The quantity of energy we have to spend at any given moment is a reflection of our physical capacity. Our motivation to spend what we have is largely a spiritual issue.

We define "spiritual" not in the religious sense, but rather in more simple and elemental terms: the connection to a deeply held set of values and to a purpose beyond our self-interest.

At the practical level, anything that ignites the human spirit serves to drive full engagement and to maximize performance in whatever mission we are on.

Expanding our spiritual energy requires subordinating our own needs to something beyond our self-interest.  The commitment to live according to our deepest values not only creates a more stable center in our lives but also helps us to better navigate the challenges we face along the way.

Viktor Frankl has written movingly about the power of spiritual capacity to transform even the most horrifying circumstances. Frankl was the psychologist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write the classic Man's Search for Meaning.  In it he quotes Nietzsche's famous words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."  Frankl goes on to describe the way this insight helped to save his own life, even as others were dying around him:

"Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.  He was soon lost.  What was needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life.  We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.  We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life -- hourly and daily.  Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.  Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."

As Frankl saw it, we must make our own meaning -- actively build spiritual capacity.  Doing so necessarily involves discomfort.  "Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension," he wrote, "the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.... What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task."