"Leadership is the process of transforming deep personal energies - internal drivers - into extraordinary interpersonal results. The person who recognizes, accesses, and develops those drivers will first be wholly empowered and fulfilled on the personal level and then, and only then, profoundly effective as a leader of people in today’s high velocity, highly complex and interconnected world."

Thus, a leader’s ability to manage his or her own energies is a prerequisite to managing external energies toward a desired impact. In The Power of Full Engagement, one of a handful of books I reread over and over, always discovering something new and useful, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz present a program for achieving optimal energy from each of the following sources: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Physical energy is measured by quantity (low to high), emotional by quality (negative to positive), mental by focus (broad to narrow and external to internal), and spiritual by force (self to others, external to internal, and negative to positive).