by Jim Loehr
Summon Your Inner Voice of Reason and Wisdom. Inside us all is the voice of sanity, of reason—yes, even of great wisdom. But far too many people, sadly, fail to cultivate this capacity. This voice represents your ability to rise above all the noise, the clutter, the distractions, the cloud of emotions, and to see the situation for what it really is and make judgments and decisions accordingly. The ability to see clearly in the storm is neither inherited nor something that develops with age. It comes from lots of hard, focused mental lifting. To nurture this voice, try this: The next time a difficult situation erupts and you feel the irrational, childish, “the sky is falling” voice bubbling inside you, sit down immediately, take a deep breath and (a) write down the facts of what is happening or has just happened (no emotion, please; just facts); and (b) write a brief story around the facts that reflects both wisdom and perspective and will make you proud when you read it six months or a year from now. Carry the paper with you always. Every time you start thinking or acting irrationally, stop and re-read this story.
Summon Your Inner Voice of Support and Encouragement. What would you say to your best friend or beloved family member if he or she were facing the predicament you’re now facing (for example, made a foolish mistake or failed to get a promotion that was clearly deserved)? Whatever message you would send to those you most care about, whatever tone of voice you would use, send it to yourself. Use it on yourself. Again—as with the voice of conscience, the voice of reason, or any other dimension of your inner voice—each time you call on this voice, you strengthen it and further improve access to it. For many people I’ve worked with, this voice is particularly difficult to train. For some, unfortunately, what rises up is not encouragement but rather a hideously unmerciful critic. In some cases, this self-deprecating voice can be so contemptuous and toxic that bystanders are shocked when the voice is made public. “I’m the biggest loser the world has ever known!” or “I hate myself for who I am” or “I’d be better off dead!” To kill off this highly destructive voice—the flip side of the supportive, encouraging voice—you must deprive it of energy. Don’t feed it. Instead, redirect your energy toward your supportive, constructive voice.
Summon Your Inner Voice of Toughness. I call this your “fighting voice” and it’s one of the most important voices we possess; after all, to complete our ultimate mission in life, we must be great fighters, and without access to this voice we’re too easily victimized by the world around us. To draw it forth, visualize what a person who inspires you would say. For example, perhaps your parent was a great fighter in life, or perhaps you watched a friend courageously battle a terrible disease. (This exercise, as with exercises for so many other aspects of your inner voice, parallels what many Christians do when measuring possible responses to situations by considering “W.W.J.D.?”—“What would Jesus do?”) If Tiger Woods, Christopher Reeve, or Mother Teresa inspires you, use your voice to mimic their legendary fighting spirit, courage, or resilience. Connect the difficulties now confronting you with a purpose or someone you deeply care about. For example: You are training for a marathon to win the respect of your son; you have committed to coming home at 5:30 three nights a week for the happiness and psychological well-being of your family; you are drawing a line in the sand about downsizing your division, telling your superior you won’t dismiss your people until you’ve helped them find other work; you are eating more organic foods not just for your health but also to do your small part in helping the environment, the planet your grandkids will need to live on. Such articulated motivation helps you to be tough and stay tough on yourself when the situation calls for it. You become the hard-assed coach who, beneath the gruff exterior, has your best interest at heart. Eventually, you, the coach, simply won’t tolerate whining, complaining, scapegoating, self-pitying, giving up, not going all out; this voice will be there always, to bolster you, push you, implore you to fight courageously, no matter what.
As with all other voices, the more you visit it, the stronger and more available it is.
Summon Your “I Don’t Buy It” Inner Voice. This is what I have also called the crap detector. If this voice is underdeveloped, you risk becoming tragically gullible. You may be easily indoctrinated, possibly for sinister purposes. But getting this voice pitched just right is difficult, because we all have natural tendencies: Some of us tend to be overly trustful and open; others, overly distrustful and cynical. That’s why you must also work on the opposite of the “I Don’t Buy It” Voice…
Learn to Suspend Your “I Don’t Buy It” Inner Voice. Okay, you’re a doubting Thomas about people and the world. That’s smart—but only up to a point, because new learning and input (a.k.a. indoctrination) are not only good for you but may be necessary for your success, even survival. Tough as it is to suspend your suspicious, questioning voice, you must, because this is how the door to personal change opens. If your story around work, money, family, or health is dysfunctional, then you don’t want to block out everything; after all, “everything” includes all that is new and functional, too. Since we’re constantly required to make course corrections for our lives and businesses to succeed, then it is only through skillfully letting in selected forces of indoctrination that we can acquire the new learning and adaptation required for success.
Teach yourself to suspend your cynical, crap-detecting voice simply by saying to yourself—every time this voice clears its jaded throat—“Stop. This is good for me.” Stop the cynicism dead. And once you say “stop,” immediately focus again on whatever new lesson you are learning.
Summon Your Inner Voice of Compassion. Think of emotions such as kindness, empathy, and sympathy as if they were muscles that grow and expand in response to the energy we invest in them: Just as your bicep grows as a consequence of the energy you invest in it when weight-lifting, so your compassion as a human being grows as a consequence of the repeated energy you invest in it. Every time you stimulate feelings of compassion within yourself, you increase that capacity; the greater the capacity, the more accessible the voice. Anything or anyone that stimulates feelings of compassion in you is valuable in your voice training. Feelings of compassion might be stimulated by reading, by listening to people’s stories, by visualizing and imagining how you would feel if this difficulty or that predicament were happening to a family member. Volunteering for work in hospitals, nursing homes, and soup kitchens might be the moral equivalent of heavy-duty weight-lifting sessions. I’ve heard so many stories of self-confessed cold-hearts who made the effort, if begrudgingly, to do this kind of volunteer work, and every time the result has been nearly identical: a newfound appreciation for the plight of one’s fellow man, which of course deepens one’s appreciation for life’s blessings.
Summon Your Voice of Sincerity. One of the most crucial voices we possess, first and last because it validates all the other voices. That is, it signals for us and for others that the stories we tell are authentic, that they represent what we truly think and feel and that we can be trusted. Those who let this voice atrophy suffer painful, even tragic consequences. We all know people whose sincerity quotient is extremely low, even nonexistent. We perceive them as being phony, shallow, manipulative, calculating, inauthentic. When we’re with people whose voice of sincerity is weak or nonexistent, we get the impression that their head and heart are not connected, that they do not act in concert with each other.
When your public voice resonates with sincerity, people perceive you to be real, grounded, genuine. To get the public voice right, however, you must get the private voice right. One’s public voice cannot reflect what it cannot read or detect. The voice of sincerity begins by listening to and acknowledging one’s private voice, then finding an appropriate and honorable way of expressing it when speaking publicly to others. Do it enough and the merging of the two voices becomes habitual. People start believing that what you say is really who you are.
Summon Your Voice of Intuition. This is the voice of your gut, a voice of intuitive intelligence
that doesn’t follow the standard pathways of conscious logic and reason. It represents a somewhat mystical way of knowing and, as a consequence, is often devalued, perhaps intentionally repressed. But training this voice, listening to and respecting this voice, can pay enormous dividends in just about every dimension of life. In relationships and in parenting, in work and in investing, when playing golf or sitting in a classroom, the voice of intuition can prove invaluable. Simply asking the question, “So what’s my gut saying here?” can summon the voice. Your gut response may be right—or not! you may want to do the “wrong” thing!—but it’s a voice that very much merits a listen.
Six
THE THREE RULES OF STORYTELLING
I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER
In 1971, a landmark study by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced the concept of the “hedonic treadmill,” which suggested that people’s emotional reactions to life events worked much like sensory adaptation—your eyes adjusting to the dark, say—so that “good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality.” The study also suggested that each of us possesses a more or less fixed happiness “set point.” Memorably, further study posited that lottery winners, once the novelty and excitement of their financial windfall had worn off, were no happier than nonwinners; alternatively, the recently paraplegic, once the newness of their misfortune had faded, were not substantially less happy than those who could walk. People continue to pursue happiness, the study concluded, because we believe, incorrectly, that greater happiness lies just around the corner—in the next goal accomplished, the next social relationship obtained, the next problem solved. Forget it, admonished the unsettling new theory: In the long run, your efforts are futile.
If the hedonic treadmill model really was correct, then almost no change in life circumstance should ever lead to a lasting change in happiness or sadness. (Some events, particularly the loss of a longtime spouse, are associated with a marked, often permanent changing of the set point.) If true, then there was no way, through our own efforts, to raise our happiness set point, which seemed substantially, if not predominantly, a heritable gift or curse. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: No matter how high or low you got, you would always return roughly to your set emotional level/mood.
In 2006, thirty-five years after this initial study, researchers Ed Diener, Richard Lucas, and Christie Scollon published a survey called “Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill.” While acknowledging that their studies were in the initial stages, their work contradicted the idea of an unchangeable happiness set point and put forth the notion that, with work, one might be able to elevate it. “Happiness can and does change,” claimed the authors. At least it did for some people surveyed—and if it did for some, then there was hope for at least some of the rest of us.
So what did those people do to raise it? When faced with tough times or disappointments, they tended to use reappraisal strategies (such as reordering priorities or creating new stories to explain events to themselves). Faced with the complications and difficulties of aging, older people whose set points rose, or at least didn’t fall as much as the norm, made adjustments: They were more likely than the rest of the elderly population to use coping styles such as humor, information seeking, and “keeping going.” Others who evidenced an increase in happiness set point included those who frequently changed activities and those who performed random acts of kindness each week.
If this newer survey is true—and everything about my professional experience supports the idea that one’s set point can be elevated markedly—then we constantly need to infuse our story with new thinking, new energy. To do so can bring about shifts in happiness, excitement, enthusiasm, joy, inspiration that are not temporary but sustained. And to come back to one’s now more fluid set point, it is (to paraphrase Dickens) a far, far better place one returns to than one had ever known before.
But one needs to work at this, continuously. If not, then one almost certainly retreats to previous, lower levels of happiness and engagement.
Perhaps the best way to raise the level, a method used particularly by spiritually inclined clients, is to consciously increase thoughts of gratitude in one’s daily life. Whether I knew it or not, that’s what I was doing when I committed to calling my sons at eight P.M. every night I was out of town—reappreciating and reconnecting on a regular basis with the greatest blessings in my life. One hardworking client felt terribly guilty that she couldn’t be at her dying mother’s bedside all day; by committing to calling her every morning, visiting her every lunchtime, and calling her every night after work, she could feel her mother responding (she now had a dose of love and attention she could count on) and the client herself felt her guilt giving way to pride that she was doing something tangible for her mother, something both of them could feel. Another client, a hard-charging, frequent-traveling VP who was always out of the house before his daughters woke for school, decided he’d put little notes to them in their lunchbags every morning before leaving for work. They said nothing about it; still, he continued to do it, feeling good about the gesture. One day, sitting in the airport terminal as he waited to board for yet another business trip, he opened his briefcase to find a love note from each of his daughters.
Building a sense of deeper gratitude into our stories may help to prevent that adaptation that brings with it complacency. Since it is eminently possible to identify the beautiful things in our lives, we must appreciate and reappreciate them.
The inevitably exciting conclusion of this later study by Diener, Lucas, and Scollon is that, were the workplace made more engaging and interesting, it could “provide an optimistic foundation for the various fields of applied psychology”; that is, what is implemented and learned there might eventually be applicable to society at large. The study’s authors, who were also interested in the dynamics of organizations, called for a “system of national accounts of well-being in which people’s happiness, meaning, and engagement are assessed over time and in various situations.” In short, when we discover what makes people feel better—consistently and on a daily basis—then instituting changes to transform the corporate culture could meaningfully raise the set point of many employees.
This is exactly what we’ve done when we work with entire business units or whole companies. While ultimately it comes down to each individual’s commitment to bettering himself or herself, we try to show management the importance of creating an environment that fosters respect—and then actually supports the idea, putting its money where its mouth is by providing useful programs and tools (making healthier snacks available, mandating exercise, mandating time off, monitoring balance in its employees’ lives). Theoretically, this can only be positive for everyone in the organization, top to bottom.
And in actuality, it’s true, too. Just ask Procter & Gamble. Or Nordstrom. Or GlaxoSmithKline. Or PepsiCo. Or Janus. Or Qualcomm. Or other giant corporations and mid-sized companies alike, all of whom have been through our program and are now far along on the road to reconceiving their organizations into ones that understand that you achieve long-term productivity and profitability not by the time your people clock in but by the energy they invest. That you’re better equipped to plan and meet bigger-picture goals not by single-mindedness but by balance. That nothing compels employees to be loyal and hard-working more than a belief in the story—the good story—their company tells about itself.
REWRITING: TURNING POINTS
So positive change really is possible; great. How does one identify the right time to initiate the change?
All good stories, says Herminia Ibarra, professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, hinge on dramatic moments, truth…and turning points. All life stories have turning points. Turning points can be positive: wedding day, the dawn of a relationship, leaving for college, a job promotion, buying a home, becoming pregnant or giving birth, getting a driver’s license, committing to train for your first marathon or completing it, getting your first A in math
, making the commitment in various ways to quit drinking, smoking, overeating. Turning points can be negative: death of a spouse, loss of a marriage, a heart attack, being passed over for partnership, taking a physical that reveals dangerously unhealthy blood chemistry; the failure of a business, getting disturbing feedback from direct reports on 360 evaluations, hearing that a close friend, a lifelong smoker, has lung cancer. It should be said, also, that one person’s negative turning point is another one’s positive; after the fact, many people have described a traumatic experience as “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
A turning point is simply an event or circumstance that precipitates a significant change in the story, a change in how we think or feel about something important in our lives. Turning points can alter, suddenly, our day-to-day circumstances, our self-confidence, our perception, even our values and beliefs. Turning points usually entail powerful emotion. They can force us to face the truth as nothing else can. F. Scott Fitzgerald provocatively—and in my opinion wrongly—said, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Maybe so—but only if one chooses to ignore the profound opportunities for transformation represented by the plentiful turning points in every life.
Here’s the thing about turning points, though: They’re not always obvious. (Nor must big events—a wedding or a new job, say—necessitate profound changes in how we live.) Many turning points are subtle, recognizable only in hindsight; they “tend to be much more obvious in the telling than in the living,” write Ibarra and Kent Lineback in their article “What’s Your Story?” in the Harvard Business Review. A turning point can be the tail-end of something gradual and cumulative—more accurately described as a tipping point than a turning point. “During our life we often experience periods when we seem to lose our sense of meaning and purpose,” writes Robert Quinn in his book, Change the World. “There is no longer a feeling of alignment between our inner values and our tasks in the external world. We find ourselves working harder and harder and receiving less satisfaction from our efforts. We struggle through every day, lacking the vitality, commitment, and initiative we used to have. After much inner reflection and contemplation, we begin to realize that we need a new focus, a new vision, but it is difficult to uncover.”