The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

realistically fixable

  clearly defined

  supportable by behavioral changes (rituals) that will do the trick

  A couple of examples of actual Training Missions and their supporting Rituals:

  Training Mission 1:

  To become more engaged with my wife at home and with my direct reports at work.

  Rituals to Support My Training Mission

  Every day find two things to compliment Sandy on

  Date night with Sandy every other Saturday

  Be more engaged in the time together with Sandy

  Home for dinner at least 3 times per week and encourage direct reports to do the same

  Listen more, talk less in time with direct reports

  One-on-one lunch with direct reports every Thursday

  Thank direct reports for their hard work and contributions at least once a week

  Devote ten minutes of weekly meeting for direct reports to discuss matters affecting their work/life balance

  Review training mission (and New Story) first thing every morning

  Training Mission 2:

  Find ways to engage more with family, especially given all the travel I do for work, and to be more engaged at work.

  Rituals to Support My Training Mission

  When home, bedtime stories every night at nine PM

  Call home at eight PM every night out of town

  Establish and meet a minimum number of days per month to be home for dinner

  Make phone call to parents every Sunday evening at 8:30 PM

  At least twice a day, instead of e-mailing colleagues with questions or information, walk to their office instead

  Eat breakfast every day

  Never go longer than four hours without food

  Drink water regularly throughout day

  Once you’ve succeeded at one Training Mission, you’ve not only improved specifically (in those few areas) but you’ve improved generally, showing yourself capable of meaningful change. This arms you with the confidence and track record to embark on another training mission, perhaps more ambitious than the last. Each time you “ritualize” a new, improved behavior and turn it into a largely unconscious habit, one that requires less and less energy as it becomes simply a part of your new way of being, you free up new conscious energy needed to change in other important ways. As long as you engage in the step-by-step, clearly defined program as set out by the Training Mission—conscious, honest engagement—you’ll be amazed at how relatively quickly the power (and size) of your unconscious mind begins to take over, making your better behavior the norm.

  Now write down yours:

  My Training Mission

  Five Rituals to Support My Training Mission

  THE TRAINING EFFECT, THE STORY EFFECT

  The more curls you do with a dumbbell, the more your bicep grows. Increase the repetitions or the weight and the bicep increases in size and strength. It’s not rocket science. It’s the simple effect of training your bicep.

  Whenever you invest energy in anything, there is a “training effect.”

  The greater and more frequent the energy you give to that thing, the more life you give it, and the bigger and stronger it becomes. Its impact grows. The training effect is inescapable. It happens whether you intend it to or not. It happens whether its impact on your life is good or bad. It happens whether the repetition is an action or a thought. It affects you outwardly and inwardly, and likely affects others, too. If you repeat it at the same time of day, or in a predictable sequence, then you will train yourself eventually to act or feel or think a certain way at that time of day, or at a predictable juncture in the sequence. (Think Pavlov, who so famously conditioned dogs to salivate merely by ringing a bell—because they’d been trained, through repetition, to associate bell-ringing with feeding.) If you have eggs and cereal every morning with your kids, then there’s a training effect in a variety of ways: the omega-3 in your blood will rise but so might your cholesterol (some say no); also, you’re bonding with your children. There’s a training effect on them, too: They see breakfast as a ritual and an important source of fuel. They see that you have time for them at the start of the day. The habituality pays dividends, sometimes bad, sometimes good, but it always pays. Often multiple training effects are happening at the same time, some positive and some negative. So many working mothers torture themselves because they feel guilty that they’re not home more with their kids, and that their kids will take something negative away from that. Maybe yes, maybe no—but these women also need to honor themselves for making an impression on their children that doing work outside the home can be fulfilling, even joyful.

  So long as you invest energy in anything, there will be a training effect. Don’t expect to “outthink” your body or your brain, as if you can do something while also denying its impact. Perhaps the training effect is not exactly a euphemism for Newton’s Third Law of Motion—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—but it’s clear that if you do something, then something else happens. No one gets away with anything.

  Now suppose that, rather than growing your biceps, you’ve long wanted to be more patient. How would you make your patience “grow”? You’d invest energy in it, of course; that is, you would seek regular occasions to build it, to develop it, in the same way you regularly go to the gym to work your bicep. Fortunately—or unfortunately—there is no shortage of opportunities to grow patience: finding yourself in a traffic jam, being put on endless hold, trying to get out of the house in the morning as the kids dawdle putting on their coats, working with a new colleague who’s trying hard but still not up to speed. Invest energy in patience and it will grow, like a muscle; conversely, if you invest energy in impatience, then it will grow. By giving something energy, you give it life.

  The same is true with your job, your marriage, your relationship to your kids, your golf swing. Invest energy in each and it grows; stop investing energy and it stops growing, and eventually dies. Just as our bicep adapts and expands its capacity in response to the investment of energy in weight-lifting, so do patience, compassion, trust, mental focus, and integrity respond to energy investment. When we give something energy, we grow it; when we give something extraordinary energy, it grows extraordinarily.

  There is a training effect for stories, too. With each repetition of a story you tell yourself, that story travels your neural pathways more easily. Tell yourself that story again and again and again and soon enough those pathways that were once unpaved roads, metaphorically speaking, have now become slick six-lane superhighways. Gradually, repetition reinforces the primacy and value of that story—not to mention pushing away or ignoring alternative stories undeserving of your energy, which then atrophy or die, and the pathways they once traveled now narrow again, growing less supple with disuse. You become indoctrinated by your current story. You are training yourself to believe it and to live it. Steve, the incredibly successful client who was dogged by the presence of his late father, commissioned himself to write a letter to his dad every Friday, saying things in it that he hadn’t when his father was alive (such as gratitude he wished he’d expressed), as well as documenting what was going on right now with Steve, his family, and the family business. For thirteen Fridays in a row he did this—sometimes a page, sometimes five. After three months, he felt as if he understood his father better, as well as himself. That’s not to say that everything was perfect because of a Friday letter, but his relationship to his father had changed, for the better.

  Every story we tell has some effect. Stories move the needle every time we tell them. Because of this powerful “story effect,” it’s imperative that the story you tell be a constructive, and not destructive, one: The effect of training makes it hard to break the bonds that form. It’s crucial, then, to be utterly conscious about who you are and what you’re doing with your life—in other words, to be brutally truthful with yourself about your purpose—so that you are aware of your story and can assess whether and how i
t’s helping or hurting you. Obliviousness is, as they say, not an option. Without this awareness, you can’t take corrective action.

  There’s a problem, though. You may be thoroughly well-intentioned about examining your story, yet often it’s difficult, if not impossible, to see the immediate consequences of your story on yourself or others. Your story’s impact may not reveal itself for years. For example, who sees the consequences of eating one bad meal? Or not working out for one day or one week? Impossible. So we continue not to work out, and to eat bad meals. And the next day and the next. We “get away” with it. We don’t see the consequence of our inactivity (I’ll get to it when things are not so crazy at work…when the weather is warm…when the kids go off to college), and then one day we get a physical, our first in five years, and—shock of shocks!—our bloodwork and other health indicators are all at alarmingly unhealthy levels. One client, a banker who smoked and was considerably overweight, later had a heart attack and quadruple-bypass surgery. He told me that for years his doctor always labeled his bloodwork and other health indicators as “moderately” high. “That word ‘moderately’ totally let me off the hook,” he said. “Every year I walked out of his office after a checkup, that word allowed me to do nothing.” And then one day he had a heart attack. How did his story come to such a pass? Again, as the character says in The Sun Also Rises, when asked how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

  I don’t mean to suggest that the training effect is more a negative than positive development. Far from it. Indeed, when you are pursuing your New Story and trying to fulfill your Training Mission, you want to be at the mercy of the training effect: This is where the power of your unconsciousness is delightfully beneficial, working for you. Thanks to the training effect, once you’ve finished an initial period of training, you’ll gradually be required to spend less and less of your conscious energy toward making that positive change.

  RITUALIZING

  The first time Jack B., vice president at a consumer products company, pulled into his driveway after work and intentionally left his cell phone in his car, he had to pretend to himself that he’d done so mistakenly; without indulging that little lie, he couldn’t quite close the car door behind him, his diabolical electronic lifeline perched in its holder, beckoning him. But he made it inside his house and, astonishingly, the world didn’t fall apart. He didn’t get fired the next day. The following night, he again left his phone in the car, only this time he didn’t feel the need to concoct a story for himself about why. The world continued spinning on its axis; he still had a job the following day. Within three weeks, his “change experiment” had become a habit. His cell phone would not cross the threshold of his home. His initial reasons for leaving it behind were so he could be more attentive to his kids and wife; so he could feel a boost when he saw them, not that on-edge, work-never-ends feeling; so he could actually relax more. But he discovered that he now enjoyed at least one more benefit, too, a change he would have considered counterintuitive had he not experienced it himself: He became more productive. At the office he concentrated better because he was aware that that was the time when all things had to get handled, no two ways about it—and his team knew it, too. His direct reports could no longer treat him as if he were their trouble-shooting ATM, available no matter the time of night or day. Six months later, Jack’s world was still standing and his “radical” change still had not put him in jeopardy of getting fired. The idea of it made him laugh, in fact. Thanks to this one small but crucial new restriction on his home life, he was so much more energetic at work (at home, too) that he felt more indispensable to his firm than ever.

  That’s certainly one way to develop and embed a “ritual,” the term I use for a new way of doing or thinking that transforms into an advantageous habit: Make up a story to tell yourself. But lying to yourself is hardly a prerequisite for getting a profound change to take hold. In fact, the more honest, open, and explicit you can be about it, the better.

  Let’s explore more closely the connection between a more formal Training Mission and turning it into action. The Training Mission might be, say, to expand your horizons; the ritual, to read a book for twenty minutes on the train ride in before you turn your attention to The Wall Street Journal. The training mission might be to charge, rather than shuffle, through those periods of the day when your drop in blood-sugar level renders your ideas worthless, your concentration non-existent, your energy quasi-catatonic; the ritual, in response, might be to set your wristwatch alarm to go off at eighty-minute intervals, which is your signal to stand, stretch, stride down the hall, and step outside for five minutes of recharging with a granola bar, fresh air, and the serotonin spike of actual sunlight. The Training Mission might be to improve communication with your direct reports; the ritual, to sit down with each of them individually for twenty minutes every Wednesday morning. The training mission might be to reconnect with your spouse; the ritual, ten consecutive Tuesday nights of ballroom-dancing classes.

  Once you’ve enjoyed success at making these modest but vital changes, and you see for yourself just how swiftly constructive rituals can be cultivated and integrated into your life, you’ll develop the confidence to take on more, and more ambitious, rituals, in the service of fulfilling your Ultimate Mission.

  Now probably you think I’m making ritualizing sound too easy, unrealistically so. Real change requires more than desire, more than a good intention, which is a necessary condition for change but not a sufficient one. After all, come New Year’s Eve, many of us, stocked for winter with good intentions, resolve finally to change our stories—seriously this time, no kidding, cross our hearts. Yet sadly, rare is the resolution that’s still in play by Valentine’s Day.

  Don’t shy away from rituals that, by themselves, seem simplistic or trivial, given the magnitude and scope of the life change you are targeting. We’ve learned something very important at the institute: Never underestimate the power of a single ritual to effect significant change. Jack B., the VP who trained himself to keep his cell phone out of his house at night because it trivialized his family life and threatened actually to endanger his marriage, still had work left over from the day that needed to be done. So besides just leaving his cell phone in the car—a clear signal to his wife and daughters that he had rediscovered his respect and even love for them and for the sanctity of their family—he instituted another ritual. In his words, he “got permission from my wife to do one hour of work in the evening after the kids have gone to sleep, but then she and I spend an hour winding down together in bed—talking, watching a movie, reading next to each other.” Although Jack was sure it would be a hard change to stick to—just as he’d feared with the cell phone—he found that it was in fact surprisingly, satisfyingly easy. Precisely because it was just that one hour of work, and he was forbidden (or forbid himself) to let it bleed into the next, he was more engaged than he was used to being in his home office. More often than not, forty-five minutes was enough for him to accomplish what he needed, sometimes as little as twenty. The time with his wife was then undistracted and more enjoyable, energized by the fact that he’d gotten his work done and that he wasn’t (as he used to do) “plotting in the back of my mind how I would slip out of bed later.” Says Jack: “It’s amazing what it’s done for our relationship, and it’s made me more efficient in my work, too.”

  I won’t back away from the claim that rituals are relatively easy to inculcate—so long as you work toward them with this checklist in mind:

  Identify the story/stories that are causing you pain, agitation, unhappiness, frustration.

  Identify a few behaviors or habits you could improve to reduce or eliminate these negative feelings.

  Decide on an action, one consistent with your values and beliefs, which allows energy to flow in the new targeted direction, and make sure it is highly structured, reasonable, and not overtaxing to your present lifestyle.

  Creative thinking is pretty much a necessity
in this ritual creation process; after all, to get to a new way of being you’ll probably have to be clever. Be open to enlisting others. For example, if the story that needs changing is the one around your health, and the action you need to take is to carve out several times a week to exercise, then the question is, How? Your mornings are filled with a long commute, your nights consumed by family. Perhaps you make lunchtime Monday, Wednesday, and Friday your inviolate workout session, get a colleague to cover for you during those three slots with the proviso that he call through only in emergencies (which happen much less frequently than we tend to think), and you return the favor by covering for him or her another three hours during the week. Or maybe you decide that the change you need to make is to eat healthier, especially those Thursday staff lunches when your dining choices are not yours to make. E-mail those who attend the meetings that you’d like to order from a variety of healthy places and then have an assistant, or each of you, on a rotating basis that taxes no one, make sure to order from those menus. Before you know it, you’re looking forward to the food at Thursday’s gathering and wondering why you don’t eat healthier the other four workdays. You shouldn’t hesitate to include others in your rituals. So long as you’re not coercive or obnoxious about it, chances are great that the positive change you want to make is something they’re looking to make, too, but have so far just lacked the proper incentive, structure, or camaraderie to succeed.

  One mid-level manager chose to be creative in this way: In an attempt to spend more time with his son, at the beginning of each quarter he found out all the key son-related events coming up—such as soccer games, piano recital, birthday, parent-teacher conferences—and then “encoded” them into his work calendar as “AMX.” When those in the firm wanting to schedule time with him looked at his calendar, which was available on the company intranet, they saw the serious-sounding letters peppering his calendar. If someone called to make an appointment at one of those times, his assistant told them, “I’m sorry, but he’ll be with AMX then.” Everyone came to believe that AMX was an important client, which of course it was, his most important. Everyone came to treat those occasions as untouchable. The manager, meanwhile, had forever ritualized time with and for his son.