MODULE 1
Are You on Fire? Managing Energy Not Time is The Key to High Performance
Objective: To understand and begin putting into practice the key principles of managing energy.
This module provides an overview of the four energy management principles that lie at the heart of our work:
Participants leave this module committed to two initial rituals -- one focused on expanding a specific capacity, the other designed to insure more regular renewal and recovery.
SESSION 2
Taking Stock. Taking Control: Fueling Energy From the Inside Out
Objective: To understand the power and responsibility of every individual to cultivate, sustain and communicate the energy that fuels sustained high performance.
This module focuses on helping participants to face the facts in their lives and to take more responsibility for the stories they tell about those facts. Aided by narrative 360 feedback from colleagues, participants first illuminate the truth about how they are currently managing their energy across all four dimensions. Next, they learn how to experiment with different lenses through which to view the facts of their lives and to interpret them in ways that are more empowering and realistically optimistic. The ultimate aim of this module is to help participants shift responsibility for way they experience the world from outside themselves to inside themselves, and from playing the role of victim to becoming masters of their own destiny. In the process, immense energy is freed for more productive use.
SESSIONS 3-6
Charge! And Recharge: Expanding and Refueling the Tank.
Each of the following four sessions focuses on helping participants to build and regularly renew capacity in one of the four key dimensions. The principle of interval training pushing beyond our ordinary limits, followed by deliberate recovery and renewal lies at the heart of any successful effort to expand and sustain capacity. In each of the four dimensions, translating specific intentions into sustainable new behaviors depends on building energy management rituals -- highly specific behaviors that become automatic over time.
SESSION 3
Stoking the Fire: Managing Physical Energy
Objective: To help participants increase and sustain the fundamental level of energy necessary to drive any action or behavior.
Without sufficient physical energy, all other dimensions of energy are compromised. More so than in any dimension, physical capacity decreases with age, and dramatically so in the absence of systematic training. Participants in this module are helped to understand the key drivers of high physical energy and to design practical rituals that fuel it. The focus is on fitness, nutrition, sleep and rest, but also on breathing, body language and personal presence.
SESSION 4
Flexible Focus: Managing Mental Energy
Objective: To help participants cultivate the flexible focus necessary to sustain high performance.
In the face of rising demand, our focus is increasingly fractured. The highest levels of task-based performance depend on the capacity for narrow focus -- engaging fully in one challenge at a time. Multitasking -- the most common coping mechanism -- means being partially engaged in several activities at once and never fully engaged in any of them. In this module, participants learn to systematically build back the muscle of absorbed concentration. Open focus depends on the capacity to disengage fully from logical, analytic thinking. Participants learn to create the appropriate space for the sort of big-picture reflection that is often sacrificed to more urgent priorities.
SESSION 5
From Survival to Abundance: Managing Emotional Energy
Objective: To help participants cultivate the positive emotions that serve optimal performance.
When people are asked to describe how they feel when they are performing at their best, they invariably use words such as happy, optimistic, confident, positive, committed and passionate. Under high demand, however, they often to default to survival-based emotions such as frustration, impatience, anger, fear, defensiveness and resentment. These feelings are energy draining, toxic to the body and infectious. This module focuses on helping people to exercise more conscious control over their emotional states and the resulting behaviors
SESSION 6
Beyond Self-Interest: Spiritual Energy
Objective. To help participants draw on spiritual energy through a commitment to deeply held values and a mission larger than themselves.
Much of our everyday behavior is expedient, responding to immediate demands at the expense of our long-term sustainability and well being. We become more positively energized when we can move from a preoccupation with our own needs to also serving a mission beyond ourselves. Building rituals that keep us connected to universal values such as integrity, compassion, generosity and courage offsets our tendency to negative emotions and to expedient behaviors and generates the inner experience of well-being that best serves performance.