Manage Energy and Stress--and Do More With Less.

• Author: South, Holly

When the American Society of Legislative Clerks and Secretaries met in Madison, Wise, in September, Cindy Maher and Jamie Guite, with Leading Edge Coaching and Development, led an enlightening and entertaining workshop on managing energy and stress in a high-change, high-pressure environment. (Sound familiar?) The workshop was inspired by a Harvard Business Review article, "Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time," by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy.

Resilience, Maher and Guite said, is critical for adapting to change and is affected by how much control we think we have over events--something psychologists describe as our locus of control. If our locus is internal, we make things happen; if it's external, things happen to us. This in turns affects how we perceive change.

"People can cultivate positive energy by learning to change the stories they tell themselves about the events in their lives," Schwartz and McCarthy write.

According to Maher, the connection between energy and productivity is this:

* Alt of us are required to do more with less. That usually means we work longer. The problem is that time is a finite resource; we only get 24 hours in a day. But energy is renewable.

* Energy (our...