The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  Their divergent narratives ultimately stem from vastly different beliefs and values, the keys to how they, or anyone, interpret whatever facts they’re exposed to. For example, one of Robert’s most impenetrable beliefs is that war is never an acceptable way to resolve an injustice or settle a dispute. According to him, war is always evil, represents a massive human failure, and never truly resolves anything. According to his belief system—his story—no matter how bad or tragic a situation might appear, with persistence, diligence, and prayer, an alternative to war can always be found. The intentional taking of human life can never be justified. For Robert, all wars are ill-conceived failures, leading only to indescribable human suffering and pain.

  Once one knows Robert’s beliefs about war and the taking of human life, his attitude and opinions about President Bush become more understandable. Every article Robert reads about Bush, every fact about the war he absorbs, every newscast he views is filtered by his powerful beliefs. Even when confronted, at one point early on, with news that elections were being held successfully and Iraqi troop strength was growing, Robert’s hatred and contempt for Bush persisted. Indeed, after reading reports suggesting that the war was yielding possibilities for hope, Robert felt all the more threatened and disturbed; this good news directly contradicted his belief that war never leads to a positive outcome. Deep down, Robert secretly hoped the war would fail and that President Bush would get what he deserved: impeachment.

  Diane’s beliefs lay the foundation for a completely different story. One of her most important beliefs is that evil exists in the world and, if left unchecked, it can spread like a deadly disease. Serial killers, mass murderers, and ruthless dictators are facts of life and pose such serious threats to the welfare of others that physical force and even war become not only justified but moral imperatives, necessary actions to excise these cancerous threats to civilization. Violence and war are choices of last resort but may be required in special circumstances to protect the rights, freedoms and well-being of others. To support her belief, Diane cited two examples: the removal of Hitler from power; and the fact that law enforcement officers must occasionally use deadly force to protect the innocent. Even if the original rationale for the American invasion, and the most broadly persuasive, turned out to be untrue—that Saddam Hussein, who had already exhibited a willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, was gathering them for deployment against the West—Diane was not fazed. Because of her steadfast belief that life is extremely messy and complicated, full of bad people who will use all means to destroy America and its way of life, she could easily explain to herself the WMD debacle: It was naïve, she argued, to assume that our intelligence-gathering operations could ever be flawless when dealing with madmen. When the media began to report that the upper ranks of the American military and even members of the president’s own party were growing increasingly disenchanted with his military strategy—or lack of a strategy with any apparent coherence or thoughtfulness—Diane dismissed it as flinching, as 20/20 hindsight; the reports only strengthened her belief that cowards are always quick to criticize but slow to act and fueled her argument that the invasion was completely justified, since numerous diplomatic attempts to bring Iraq back into the community of nations had long ago failed. For America not to draw a line in the sand, when the Iraqi people were being killed and oppressed and the world was in a perilous situation from which it might never return, would have been a surrender of morality and responsibility because it would serve only to embolden other madmen.

  Whose version of the story is right? Or—at least—more right? Which one more closely reflects objective reality?

  There is, of course, no answering this question. If there is an objective reality—and I believe there is—then we can hope only to approach it but never to know it fully. The only reality we know fully comes from the stories we create around our sensory experience; these stories are profoundly influenced by beliefs and values, the bedrock of each person’s worldview; and this bedrock is formed by a mixture of influences that varies wildly from one person to the next. “There is properly no history,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “only biography.” The core values and beliefs we hold are not the truth, of course, but rather our truth, representing critical elements only to our story. Morality is kaleidoscopic. “We do not see things as they are,” says the Talmud, the sacred Jewish text. “We see things as we are.”

  Robert and Diane used mostly the same facts—or perhaps “filtered” is more accurate—to build to vastly different conclusions. Facts are meaningless without a contextual story; that context is built with the bricks and mortar that are our pre-existing values and beliefs. For our purposes in this book, the crucial point in all this is to recognize that whatever our beliefs and values, they are powerful forces in our storymaking. For better or worse, they help us to form, modify, alter—and, yes, distort—our sensory experience. If we hold a core belief that, for example, people can’t be trusted, then we will bend or distort the reality we experience to support that belief. Rather than register and consider and appreciate and finally embrace the living example of the next twenty trustworthy people we encounter, whose existence and actions might logically undermine this belief of ours, we instead wait for, and are ready to pounce on, the example of the twenty-first person, that lying, lousy, two-faced cheat who represents everything we’ve been saying for so long. We’ll find facts or generate evidence to prove our point, to keep our belief alive. If those strong beliefs reflect racial, ethnic, or gender biases, say, then we’ll find evidence to perpetuate the story we tell around it.

  In short: It’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

  WHERE DO OUR VALUES AND BELIEFS COME FROM?

  Since core beliefs and values play such a central role in our storymaking, it might be useful for us to understand how they form inside us. That’s not a simple task: There are so many factors to consider, most of them invisible. But one thing we do know: Beliefs and values are not inherited or coded in the genes. They are assumptions about life—it’s always wrong and immoral to take human life; love of money is the root of all evil; all people have inherent value in and of themselves; meat-eating is wrong; people who don’t travel are narrow-minded; you have to be crazy to live in New York City; Southerners talk slow because they’re dumb—that we acquire, in the same way that we acquire a foreign language, or learn our way around a new city, or learn to be respectful toward others, or to love our parents.

  Because beliefs and values are acquired, their truth does not typically lend itself to scientific verification. Sure, we might be comforted if science, which we adjudge to possess a high objectivity quotient, could help us to confirm or dispel the truth of beliefs and values, but for the most part we can’t. (How satisfying would it be to have a science experiment prove, once and for all, that a belief of yours, a belief that contradicts your friend’s, is true? How long could you keep yourself from calling him up to crow, “You see? I was right!”) Now and then, an assumption that many people have held to fervently for centuries has been debunked by scientific inquiry; the best example, undoubtedly, is “The world is flat.” But that’s the exception. Scores of attempts have been made, for example, to scientifically prove the existence of God, but to the entrenched nonbeliever, the evidence presented is neither scientific nor convincing. (And could it really ever be thus—that a mathematical proof or scientific experiment could definitively corroborate the truth or falsehood of a belief? Or do we idealize that science’s “objectivity” could help us, precisely because it never could? “There are three kinds of lies,” Benjamin Disraeli is reputed to have said. “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”)

  If core beliefs and values are not inherited, where do they come from? How do our major assumptions about life, which play such a central role in our storymaking, get formed? To understand the process by which beliefs and values are acquired—that is, how they get embedded in our minds—is to gain control over a profoundly important tool. It is to und
erstand that beliefs and values aren’t just static tendencies we possess, but qualities that, at various key turning points in our lives, as well as in our day-to-day life, move our story this way and not that, or that way and not this. This self-awareness can then be accessed to change, modify, or eliminate those beliefs and values of ours that, upon examination, work against our self-interest. This knowledge can help us to answer the important question: Do my beliefs and values help my story take me where I want to go?

  To understand the acquisition process a bit, let’s revisit our friends Robert and Diane. Again, I start with Robert’s story. An only child, Robert is unmarried. Both his parents are well-educated and deeply religious. Robert’s father holds a doctorate in theology and has been an Episcopal priest for twenty-nine years; Robert’s mother earned a master’s degree in marriage and family counseling and for more than a decade has maintained a small private practice. It’s no surprise to Robert that his core beliefs are so similar to his parents’. He has vivid memories of how his parents used every opportunity to instill their beliefs that war is never justified and the taking of human life is always wrong. “They were relentless,” says Robert. “At times, I guess they were over the top with their indoctrination of what they believed. Their intent was good and, in the end, what they did worked. I believe I’m a deeply principled person and I credit them for who I’ve become.” Robert graduated with honors from a small West Coast college within driving distance of his parents, then went on—against the wishes of his conservative parents—to receive a master’s degree in political science from that famously liberal bastion, the University of California at Berkeley. While in grad school, he became politically active and an advocate for numerous social causes. His favorite and most influential teacher was, according to Robert, one of the more controversial figures on campus. Robert credits this professor with not only reinforcing some of his established beliefs but, more important, challenging many of his traditional views, spurring him to expand his thinking in ways that have fundamentally changed his life and view of the world. According to Robert, his core beliefs and values are primarily the product of the strong influence of his parents, his rigorous religious training, the many books he read as a child, and his exposure to new ideas and thoughtful people during his graduate years, nurtured most memorably in the endless discussions he had with his favorite graduate school professor.

  Now Diane’s story: Married with two children, ages two and four, she’s a stay-at-home mother who’s active in her church and a community volunteer. She received a nursing degree from the University of Nebraska and intends to pursue a nursing career once her children attend school full-time. Her husband owns a small construction company and works part-time as a volunteer fireman. Diane and her family live in the same midwestern community where she was born and raised; her parents live two miles away, in the house they moved into when Diane was a teenager. When asked about the origin of her values and beliefs, Diane points immediately to her parents as the strongest influence. Both of her parents, she says, are hard working, possess strong religious views, and take a conservative approach to almost everything. Her father owned a hardware store and small grocery. Both her mother and father worked from “dusk to dawn” to make ends meet. Diane’s only brother was killed in a military training accident. Despite the pain and anger she and her parents felt over her brother’s death, her positive views about the military remained largely unchanged. During her mid-teens, she rebelled against much of the religious doctrine she’d been exposed to, but as she got older, and particularly after having children, she returned to most of the same beliefs and values taught her by her parents and religious educators. Diane believes that her feelings about war and the existence of evil, and her admiration for President Bush, stem from the influence of her parents, her religious experience, the frequent conversations she has with her husband (who, according to Diane, is cut from the same political cloth as she), as well as a circle of friends—her “political buddies,” she calls them—with whom she shares ideology, who watch the same news channels, and who keep each other current on world affairs by exchanging books on topics that are vaguely or explicitly political.

  Both Robert’s and Diane’s stories exemplify how plentiful and diverse are the factors that influence the formation of core values and beliefs: parental input (particularly during the early childhood years), religious teaching, formal educational experiences, the beliefs of selected teachers, reading materials both religious and political, news reporting on television, and the beliefs and values of friends, peers, and extended family. Our core values and beliefs, then, admit to multidimensional origins and reflect complex indoctrinating forces.

  But for the purposes of this book and its potential benefit to you, the most significant point to take away from Robert’s and Diane’s stories, I think, is not the multiplicity of influences on them. Rather, it is how—though the strongest and most pervasive influences may have occurred during early childhood—the learning process continued throughout their adolescent and adult years.

  That’s not unique to Robert and Diane. This evolution happens to all of us, if you believe the data and stories we’ve collected on the many clients who have attended HPI.

  Why have I spent so much time, relatively speaking, examining Robert and Diane? I do it because I believe their life stories are representative; because I think that looking at them can help you to look at your own life and story, with a finer appreciation for the force of indoctrination in your life. By doing so, you come to see—I hope—that indoctrination, quite simply, determines the reality you experience; this reality, in turn, largely determines your hopes (and, equally important, your sense of hope), your fears, your joys, your sorrows, your feeling of accomplishment, your sense of value, your resilience through all of life’s storms—in short, your destiny. As Freud and quite a few others have noted before me, the better portion of our most enduring indoctrinations occur during early childhood, when the brain is particularly malleable and critical thinking skills are developing. Once the indoctrination is complete and the brain’s architecture has changed, it is unlikely that even logic and rational thinking can dissuade you from your view of the world and the story you create that reflects it. The progression works this way: A core belief is embedded, thus changing brain structure; the change in brain structure changes your reality; the change in your reality changes your stories. Perhaps truer than “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” would be “You can’t unteach an old dog old tricks.” While the difference between the two statements may appear cosmetic, the latter speaks more starkly, if clumsily, to origins, explaining why old dogs have practically zero chance of learning a new trick. Once you’ve formed a core belief—say, that fear drives all people, or that no one really appreciates or cares about you, or that Belgians are bad people—you will argue and defend your position against all challengers. You simply know your belief is right. New tricks can’t be taught to you because you see absolutely no reason for them in the first place.

  Outside of the sheer pleasure and fascination that comes from studying and understanding any meaningful idea, the source of the influences on our values and beliefs would otherwise merit no special scrutiny…if your story took you where you want to go in life. If your story engaged you in such a way that you were always in the process of fulfilling your most important missions in life. If your values and beliefs, deeply cherished though they were, could easily be tweaked or even overhauled whenever they seemed to be working at cross-purposes with your interests.

  If, if. If only any of that were the case.

  But it isn’t.

  THE DILEMMA OF FLAWED VALUES AND BELIEFS

  What happens when our values and beliefs are seriously flawed? What if one or more of the assumptions we make about life are tragically misguided? Flawed beliefs, I am certain, produce flawed stories; a flawed story, I am equally certain, produces failure.

  In the worst examples, the embedding of core beliefs an
d values of dubious or outright indefensible worth can have catastrophic repercussions on the culture—take Hitler’s belief in the inferiority of Jews and the superiority of the Aryan race, for example, or the Islamic extremist’s belief that nonbelievers represent the most vile form of evil and must be exterminated from the earth.

  On an individual scale, the person who harbors a seriously flawed belief victimizes those around her—and damages herself, of course, worst of all. Judy L., employed by a giant company and in charge of $1 billion in sales, attended HPI in 2004 with twelve of her direct reports, nine of whom were men. Upon receiving the 360 evaluation feedback from her direct reports, Judy grew visibly upset, then defensive. Feedback from eight of the nine men was disturbing and consistent—disturbing in large part because it was consistent; so consistent, in fact, that Judy was convinced the men had conspired to send her the same negative message. All but one of them depicted Judy’s approach as a person, as well as her management relationship to them and to others, as distrustful, cynical, angry, defensive.

  After discarding the idea—by herself, to her credit—that there was a “conspiracy,” Judy worked hard to figure out why the men beneath her (none of the three women drew such a portrait of her in their 360s) could feel the way they did. Finally, after taking a hard, genuine look at herself, she acknowledged to me that, yes, it was true: She didn’t trust men. Then she articulated the story she’d always told herself to support and justify this belief. “Two days before my fourteenth birthday my mother and father announced they were getting divorced,” she wrote as part of her storytelling inventory. “My mother had discovered that her husband of seventeen years was having an affair with her best friend. The effect on me, my sister, and my mom was devastating. Barely four years into my own marriage, I learned that my husband, whom I adored, was involved in multiple affairs. I’ve been divorced for five years but the sense of loss and betrayal are ever-present. I don’t think I’ll ever fully get over it. To make matters worse, I’m ninety percent sure my boyfriend, whom I’ve been dating for eight months, is cheating on me. Do I trust men? No, I don’t! Why should I? I’m bitter and angry but I can’t let go of it. I’m not even sure I want to. As long as I feel this way, I won’t be disappointed or blindsided ever again. I’m surprised, however, that my feelings about men have spilled over into the workplace. I thought I hid them quite well. Obviously not.”