Your Personal Energy & Productivity

June 7, 2010

Interview with Tony Schwartz, author of the book The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance

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Mike Carruthers:
You’re energy is the fuel that gets you through the day, but here’s the problem…

Tony Schwartz:
We are really good at spending energy and it’s the thing that gets valued in this world, and we tend not to take seriously the importance of renewing or restoring our energy.

Tony Schwartz, author of the book The Way We're Working Isn't Working, says you can restore your energy throughout the day and it starts with breathing.

All it is is this; you breathe in through your nose to a count of 3 and out through your mouth to a count of 6. If you do that for 30 to 60 seconds, the body will reset itself. It will reduce the level of stress hormones in your blood stream dramatically and it will put you back into a state of greater equilibrium.

As you go through your day things always come up that cause you to react with negative emotions.

And the problem with negative emotions is that while we can keep working when we’re feeling them, we’re less effective when we do. So we have something we call the golden rule of triggers. A trigger is that thing that pushes you into negative emotion and the golden rule is this, whatever you feel compelled to do when you’re triggered, whatever you feel compelled to do – don’t.

Because Tony says those negative emotions will likely drive you to doing something you’ll later regret.

And that is not a good way to make decisions. In fact it’s not making a decision it’s letting the decision happen to you.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here