The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  Who are the people who come to HPI with dysfunctional life stories that need serious editing? They are, simply put, among the smartest, most talented, most ambitious, most creative people in their communities and professional circles. Some participants even bring, or return with, spouses, friends, or parents. They tend to have lots of responsibility, they’re accountable for a great deal that goes on in their companies, they often make lots and lots of money…yet, perhaps ironically, for all their accomplishments they can’t seem to get their stories right. On the questionnaire we ask clients to fill out before they come down to Florida for our two-and-a-half-day sessions (or to the one-and two-day off-sites we conduct around the country and the world), they are asked, among other things, to write down some of the most important parts of their life story. “My father died young of emphysema,” wrote the CEO of his family’s company. Later on the questionnaire, he wrote, “I smoke two packs a day.” Still later, describing one of his goals for the now fifty-year-old company, he wrote, “On the evening celebrating our company’s seventy-fifth anniversary, I want to be able to look back on yet another quarter-century of quality, growth, and profitability.”

  How can these three sentences possibly follow from each other without their author acknowledging that, taken together, they add up to utter nonsense? Especially when the author is superbly gifted in so many other areas?

  “The most important thing in my life is my family,” wrote one senior VP, “and if things continue in the direction they’re going, I’m almost certainly heading for divorce and complete estrangement from my children.”

  I’ll give him this much: At least he sees the car crash coming.

  In The Power of Full Engagement, a book I co-authored with Tony Schwartz in 2003, I argued that one of our biggest problems is rooted in our flawed belief that simply investing time in the things we care about will generate a positive return. That belief and the story that flows from it are simply not true. We can spend time with our families, be present at dinnertime, have lunches with our direct reports, remember to call home when traveling, put in forty-five minutes on the treadmill five days a week—we can do all of it but if we’re too exhausted, too distracted, too frustrated and angry when “doing” these things, the positive return we hoped for will simply not materialize. Without investing high-quality, focused energy in the activity before you, whatever it may be, setting time aside simply takes us from absenteeism to presenteeism—a condition increasingly plaguing American business, a vague malady defined as impaired job performance because one is medically or otherwise physically or psychologically compromised. Is a worker who’s too fatigued or mentally not there for eight hours really better than no worker? How about a parent? A spouse? Time has value only in its intersection with energy; therefore, it becomes priceless in its intersection with extraordinary energy—something I call full engagement.

  In what areas are you disengaged right now? Whatever the answer, you’re likely to lay a good deal of the blame for this disengagement on external facts—overwork, the time and psychic demands of dealing with aging parents, frequent travel, an unsupportive spouse, a high-maintenance team at work, not enough hours in the day, debt, a slipped disk, not my fault, out of my hands, too much to do, always on call—but such excuse-making is neither helpful nor accountable. (Funny: We enjoy the privilege of being the final author of the story we write with our life, yet we possess a marvelous capacity to give ourselves only a supporting role in the “writing” process, while ascribing the premier, dominant, true authorial role to our parents, our spouse, our kids, our boss, fate, chance, genetics, bad weather, or lousy interest rates. Anyone or anything but us appears to have more influence in moving the metaphorical pen across the paper.) Getting our stories right in life does not happen without our understanding that the most precious resource that we human beings possess is our energy. The energy principle still holds, and is crucial to ideas in this book, too; I maintain that it is at the heart of any solution not only to our individual problems but also to our collective, national ones—our health care problem, our obesity problem, our stress problem, our multi-tasking problem.

  In recent years, though, I’ve come to see that, amazingly, the key to almost all of our problems, more fundamental even than poor energy management, is faulty storytelling, because it’s storytelling that drives the way we gather and spend our energy. I believe that stories—again, not the ones people tell us but the ones we tell ourselves—determine nothing less than our personal and professional destinies. And the most important story you will ever tell about yourself is the story you tell to yourself. (Mind if I repeat that? The most important story you will ever tell about yourself is the story you tell to yourself.) So, you’d better examine your story, especially this one that’s supposedly the most familiar of all. “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question,” said paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Participate in your story rather than observing it from afar; make sure it’s a story that compels you. Tell yourself the right story—the rightness of which only you can really determine, only you can really feel—and the dynamics of your energy change. If you’re finally living the story you want, then it needn’t—it shouldn’t and won’t—be an ordinary one. It can and will be extraordinary. After all, you’re not just the author of your story but also its main character, the hero. Heroes are never ordinary.

  In the end, your story is not a tragedy. Nor is it a comedy or a romance or a thriller or a drama. It’s something else. What label would you give the story of your life, the most important story you will ever tell? To me, that sounds like an epic.

  End of story.

  Part One

  Old Stories

  If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.

  —Horace Mann

  One

  THAT’S YOUR STORY?

  Slow death.

  An uglier two-word phrase it’s hard to find. But if you’re at all like the people I see in our workshops, then I’m afraid you understand the phrase all too well.

  How did it come to this?

  What am I doing?

  Where am I going?

  What do I want?

  Is my life working on any meaningful level? Why doesn’t it work better?

  Am I right now dying, slowly, for something I’m not willing to die for?

  WHY AM I WORKING SO HARD, MOVING SO FAST, FEELING SO LOUSY?

  One man I heard about was quite literally going through slow death. A senior executive at a big firm, he was home the last few weeks of his life, in the final stage of cancer, in and out of lucidity, medicated so heavily that his tongue loosened and he regularly spewed his unfiltered, apparently truest thoughts. He cursed at his wife as never before, using vile, demeaning language—all while she was caring for him day and night, knowing these were his last days on earth, the final days of their long marriage. He did the same to his kids when they visited, making an already difficult situation for them nearly intolerable, and certainly bringing them nothing remotely like peaceful closure. Mostly, though, the man’s most shocking, blistering commentary was reserved, in absentia, for his boss: vicious, intermittently coherent paroxysms of resentment and contempt for the president of his firm who, it was painfully obvious now, the dying executive blamed for most of the anger, frustration, and general rottenness he’d felt the past two decades.

  Slow death. It comes in different forms. Two years ago a heart surgeon came to our institute. The first morning he had his blood work done and took a turn in the BodPod (a chamber inside which one’s lean body mass can be measured with exceptional accuracy, through the displacement of air rather than water). His results were borderline alarming—extremely elevated levels of cholesterol, glucose, blood lipids, triglycerides, C-reactive protein. He was given a copy of the results.

  When his turn came to discuss the meaning of the numbers and how to approach them, the surgeo
n said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You know what these numbers mean,” said Raquel Malo, our director of nutrition and executive training.

  “Of course I do,” he snapped. “I’m a doctor!”

  “What if I was your patient and I got these numbers?”

  “I’d be all over you.”

  “Yet you’re telling me—”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But—”

  “Change the subject or I’m on the next plane home,” he said. “Don’t bring it up again while I’m here.”

  Two days later the doctor left, having done nothing to address his perilous health, or even to acknowledge there was anything to address. He returned to his thriving medical practice, where he would continue to caution patients to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease. (Of all the demographics we see, health care providers as a group hover near the bottom in fitness and physical well-being.)

  Slow death: what a harsh phrase. Is that really what’s happening to all those people, the ones who start out contented by what is good and pure in life—a simple cup of coffee, a few seemingly reasonable life goals (a nice salary, say, and one’s own home)—and who, once they’ve achieved those goals, can’t even be satisfied because they’ve already moved on to life’s next-sized latte (six-figure salary, second home, three cars), only to move on to something double-extra grande when that’s achieved, a continual supersizing that guarantees one can’t ever be fulfilled?

  Okay. Not everyone I see or hear about is dying slowly. But to judge from the responses we get, workshop after workshop, year after year—and each year it gets worse—whatever it is they’re doing sure doesn’t sound fun. It doesn’t even sound like getting by. I read the frustration and disappointment in their self-evaluations and hear it in their own voices, if and when they’re comfortable enough to read aloud from their current dysfunctional story, the autobiographical narrative they attempt to write the first day at HPI, but usually don’t finish until the night before our last day together.

  “Life is hard and getting harder,” read one senior VP, with a very big house, a very big salary, and dozens of direct reports. “My current life story is stagnant…On a scale of 1 [worst] to 5 [best], I’d give my health and family each a 2…My biggest feeling about myself is complete disappointment…I have virtually no energy…I’m completely addicted to cell phones and PDAs.”

  “The tone of my story is cynical, sarcastic, and ironic,” read a forty-three-year-old woman who runs a successful telecom business in the Southwest. “I’m driven to achieve solely for the purpose of being able to point to the accomplishment, and the recognition I receive…I need a more positive view of my future…I do NOT embrace the idea that the story I tell about what happens is more important than what actually happens…My current life story is sad and depressing…My health is a 2, work a 3, happiness and friendship each a 2…”

  “I’m deeply disappointed in myself and always extremely self-critical,” wrote a managing director in a financial services firm. “My happiness is a 1; I’m as unhappy as can be. I’m getting divorced after thirty-three years of marriage…My greatest weakness is that I don’t trust anyone anymore. The dominant theme in my life is distrust.”

  I hardly think it’s overstating to call these tragic stories.

  As the workshop progresses and people’s defenses start to melt away, we hear more and more of these stories. By almost any reasonable standard, these stories exemplify failure; in many cases, disaster. There is no joy to be found in them, and even precious little forward movement. In every workshop, nearly everyone has a dysfunctional story that is not working in at least one important part of his or her life: stories about how they do not interact often or well with their families; about how unfulfilling the other significant relationships in their lives are; about how—despite all that extracurricular failure—they’re not even performing particularly well at work (!), or, if they are, about how little pleasure they gain from it; about how they don’t feel very good physically and their energy is depleted.

  On top of all that (isn’t that enough?), they feel guilty about their predicaments. They know, on some almost buried level, that their life is in crisis and that the crisis will not simply go away. Their company is not going to make it go away. The government is not going to make it go away. God is not going to make it go away.

  And so they wake up one morning to the realization that the bad story they for so long only feared has become finally their life, their story. Not that this development is their fault. No. Nor is there a heck of a lot to be done about it.

  It’s a competitive, cutthroat world out there.

  God knows, I want to change but I simply can’t. I’ll get eaten up and beaten by someone who’s willing to sacrifice everything.

  The world moves faster today than it did a generation ago.

  Hey, at least I see my family some weekends. At least we’ve got a roof over our heads. At least I exercise twice a week.

  What am I supposed to do—quit my job?

  These are the facts of my life. There’s nothing I can do about them.

  My life is a known quantity, so why mess with it even if it’s killing me?

  Let me repeat that one: …even if it’s killing me.

  As corporate consultant Annette Simmons says in her book, The Story Factor, “People don’t need new facts—they need a new story.”

  Recently I conducted a seminar with thirty-two engineers from a profitable company who’d been sent to us not of their own desire—if it was up to them, it soon enough became obvious, they’d have preferred to undergo a colonoscopy and root canal simultaneously—but because the head of their division, a recent and enthusiastic attendee of the program, felt it would be useful for them and thus for the company. I could tell that the brainpower in the room, judged on sheer intellectual payload, was staggering. Each engineer had a position of considerable authority, each had several direct reports, each was veteran enough at the company to feel part of the fabric that made it what it was. Early in the session, I asked what might be done to improve their situations at work. Not a single hand went up. When I asked what they thought about their latest job evaluations, the few who spoke expressed the same general idea: They were doing about as well as they expected; there wasn’t much that would make things worse or better. It was what it was.

  Over the next half hour, though, I was able to start eliciting some details. Many of them said they couldn’t pay much attention to their health because, well, there was obviously no time to exercise before or after work, and to exercise in the middle of the afternoon would feel, as one said, “almost like you’re irresponsible.”

  “Is there an actual rule against it?” I asked.

  “It’s unwritten,” he said. “Everyone can feel it.”

  So there it was. The corporate culture was at fault. Nothing to be done about it. It was what it was.

  I asked for a new show of hands: How many did get regular exercise? Four engineers out of thirty-two responded.

  “They’re single,” said one of the others. Everyone laughed.

  “Really?” I said. I turned to the Exercising Four. “How many of you have spouses and children?”

  Three of the four raised their hands.

  “You’re married with kids, yet you work out,” I said to them. “How is this possible?” I asked the three if they thought that the time they spent exercising was jeopardizing their careers, in the long term, or making it more difficult to get work done, in the short.

  No, said each. “It makes me more productive,” said one.

  I then asked the whole group of thirty-two how many had dinner with their family at least three nights a week. Only five did…and—what do we have here?—three of the five were the Exercisers Married with Children.

  Some people just figure it out. Why them and not others?

  As we continued to talk, it became apparent gradually (engineers and s
cientists are tough nuts) that almost everyone in this room full of high-achievers and leaders felt as if they were caught in a brutal culture, one which allowed them no breathing room, which compromised their health. Many of them said outright it was the company’s fault. But among the three who exercised and ate dinner regularly with their families, the prevailing attitude was, in the words of one, “If you have to blame the damn institution, then get out.” Another said, “Don’t be a victim. Your boss is not going to change.”

  Finally, I asked a question I thought might get a robust response. “How many of you think there’s a lot of brilliance in this room?”

  Every arm shot up.

  “Suppose,” I said, “that your boss walked in here and said, ‘Okay, I want to use all the intelligence in this room to reverse-engineer a culture that would allow our people to take better care of themselves, to actually feel great enthusiasm and initiative about work, and to spend meaningful time with their family.’” I looked around the room. “What’s the chance you could come up with that?”

  Again, every arm went up.

  “But wait,” I said. “This new culture you’re all going to create, this one that helps you feel healthier and more connected—remember: It must continue to drive the bottom line. Is that really possible?”

  “Absolutely,” said one excitedly, and I saw heads nod in agreement all around the room. “I’m certain we can do it. But no one’s ever made that proposition.”