When Romy was a child, her daily schedule was almost as busy as that of many adults. Just like all the other children, she woke up early to go to school, came home for lunch, and took a little break before doing her homework. Afterwards, however, she would not go and play with her friends or watch TV: Romy usually had plans for the rest of the day, ranging from weekly ballet classes and music lessons to tennis. Later, in high school, she worked in a bookshop one afternoon per week and on Saturdays. During the winter, Sundays were reserved for the ski club, which meant getting up at five a.m. to catch the coach that took the whole group to a ski resort nearby. Oftentimes, dance performances or tennis games were scheduled for the weekend, too, and still Romy found time for her friends, for school, and other activities like reading.

How is that possible? And moreover, isn't it irresponsible of parents to overwhelm their children with scheduled activities while they are young, given that adulthood will come sooner than one will realize anyway? Looking back now, fifteen years later, Romy explains: "The happiest times in my life were those when I was actually most busy, but with different things that fulfilled me in a complementary way. There were also times when I was not engaged in so many things, basically just went to school, hung out with friends, and did some kind of sports once or twice a week. I got quite bored and grumpy, and ended up spending way too much time watching TV…" Romy seems like a fairly engaged person, but does that mean that the mere number of different tasks one engages in at a given stage of life can predict how happy one is?

Let me describe another example of an engaged person, the enthusiastic workaholic. The person might love her job even though it takes up most of her time, diminishing opportunities for socializing, being with her partner or family, for holidays, or merely reading a book. There is not much diversity involved in the kinds of tasks this person engages in, at least not beyond what the job itself can afford, but the person might still be very happy. This might be due to a mechanism involving strength of engagement: The more absorbed, involved, occupied and interested the workaholic is in her job, the more valuable it will be for her, even if he encounters obstacles that sometimes make everyday business a real pain (see Higgins, 2006). Yet, there is another kind of workaholic, the so-called non-enthusiastic type. This person also feels heavily compelled to work at his or her job, but does not necessarily like it (Bonebright, Clay, & Ankenmann, 2000). By the same principle that makes the enthusiastic workaholic adore her job, the non-enthusiastic workaholic may become increasingly repelled by it the more absorbed and occupied she becomes. This is because strength of engagement does not simply add to the positive value of things, but intensifies our subjective evaluation of any target object, be it positive or negative. Hence, if a person evaluates her job rather negatively in the first place, she will hate it even more the more she engages in it.

The difference between the two examples is the level at which engagement is defined: While the latter perspective defines engagement as a state that people are in while they are doing something (e.g., pursuing a goal, reading a book, solving a problem, or playing a tennis match), the former example describes what one may call an engaged life, which is quite a different thing, at least at the first glance. What exactly is an engaged life then? Isn’t it just a busy, hectic way of spending one’s time? Or does the diversity of activities one pursues on a regular basis also play a role? Again, there is no single answer, but as you will later see, all answers have something in common. For example, if one were to ask people on the street what engagement or being engaged means, one would be likely to find answers ranging from being involved, committed, willing to expend time and energy on things one values, a sense of caring, and taking responsibility for something. If one were to ask researchers in the domain of positive psychology, on the other hand, they would explain that an engaged life refers to making use of one’s positive traits, including strengths of character (e.g., originality, integrity, or courage) and talents, which in turn leads to higher engagement, absorption, and flow in life, and thus adds to subjective well-being (Duckworth, Steen, & Seligman, 2005). Similarly, Cantor and Anderson (1999) believe that vigorous participation in personally involving daily life activities increases effective funtioning and subjective wellbeing. Speaking to the diversity aspect of engagement, the expression “engaged lifestyle” has also been used to describe an active involvement in various domains of life, including mental, social, and physical activities, which acts as a buffer against cognitive decline as people are getting older (Bosma, van Boxtel, Ponds, Jelicic, Houx, Metsemakers, & Jolles, 2002). So engagement not only makes you like your job more (provided you consider it to be at least a little bit positive), but also makes people happier and smarter in old age? This is a compelling conjecture supported by preliminary evidence, but it requires some further thought and empirical testing. Remember, all the findings are based on a slightly different definition of engagement! However, what all of them have in common is a sense of involvement in current activities or in what life has to provide.

How can the average person make use of such findings in everyday life? Not everyone will be thrilled about reading dense scientific articles with lengthy passages on statistical methods and procedures. No, the “modern person” uses Google and searches online bookstores to find the information he or she needs. In fact, this is what I did as well in order to find out whether engagement as a term also exists in popular science and what context it is used in there. To my surprise, my search yielded an almost perfect hit, namely a book called “The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal” (Loehr & Schwartz, 2003) Wow. It sounds like a bestseller, doesn’t it? The title reminds you of those thousands of books out there that tell you how to live. One that both top-managers, commuting to their fancy office in lower Manhattan, and people who are fed up with checking off their to-do-lists merely to realize at the end of the day that they again did not manage to do everything they had planned would litteraly absorb. But the very title, proclaiming the power of engagement, also compelled me to take a closer look - I just couldn’t resist. And I became even more curious to learn more about the specific approach after I read the inside cover, which explains that the authors had originally designed their program to enhance the performance of athletes like Monica Seles and Jim Courier, but then adapted and applied it to other settings, mostly in the corporate world, where it has been greeted with great interest. Loehr and Schwarz promise their clients no less than to become “more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned” through following their program. Indeed, the book is full of sample cases that are used to illustrate the core principles and practical aspects of a typical training. So, how does it work? I will not go too much into detail here due to a lack of space and because it would become pointless to read the book. Moreover, it is certainly not the one and only way to lead an engaged life and it is written from a very Western perspective. Nonetheless, the authors make some intriguing points and suggestions that are easy to implement and apparently are capable of turning the workaholic who usually eats his or her sandwich in front of the computer screen rather than taking a proper break and feels the job leaves no time for family, friends, or other valued activities, into a more effective, socially apt, and generally more balanced person.

So, the first core principle established by the authors is that managing energy rather than time is the key to high performance. For instance, rather than cramming as much as possible into our daily schedule, we should pay attention to the quality of the time we spend on things. Trivial as it sounds, people often ignore this principle, putting efficiency at risk. The second principle contests that full engagement requires drawing energy from four dimensions of resources: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Thus, one should take care of building up strong capacities on each of those dimensions to become fully engaged instead of tripping over the slightest obstacle, becoming sick, depressed, stressed out, or left without a sense of why one is doing what one does. Third, energy capacity is assumed to decrease with overuse and under-use, so it’s not only those who never rest will trade off abilities to focus and invest effort in their personal goals or relationships, but also those who rest too much. They will become inactive and lose drive. The fourth principle is that capacities can be built up by pushing beyond one’s limits in a systematic way, similar to a muscle that can be trained by straining it systematically. And last but not least, the key to full engagement and sustained performance is the use of so called “positive energy rituals”, which are very specific routines implemented in daily life, helping to renew one’s energy periodically and then being able to expend it again. For instance, going for a five to ten-minute walk after an exhausting meeting helps to refresh one’s mind before going back to one’s desk and work more efficiently on the next task. Without such a break, it is difficult to switch to the next task and sustain concentration, because of depletion (see also Baumeister, Muraven, & Tice, 2000).

Easy and simple as this seems, many people don’t actually make use of such rituals, because they think they have too little time to lose or don’t know what they could do during breaks. Even calling a close friend or your grandma for a few minutes takes your mind off work and at the same time shows the person that you care for him or her. In fact, implementing positive rituals is an intriguingly useful thing to do, because after a while they become habits one does not have to think about anymore and that therefore do not require conscious effort anymore. Moreover, the idea of building up capacities by positive rituals goes in line with the assumption from positive psychology that a sound and solid basis of positive feelings, habits, and ways of thinking buffers against negative events and adds to the perceived quality of life. In practice, the training usually starts by assessing a person’s current behavioral patterns, physical health, personal strengths, deepest values and goals, as well as asking him or her about their most disturbing performance barriers at work, like lack of focus, negative thinking, little passion, or dissatisfying personal relationships. Then, the person together with the trainer comes up with a few positive rituals targeted to remove these barriers and build up the appropriate “muscle” to deal with them in a more effective way, as well as a concrete timeframe for when to implement each ritual. Again, making intentions specific or even framing them in an “if…then…” sentence increases the likelihood of actually performing a behavior (Gollwitzer, 1999). Overall, for people who are thinking about changing something in their daily lives because they don’t feel energized or dull, or those who want to make better use of their time, this book might be a fun and motivating companion with plenty of suggestions that are easy to try out. However, it should be noted that the authors use a rather Western approach that might make little sense to people from other cultures, and their claims are based on a mixture of years of practical experience and some scientific findings. For those with a preference for scientifically established “facts”, findings seem to suggest that in terms of improving the quality of life through engagement, the following things are important: First, you need to find things you value, let yourself become immersed in them, and you will value them even more. Second, make sure that you don’t completely neglect aspects of life that are highly important to you, like social relationships or activities you enjoy for intrinsic reasons. And third, allow yourself to renew energy capacities, for example with physical activity or rest.

Ultimately, a lot of empirical work is still necessary not only to reconcile the applied perspective with scientific views, but also to find out what engagement really is, what exactly it does to us, when engagement is useful and when it is necessary to disengage. How people are able to do that is yet another question to address, for if positive things become more valuable to us the more we engage in them, how would we ever try out something new? One thing is for sure: No matter how people arrive at feeling engaged and absorbed – either in their lives or in a specific activity – it is certainly not a bad thing at all.

References

Baumeister, R. F., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (2000). Ego depletion: A resource model of volition, self-regulation, and controlled processing. Social Cognition, 18, 130–150.

Bonebright, C. A., Clay, D. L., & Ankenmann, R. D. (2000). The relationship of workaholism with work-life conflict, life-satisfaction, and purpose of life. Journal of Counceling Psychology, 47, 469-477.

Bosma, H., van Boxtel, M. P. J., Ponds, R. W. H. M., Jelicic, M., Houx, P., Metsemakers, J., & Jolles, J. (2002). Engaged lifestyle and cognitive function in middle and old-aged, non-demented persons: A reciprocal association? [Engagierter Lebensstil und kognitive Funktion bei nicht-dementen Personen mittleren und höheren Alters: Eine reziprokale Assoziation?]. Zeitschrift für Gerontologie und Geriatrie, 35, 575-581.

Cantor, N., & Sanderson, C. A. (1999). Life Task Participation and Well-Being: The Importance of Taking Part in Daily Life. In: Kahnemann, D., Diener, E., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.). Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. New York: Russel Sage Foundation.

Duckworth, A. L., Steen, T. A., Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Positive psychology in clinical practice. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 1, 629-651.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54, 493-503.

Higgins, E. T. (2006). Value from hedonic experience and engagement. Psychological Review, 113, 439-460.

Loehr, J., & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. New York: Free Press.