Susan Scott’s previous books are about keeping mentally and physically strong: what we refer to as resilience – the capacity to cope with everyday challenges and remain well. There is one missing ingredient, though, if you want to ensure true performance and success, and that’s energy. As we hear more and more, ‘you can’t pour from an empty glass’.
Energy is what helps us get more done, more easily and to a better standard. It is our oomph and joie de vivre. Our motivation and creativity. It is the very fuel in our tank and without it we’re not going anywhere.
Stress, anxiety, money worries, managing excessive demands, overwork, relationship issues, working long hours, job insecurity, all take their toll on our energy levels. ‘I wish I had more energy’ is frequently heard. ‘Why am I so tired and exhausted all the time?’ is a classic question. There is a trend in the workplace to do more with less ‘energy’ – as a lack of energy has the potential to be catastrophic.
Organisations work to performance management procedures based on knowledge, skills, experience and behaviours. They are obsessed with engagement, believing that it’s an engaged workforce that improves the bottom line. Yet they never consider energy, that ingredient of human capacity, as the most important driver of performance.
Energy is life itself and what drives energy is well-being. Energy is not solely about nutrition, sleep and exercise – although these are important – but also the impact the mind can have on your energy and how mental health can determine how well you are firing on all cylinders.
Everyone with a mobile phone plugs it in at night to charge it up – why is it that we never think about our own batteries and how much better we’d feel, and how much better our performance would be, if we recharged ourselves?
To summarise. Energy is the foundation of resilience and performance: without it all the skills, knowledge and experience in the world count for nothing. It has the power to take an ordinary person to extraordinary. It has a positive impact on behaviour and performance in the workplace, on the bottom line for the organisation, but most of all, on the health and well-being of individuals. It is an imperative.
How to optimise your personal energy
This is the book to tell you how to:
- Stop feeling tired all the time
- Enhance your energy, vitality and sustainability
- Fuel the energy-making powerhouses in your body
- Avoid energy slumps during the day
- Sleep better and wake revitalised
- Use energy to focus, concentrate and deliver to a higher standard
- Improve your mood and outlook on life
- Improve your resilience to manage your demanding life
It will show you how to have the capacity to live life to the full mentally and physically – a mind and body approach.
Using theory, activities, questionnaires and case studies, each section will be explained in a way that guides the reader to make the changes necessary to recharge their batteries and keep them topped up going forward.
