Be Excellent at Anything by Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy Book Summary

 Mental and Educational Health  No Responses »
Oct 022012
 

If you want to consistently achieve excellence within all facets of your life while maintaining a balanced and satisfying lifestyle then I suggest you purchase Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To Transforming the Way We Work and Live in which this summary is collaborated from!

Chapter 1 – More and More, Less and Less

The way we’re working isn’t working, in our own lives or for organisations.  The relentless urgency that characterises most corporate cultures undermines thoughtful deliberation, creativity, engagement, and sustainable high performance.

  • The primary value exchange between most employers and employees is time for money.  It’s a think, one-dimensional transaction that leaves both sides feeling unsatisfied.
  • Rather than trying to get more out of people, organisations are better served by investing more in them and meeting their multidimensional needs in order to fuel greater engagement and more sustainable high performance.
  • Human being needs four sources of energy to operate at their best: physical (sustainability), emotional (security), mental (self-expression), and spiritual (significance).
  • It’s not how much time we invest into our work that determines our productivity but rather the value we produce during the hours we work.
  • We’re not meant to operate in the same way machines do:  at high speeds, for long period of time, running multiple programs at the same time.  Human beings are designed to pulse between the expenditure and the intermittent renewal of energy. Continue reading »
 Posted by at 6:04 pm

The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz Book Summary

 Mental and Educational Health  No Responses »
Jun 292012
 

You can purchase The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal from Amazon.com here!

 

Chapter 1 – Fully Engaged: Energy, Not Time, Is Our Most Precious Resource

- Managing energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.  Performance is grounded in the skilful management of energy.

- Great leaders are stewards of organisational energy.  They begin by effectively managing their own energy.  As leaders, they must mobilise, focus, invest, channel, renew and expand the energy of others.

- Full Engagement is the energy state that best serves performance.

  • Principle 1:  Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
  • Principle 2:  Because energy diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
  • Principle 3:  To build capacity we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
  • Principle 4:  Positive energy rituals – high specific routines for managing energy – are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

- Making change that lasts requires a three-step process:  Define Purpose, Face the Truth and Take Action. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 4:22 pm

What Causes Rage: The Biology of Anger and How to Keep Your Cool – Part 2 of 2

 Social and Emotional Health  No Responses »
Mar 302012
 

In the previous article I talked about the types of anger (Primitive and Calculated), the biology of anger (what goes on behind the scenes in the brain and body), how anger builds upon itself and when anger is useful and when it IS NOT!

I would like to finish off this series with the final section regarding how to keep your cool in tense anger-ridden situations so that you don’t let the Primitive Anger take over and cause you to take actions you will regret!  There is nothing beneficial about having anger control your life and I want to help you take control back.

Awareness of Your Anger

Before any of the following techniques and methods can be used to keep your cool, the one essential skill required is the ability to RECOGNISE your anger early on in the rage build-up cycle.  This may come easier to some than others, and can be improved with practice.  Being able to recognise and identify your emotions is a handy skill in general, but it becomes much more important when involving prevention of anger because, if you wish to challenge angry thoughts, you must recognise early on that you are angry.  This is because, as explained earlier in the series, your anger BUILDS UPON anger until you reach a point of rage – and when you’re in a state of rage THERE IS VERY LITTLE YOU CAN DO to balm the anger.  Therefore you need to step on the initial sparks before the fuse runs out and all hell breaks loose!

A common (modified) technique used to become familiar with recognising your emotions, as explained in Martin Seligman’s book Authentic Happiness, is to set an alarm at a different time every day for a couple of weeks.  When this alarm goes off during Continue reading »

 Posted by at 4:02 pm

What Causes Rage: The Biology of Anger and How to Keep Your Cool – Part 1 of 2

 Social and Emotional Health  No Responses »
Mar 202012
 

Everyone experiences anger to some extent in their everyday life, be it someone cutting you off in traffic, a sibling purposely being noisy to annoy you or your house-mate leaving all of the washing up in the sink after insisting they would clean up (2 days ago) – even the Dalai Lama admits to becoming frustrated when a mosquito continues to relentlessly bite him.  Some people, though, find that their life tends to be CONTROLLED by this emotion and have rage consume their lives – and for these people their rage has a wholly negative affect on their general wellbeing, happiness and quality of life.  Even for the even-tempered person, they would be able to list off a number of times when rage has taken the driver’s seat of the brain resulting in an outburst or action that was not wholly thought through beforehand.

Today’s article series is aimed at both the off-the-wall rage-aholic, as well as the Average Joe who does not want to lose control in those rare passionate moments of destructive emotion.  This article will be covering topics such as the different types of anger that are generally experienced, the biology of why we experience rage, what contributes to the transition from anger to outright rage, when anger is useful and healthy (and when it is not), and finally some methods to keep your angry emotions in check.

Primitive Anger and Calculated Anger

There are two main types of anger that people experience, and if you are one to read my titles, you would know that I have named them Primitive and Calculated anger.  Just by the names alone you may already have an idea of the differences, and below I will outline an example of each type of anger and the biological “behind-the-scenes” occurrences that contribute Continue reading »

 Posted by at 2:07 pm
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