The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  Think to a time when you were very ill, so sapped of energy that you didn’t even feel like reading a book in bed. Do you remember any promises you made to yourself while lying in bed? As in, “I don’t ever want to feel this way again. If and when I regain my health, I’m going to…”? Write down three promises you made:

  Your Story Around Happiness

  What’s your story about your happiness? How would you rate your happiness over the last six months? Is your answer acceptable to you? According to your story, how important is happiness and how do you go about achieving it? Are you clear about where or how happiness might be realized for you? If there is something out there—some activity, some person—that dependably brings you happiness, how long has it been since you encountered it or her or him? What do you think is the connection, if any, between engagement and happiness? If your level of happiness is not where you want it to be, then what’s the story you tell yourself that explains why it’s not happening at this point in your life? If you continue on the same trajectory, then what kind of happiness do you expect is likely in your future, short-term and long?

  Do you consider your own happiness an afterthought? An indulgence? A form of selfishness? Have you removed joy—joy, as opposed to contentment—from the spectrum of emotions you expect and wish to experience during the remainder of your life?

  Jot down ten moments/occasions during the last thirty days where you experienced joy.

  Your Story Around Friends

  What’s your story about friendship? According to your story, how important are friends? How fully engaged are you with them? (That is, don’t calculate in your mind simply how often you see them but what you do and how you are when you’re together.) If close friendships are important to you, yet they are clearly not happening in your life, what is the story you tell yourself that obstructs this from happening?

  In what way, if any, might friendships be connected to health and happiness for you? To what extent are friendships important to your realizing what you need and want from life? If you have few or no friends, why is that? Is this a relatively recent development—that is, something that’s happened since you got married, for example, or had a family, or got more consumed by work, or got promoted, or got divorced, or experienced a significant loss, or moved away from your hometown?

  When you think of your closest friendships over the last five years, can you say any of them has grown and deepened? According to a Gallup poll, people who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their job, get more done in less time, have fewer accidents and are more likely to innovate and share new ideas. An employee’s satisfaction jumps by almost 50% when he or she has a close relationship at the workplace. (And if your best friend has a healthy diet, you are five times more likely to eat healthy yourself.)

  Suppose you had no friends—what would that be like? This may seem like a morbid exercise but write down three ways in which being completely friendless might make your life poorer (no one to turn to in times of crisis and celebration, no one to mourn your passing, etc.).

  WRITE YOUR CURRENT STORY (OR TRY TO)

  The following are the first steps in a process we’ve devised and refined over the years, from feedback our clients have provided. It starts with you writing your current story—a first draft. Eventually, after some hard and honest work—and several drafts—you’ll have produced a story that accurately reflects the way things have been going in your life. Then you’ll discard this current story, recasting it now as your “old story,” and replace it with your new, forward-moving story.

  But that’s getting ahead of ourselves—especially considering that the majority of those I’ve worked with have not quite “gotten” their current story on the first attempt.

  STEP 1: Identify the important areas of your life where the stories you tell yourself or others are clearly not working. They simply do not take you where you ultimately want to go—for example, with personal relationships, work, financial health, physical health; with your boss, your daughter, your morning routine. Ask yourself: In what areas is it clear I can’t get to where I want to go with the story I’ve got?

  Keep going, if you have more.

  STEP 2: Articulate as clearly as possible the story you currently have that isn’t working. Put it down on paper. Eventually we’ll refer to this as your Old Story.

  Here are five examples from clients. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all five have experienced enormous professional success.

  Greg:I have an overwhelming, all-consuming drive for results, holding myself totally accountable for my company’s performance, especially poor performance. And this is how it’s supposed to be for a leader. It comes with the territory. I am ultimately doing all that I do to provide the best for my family, which they don’t understand. They don’t understand, especially my wife (!), that I need the time at home to work through the issues I have in my job. At work, when we are having tough results, I need to jump into the business to understand the issues and direct our course of action to turn things around. I will be the one that ultimately gets asked what we are doing to fix the situation. I need to have the answers, which means I don’t have time to let the team find their way.

  Janine:My life—the way that it is—does not allow me any time for me, and I’m okay with that. Exercise time is time I need to spend with my family or get work done. I don’t have the luxury of time to focus on something so selfish. Also, eating right is too difficult—so why even bother? The main thing is that I eat something, anything. The right food is not readily accessible anyway. I have a pretty high metabolism, so it’s not a big deal when I don’t eat right—and sometimes it just feels good to eat a lot of unhealthy things—it’s a huge stress reliever for me.

  Paul:I am an impostor sneaking by under the radar. I’ve gotten to where I am out of pure luck. I don’t know what I’m doing and am petrified that people will discover the truth. I work hard and fear leaving the office because I am certain, if found out, I will be fired. I have considered personal executive coaching but deep inside don’t believe it will help. I’ve also broken my pact with my wife to share in childcare responsibilities, so I’ve failed there as well. I blame all my misery and feelings of failure on my job rather than creating the opportunities that I really want in my life.

  Tricia:My “great” job has changed drastically. The company has created an organization that makes no sense and is operationally set up for failure. I have huge increases in responsibility, including businesses and people over which I have no authority. The company looks to me for answers when, in fact, they should be solving these issues at a structural or strategic level. My job has significantly increased in demand and volume and I simply don’t have sufficient staff to cover what is expected. I’m frustrated, I’m angry, I’m resentful.

  Ken:I’m a 35-year-old African-American, senior executive for one of the biggest, most challenging companies in the world. I rose very quickly and now the pressure is on me. No one can understand or appreciate what I face on a daily basis. I have so many expectations to live up to, both at work and at home. My family should try to understand how hard I work and how much I do for them. They don’t know how this terrifying fear of failure burdens me every single day. My voice inside keeps saying, “You cannot fail, you cannot let people down.” But my voice also says, “I don’t have time for me, I don’t feel in control and someday soon, my flaws will be discovered.” My work expectations are beyond my level of competence. My world at home has a similar theme. I love my wife but I know she’s going to attack me for something I have not done right and she’s probably right. Eventually, I just shut down, mentally and emotionally. I have no time for friends or community. Inside I’m a complete wreck and I have no clue what to do about it.

  Before you begin writing your own Old Story:

  Really bring it to life. Express your logic, your rationale, your thinking process about why you’ve been living the way you have. B
y getting it down on paper, you can see it, study it, break it down, judge how it flows (or stumbles) as a story. Write in the voice you typically use privately with yourself. Don’t hold back. If it’s a rationalizing, scapegoating voice, then use that. If it’s bitter or prideful, use it. This story—initially, anyway—is for your eyes, no one else’s, so don’t write your story scared; no need to be diplomatic or politically correct. At some point you may wish to share it with others, as many people do in our workshops.

  Some tricks to a more authentic story:

  Exaggerating your voice often makes it easier to recognize how destructive and illogical the story you’ve been telling yourself actually is. For example, if you feel used and taken for granted, listen to the voice and capture both the message and the emotion in your writing. Instead of writing the more muted, slightly dishonest, “When I get home I can’t give my kids the time they want because I still have work calls to make”—as one client wrote in the first draft of his Old Story—get down and dirty, as he did when he nailed his whiniest, most immature, but honest inner voice by his final draft: “My kids don’t appreciate what I do, it’s insensitive of them to keep hounding me, and I’m actually angry at them because they want me to play Monopoly with them the instant I walk through the door.” If that’s the way you think—no matter how ugly it sounds—capture it.

  Just as novelists and screenwriters go through dozens of drafts before they get it right, prepare to go through several rewrites before you can effectively capture the voice, content, and essence of your faulty Old Story. Clients tell me they go through three, eight, fifteen drafts. When it’s right, you’ll know it.

  Just as writers emphasize detail, you, too, should get as specific and concrete as you can with your Old Story. Capture the nuances of how you talk to yourself and the logic of your thinking. The elements of a story that make it persuasive or not—theme, tone, major characters, pace—provide color and texture to life, so try to capture them on paper.

  Okay. Now take a stab at your Old Story.

  Old Story

  Note your feelings as you’re reading and writing your old story. Clients often experience shock, embarrassment, even self-loathing when they write and read their Old Stories as they genuinely face their rationale for the first time. “This story is making me sick as I write it,” one client wrote as part of his story.

  You can only really write your New Story—eventually—if you’ve isolated what it is about your Old Story that’s faulty. (If there’s nothing faulty in it, then there’s no reason to write a new one, right?) How do you do that?

  STEP 3: Identity the faulty elements of your old story by asking yourself three questions, about both the total story and each of the individual points it makes:

  Will this story take me where I want to go in life (while at the same time remaining true to my deepest values and beliefs)?

  Does the story reflect the truth as much as possible?

  Does this story stimulate me to take action?

  These three questions are the foundations for the three rules of good storytelling, which we will cover in detail. Your Old Story usually flouts one or more of these rules, often all three. I refer to them short-handedly as Purpose, Truth, and Hope-Filled Action. It’s the lack of one or more of these criteria that makes your Old Story flawed and ultimately unworkable. In your New Story, on the other hand, all three rules will be addressed and conformed to. You simply cannot tell a good story without satisfying each and every one of these three elements.

  So: Does your Old Story work for you?

  The answer will be found by holding it up, first, against your purpose in life. Is this story you wrote above, the one you’re right now living and have been for some time, moving you toward fulfilling and remaining true to that great purpose?

  Two

  THE PREMISE OF YOUR STORY, THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE

  There are two towers in downtown Orlando, each 175 feet high and separated by a distance of 36 feet. To anyone who walks across a plank that spans the roofs, my institute will award a certified check for $5 million. We’ll pay the taxes on it. The chance of success: 80%. This is no joke. Interested?

  Whenever I make this offer in our workshops—typically fifteen to thirty individuals in the room, mostly Type A’s—maybe one hand goes up, rarely more than three, often none. (I tell them the offer is hypothetical only after the exercise is over.)

  I then add, in the interest of full disclosure, that it’s preferable to make the crossing in the morning, after the fog clears. And that there may be some wind issues, though the gusts are rarely severe. Anyone?

  Maybe the one or two hands stay up, maybe not.

  Did I give the plank’s dimensions? Twelve inches wide, 11/4 inch thick, a little give. No way should that frighten you; were the plank laid on the floor, you could absolutely walk across it without teetering off, no problem. (And no, you can’t win the money by crawling across on your stomach; someone always asks that.). So: Five mil, 80% chance of success. Hello?

  The same one or two hands.

  Obviously the offer is not compelling enough. All right, then: To anyone who crosses from one roof to another—a measly twelve yards! on a strong plank easily wide enough for you to walk across!—the institute will pay $50 million, tax free.

  A whopping four or five hands go up this time (five million bucks ain’t what it used to be). Obviously, the offer still lacks universal appeal. Let’s see…

  Okay, how about this: You’re standing on the roof of Tower A. Thirty-six feet away, on the roof of Tower B, stands your family. To save their lives, you must cross the plank. Who’s up for it?

  I’ll let you guess how many hands go up.

  He who has a why to live, said Nietzsche, can bear with almost any how.

  You guessed right: Every single hand goes up, every single time. (In his insightful and powerful book, What Matters Most, Hyrum Smith employed a similar analogy to illustrate how our actions are thoroughly dependent on the stakes involved.) I have yet to meet a person who, given the proposition laid out above—risk your life or the lives of your family members—has said that he or she would not walk that narrow plank, 175 feet above the concrete, battling occasional gusts and a one-in-five chance of dying. (By the way, I chose “80% chance of success” arbitrarily, since no one has ever actually made the crossing.)

  I present the wood plank example not to show clients that saving their family from harm is their ultimate purpose in life—it’s a purpose, a vital one, but not the purpose, not the reason you are on this earth—but to show just how dramatically our story, and our willingness to spend energy and take risk, change when there is a great purpose. In short, when the stakes are a large sum of money—almost never a transcendent purpose—no one walks across that plank. When the stakes are love and life and that which has incalculable value, everyone goes.

  Purpose is the epicenter of everyone’s life story. Purpose is one of the three foundations of good storytelling.

  Without purpose, no character in a book or a movie would do anything interesting, meaningful, memorable, worthwhile. Without purpose, our life story has no meaning. It has no coherence, no direction, no inexorable momentum. Without purpose, our life still “moves” along—whatever that means—but it lacks an organizing principle. A mother of four quoted in Dan McAdams’s book, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, may have captured it most eloquently and bittersweetly when she said, “I know what to do when I get up every day, but do I really know where I’m going?” Without purpose, it is all but impossible to be fully engaged. To be extraordinary.

  With purpose, on the other hand, people do amazing things: good, smart, productive things, often heroic things, unprecedented things. For example, a sizable number of women smokers who’ve never had luck quitting do so the instant they find out they’re pregnant. Suddenly there’s a purpose, a higher calling that pulls at them more strongly than even the most irresistible addiction. For the next nine months, these
women are amazing, not even touching a cigarette, or barely. It’s an impressive feat. This new purpose—protecting growing life—succeeds to move her to action where the lesser purpose—not harming her own health—failed repeatedly to move her, despite pleas by concerned partners, parents, friends. Perhaps those pleas to not smoke failed because their purpose seemed not so much lesser as theoretical: Lung cancer, emphysema, and other health complications may occur but then again they may not, and even if they do, they will likely descend in the fog of the future, maybe a very distant future. In contrast, there’s nothing theoretical about life growing inside one’s belly. The baby squirms inside you. So these women make this profound change, motivated by a noble purpose.

  And then, guess what? Within months of delivering new life into the world, most of them pick up a cigarette again and resume smoking.

  I am not here to slam new mothers who smoke. It goes without saying that there’s no shortage of individuals, you and me included, who do things counterproductive to our own self-interest and the interest of those we care about most. I’ve already shared with you some of their stories, tales that spill over with contradiction. “My son Noah is the most important part of my life,” wrote an executive in his questionnaire. Yet on our “If you continue on the path you’re on, where will you end up?” scale, where 1 = “in trouble” and 5 = “where I want to be,” he rated his family a 1, and admitted that almost everything that might have a profound impact on his son’s well-being and development was disastrously off: the executive’s relationship with his wife, the amount of time he spent (or did not spend) with his son, the quality of time he did spend with him (completely disengaged). In this case, as in so many others, it’s not that the individual lacked a purpose. Indeed, he seemed to have one—at least claimed to have one—but then he went about living his life and telling a story that supported that purpose hardly at all. And if that’s so, then what does it mean, really, to have a purpose? Or do you just say you have a purpose to cover yourself? Or do you not understand the meaning of the word “purpose”?