deep absorbed focus has really diminished for all of us and its largely due to technology. So, the work that we do around mental energy or focus has to do with building that capacity for a singular absorbed focus and knowing where to put it once you have it. And finally, the fourth dimension is spiritual energy. We define spiritual energy as the energy thats derived from the feeling that what you do really matters and from serving something beyond yourself. We also believe that spiritual energy is derived from the alignment between what you say you value and how you actually behave. The greater the alignment between those two things the more powerful a source of fuel you have available to you. This is true organizationally as well.

So, in terms of organizational energy, the greater the alignment between what the organization says they value and how they actually treat their people the more powerful potential fuel the organization has. So, when all four sources of energy are full fueled, we call that firing on all cylinders. So, were going to take a quick look on how all of you are doing. Im going to give you what we call the individual energy audit. I believe everybody got it on the way in.

Does everybody have it? So, its 20 questions. What Id like you to do is Im going to read you each question and if the answer is true for you, Id like you to circle it. If the answer is kind of true, kind of not true, Id like you to treat it as a yes. If youre really having trouble deciding, I want you to imagine that your partner or your spouse is sitting on your shoulder and if you were to ask them is it true for you, what would they say? Okay? Were going to move through these fairly quickly. Okay, number one, I dont regularly get at least seven to eight hours of sleep and I often wake up feeling tired. Number two, I frequently skip breakfast or I settle for something that isnt particularly healthy. Number three, I dont do cardiovascular training at least three times a week and strength training at least twice a week. Number four, I dont take regular breaks during the day to renew and recharge. Five, I often eat lunch at my desk if I eat lunch at all. Six, I frequently find myself feeling irritable, impatient or anxious at work, especially when demand is high. Seven, I dont have enough time with my family and loved ones and when Im with them, Im not always really with them. Eight, I take too little time for the activities I most deeply enjoy. Nine, I rarely stop to express my appreciation to others or to savor and celebrate my accomplishments and blessings. Ten, I often feel that my life is just a relentless set of demands Im expected to meet and tasks that I have to complete. Eleven, I have difficulty focusing on one thing at a time and Im easily distracted during the day, especially by e-mail. Probably everybody should just circle that one. Twelve, I spend much of my time reacting to immediate demands rather than focusing on activities with longer-term value and leverage. Thirteen, I dont take enough time for reflection, strategizing and thinking creatively. Fourteen, I rarely have any time when my mind is quiet and free of thoughts. Fifteen, I often work on evenings and weekends and/or I rarely take an e-mail free vacation. Sixteen, I dont feel passionately committed to what I do. Seventeen, I spend too little time at work doing what I do best and enjoy most. Eighteen, There are significant gaps between what I say is important in my life and how I actually live. Nineteen, My decisions at work are often more influenced by

external demands than by a clear strong sense of my own purpose and 20, I dont invest enough time and energy in making a positive difference to others and/or in the world.

So, tally up your yes answers and if we could just take a quick poll. How many people scored ten or higher? Oh, the majority of the room. How many people scored 15 or higher? Okay. How many people scored ten or lower? Good. Five or lower? Okay. So, definitely the ten or higher group was the biggest. And just so you know, weve given the energy audit to tens of thousands of people across all different organizations and industries and the average score is about a 14. So, the good news is youre not alone and the other good news is theres something we can do about it quite easily. So, Im assuming that its safe to say that every yes answer your energy audit is a percentage of your overall energy thats being compromised. Would it also be safe to say that nothing on the audit came as a surprise to you? Is that true? These are things you generally know, right? So, if you know it would be better to have more energy and you know the behaviors that are not serving you very well, why dont we change?

Well, Im going to cut to the chase and maybe some of you are familiar with this story. It was actually a real experiment, but it was in the 1800s. Thankfully they dont do it anymore, but its a great metaphor. So, if you take a frog and you throw the frog in a pot of boiling water, what does the frog do? He jumps out. Its way too hot. If you take the same frog and you put him in a pot of room temperature water, what does he do? He stays. He swims. He gets comfortable. And then every so often, you just crank up the heat a tiny little bit. What does the frog do then? Right, he stays and he stays and adapts and he adapts so well that he cooks. So, how are you like the frog? How cooked are you? Or, another way of putting it is how hot is the water youre swimming in? Is the temperature heating up? So, similar to the frog, human beings are incredible adapters. Its one of the things we do extremely well. The only problem is one of the ways we adapt is we go numb. We stop feeling. So, a large part of this work is about waking up to the consequences of the choices that were making that arent serving us so well. Its also about waking up to the possibility that things could be different. So, sometimes we arent always as challenging. We dont challenge ourselves enough around the choices that we have, or the potential choices that we have. So, this is a very profound question and I dont really want you to even try to answer it right now and probably not even today, but what I would like you to do is take this question forward, carry it with you and periodically in the weeks and months ahead pull it out and think about it. Avoid going numb. Thats one of our big goals is getting people to wake up and be more intentional about their choices.

So, one of the other reasons why its so difficult to change is because we are profoundly creatures of habit. We love to know whats coming. We love doing the same thing over and over again. Why, because its not scary. Even if, and this is true certainly in the work I did with trauma, even if its a horrific situation, if its familiar to us, it just might be better than the unknown. So, we are really up against it in terms of change. Change is really hard. So, at the Energy Project, we want to approach change a little bit differently. So, typically when we think about change, we think about the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Thats where things like will power and discipline are stored. As it turns out, human beings, all of us, we just dont have a whole lot of will power and discipline. Its a very limited reservoir. So, think of New Years resolutions. So, how many of you made New Years resolutions? Okay, why not? I dont even think I saw

one hand. Why dont we do it? They dont last, right? So, we might be pretty good for a little while, but eventually they just dont last. So, most of us dont even bother any more. New Years resolutions rely on usually will power and discipline, just like diets do. So, thats why the diets that tend to work the best are the diets that tell you what you can eat instead of diets that say you have to resist this, resist that. Those are the diets that, again, after a couple of months, you might find yourself with a big bag of potato chips of whatever. So, we dont want to rely on this for change. Instead, we want to think about a different part of the brain, a much more primitive part of the brain, the basal ganglia. So, thats where habits are formed and stored in the brain and each time we repeat a behavior, its much like a tire tread that it gets a little bit deeper every time we do it and a little more likely that well do it again. So, thats what we want to access.

So, there are four principles of energy management. Im going to share two of them with you today. This is the first one, which is to manage our energy more efficiently, we must build positive rituals. Rituals are simply healthy habits. Thats how we use the word ritual. So, its a highly precise behavior that you repeat until it becomes automatic. So, how many of you brush your teeth? Yeah, okay, very good. How much energy do you put into brushing your teeth? Do you walk down the hall, you pass by a bathroom, you see your toothbrush and think, Oh, darn, tonight. Tonight, Im brushing. Its been three nights, but tonight Im doing it? Is that how it goes? No. We dont even think about it. I mean its different for our kids, but for us, we dont even think about it. Thats a ritual. So, thats the goal when we want to-- if you look at your energy audit and you pick one behavior that you might like to address, thats the goal. You want to make it very specific and repeat it until it becomes automatic. So, as it turns out, Aristotle had this all figured out thousands of years ago when he said this quote. So, he understood that whatever we repeat gets stronger for better and for worse unfortunately, but we want to use it to our benefit. So, its just like working out. If you lift weights, you know, with your biceps, well guess what, your biceps will be stronger. Its true across all dimensions of our energy.

So, theres some keys that Im going to take you through that are the keys to building rituals that have a higher likelihood for success. Target one or two behaviors at a time. So, we really want you to start small and with audiences like this of high achievers, this sometimes is actually pretty difficult. So, you have to resist the temptation to take on a lot. Wed rather have you take on far less than you even think is possible. That way, if you succeed you can build on it. The second, be as specific as possible. Theres a couple of reasons for this. One is that you could be more accountable. You can measure it. Its very clear whether youre successful or not. The other is that it requires much more intentionality if you break your ritual. So, for example, if your ritual is to go to the gym twice a week and thats your ritual, very low likelihood of success because guess what? Every day, theres always going to be something else you could do instead and then it gets to be Sunday and you realize, Oops, I didnt go to the gym this week. If you say Im going on Tuesday afternoons at 5:00, Im going to take an hour spin class, Tuesday comes, its 4:45, its a lot harder to break it, but if you do break it its with a greater degree of awareness than if its not specific. The next is focus on doing rather than avoiding. Thats the whole piece about will and discipline that I just spoke about. Expecting resistance; change is hard no matter how you slice it. If you walk into it knowing that youre going to hit some bumps along the way and you tell yourself, It will happen and when it happens Im going to know its a normal part of the process, its a little bit easier than if it kind of blind sides you. It can be more devastating.

And lastly, share your commitments to create accountability. This is very important. The more people you tell the more likelihood that youll stick with it. But, certain people are really good accountability partners, like husbands and wives and partners. Children are really good. Assistants are really good. My only tip here is be very specific about how you want to be held accountable, particularly with your spouse because it can really backfire. You think you want them to hold you accountable and then when they do its like argh. So, tell them how to do it.

Okay, so this is our next energy management principle, which says to sustain our energy we must balance expenditure with recovery. So, this seems painfully obvious. However, it is both counterintuitive and its countercultural. Okay, so its countercultural and its counterintuitive. So, countercultural, what gets celebrated more, bigger, faster, harder, right? The idea that not doing is an effective strategy for getting more done is just a difficult one to wrap our brains around. But, no great performer would ever dream of working continuously. If you think about it in terms of the planet, its obvious. We all know that in terms of the earths resources, if we continue to burn them down at the current rate without renewing them, were going to run out. So, its true for the planet. Its true for us. We need regular refueling and maintenance in order to perform at our best.

Its also counterintuitive. So, when your work pile is going up, what do we do? We think, I am going to hunker down. Im going to burn the midnight oil. Im not going to get up until I make a dent in this pile. Actually, thats the worst way. Thats the worst strategy to get it done because as each hour goes on, if you think about energy as a tank, your physical energy is diminishing. Your ability to focus is diminishing over the hours. So, your quality of work is going down with each hour whereas if you intermittently refuel your energy along the way, youre coming back to it over and over again fresh and able to get more done. So, because we dont renew regularly, what happens is we go flat out running to flat out collapsing and theres not much in between. So, I dont know if this feels familiar and sometimes we rely on external sources to either get us up or to calm us down. So, theres nothing wrong with a cup of coffee and theres certainly nothing wrong with a drink, but if youre over relying on external sources to either rev you up or to calm you down, its a good indication that youre not managing your internal energy well enough. So, thats just a little rule of thumb.

So, we are rhythmic creatures. We are design to pulse. Everything about our bodies and our brains is rhythmic. We make the faulty assumption that we can operate like machines, that we can work continuously, running multiple programs at the same time. Were not designed that way. We just dont work that way. We function at our best when we move rhythmically between expenditure and recovery. So, think, heaven forbid, if you went to visit someone in the hospital and their EKG was like this. How are they doing? Very, very, very bad, right? If its like this were happy. Why? Thats health. Health is a wave. So, if nothing else, I want you to remember that health is a wave between expenditure and recovery. Thats health. Flat lining is the opposite of health. Its death. The only thing in terms of energy that you want to be a continuous flat line is your glucose levels. Other than that, everything else, a wave. So, make waves. Make waves in your day. Make waves in your life.

Now, the particular rhythm of the wave is the ultradian rhythm and this is an internal biological rhythm and it was discovered by sleep researchers and were all very familiar with the 90 to 120 minute sleep cycle where we cycle through the four stages of sleep. As it turns out, theres a 90 to 120 minute, closer to 90 we think, rhythm that we cycle through all throughout the day and its called the ultradian rhythm. So, every 90 minutes we move from high arousal to we dip down into a physiological trough. When we hit the trough, our body sends us signals. If youve been sitting for a while, you might start to get antsy. You might need to use the restroom. If youve been standing up for a while, you might want to sit. But, when our bodies send us these signals at work what do we do? Ignore them. Yes, keep going. Grab a cup of coffee. Grab a muffin. So, we want you to start paying attention to the rhythm and honoring it because this is the way youre designed to perform at your best.

So, instead of grabbing a coffee or a muffin at that 90 minute mark, what wed like you to do is think about a healthy form of recovery and physical recovery is extremely simple. Its moving if youve been sitting. Its sitting and resting if youve been moving. Its eating something healthy, drinking something, or going outside and getting air and sunlight. Thats it. So, we want you to begin to incorporate that into your day. The final paradigm shift is we want you to be like a sprinter as opposed to a marathoner. So, what I mean by that is when a marathoner runs a race, the gun goes off and the marathoner does what? They pace themselves, right? Its a really long race. They cant see the finish line. If they ran full out, theyd probably drop like a stone before the end of the race. What about the sprinter? The gun goes off, full speed ahead, all in 100%. How do they do that? Its a very short race. They can see the finish line. So, we want you to think of your life or your work day as a series of sprints. So, when youre in, you are all in 100%, fully engaged because youve created clear stopping points all along the way during which you recover. You prepare for your next sprint.

So, you run your series of sprints throughout the day. So, its getting rid of the gray area. When youre working, youre fully engaged in work, but when youre not working, youre fully disengaged and the gray area, everybody knows what Im talking about - when youre out to dinner and youre checking the BlackBerry or at your kids game or, you know, or working late into the evening at home. We want to reserve distinct periods of time that are only about you recouping your energy so that you can get up the next day fully fueled. Okay. Im out of time, but thank you and if youre interested at all more in the work, you can visit our Web site, theenergyproject.com and my colleague Steve and I are going to hang around if anybody wants to chat or has questions. So, thank you.

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