By tapping into our three most primal and enduring drives — the search for meaning, confrontation of the shadow, and the use of rituals — this 2004 classic, The Power of Full Engagement, leads to better performance and drives the active reader towards personal fulfillment. Whether you are facing an existential crisis, lackluster performance, or just looking to sharpen your competitive edge, this well researched and easy follow book is a must read.
The Hero
“The ‘hero’s journey’ is grounded in mobilizing, nurturing, and regularly renewing our most precious resource — energy — the service of what matters most.”
The hero’s journey illustrates our search for meaning. Rooted some of our oldest surviving epics, The Aeneid, The Odyssey, and Beowulf, this monomyth continues to drive some of the biggest Hollywood franchises from The Wizard of Oz, to Star Wars, to Finding Dory. The search for meaning, the hero’s journey, the quest for a purpose driven life plays on our collective consciousness. The Power of Full Engagement serves as the inciting incident as well as the guiding hand to help us balance our energy, direct change to serve our values, and lead a fulfilling life.
“To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.”
To drive us in our journey, the authors advocate three part structure:
- Define Purpose
- Face the Truth
- Take Action
In the first step: to find your purpose, start by writing down your five values, right now.
“To be meaningful a value must influence the choices we make in our everyday lives. Professing one set of beliefs and living by another is not just hypocritical, but also evidence of disconnection and misalignment.”
This is important to keep in mind when crafting a vision statement either at the individual or corporate level.
After you write down your values, answer the following questions:
· Jump ahead to the end of your life. What are the three most important lessons you have learned and why are they so critical?
· Think of someone that you deeply respect. Describe three qualities in this person that you most admire.
· Who are you at your best?
· What one-sentence inscription would you like to see on your tombstone that would capture who you really were in your life?
The Shadow
“It is both a danger and a delusion when we become too identified with any singular view of ourselves. We are all a blend of light and shadow, virtue and vices. Accepting our limitations increase the amount of positive energy.”
The Power of Full Engagement draws on a second essential drive and that’s the shadow projection, it’s the opposite of facing the truth. Instead of facing the truth, we create our own shadows. The shadow describes those aspects of ourselves that we split off because they violate our self-image. Whatever we fail to acknowledged or notice, we tend to act out. That’s the danger of the shadow.
“If the truth is to set us free, facing it cannot be a one-time event. Rather, it must become a practice. Like all of our “muscles,” self-awareness withers from disuse and deepens when we push past our resistance to see more of the truth.”
Chapter Nine of The Power of Full Engagement helps work you through facing your shadow — here are some more questions you can answer right now:
1. How closely does your everyday behavior match your values and serve your mission? Where are the disconnects?
2. How fully are you embodying your values and vision for yourself at work? At home? In your community? Where you are falling short?
3. How effectively are the choices that you are making physically — your habits of nutrition, exercise, sleep and the balance of stress and recovery — serving your key values?
4. How consistent with your values is your emotional response in any given situation? Is it different at work than it is at home, and if so, how?
5. To what degree do you establish clear priorities and sustain attention to tasks? How consistent are those priorities with what you?
The power in facing the truth lies in the confrontation with the shadow. The part of us that we’ve cast away and project onto others. This a powerfully negative drive inside our psyche. Taking the time to honestly and thoroughly go through chapter nine, helps you face your shadow. Even a little progress in the area goes a long way to freeing up positive energy for execution in chapter ten, which focuses on creating rituals towards your vision.
The Ritual
“Creating positive ritual is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.”
To take action you need rituals. The difference between routine and ritual is the meaning attached the ritual and too often societies fail to maintain meaningful rituals — not only initiatory rituals which help bridge the gap between generations, genders, and leadership, but ongoing rituals which preserve that energy, keeping us on track and in balance. By themselves, our wills can’t answer the daily demands of our hero’s journey — the purpose driven life.
“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
Think about how many calculations a computer can make. Think about the computing power needed in today’s cars, today’s phones, even our books now on tablets. A simple Google search has two billion lines code, flying to the moon requires 400,000. Just like in the b2b world where we constantly seek automation, in our own lives — we need to automate as much as possible. How many lines of code can we write into our day to day to routine?
Our dual challenge is to hold fast to our rituals when the pressures in our lives threaten to throw us off track, and to periodically revisit and change them so that they remain meaningful.
“Creating positive ritual is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.”
The Power
The Power of Full Engagement values energy over time. It offers a true new paradigm of self-directed change. These are the principles:
· Energy not time is the key currency
· Energy has four equally important dimensions — body, emotion, mind and spirit
· Oscillate between stress and rest, like a weightlifter or interval runner.
· Systematically push your limits.
· Rituals hold the key.
The genius of the work is that it taps into three innately human drives — the search for meaning, avoidance of the truth, and the power of rituals.
Each of the drives is present in the define-truth-act model. It’s a model that sounds almost axiomatic. As if you were planning any project — what’s the purpose of the project, where are we now, how to do we get there — but like functioning rituals, it’s the meaning attached to it that gives it is full power, reading The Power of Full Engagement, working through the probing questions, analysing the case studies, and developing your own define-truth-act model will lead to the meaning you need for fulfilling accomplishments.
“From what we get in life, we make a living. From what we give, we make a life” — Arthur Ashe
