Energy Rising by Julia DiGangi

Energy Rising
by Julia DiGangi

ISBN-13: 9781647823450
Hardback: 256 pages
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Released: September 26, 2023

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Your success in life—at work and at home—rises when you harness the energy that powers your brain. A neuropsychologist explains how. Your drive to create change, catalyze impact, and build relationships all come from neuroelectrical energy—real, electrical impulses—firing in your brain. Who you are as a person depends on how you work with this energy. When this energy rises within you, you feel empowered and dynamic. But when this energy falls, you feel down, stressed, and defeated. You may feel as if you don't control your emotional energy, that it's an inevitable consequence of the world around you and the forces bearing down on you. But that's not the case.

To reach your full potential, you can learn to recognize and harness the energy in your brain. Leading neuropsychologist Julia DiGangi will teach you how through eight "codes." Some of the codes will surprise you. All will fortify you. You will learn why these codes work and how to apply them to your own challenges through exercises and reflections. When you start viewing your life less about the activities you do and more about the natural energies within and around you, your power to live and lead with impact grows exponentially. Energy Rising offers you a provocative and neuroscientifically accurate path to greater emotional power, influence, and connection, both at work and at home.

DiGangi's lab and clinical work have been conducted at Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown University, the University of Chicago, DePaul, and the University of Illinois Chicago. Her fMRI and EEG research has helped business leaders, parents, couples, educators, and military leaders. Her work, rooted in resilience after extreme stress, will show you how to effectively deal with struggles you currently face. She tells the stories of business leaders, parents, couples—and even combat veterans and trauma survivors—who used the eight codes to rise.


My Review:
Energy Rising is about how you can change painful situations by uncovering the root causes of how you react to those situations. The intended audience is people in leadership positions with a focus on business, but the author also gave examples from marriage, parenting, and other areas of life. Each chapter covered a different "code," with 5 focused on yourself (which change how you interact with others) and 3 on influencing others. She clearly explained each concept and gave questions to work through to help you implement each concept.

Among other things, she talked about naming what you fear will happen if you change your behavior and evaluating how likely it is that bad result will happen. Also, about changing your outlook from negative to positive (like from a discouraged 'no one understands what I'm trying to accomplish' to seeing it as a positive challenge resulting from 'I'm at the cutting edge'). She explained the root fear that you don't matter and aren't worthy of good things and about becoming aware of our sense of worth regardless of the situation. She covered how our brain tries to avoid uncertainty, but how it's better to become self-assured and be willing to say, "I don't know." She also examined how ways of dealing with life that you learned in childhood aren't necessarily helpful in adulthood and exercises to rewrite those patterns.

She then talked about why you don't need to always be the one who's right or have everyone's approval to be an effective leader. She also explained how to get people to follow your lead because they want to and to visualize how you want your relationships to look in the future. Overall, I found the topics covered to be interesting and helpful, so I would recommend this book to others.

From the book: "Your most enduring pain comes from what you already think about yourself--that you're not good enough, important enough, or worthy enough. And the thing about this pain is that you can never outrun what you believe about yourself."


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt: Read an excerpt using Google Preview.