by Jim Loehr
To keep herself from slipping, she still logs her departure time every night. “My staff will say, ‘I know you’re about to leave,’ because they see me take out my little book.”
Exercise: Parts of your story get perpetuated simply because they have no immediate consequences, because you don’t have to justify them, because no one calls you on it, because you can. See if that’s still true after you call yourself on it.
Keep a daily log of five things you suspect you do because you can get away with it. So, for example, log every time you turn on and turn off the TV (calculate the hours it’s on), or the frequency with which you check e-mail or go online, or go to the bathroom, or drink soda, or yell at someone (and apologize). You may be surprised by what the results look like, in black and white:
COOKING THE BOOKS
There have been more wise, oft-repeated things said on the subject of perception than about perhaps almost any other subject (or maybe it just seems that way). Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Don’t judge a book by its cover. There are countless more. But perhaps the best, most elegant, line of all is a little-known kernel by British philosopher Erich Heller, who observed, “Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.”
We live as if our perception is not merely our current reality but everyone’s reality, now and always. Thus, it is difficult to separate out the false assumptions that pepper our story and in many ways define it. If we don’t exhibit the courage to look at things somewhat coldly and carefully, then our somewhat (or largely) false story becomes the story. It’s not hard to keep to it because it’s actually somewhat close to the truth, a version of the truth—it’s got “truthiness,” as comedian–fake newsman Stephen Colbert dubs it. Yet as we tell it—innocently enough, without seeming malice—our story may be as untrue (if not quite illegal) as the phony financial story a devious accountant or CFO “writes” when he “cooks the books.”
Take this story, for example.
With two young children and a job that has no boundaries, I simply have no time whatsoever for community work. To be honest, I rarely even think about it. There’s no possibility for it to happen in my life so I block it out of my mind completely. When I force myself to think about it, I get increasingly upset that I’m not giving back beyond the reach of my immediate family, but I have no choice. Giving back is an important part of who I want to be and the legacy I want to leave behind but it just can’t happen at this time in my life.
Is this true? Yes, the marketing executive who wrote this has two children and a demanding job; I know these to be facts. But what about the assertion that her “job…has no boundaries”? Is that true or simply the way she chooses to think about it? Is it true that she “simply [has] no time whatsoever for community work”? Or is that, too, just how she’s come to think about it? So many people we see at HPI are conflicted on the subject of community service. She’s like most of them: They place an extremely high value on charitable service but spend virtually no time on it. Yet 10% to 15% of them, with jobs just as demanding and families just as big as hers, report that they have found time for it. With similar time constraints, they have somehow found ways to align their lives with this cherished value. How can this be?
Even if she was not aware of the litany of ancillary benefits associated with volunteer work and community service—improved life satisfaction, higher self-esteem, social integration, distraction from one’s own troubles, longer life—she is acutely aware of her personal value system and, at least dimly, of her Ultimate Mission in life. Community service is integral to both of those. How, then, could there be such a discrepancy between what she says is important to her and how she actually lives her life? Is it really just a matter of hours in the day? Is it really just this finite period of young motherhood she’s currently in the midst of? Is community service really something that can, or should, be put off to some indeterminate time in the future?
As we examine her story, its dysfunctionality, at least as it relates to community service, is traceable to the faulty assumptions she has made about her job’s boundaries and about time. Once these assumptions embed themselves into her story, her “book is cooked” on doing any community service, now or in the foreseeable future. As long as she persists with these assumptions, then this reality, this supposed truth, will rule. There isn’t a glimmer of hope that she can do anything to change her current situation. With the story she’s got, I can guarantee that she will never get to community service.
THE FOUR SCENARIOS
On the Storytelling Inventory our clients fill out, we ask a number of questions to get them to portray their life in story terms: Describe the theme of your life story; Describe your character role in it; Describe the tone of it; Describe the trajectory. For example, one question asks:
Which is your story?*
a. A good past has led to a good present.
b. A good past has led to a bad present.
c. A bad past has led to a good present.
d. A bad past has led to a bad present.
While it may, at first, seem artificial or simplistic to ask people to reduce their entire, quite complicated, endlessly nuanced history to one of four rather blunt scenarios (elsewhere we ask—to give another example—“Is your life story a Comedy? A Romance? A Tragedy? A Fable?”), we treat it as a first step. It gets one thinking. It enables the respondent to see structure where perhaps he or she didn’t before; to recognize that there is an end toward which every life, like every story, is driving. And because one’s life is so obviously more complicated than broad descriptions like “good” and “bad” (and “past” and “present,” for that matter) can ever portray, simple questions like these tend to promote elaboration.
Here, for example, is the more elaborated account of a respondent, an accomplished professional musician, who circled (c) A bad past has led to a good present. (For the record, 43% circle (a); 15%, (b); 22%, (c); and 20%, (d).)
The truth is I came from a home that was cold and loveless, with parents who were either never around or incapable of expressing affection for my siblings and me. As an adult, the home I’ve made is full of love, with a great husband and two great girls. But I have started to realize just how much I have immersed myself in my work, telling myself the whole time that creative achievement and professional advancement are incredibly important to my sense of well-being. Meanwhile, I’ve become less and less available to my family—and yet it is the love of my new family that I’ve always wanted, more important to me by far than career advancement. The truth is, if I keep on this path, I may lose it all, when it was right there in front of me.
Perhaps there’s something presumptuous about asking questions like the multiple-choice one earlier, and making respondents commit to the “best possible answer” to describe their incredible stories. But another useful reason to paint it, initially, in such broad terms is that people are pretty adept at describing the mood of their failing story. Only then can they start to pick apart the potentially false, toxic details that have made it so.
Which are you? a, b, c, or d?
PESSIMISTS, WATCH OUT
Whether we’re by nature the Little Engine That Could or Eeyore, most of us would accept that positive thinking tends to be more beneficial for us than negative thinking. This proposition is not just something grasped intuitively or suggested anecdotally; repeated scientific studies back it up. Hope-filled individuals tend to heal faster, from both psychological wounds and actual physical ones, than do their dread-filled counterparts; optimists are more likely to persist in the pursuit of their dreams and desires; they’re more likely than depressives to make those around them feel energetic. A story can only work if its Ultimate Mission is positive; it won’t work if its main goal is merely the avoidance of risk and pain. Even if we’re wired to be pessimists, there’s something about the glass-half-filled camp that appeals irre
sistibly. “Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’” Robert Kennedy famously said. “I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’” If the choice were ours (is it?), who wouldn’t prefer to be blessed with the latter mindset?
As I said earlier, more important than the “facts” of any life story is the meaning we attribute to the facts. It’s crucial, therefore, to be aware not only of external influences on our perception—the inherent biases in information sources such as one’s parents, teachers, newspapers, TV news channels, or websites of choice—but also our internal tendencies. Our basic natures have an enormous effect on how we see things. If you’re inclined toward pessimism, perhaps no otherwise rational analysis of your situation or story will make things seem attainable or fixable. (No one in my family has escaped addictive behavior, so what makes me any different?) Or perhaps this negative tendency, while not based in “reality,” is a valuable, if distorting, survival technique. For instance, worriers have no more control over events than non-worriers do, yet, as studies show, most of the perceived benefits of worry center around people’s belief that worry helps avoid catastrophe and deeper emotional topics that they don’t want to think about. Anyone counseling a worrier to stop worrying is pretty much wasting his or her breath: The benefit of worry “may also be reinforced superstitiously because the vast majority of things people worry about never happen,” say psychologists Susan Mineka and Richard Zinbarg of Northwestern University, who studied the roots of anxiety and phobias. In other words: I envisioned the plane crashing; it didn’t crash; therefore, every time I’m haunted by the specter of a crash, I’ll make myself sick by envisioning it again and perhaps duplicate the desired result. By this circular “reasoning,” worry becomes “self-sustaining” and thus “notoriously resistant to extinction.”
I’m not here to advocate for blind optimism, which, in its own way, can be as indefensible and misguided as blatant pessimism, often leading to tragic outcomes (wait one more paragraph). But those naturally given to feeling off balance by the unpredictable, stressful nature of their life may suffer from something called General Anxiety Disorder, a malady whose central characteristic—worry about possible bad outcomes or dangerous events—“seems to serve as a cognitive avoidance response that is reinforced because it suppresses emotional and physiological responding.” That is, once people develop compulsive rituals to neutralize or prevent obsessive thoughts, they have made it that much harder for themselves to confront the truth of their story and thus to move to greater fulfillment. Such people must find a way to move from what renowned psychologist Martin Seligman termed “learned helplessness” toward “learned optimism”—a state not to be confused with (to use Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase) “irrational exuberance,” but, rather, one that is both forward looking and reality based.
OPTIMISTS SHOULD WATCH OUT, TOO
A human being simply cannot run the mile in under four minutes. Can’t be done; physiologically impossible.
So said many “experts” in the months and years leading up to May 6, 1954, the day Roger Bannister covered 5,280 feet in 3:59:4.
By the end of 1957, sixteen other runners had also broken the golden barrier.
Hail the power of positive thinking.
The majority of studies about medical placebos support the power of positive thinking. Time and again, my own professional experience has shown me just how profound an influence positive thinking can have. One particularly memorable example from my own history: After world sprint champion speedskater and overwhelming Olympic favorite Dan Jansen suffered humiliating defeats at the Calgary and Albertville Games in 1988 and 1992, he was in jeopardy of securing a place as one of the greatest chokers in modern sports history. While training for his last-ever Olympics, he came to see me. We agreed (though not without some back and forth) that his training so hard for the 500 meters, his best event, and not fully embracing the 1,000, the other distance he would compete in at the 1994 Games in Lillehammer, Norway, would make the pressure in the shorter race almost unbearably high pitched. Since this would be Dan’s final Olympics, with his ultimate legacy as a competitor on the line, sustaining maximum performance during the race would be the greatest challenge (as it always is, of course, only here it seemed even more pronounced). At first, Dan didn’t buy the idea (negative assumption) that he could ever be as great at the 1,000 as he’d been at the 500. In the latter, after all, he was the only human ever to skate the distance in under thirty-six seconds, and he’d done so four times; in the 1,000, meanwhile, there were several skaters faster than he. But he was so supremely talented and strong, there was no reason that, with proper training, he couldn’t dominate any of several distances if only he could change the story he told himself. We worked together for two years while he not only trained under his coach with phenomenal dedication at both distances but also worked at truly believing in his new 1,000-meter story. Finally he felt that this, too, was a race he was born to skate and win. In his final Olympic go-round, Dan, still world 500-meter champ, skated in his beloved event…and again came up short, finishing a pedestrian, almost unthinkable eighth place. His reputation as a choker almost assured, he had one last race in which to rewrite his Olympic story—and it was the 1,000, a distance he had for so long not fully accepted as his, but around which he had now told himself a great new story.
Dan won the gold.
The medal and the moment that had eluded him for years were his, and he captured them by skating the fastest 1,000 meters of his life—or anyone’s, for that matter. He broke the world record.
I’m sure you can think of dozens of examples from life—those around you and, one hopes, your own—in which optimism and belief (positive assumption) led to the achievement of great things.
There are two popular definitions of optimism. One, identified by psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver as “dispositional optimism,” is “a global expectation that good things will be plentiful in the future and bad things scarce.” In this definition, optimism is largely objective, the inescapable response to a world of bounty and virtuous elements.
The second definition, largely subjective, is that optimism represents a constructive way to partly neutralize bad events. For now, I am more interested in the latter definition because a natural tendency toward optimism can be a surprisingly destructive force, once it strays far enough from reality.
A 1987 study by Neil Weinstein showed that people consistently underestimated their risks in eating bad foods, not exercising, and following generally poor health habits. The story they told themselves was that others behaving in such a way were likely to suffer serious health consequences but that they themselves would not. I won’t have a heart attack from smoking but lots of other people will…I won’t have an accident so I don’t need to wear a seat belt. Such a worldview becomes a license to do anything and to do nothing, without regard for consequence. While paralyzing worry may be rooted in superstition, behaving in ways that you believe are consequence-free is rooted in delusion.
Of course, such “irrational exuberance” (the phrase seems appropriate now) may quickly extend to areas beyond health, into other meaningful aspects of one’s life. My wife will never leave me no matter what I do…No matter how much I work, I will never become estranged from my kids…Even though my debt has built considerably every year for the last several years, I do not have to change my lifestyle patterns…
Another study also corroborates the danger that a positive, forward-looking temperament, an outlook we otherwise tend to admire, can undermine reality. When there’s too much negativity, the environment becomes toxic, granted, but when there’s too much positive feedback, the environment departs from reality. Several researchers have concluded that “bad is stronger than good”—meaning that positive experiences may need to outnumber negative experiences if human relationships, including business relationships, are going to flourish—but only up to a point. Dr. John Gottman, one of the leading voices on why marriage
s succeed and fail, conducted two decades of observational research on marriage and determined that unless a couple is able to maintain a ratio of at least five positive messages (praise, encouragement, affection) to one negative message (complaint, critique), it is highly likely that their marriage will fail. (Very little that comes out of our mouths can be called neutral: Almost every utterance has either a positive or negative aspect in content, tone, or suggestion. If you merely say it’s sunny outside, it likely registers as a positive message—or negative, if you’re in the middle of a drought; if you’re looking for a good deal on a used car and simply read aloud a newspaper ad about a cheap car, it registers as positive, whereas if you read aloud an ad about an overpriced vehicle, it’s negative.)
But that’s not the entire story. Not only does excessive negativity (a ratio under 5:1) threaten to undermine the marriage, excessive positivity does, too. Disintegration of the relationship also begins to occur when a positive to negative remark ratio exceeds 11:1.