Our Renewable Resource

Solving Our Personal Energy Crisis

by Teya Skae, June 01, 2009

In our increasingly pressured lives, people are craving more time and energy to get more things done, or even just to get through their daily routines. In fact, time and energy are now commodities. Buying “time share” holidays or trading options to achieve the most profitable outcome in buying or selling commodities is based on the concept of buying, negotiating, or extending time. But can we buy energy?

The answer is probably. Energy bars and meditation, yoga, or exercise can boost one’s energy. Yet this is clearly not sustaining enough, as most people still crave energy despite their hard-earned efforts at increasing it.

Why is this so? If we understand that time is outside of ourselves and energy is within us all, we begin to understand that energy is our own currency for living. Without energy, we can’t perform and do much in our life, even if we can buy time.

As philosophical as it may sound, this realization is very practical and has huge implications in the way we use and value our most vital resource—our energy.

The old paradigm for getting things done emphasized “time management”; now the human potential movement sweeping across the planet (so much so that it now underpins leadership training programs for Google staff) takes as its basic template for living your life, the need to balance your energy. So the new paradigm is all about energy and how we use it, and, most importantly, renew it.

But the “new paradigm” is not really new; its foundation lies in the wisdom of the ancient texts of Upanishads and the Vedas, and traditional Chinese medicine, a 5,000-year-old system for living in harmony. All of these bodies of ancient wisdom recognize that energy is the fundamental principle of life, and if it is not harnessed or renewed we face major struggles, symptoms, and imbalances.

It might sound a bit nebulous, yet energy transcends time, space, and dimension, as quantum physicists would attest. Simply put, when you manage energy, you are, in fact, managing time.

In the New York Times bestseller The Power of Full Engagement (2003, Free Press) co-authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (corporate coaches to top-ranked professional athletes and corporations) demonstrate how managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance, as well as health, happiness, and life balance.

As the authors and management leaders summarize: “We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We’re wired up, but we’re melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution.

“The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. This fundamental insight has the power to revolutionize the way you live your life.”

The key to sustaining high performance in any area of life is to make the experience engaging and enjoyable, so it can be re-created again and again without burning us out. While our customary busyness may have the appeal of suggesting high productivity or being successful and in demand, it can also mean avoidance and energy drain. To renew our energy, we must find time for rest, relaxation, fun and play, emotional connectedness, mental relaxation, and spiritual realignment every day and in short bursts.