The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  YOUR CRAP DETECTOR

  Asked what it takes to be a great writer, Ernest Hemingway replied, “a built-in shock-proof crap detector.”

  We all have a crap detector—some better than others, some exquisitely on the mark, some tragically deficient. It is our evaluative inner voice, an absolutely vital instrument that enables us—privately, at least—to see things for what they are; to know if something, deep down, is good or bad for us.

  Just being able to detect crap, however, is not enough; if it were, then we’d all be doing the right thing for ourselves, all the time. There are people all over who, while capable of detecting crap, do nothing about it (for example, those who remain in abusive relationships, rotten marriages, dead-end jobs; who take no concrete steps to pursue lifelong dreams). Theirs might be called an “underactive” crap detector: It exists, it’s even turned on, but it doesn’t trigger meaningful action, and thus does its owner little good.

  An underactive crap detector also makes us vulnerable to all sorts of deceptive influences (e.g., some of the indoctrinations mentioned earlier in this chapter). If we refuse to listen to what we know is suspect, then we are complicit in the sinister indoctrination that may happen to us. We need the crap detector to filter, to protect us from all kinds of destructive input. An underactive crap detector greatly increases the chance that we might drink the Kool-Aid.

  On the other hand, we don’t want an “overactive” crap detector, either—an inner voice that, metaphorically speaking, guards us so tightly against external input that nothing new is allowed in, even if new, constructive data or perspectives are precisely what we need to improve our story. The possibility that Judy L. could encounter, much less befriend or grow intimate with, a trustworthy man seemed impossible so long as she had an overactive crap detector. If you built up such a wall and, say, a colleague commented that he’d discovered a more efficient way to run meetings, or your mother told you about a movie she’d just seen that she thought you would really enjoy, or a friend you hadn’t encountered in years showed up in phenomenal physical condition and described his regimen…you’d block it all out. Because you approached everything new with cynicism, skepticism.

  If positive change doesn’t happen with an underactive crap detector, with an overactive one, change can’t happen. Yet change might be exactly what you need: By giving up your own long-held notions about physical conditioning, say, which haven’t worked, and indoctrinating yourself with your friend’s thinking, you’d have a real shot at turning your dysfunctional story about fitness into a constructive one. But your crap detector is having none of it. An overactive crap detector won’t allow any changes in your stories to occur; it perceives everything as threatening or irrelevant. So a crap detector gone berserk doesn’t help us, either.

  In workshops, I often compare the crap detector to a gatekeeper: It’s there to let in the good influences and keep out the riffraff. What so often amazes me, and amazes the clients themselves, is how sensationally well developed their gatekeeper is in their business life—knowing the good people to hire and the bad ones to eliminate; jettisoning superfluous or destructive ideas and embracing constructive and necessary ones; focusing always on the fundamentals—and yet how sensationally underdeveloped their gatekeeper is in their personal life—neglecting their health and their relationships with loved ones; getting caught up in what doesn’t really matter; not focusing on the fundamentals. I often say that if the gatekeeper they employed for their personal life were hired to do the same for their business life, they’d have gone bankrupt years ago.

  You need a built-in, shockproof crap detector to help you, but not just to know when to let in the good external influences and keep out the bad. It’s also valuable in allowing you to distinguish between two things very much within you: your public voice and your private voice—the latter, the very force that provides a running narrative of your life and, in many ways, determines its success.

  Five

  THE PRIVATE VOICE

  I don’t mean to suggest that because you, like all of us, are subject to the effects of subtle indoctrination, you’re but one small step away from succumbing to a cult and relinquishing all control over your thoughts, your money, your life. Still, distasteful as it may be to accept, there are parallels we can learn from. And perhaps it’s in the unabashed, unnuanced nature of extreme indoctrination to let us peek behind the curtain and understand a little better how all indoctrinations work inside of us, how they can seep in and help to create storylines for us that can be at once fantastically seductive and destructive. This knowledge may prove extremely useful to us even for everyday situations, even for those of us who could never imagine ourselves, in ten lifetimes, capitulating to cult-think of any sort.

  To embed beliefs in us, precisely which part of our story are “they” trying to infiltrate and transform? Two parts, really: our public, outer voice—the one we use to account for ourselves (i.e., tell stories) to others—and especially the private, inner voice—the one we use to narrate our life story to ourselves. Years of indoctrination can result in the partial or complete loss of ownership of that private voice. It’s an extremely disturbing loss because it means you no longer own your stories (if you ever did); these stories are someone else’s now. In your own body, in your own life, you have been usurped by another. This inner, private voice may belong instead to your mother, father, relative or anyone who played a powerful role in your life. Your teacher or preacher maybe. For Steve B.—the outwardly confident, inwardly joyless CEO who ran his family’s multimillion-dollar rubber business and otherwise seemed to have it all—his private voice belonged to his late father, a revelation Steve experienced only after coming to see us. That Steve’s voice was not his own—no matter how much he may have respected and loved his father, which he did, abundantly—prevented Steve from experiencing genuine pleasure and fulfillment in his life. When he realized the inauthenticity of his voice, and how many years it had been not his own, he broke down.

  Is your private voice still yours? You’re sure about that? To help determine this, and whether your private voice is working for or against you, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

  What’s the general tone of your inner voice? Harsh, bitter, and critical? Or supportive, kind, and encouraging?

  Estimate how much of the time your inner voice is a constructive force in your life, and how much a destructive one. To what extent does it instill you with confidence and hope? To what extent does it terrorize you with messages of inadequacy, incompetence, and regret?

  Ever feel that your inner voice is not really you speaking? If it doesn’t feel like you, whose voice might it be? Consider both content and tone.

  To help you achieve real happiness and to leave the legacy you desire for those you care about most, what changes would you make in the content and tone of your private voice?

  To what extent is your private voice aligned with your ultimate mission in life? What seems to be the driving force behind your private voice? Where is it taking you?

  Because everyone possesses both a public and private voice, and because the stories we tell and hear embed themselves more deeply in our subconsciousness the more they are repeated, the most successful indoctrinations, for both good and bad ends, aim to influence both voices, repeatedly. The more aligned both voices are with the desired new learning, the more open one is to being indoctrinated.

  In the end, though, it is only the one voice that truly matters. Because your inner voice is telling you your story all the time, you’re rarely even conscious that you’ve been “telling” a story. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what it would feel like if suddenly you stopped telling yourself your story, or even just changed this one.

  Therefore, if you control the quiet, internal, private voice, then you own the keys to the vault. At least that’s how brainwashing experts have long proceeded in their sinister, and very successful, efforts to control and reform the minds of prisoners of war. Years of experien
ce taught brainwashers that, once they gained control of a prisoner’s private voice, his whole mind was theirs for the taking.

  WHEN STORIES COLLIDE: THE TWO VOICES OF THE STORYTELLER

  The public voice expresses the story we tell others. It is posture, and by that I don’t mean false posture but rather presentation. It is our voice to the world outside ourselves. It may or may not reflect the truth.

  The private voice expresses the story we tell ourselves. It can be the measured voice of reflection or the completely uncensored voice of cynicism. It can be our filter, our gut check, our crap detector, our relentless, brutal critic. It reflects our internal reality at the moment but may or may not reflect objective truth.

  Both our public and private voices coexist throughout our life. Both voices help to form “realities” for us and, to a lesser extent, for those around us. Although the two voices move us forward in different ways, if they are to work effectively for us, they need to be aligned.

  That’s the ideal, of course: having both voices be as aligned* as much as possible. No, let me refine that. To be aligned is necessary but not sufficient; after all, you may privately believe that Joe in Accounting is skimming off the top, and you may even share that view publicly with colleagues—but if it’s not true that Joe is doing that, then simply being aligned in your views means nothing. Or a man may feel, privately, that all women are to be mistrusted, and he may, publicly, tell joke after joke that betrays his misogynistic view, but merely having his voices in concert with one another doesn’t necessarily reflect anything positive or factual. The ideal, then, is to have both voices be aligned and to have each of them express a version of a story that is virtuous, productive, and realistic.

  Unfortunately, that rarely happens. I estimate that in 80% to 90% of my clients the private and public voices are out of synch on one or more of their most important life stories, as well as dysfunctional—their stories around work, around family, around health, etc. In these cases, the two voices are not working toward the same goal, not operating from the same vantage.

  Some examples, in minor and major affairs, that may feel familiar:

  Examples like these must resonate. After all, how many times a day do we wish that our public voice expressed more accurately and explicitly what we want or need? For most of us, that would be a giant, probably welcome departure from our usual response, the one where we’re reciting as if from a script, automatically and dispassionately, subverting our self-interest in favor of civility and etiquette. Which, sadly, is not really life but rather some watered-down simulation of life.

  As the above examples and countless others show, our public and private voices can send very different messages that lead to entirely different stories, stories that may conflict or even cancel each other out. For example, Public Voice expresses regard for the short-term (“That was so much fun—let’s definitely get back to Vegas before we break for the year!”) but undermines what Private Voice needs for the long term (“I can’t pass my MCATs unless I study all-out for the next two months”); or Public Voice puts professional well-being first (“If no one else is available, you can count on me to fly to Sydney to close the deal”) while Private Voice recites a message more concerned with familial well-being (“Janice has been raising the children practically as if she’s a single mother and I want to know who my kids are”). Each time this occurs—and it may occur dozens of times a day—our public voice becomes, in varying degrees, disingenuous, inauthentic, to ourselves and/or to others. How we feel about our own credibility and trustworthiness, about our ability to see our missions through to completion, to see our life stories through to fulfilling ends, begins to erode. In the best case, this “battle of voices” wastes precious energy. In the worst case, it thoroughly undermines our sense of well-being and inner peace. One client put it eloquently: “My public voice always says ‘Can do!’ My private voice always says, ‘Can’t do!’”

  But wait. Must we really get these voices to align? And, if so, how can we possibly keep these two voices in check? Don’t the demands of our world—the masked ball that is polite society—often obligate us to say and do things that we may not want or believe in, while privately we feel quite differently?

  To get our story right, I believe, our private and public voices must each get the message right and true, working hand-in-glove. And to help facilitate this, most of us need exactly what it sounds like we’d need: voice lessons.

  Voice lessons allow you to control both voices, and in so doing to control your story. Specifically, if you can’t get your inner voice right, you can’t get your stories right. The irrefutability of that simple statement has become clear to me after years at this. Say what you want outwardly, but it is your inner voice that is the master storyteller, the one that carries the greatest power and influence over your destiny, over who you become and where you end up. When you get your private storytelling voice right, and then align your public voice with that voice, your power will be breathtaking and nuclear. Proper “voice lessons”—which we can practice ourselves, once we know what we’re going after—will finally allow both voices to recite from the same page. In this way, they will be authentic. In this way, your story will reflect the real world. In this way, your story will give you hope. In this way, your story will be consistent with your core values and beliefs. And in this way, you will take yourself where you want to go.

  With the proper self-training, controlling both voices is indeed possible. There are three basic steps to gaining voice control:

  acknowledge the existence of your private voice;

  turn up the volume on it;

  listen to it.

  Listen to what your inner voice is saying. Is it a relentless, second-person critic? (You’re so stupid! You never do anything right. You’ll never amount to anything in this world.) A first-person complainer/whiner? (I hate this job. I always get dumped on to do things nobody else wants. Why do I put up with all this crap?) The supportive, encouraging “coach” voice? (Hang in there. Take a deep breath and finish what you started. You can do this.)

  Listen to the stories your voice tells. By being fully aware of your silent story, you will unearth, perhaps for the first time, the private voice which is, in the end, the voice of greatest power. You may find your private voice to be surprisingly wise, confident and encouraging—an absolutely brilliant storyteller. At other times, perhaps more frequently, your inner voice may sound unjustifiably harsh, impatient, irrational, critical. By amping up the volume and listening carefully to the story being told, you begin the voice-training process. Once you genuinely hear the voice and the message it’s carrying, you can determine whether the story is true, whether it can take you where you want to go in life, and whether it inspires you, finally, to hope-filled action.

  VOICE LESSONS: TEN INNER VOICE SKILLS

  The voice training that follows is designed to help you to discover, and eventually equip you to access easily, the many inner voices you have at your disposal. These private voices are powerful, virtuous, and useful—but useless if you don’t know that they exist (most people seem not to), don’t realize how powerful they can be, don’t know that they can help you to achieve your ultimate mission, and don’t know how to summon them.

  The first step in accessing the various private voices you possess is simply by believing that they can be cultivated inside you. After that, you “merely” need to learn how to draw them forth, and to do so regularly so that you can invest energy in them and, by doing so, strengthen them, like muscles.

  I realize there are many types of voices below. I don’t expect you to memorize them, or cultivate them all at once.

  Quiet Your Inner Voice. Shut down the internal chatter by immersing yourself in an activity that engages you fully. Complete absorption quiets the inner voice; in fact, it may be the first time your private voice—often so critical and negative—has had nothing to say to you in a very long time, and the silence may be deafeningly profound. Meditation,
deep breathing, and yoga are especially effective ways to reach this tranquility but it may also be achieved by playing sports, building models or sand castles, riding a horse, painting, following a dung beetle, or any of a thousand activities. While everyone should develop this quieting skill, it’s particularly beneficial to those in high-stress situations, such as medicine, sports, and law enforcement. Developing the ability to methodically quiet your inner voice better equips you, conversely, to clear away the ambient inner noise when it’s time to perform and you need to access all your skills. In short, quieting your inner voice helps you to focus better.

  Summon Your Inner Voice of Conscience. Spend energy exploring, clarifying, and understanding your values and ethics—your ideas and thoughts about integrity, honesty, and character. Ask yourself questions like, “What’s really the right thing to do here?” or “What do I really believe should be done here?” Sometimes reflecting on how a deeply admired parent, friend, business leader, pastor, or military leader would respond in this situation will help summon this voice. The more you draw this voice forward, the more available it will be.