by Jim Loehr
Barbara Fredrickson from the University of North Carolina and Marcial Losada from Catholic University of Brazil, studying the dynamics of business relationships, concluded that business teams flourish with positivity ratios above 2.9 and begin to disintegrate at positivity ratios above 11.6.
Such findings corroborate what I had already gathered from my early experience in coaching tennis. When working on stroke technique with young tennis players, I largely eschewed offering positive feedback and went right for what was wrong. I assumed that was what good coaches did, and the most efficient way for my pupils to acquire sound mechanics. Wrong. I gradually came to see that my relentless focus on what was faulty in my student’s technique was blocking the overall learning process. I grew more aware of the need to temper criticism with affirmation (since I’d already been a parent for many years, you’d think I would have figured out that the same general balance that held true for my kids might hold true for other young people). It struck me (years before scholarly studies provided corroboration) that this balance worked out to roughly 4:1. For every one correction I would make to the player’s stroke, I had to offset it with four comments about things the player was doing well. I had to be four parts cheerleader to one part critic.
It becomes obvious, then, that the balance between truth and optimism is a delicate one. An optimistic bias, if it departs sufficiently from reality, can be as harmful to one’s story as a pessimistic bias. When we depart sufficiently from reality, the optimism that ushered us there deserves a new name: denial.
As the author of our own story we determine not only content but tone. Although I suggested a couple of pages ago that, given the option, most of us would choose optimism, it’s not necessarily our nature to be optimistic. Indeed, while countless studies have confirmed the utility and benefit of placebos, less well-known studies of “nocebos”—the placebo’s evil twin, an inert drug that the patient believes can cause harm or unpleasantness—show that they also tend to work. The mind, needless to say, is a powerful instrument. One may be as easily given to unjustifiably negative storytelling as delusionally positive storytelling.
To undo old, bad stories, then, we must move forward within a positive framework, yet maintain a capacity to confront our stories with dispassionate eyes and ears: to detect lies and manipulations; to recognize our tendency to make assumptions, and often false ones, at that; to appreciate our predilection for optimism or pessimism, which may skew the tone of our stories.
Easy to say, harder to do. The problem to accomplishing that evenhandedness? Our early training, which is so powerful, so hypnotizing, so subconsciously digested and integrated, it’s often hard to know if the story we’re telling is even, in fact, our story.
Four
IS IT REALLY YOUR STORY YOU’RE LIVING?
He was everybody’s idea of the perfect guy: California handsome, captain of his own multimillion-dollar business, great wife and kids, Harvard-educated, scratch golfer, licensed pilot, a person of boundless energy. Whatever he tried, it seemed, he conquered. Businessman, family man, man’s man. In so many of the people he encountered he inspired envy, because he embodied the ultimate: to fully live one’s own life, which is really all any of us want.
When Steve B. came to us in December 2005, he and I hit it off immediately. He was one of those rare people who’s exciting just to be around.
But I’d read the bio that he, as everyone, had provided us, and during a break on the second day I couldn’t help making an observation.
“I could be way off base, Steve,” I said. “I get all your accomplishments and your vision and your amazing capacity to persevere. I get all that. What I don’t get is any joy.”
Had I been a surgeon, it was the equivalent of hitting an artery. He was silent. His eyes could not have looked more startled. Later, after he’d had time to digest my critique, he would tell me that it was as if a laser had penetrated skin, bone, and heart, and gone right to his soul.
When we found the opportunity over the next two days, he and I talked about the absence of joy in his life. I told him he needed to be as scientific as possible about it—that it was necessary to get to the root cause of his joylessness before any meaningful corrective action could be taken. I pushed him hard. I wondered why, with such a seemingly blessed, spectacular existence, he could appear at times to lack feeling, even to be robotic. The outer and the inner just didn’t synch up. With all he’d accomplished in his fifty-three years, I asked, why couldn’t he sit back with a big fat Cuban cigar and contemplate the joy in his life?
I pushed more. Something was behind this, of that I was certain, but I wasn’t sure what. I’ve met scores of successful, driven people, and with most of them I could soon enough grasp some sense of where the intense drive came from: Maybe it was spurred by low self-esteem, or an ugly divorce at the absolute worst time in his or her childhood, or a bad relationship with his or her parents, or not being picked for the All-Star team…none of that was true with Steve. What was it? As he talked and I pushed, I remembered what he’d written in his bio about his father. Steve constantly found a way to work his dad into the conversation. His father had been his mentor, role model, best friend; there seemed to be no person in his life for whom he had greater love and respect. They’d golfed together and shared friends, and Steve worked for, and eventually took over, the rubber-molding business his father had founded thirty-five years before. In the twenty years since Steve’s father had died at age sixty-eight of cancer, the business had grown significantly, yet you’d hardly think that Steve, president and CEO during that whole expansion, had contributed very much to it—certainly not nearly as much as his deceased father had.
“Steve,” I asked, diving in again, “whose voice is it that’s constantly admonishing you?”
Another nicked artery, another deer-in-headlights expression.
“What do you mean, ‘Whose voice?’” he said weakly.
“That tyrannical voice, that relentless critic,” I said. “It comes from somewhere.”
We had to stop just then because his group had a gym session scheduled, and Steve went off, shakily, for a workout. A half hour later as I worked in my office, Steve poked his head in. He was on the verge of tears.
“It’s your father’s voice,” I said, as gently as possible.
“Yeah, it is,” he said, the tears coming.
He sat down heavily. I told him I thought he was either too afraid to confront the fact that his father was dead, which is why he was trying to live the golden years of his father’s life, which his father didn’t get to; or maybe he was doing it for the Oscar he expected to win when he got to heaven, for playing a role all these years that wasn’t him. The echo of his father’s voice dominated, and eventually became Steve’s “private voice,” obstructing him from experiencing any joy or fun in his life. It wasn’t that Steve’s father was a scary guy; but when he died, his son had saddled himself with the belief that the only thing that mattered was keeping the family business successful. Steve seemed spiritually, psychologically dead because, for all his fabulous outward accomplishments, he’d been pursuing a life at the heart of which was an inadequate purpose, a flimsy storyline that did not and never could infuse him with joy. I recalled a story that Steve had told me, offhandedly, about a recent golf tournament he’d competed in. A top amateur golfer, Steve had finished second in the tournament but didn’t bother to attend the award banquet. If he didn’t win, then the only way to characterize what had happened was that he had lost.
“If you keep on in this way,” I told Steve now, “I fear you’re going to die a deeply unfulfilled human being. With all your accomplishments. You’ve got to start living your life.”
The manipulations on our lives are numerous, often impossible to recognize or calibrate, and by no means always or wholly destructive. But because outside influences have the capacity to exercise profound, at times paralyzing, sway over us and how we live our days, it is imperative—at least for the vast m
ajority of us who have ever felt a “misalignment” in our lives, a gnawing lack of engagement and joy—that we work at figuring out how we ended up doing what we do and being who we are. I am not advocating four-times-a-week psychotherapy or anything like it (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but an exercise in self-discovery, one of which we’re all capable, one whose benefits go a long way. We wake up one morning and feel rotten, not knowing it’s because we’ve become so dogmatic, and our story so inflexible, that we’re impervious to change and even fresh input. We stare midday at our computer screen, cataloguing our life, unaware that every important decision in it has been triggered by one goal: the avoidance of pain and risk, professionally and personally. We look out the airplane window and review silently our rock-solid belief system, unconscious to the truth that it’s really an anti-belief system, a rejection (say) of all things sacred. We lie in bed at night and think, Personal integrity has always been a non-negotiable principle for me…I work for Enron…and don’t understand how we’ve just gone through another bottle of antacid pills.
To quote the Talking Heads’ song: How did I get here?
In many cases, it’s because we’ve been manipulated there. But whether external influences on us are intentional or accidental, malicious or well-meaning, my experience with all kinds of professionals, be they athletes or CEOs or cardio-surgeons or salespeople, is that the terrible traps that people get into, the flaws in our stories, simply cannot happen unless we let them happen. And we let them happen by remaining unalert, often willfully. We look the other way until we can’t. “How did you go bankrupt?” one character asks another in Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” answers the other man. “Gradually and then suddenly.” The “slippery slope” that serves as a metaphor for almost anything—morality, the passage of time, commitment—gets an unfair rap: We see the mountain, often from a considerable distance, but when we find ourselves “suddenly” sliding down it, then of course it’s the slope that’s to blame. Your boss asks you to do a little tiny thing you’re not comfortable with—to refrain from reporting something that maybe ought to be reported, say, but which technically isn’t even lying, right?—and you do it…and soon enough you’re committing acts way over the line, crimes even. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Nixon White House. Or let’s not blame it on the boss: Say you’re a journalist who needs juicier quotes to make your story really sing, so you start massaging your sources’ words; after you’ve done it once, what’s the difference in doing it a second time, or a one hundredth? Soon enough you’re actually fabricating thoughts, people, events. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who banged out stories about colorful happenings and characters from around the country, often while sitting in his Brooklyn apartment and lifting passages from other newspapers or just making stuff up. How did he get there?
Those people were at least lucky enough to get caught. They got caught because there were people out there with sufficient incentive to catch them. Is there someone out there to call you out on the phony, self-sabotaging parts of your story? Do you have someone who cares enough to do that, and is himself or herself unentangled? Who sees you and the world with some measure of objectivity? Whom you trust and respect? If you have such a person or persons, that’s good. Great, in fact. But even if you do, you don’t want to rely on others to police yourself. Individual and collective disasters happen when we don’t examine our story to see if it’s really ours anymore, when we don’t look hard to see if perhaps someone or something else has infiltrated it without our conscious knowledge or consent. If you don’t activate your built-in bullshit detector (more on that later in this chapter), if you don’t start listening to your intuition, you make your evolving story vulnerable to hijacking, to rerouting, to programming. That’s why it’s vital to work at understanding how external forces help us to form our perceptions and values; that’s why it’s vital to waken ourselves to the brilliant, subtle, often nefarious methods that individuals and institutions use to indoctrinate us, be they parents, corporations, media, religion, schools. We are, after all, easily indoctrinated, amazingly easily; worse, once indoctrinated—or “frozen,” to use the term coined by Edgar Schein, author of a study on interpersonal dynamics in corporate America—it is extremely difficult to unlearn. To unfreeze.
Although “indoctrination” has come to have a largely negative connotation, it does not always manifest itself as a dark force. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Mind control” can be used beneficially, for example, to cure people of drug addiction; Reverend Jim Jones, who would later lead almost a thousand people to commit mass suicide in Guyana, started out as a drug counselor. Parents use indoctrination every day for positive ends: to convince their kids never to get in a car with strangers, say, or always to look both ways before crossing the street, or to stay away from drugs, or to love music and art. (Of course, negative applications of the indoctrination process are at least as endless: embedding intense racial hatred or prejudice, or the belief that the intentional killing of women and children in suicide bombings is justified and even noble, or the belief that defrauding customers is nothing more than smart business, and on and on and on.)
Nor must one be, or teach others to be, excessively wary of outside influences, via an overactive crap detector, in order that we remain, now and forever, a blank slate (tabula rasa). How boring and joyless would that be? After all, Earl Woods did nothing less than “manipulate,” if you will, his son, Tiger, into seeing balls in high grass and behind trees and in sandtraps not as lamentable misfortunes but rather invitations to greatness, golf shots for the ages just waiting to happen. Earl Woods spun this “positive illusion” for Tiger as his loving coach and father. Nothing nefarious about that.
What’s important, then, is to understand the astonishing power of influence and indoctrination, so that we may be better equipped to fend off the diabolical paradigms and theories (or discard those already embedded in our belief system), “new stories” that are usually gift-wrapped as panaceas, as promises of eternal happiness, as life-altering revelations of calm and vision. What’s important is to stay connected to reality and, by so doing, maintain the ability to evaluate whether our story is a reasonable one, a neurotic one, or a downright psychotic illusion. What’s important is to be flat-out conscious, lest we find ourselves drinking the Kool-Aid and living a story that someone else has manufactured for us (e.g., perpetual consumer, cog in a corporate wheel, religious fanatic, overly responsible son).
Of course, doing what I’m suggesting—unerringly knowing what is good for you versus what is bad for you—is anything but easy. The oft-tossed-out retort, It’s my story and I’m sticking to it—tongue-in-cheek though it’s usually meant—slyly speaks, I believe, to this very difficulty. The snappy comment suggests two things simultaneously: First, My story is an unchangeable story; and, second, My story may well be wrong but I will never abandon it so long as it’s mine. There’s honor simply in clinging to the “mine-ness” of it; better to propagate a false illusion one can call one’s own than rent out a truth belonging to someone else. A culture where such an idea is deemed honorable is one that may now and again muddy the concept of truth.
To understand the indoctrination process, then, will require more than a passing acknowledgment that, yes: Indoctrination does, in fact, exist. “If I, as a young woman, had had someone explain to me how indoctrination works,” said Deborah Layton, “my story might not have been the same.”
Who, you might ask, is Deborah Layton? One of the thousand who followed Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones to Guyana where, in 1978, 914 of them died, many of them when they quite literally drank the Kool-Aid, laced with cyanide. Deborah Layton survived but we can only guess at the damage; and she never would have followed had she only been aware that she’d been manipulated.
BIG BATTLE FOR A LITTLE VOICE
You have a story right now, a story that is by definition the story of your life. Who owns it?
Is it a story your parents gave you? The one your uncle or preacher gave you? The one your peers gave you? Who owns the billions of neural pathways in your brain that determine your personal reality? Who has been the principal architect of the one reality you know and the stories you tell to support that reality? If it’s not you, then are you comfortable relinquishing control of your reality to forces outside yourself, particularly considering what’s at stake—namely, your life?
If your values and beliefs are the prism through which you see the world, and the guiding force for the choices you make, then where did they come from? Was your mother a flower-child during the sixties whose values inescapably influenced yours? Did your dad’s Depression Era mentality about money so profoundly affect your worldview that you don’t travel as much as you might, don’t treat yourself to the good food and wine you now enjoy only infrequently, never spontaneously call your siblings who live in other cities—as you’d like to—unless it’s after eleven at night and the phone rates have dipped? Who or what influenced your view of family, of women, of men, of love? Of sex? of morality? of good and evil? of America? of what’s worthwhile in life?
The little private voice inside you that seems to have been there as long as you can remember—the one that insists, say, that everyone has it better than you do, or that women are no good, or that someday in the indeterminate future everyone will realize your brilliance—where’d that come from?
No matter how admirably you wrestle to unearth the origins of these ideas of yours, getting to the answer is devilishly elusive. Influence mostly operates in the murk of unconsciousness.