The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  Situated somewhere between my skepticism and a deep wish to believe, I wondered what Dow’s shareholders felt when they heard this message. Did they get goose bumps? Did they feel they were being spun? If I, an outsider, could become this moved by their story, what was its impact on insiders, the thousands of employees within the Dow organization?

  Who knows if this spectacular purpose and promise will become Dow’s legacy. Only time will tell. What it does help to show, though, is this: To have a magnificent story—be it a company’s or an individual’s—you must first have a magnificent purpose.

  QUESTIONING THE PREMISE

  Maybe you’re thinking: Hey, I may be tired and stressed out but I know what I live for. I may feel depleted and my life is chaotic but it’s not as if I don’t understand what keeps me going.

  Pardon my nerve, but I’m not sure that’s as true as you may believe it is. In the next two chapters, as I discuss in detail the second rule of storytelling—truth—I hope to illuminate the amazing, scary extent to which we often think we know who we are and what story we’re telling when in fact we’re telling something very different.

  To prepare for that discussion, here are two exercises. The first is to get you in the habit of extrapolating a real situation into an imagined one, which is exactly what you’re doing when testing to see if your stated purpose holds up (What will my epitaph be?). The second exercise is to make you more conscious generally of how purpose—sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes honest, sometimes manipulative—may lurk in the shadows, yet its influence is atomic.

  Exercise 1: Change a story in your mind and your emotional response changes immediately. Here are two examples.

  You’re driving behind an elderly lady. She’s slow and indecisive. You’re getting angrier by the second.

  Now imagine—really imagine—that the elderly driver is your struggling mother. Or your grandmother.

  How do you feel now?

  Chances are your emotion has changed dramatically. Your brain chemistry has shifted; interestingly, your brain can’t tell the difference between something that is actually happening and something that is vividly imagined.

  The second example: You light up a cigarette, as you’ve done thousands of times. But as you strike the match this time, imagine the faces of your children and what they will go through if you die young. Train yourself to do this every time you light up, or are tempted to.

  These are seemingly minor mental tricks I’m asking you to try. But they’re important first steps to take in finding the larger purpose, the one you must have if you’re to get your story straight. To discipline yourself to do that, as will be outlined in the next chapters, it helps to start small.

  Exercise 2: To evaluate an action or event fairly, determining its factuality is not enough; you must try to divine its purpose, too. To keep ourselves from being seduced, we need to work at understanding the why behind the what.

  In 2006, a large American metropolitan newspaper decides it’s not going to report any good news out of Iraq. Its stories will highlight the deaths of American servicemen and women and Iraqis (sadly, there will be no shortage of material); the factionalization and anger and chaos over there; the staggering cost and costs of war. There will be no mention of schools being built, of tides turning, of general progress, if any, being made.

  Okay, so maybe it’s not quite hypothetical. Certainly media outlets make such “decisions” all the time, even as they believe they’re providing a “true” picture of the world.

  Now, as you read any one of several daily stories about Iraq in this newspaper, you should ask yourself two fundamental questions (at least). First: Is the story true? Are the details provided in the story true?

  And, second: What is the newspaper’s purpose in telling this particular story (and not, for instance, telling another Iraq-relevant story in its place)? Why did their editorial staff feel compelled to lead with this report?

  To the first question, your answer appears to be: Yes, it is true. The facts are pretty much true as far as you can tell.

  How about the second question? What was the newspaper’s purpose in covering this aspect of the war? They might claim that their reporting is objective, and that, unfortunately, the events unfolding in Iraq are almost wholly negative. (How could any thinking, feeling person find otherwise?) They also may believe that their coverage is in the best interest of the public: Citizens need to know how badly the war is going. And anyway, if people object that the paper is not painting a full picture, they should realize that comprehensive coverage doesn’t exist. There is no such beast. And any media outlet that claims its coverage is comprehensive is making a preposterous claim.

  Now, if the paper’s true purpose for covering the war as they do is to educate (and ultimately protect) the public, then their story is authentic, perhaps even noble, if arguably patronizing. On the other hand, if the real purpose for their overly negative coverage is to advance the newspaper’s political agenda, or to create as much chaos and doubt as possible for the Administration or its political party, then the story becomes quite ignoble and inauthentic.

  My place here is not to suggest that this hypothetical newspaper is right or wrong. I chose this example to show how we need to train ourselves to build the muscle that enables us to examine the influences on us and our stories. Only by doing this can we be sure, eventually, that the story we are living is ours and no one else’s. Only by doing this can we be sure that the force driving our story—our purpose—is profound, sustainable, noble…and true. If you do nothing else that I suggest throughout this book but ask these two questions about events in your own life, then you will already have brought a level of consciousness and engagement to your life story that can have meaningful and positive effect:

  Is the story true?

  Why is the story being told?

  Now let’s turn these questions on ourselves and our own motives. Say you choose to reveal a true story to your wife knowing full well that it will be painful and disturbing. You tell her that last week you missed movie night with her because after another mind-numbingly busy workday you ended up having dinner with your secretary—a totally benign dinner—and neglected to mention it then. Or you tell her that your combined retirement account took a bad hit in the last six months, worse than you let on. When she asks why you chose to tell this story now, your reflex response is that it’s something she needs to hear.

  Is the story true? Well, yes. It actually happened. That’s a fact.

  Why is the story being told? Well, it turns out that you haven’t been entirely honest with yourself: Upon more courageous reflection, you realize that your real purpose for telling the story now was to inflict pain; earlier in the day your wife did something that hurt you deeply and you were looking to retaliate.

  When your real purpose is exposed and examined (I need to hurt her back), your choice to tell her the story at that moment is rather ignoble.

  Exposing the real purpose in our storytelling may be embarrassing or indicting. It may bring shame or tears. But pushing yourself to uncover true purpose can and will pay extraordinary dividends.

  Once, I was invited by a well-known though—at the time—struggling financial services firm to sit in on a half-day session in which senior management wanted to revise their mission statement, which they thought had grown stale and unpersuasive. Soon after they started tossing out smart, clever, even brilliant concepts to touch the heart, mind, and soul of customers new and old (and perhaps their own employees, too), it became clear to me that their intent was to come up with words solely for the purpose of driving investment. They wanted a better image, that’s all. Several of those in the room had already been through our workshop, and had impressed me with their grasp of the need to put purpose at the center of one’s story. But now, in this boardroom, over corporate fruit salad and finger sandwiches and bottled water, they spoke as if all they needed was to find the right words and massage them, and the firm would magically
become inspirational, and once again very successful.

  “We want to craft a story that says we can be trusted,” said one of the executives. “That we care about our people.”

  I had to pipe up. “I think you’re going about this backward. This is the reverse of what you should be thinking about here. First, you should ask yourself, ‘Who do we ultimately want to be?’ And, second, ‘Who are we now?’ Then you come up with a plan to bring the two together.”

  Things quickly deteriorated from there. Even as a few people in the room claimed to agree with me, my contribution as a consultant to them was pretty much worthless. As one of them said, making no attempt to conceal his patronizing tone, “There’s a reality out there, Jim. I don’t know that this is the time to be worrying about who we want to be deep down.”

  LINING UP

  Although Ultimate Mission is synonymous with “purpose,” it is also close to synonymous with “theme,” a word with which every accomplished storyteller is familiar. Every story has a theme, usually a very simple one. You should be able to identify it, though often you may have to think about it a bit, to make sure that you have sorted out the overall theme of the story from other, less profound themes. In every great story, the overall theme is reiterated in almost every scene, in ways we usually process not intellectually but very much instinctually. Thus each scene is, thematically, a microcosm of the whole story. For example, if the overall theme of The Wizard of Oz is “there’s no place like home,” then each scene—Dorothy running away from Miss Gulch, the witch of a neighbor who wants to put Toto to sleep; Dorothy with her friends in the dark, ominous forest; even Dorothy being dazzled by the eye candy of the new world she’s fallen into, the place that suggests to her “we’re not in Kansas anymore”—is also about that very same idea: There’s no place like home. If the overall theme of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II is that you can never escape your past (interestingly, a variation on “There’s no place like home”)—despite Michael Corleone’s continual, deluded belief that the family business will soon become “legitimate”—then almost every scene reiterates this idea: the moral compromise young Vito Corleone makes in the New World to become “godfather,” a position not unlike that held by the man who killed his family back in the Old Country; his hot-headed son’s falling into a trap and being gunned down at the toll plaza; his youngest son and heir apparent, the cold-blooded Michael, eliminating all his enemies on the very day he stands before God to become his nephew’s godfather. In many ways, it is this echoing or “alignment” between the overarching theme of a great story and all the scenes, characters, and moments that make up that story—be it Madame Bovary or High Noon or Moby-Dick or the Harry Potter books or the New Testament or countless others—that makes these stories stay with us forever. Great stories are never made up of far-flung elements. They are never about petty concerns. They are always tight, streamlined, deceptively simple. Indeed, they are unified.

  Unity—alignment—are hallmarks of persuasive stories. A good story is consistent. It has an internal logic. Every thought you share, every word you utter, every expression you make can’t help revealing some aspect of your unique story.

  As with great stories, the theme (Ultimate Mission) of your life story is simple—touching on ideas like family, honor, benevolence, continuity—and each subplot reiterates the theme. Without this echoing or alignment, your mission is going to fall apart somewhere. For example, if you wish to be an extraordinary father and husband, then that entails a certain level of moral integrity; you can’t at the same time be a businessperson of dubious integrity, because that runs counter to who you profess to want to be as a father and husband. There’s serious misalignment in your Ultimate Mission. Or if one of the goals in your Ultimate Mission is to “empower as many people as I can over the longest time possible” (as one client wrote)—yet you are yourself closed to new learning, incapable of improving and further empowering yourself—then there is something askew in your Ultimate Mission. Or if one of your ultimate goals is to be a person who treats people with compassion and dignity—true enough of the way you treat your superiors and colleagues, say, but only intermittently true of the way you treat those beneath you on the corporate ladder—then there’s misalignment. Without alignment, you can’t achieve what you set down in your Ultimate Mission. This is true in other aspects of life, too. Athletes must have every part of their body moving in alignment or they will not achieve their ultimate potential. Every great tennis player must move his or her feet in a certain way, must turn the body, must get the racket back, must see the ball early, must weight and unweight in a certain way, must follow through, if he or she is to be great.

  Your story can’t work without all the important elements being aligned. It’s no accident, I think, that a colloquial way to describe being aligned with someone is to be “on the same page.” If Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, co-authors of The Godfather movies, had added a scene or two showing Michael Corleone genuinely feeling as if he had been absolved of all his sins by God, his family, and the “legitimate” outside community, even as he continued to preside over his crime operation, the story would fall apart; such a scene, in being at complete odds with the overall theme of the story, would make a mockery of it. We would not be drawn nearly as much to watch these movies and revel in their human truths, because now they would strike us as false. Simply put, the story would not work.

  If your Ultimate Mission is to inspire you—truly inspire you, the way a great, consistent, seamless story moves and inspires you—then everything in it needs to be aligned. The values it professes need to dovetail with each part of your mission. If something in your life is not aligned with your Ultimate Mission—some behavior, some habit, some relationship—then you need to examine it and change it or eliminate it until things are aligned.

  FLAWED ALIGNMENT © FLAWED ENDING

  “Senseless” is the word we usually trot out when we speak of someone dying young and without apparent “purpose”—a bizarre accident, being at the absolute wrong place at the wrong time. She died senselessly. He died a senseless death. But “senseless” applies to more than just death. It can be applied, though it far more rarely is, to nearly everything that matters. A divorce may be senseless. Or the loss of a business or job. Or the loss of a friendship. “Senseless” simply means: The rotten ending to this story could absolutely have been averted. It just didn’t have to happen. You may come to believe it was unavoidable: It was meant to be…God has a plan…I couldn’t help myself…There was a combination of factors…Circumstances dictated…But that’s just after-the-fact spin, somewhere between an excuse and an apology to yourself. It’s comforting. But when you confront the painful truth, was the personal bankruptcy really fate? Or was it set in motion by the hundreds of misguided decisions you made, supported by dozens of misguided stories?

  If you lose your marriage because of an affair; if you lose your family because of your obsession with money and power; if you lose your self-respect because you cooked the books to avoid a shareholder crisis, would you not consider these developments senseless? Are the endings of these stories okay? We far too often fail to finish the story in our minds, probably out of fear or complacency. But our failure to think through the reasonable conclusion to our stories is perilous. (Another reason to envision your own funeral and what might be said about you, or go unsaid.) If only we had done so, we might have recognized how our purpose and our actions were horribly misaligned, preventing us from getting what we wanted from life while also undermining so many of the good things we already have. “To find integrity in life,” writes Dan McAdams in The Stories We Live By, “you must look back upon your personal myth and determine that, for all its shortcomings and limitations, it is good.” Only one problem with that: Many of us fear that what we will find there will not be good…so we ignore it. And by ignoring, we pretty much guarantee “senseless” conclusions to many of the subplots in our life.

  We’ve talked a
bout how a faulty purpose always leads to a bad ending. But you may have a good purpose—like those admirable, heartfelt purposes so many of the executives fill out on the questionnaires, about how they live for their family, how they want their legacy to be something that others can benefit from—and yet suffer from a monstrous misalignment between your purpose and your day-to-day actions. It is imperative to consider whether your actions and purpose are aligned; “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet. It is a fact, I’m sorry to say, that the ramifications of such misalignment will make their appearance—divorce, heart attack, estrangement, shame, maybe prison. Perhaps they’re dormant now, or in shadow, but they will emerge at some point—a year, ten years, who knows. Bookies don’t take bets on such certainties. Without examining and resolving this misalignment, no hiding, no pretending, no denial, no wishful thinking on your part can derail these unfortunate happenings from finally paying a visit, like the ghosts in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. If you consider yourself a moral person and yet your willingness to compromise is only growing fuzzier, what do you think the ending of that story will be? Is it one you want for yourself or those you care most about? If you continue not to work out and to eat and sleep terribly, can you not make a reasonable guess about what the ending will be? Is that an ending you can live with?

  After working with us, one Fortune 100 CEO, one of the most high-profile executives in America, helped to reshape his company’s culture so that its commitment to workers and its way of operating were finally more aligned with their stated values…then realized he himself couldn’t fulfill the ultimate mission he’d set for his family and community, while also carrying the intense work, responsibility, and travel load that his job required. What did he do? Resign.