The Corporate Athlete®
An interview with Tony Schwartz
by Raz Ingrasci, President
 Best-selling
writer Tony Schwartz (Hoffman Advisory Council), has co-authored a
new book: “The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy,
Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal”
(The Free Press). Tony has been on staff with Newsweek, the New
York Times, New York Magazine and Fast Company, and he has written
for numerous other magazines. He is the author of four books, including
“What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America”
(Bantam). Tony also co-created The Full Engagement Training Program
to help people increase their capacity at all levels – physically,
emotionally, mentally and spiritually. For more information go to
www.fullengagement.com
Raz Ingrasci: Your new book, The Power
of Full Engagement, is a fantastic complement to the Hoffman Process
and I hope that every graduate will read it.
Tony Schwartz: I am thrilled that you feel that
way.
RI: One of the most provocative things you say
is that “We are oscillatory beings in an oscillatory universe.
Rhythmicity is our inheritance.” That is a radical notion
because most of us live as if life is linear.
TS: We live in a culture that celebrates the relentless
expenditure of energy. Unfortunately, that has very destructive
effects in people’s lives. We are healthiest when we move
rhythmically between stress and recovery. Too much stress without
intermittent recovery leads to break down, burn out, sickness, and
even death. Too little stress leads to atrophy and weakness. The
balance is to be found in honoring the oscillatory rhythms that
define us.
We breathe in a rhythmic fashion. Our heart rates wave rhythmically.
Our brains literally wave between high speed and low speed electrical
activity and our blood pressure rises and falls constantly. The
problem is that we tend to override these rhythms. The only way
to cultivate a healthy life at all levels of what the Hoffman work
calls the Quadrinity and we call Full Engagement is by consciously
building balanced movement between energy expenditure and energy
recovery.
My partner Jim Loehr spent his early career studying performance
in athletes. He discovered that the difference between the great
and near-great tennis players was most evident in how they used
the time between points – and specifically how effectively
they recovered. The great players all used those 15 to 20 seconds
very systematically to cool down and renew energy. The result was
that they were able to perform at higher levels for longer. This
was a stunning insight. No one had ever recognized before that the
“time between points” – recovery time —
is actually critical to sustained high performance. The same is
true in all sports, and we have found that it is also true in people’s
everyday lives. People who spend and recover energy rhythmically
throughout the day not only live healthier and more balanced lives,
they are also more engaged and more productive.
RI: Our oscillatory nature literally means we’re
alive.
TS: That’s right, it’s not some ethereal
New Age notion. It’s rooted in the reality of our everyday
lives. For this most recent book I was faced with a deadline that
forced me to write it in an incredibly short period of time –
essentially three months. The natural inclination would have been
to sit down and push through long days of continuous work, grinding
it out. What I actually did was to get up in the morning very early
and work in 90-minute blocks – totally focused and engaged,
no distractions. Then I would take a 15-30 minute break to eat,
or exercise, or hang out with my family. I did four of these 90-minute
writing segments a day. That was it. I was actually able to complete
a first draft of the book in 70 days – nearly four times faster
than I had ever written a book in my life.
From the first day I began working with Jim to develop this model,
I thought of myself as our primary guinea pig. I have tested every
theory and practice we have come up with in the crucible of my own
life. We’re not interested in producing an elegant model that
can’t be applied.
RI: One of your central themes is that energy
capacity not only diminishes with overuse and underuse but also
with misuse. With regard to your Dynamics of Engagement (next page),
what we’re doing at Hoffman is helping people shift from the
negative, unproductive side to the positive side so people are using
their energy more effectively.
TS: That makes sense. Thinking of how we live
our lives in terms of energy has proved to be immensely useful.
We each have a quantity of energy from low to high and a quality
of energy, along a spectrum from negative to positive (see above).
The result is four kinds of energy. Low negative energy is associated
with hopelessness, helplessness and grief. High negative energy
ranges from anger and frustration to fear and anxiety. High positive
energy is what we call Fully Engaged – firing on all cylinders.
Low positive energy is what we call “strategically disengaged.”
That’s where you’re purposefully renewing energy and
recovering. The negative forms of energy on the left side of the
quadrant are toxic, inefficient, and extremely costly. We call this
defense spending. The more energy you spend in the service of self-protection
and survival, the less that you have available to spend on growth
and expansion. It’s that simple.
RI: Our negative emotions are storehouses of unlimited
energy and wisdom if we can only recognize and work through them.
TS: We think of a negative emotion as an alarm
bell. It’s a message that some need is not being met and that
you’re not feeling safe. The challenge in the face of negative
emotions is not to deny them, but to recognize and address them
– and ultimately to access the high positive experience of
challenge, opportunity, and adventure. The less time you spend in
the negative quadrants, the richer life becomes.
RI: I like your emphasis on the spiritual as the
energetic base of your purpose in life. Everyone says they want
to be more “spiritual,” but that state is often misunderstood
as passive and unengaged.
TS: We’ve done something rather daring by
so freely using the word “spiritual” with our corporate
clients. The associations they make with the word are often negative.
What we’re really talking about is the energy of the human
spirit – the uniquely powerful source of fuel for action that
people access when they connect to deeply held values and a clear
sense of purpose. There are other levels of spiritual development,
but this simple definition is very useful in everyday life.
In the end, just defining values won’t take you very far.
That’s only the first step. What you really want to do in
life is transform values into virtues. Virtues are values in action.
Our deepest challenge is to create alignment between what we say
is important and how we live our lives every day.
RI: Sometimes people don’t understand that
getting rid of negative behaviors doesn’t necessarily lead
to full engagement.
TS: We deeply believe in the power of practice
and training – in Aristotle’s notion that “we
are what we repeatedly do.” Our legacy is working with world-class
athletes, and we have found that what is true physically tends to
be true in all dimensions. It is possible to strengthen a muscle
such as a bicep or a tricep, but it is equally possible to systematically
train the muscles of empathy, compassion, integrity, even confidence.
The catch is that in order to build strength, it is necessary to
push past your comfort zone.
We don’t get weaker primarily by virtue of aging, but rather
because we stop training actively. We now know, for example, that
an 80 year-old person can launch a moderate weight-training program
three times a week and double or triple his or her strength in a
very short time. If that’s the case, why shouldn’t it
apply to building muscles in every dimension? Rather than becoming
weaker, more rigid, and more easily depleted as we grow older, we
can in fact become stronger, more flexible, and more skillful in
our management of energy across all dimensions.
RI: Tony, you seem more fully engaged, grateful,
and grounded than ever in your own life. What role did Hoffman play
in all that?
TS: Well, the first thing it did was make me more
forgiving of all the places where I still fall short. My experience
at Hoffman was extremely powerful. I remember it vividly as a very
simple and pure opening of the heart. There had been so many ways
in which I was shut down, self-protective, and fearful of intimacy.
When I left Hoffman, I was convinced that the opening I’d
experienced would prove to be permanent. Unfortunately, that didn’t
happen. In the real world, my defenses returned and the work of
opening my heart has continued to this day, with ups and downs.
The most unexpected value I got from the Hoffman work was a fierce
resolve to use the rest of my life in a way that I could feel proud
of and passionate about – regardless of whether I made as
much money, or whether other people approved of my choices. In retrospect,
something in the Hoffman experience touched me deeply and made me
say, “I must follow my heart and my soul no matter what.”
It drained away all my ambivalence about how to spend the rest of
my life. I feel more fully engaged today than ever and it’s
because my values and my behavior feel aligned. I’ve spent
the past four years helping to build a business and learning a whole
new set of skills. It hasn’t always been smooth or easy. Nonetheless,
I can count on one hand the number of days that I haven’t
woken up feeling positive and excited to get to work. I feel immensely
grateful for the opportunity to do work that I love and believe
in so deeply.
RI: What role does the body play in the broader
transformative process?
TS: Our grounding in the physical differentiates
what we do from most other kinds of transformative work. Physical
energy is fundamental – without it nothing else is possible.
That gives us a starting place that is relatively uncomplicated
and unthreatening – helping people to build their physical
energy by changing their behaviors around eating, sleeping, working
out, and getting recovery.
These changes can be incredibly empowering for people. They’re
also a way of launching a change process that can become a model
for building muscles at the higher and more complex levels of our
experience. What we’re providing is an opening to a training
process that needs to be lifelong.
RI: I feel the same way about Hoffman. It’s
an opening to a new possibility for life.
TS: I agree and I think that the work we do is
a great fit with Hoffman’s mission. If you’re inclined
to take our training, the Hoffman Process can either serve as a
way to deepen the experience after our training – or to create
an opening that will subsequently make what we teach more powerful.
What we do especially well, I think, is to help give people very
practical tools for making changes that last in all four dimensions
of their lives – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
RI: Your method is built around something you
call “positive rituals.”
TS: Sustainability is the real issue in change.
We are creatures of habit and for the most part what we did yesterday
is what we will do today. Our own experience – and a growing
body of scientific literature – suggests that people have
very limited stores of will and discipline. Most of our energy is
consumed by our existing habits, and by our reactions to demands
in the environment. If we want to introduce new behaviors in our
lives, we can’t count on will and discipline to make them
happen.
The key, we’ve found, is to define behaviors that you want
to build into your life in a highly precise way, with very specific
timing, focusing all of your limited will and discipline on just
one thing at a time. Over time, the behaviors tend to become automatic.
We all have rituals in our lives, which are so well established
that we don’t even think about them. Brushing your teeth every
night is the most obvious one. We’re trying to build those
kinds of routines around behaviors that people think are impossible
to significantly change – everything from compassion to integrity
to generosity to patience to realistic optimism. I’ve seen
this succeed in a dozen areas of my own life, so I believe in it
very deeply.
The reason that rituals have a bad taste for some people is that
they’re associated with rote behaviors — often in religious
settings. A ritual is meant to be the expression of a deeply held
value. Without that connection, rituals become empty, devoid of
meaning. Rituals stay rich and powerful so long as they are fueled
by deeply held values.
RI: In the end, your work is aimed at helping
ordinary people to live extraordinary lives. Is that a fair assessment?
TS: Yes. The truth is that we’re all ordinary.
Each of us has flaws, none of us are superhuman. But being ordinary
really isn’t acceptable, is it? Are you satisfied to be an
ordinary parent to your children? Are you satisfied to do ordinary
work? Do you want to be an ordinary friend? Do you want to make
an ordinary contribution to the world? Most of us want more from
ourselves than that. The only way to turn the ordinary into the
extraordinary is to embrace life – to become fully engaged
in all dimensions. That’s the work the Hoffman Process is
doing, and that’s the work we’re doing. It’s humbling
and challenging and very exciting, all at the same time.
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