by Jim Loehr
Step 5: Sit back and read your Old Story. How does it make you feel? Sick? Stupid? Dumb? Embarrassed? Does it stir powerful feelings of disgust? Can you see and feel the story’s dysfunctionality?
Step 6: Write a new story that
is fully aligned with your ultimate purpose
reflects the truth
inspires you to take hope-filled action
To help you articulate your new story, some suggestions:
Start with the words “The truth is…” Describe as vividly as possible what will likely happen if you continue with the Old Story you’ve got. Face reality head on by connecting the dots.
Don’t labor over every word. You’ll edit it later. Just get your initial thoughts on paper, quickly.
Because your New Story packs a cannonshot of reality, it will necessarily stir negative emotion (the more powerful, the better).
Your New Story should clearly reflect and connect with your Ultimate Mission in life. Anyone reading your New Story should have no trouble connecting it with what you care most about.
Your New Story should be inspirational for you when you read it. It must move you powerfully: move you emotionally and move you to take action.
Your New Story should contain a strong message of optimism and hope that the change you seek will indeed happen if you remain dedicated and persistent.
Make sure that this is your story, no one else’s! Be sure this is what you really want.
If possible, craft your New Story in the context of a major turning point in your life. This change you seek should be characterized as a breakthrough.
Work hard to summon your voice of sincerity. Your inner voice must be able to express the message, content, and direction of your New Story completely and unambivalently.
In your writing, aim to bring forward your best voice of reason, of wisdom, of intelligence. These voices can’t come forward without your encouraging them.
As with your Old Story, getting your New Story right will likely take several drafts. Once you feel you’ve finally got your story straight, write it here:
Step 7: Design explicit rituals that ensure your New Story becomes reality.
Rituals are consciously acquired habits of behavior that enhance energy management in service of a mission.
Rituals represent the vehicle by which your New Story receives the investment of life-giving energy.
A few suggestions as you think about creating your new rituals:
Link the ritual to one or more values (since the ritual by itself is largely meaningless, connect it to deeper reasons; one executive who vowed to take physical breaks every ninety minutes walked the hallway, poking her head in offices to say hi and see if she could help; in being so public about taking care of herself, she also felt as if she served as a good example for her workaholic direct reports).
Invest energy in it for thirty to ninety days.
Be precise in the timing and other details surrounding the ritual (exercise at the same time for the same number of days a week; when you walk in the door, put your house keys in exactly the same place each time; etc.).
Acquire no more than a few rituals at a time.
Focus on where you’re going, not where you came from (for example, rather than focusing on the cigarette you can’t smoke, focus on the LifeSaver you’re sucking on, the wallet photo of your kids you pull out, the brisk walk around the block you’re taking to clear your head).
Create a supportive environment (for example, recruit a buddy or colleague or spouse to work out with you; have your kids give you a report card each evening to see if you did what you said you would).
A particularly valuable ritual is to begin every day of your ninety-day mission by reading your New Story.
Rituals
Step 8: Establish a daily accountability system for the rituals you’ve committed to.
Almost every successful athlete we’ve worked with has used a daily training log. It helps to ensure that they do what they’ve committed to doing, at the time and with the focus that they committed to doing it.
Some suggestions:
Make your accountability system easy to complete and accessible. It could be a sheet of paper on your bedstand or, if you love technology, a spreadsheet on your computer. The point is that you must fill it out daily to keep the transformation process alive.
Think of your daily accountability form as both a time management system and an energy management system. Did you do what you said you would at the time you committed to (time accountability)? Did you invest the right quantity, quality, focus, and force of energy (energy management)? You can use a scale of 1 to 5 or A through F to reflect your energy investment success. An example:
(The entries listed under Rituals are not all major rituals, per se: Most are modest rituals, components of a larger ritual—e.g., “eat breakfast,” “eat until satisfied, not full,” and “small portions during lunch/dinner” are a few of the component rituals to eating better; other entries are not even rituals at all but rather are there to help you assess the quality of your progress—e.g., “exercise intensity” and “afternoon engagement.”)
3. Consider reviewing your accountability log with someone you respect (spouse, colleague, friend). Ask that person to serve as your coach during the ninety-day mission.
4. Be obsessive about your record-keeping and compliance during the ninety days. Eat, drink, and sleep your mission.
5. If your enthusiasm about the change you’re making starts to wane, or if you start getting bored reading your New Story (this will likely happen at some point), go through the entire process again but in a much shorter time frame. Rewrite your story to reignite your excitement and commitment to change.
For help and guidance through the transformation, please go to our website, www.humanperformanceinstitute.com, where we present the process step-by-step.
What do you do after your ninety-day mission is complete?
Select another faulty story that’s not taking you where you ultimately want to go; edit it and begin the process again.
If our stories are our destiny, then to achieve a destiny of our own design, rather than one that’s merely a default, requires commitment, honesty, and energy. It means editing our stories for as long as we’re alive.
The Final Chapter
RAYMOND’S STORY
In October 2003, Raymond, a forty-one-year-old executive at Procter & Gamble in China, came through our program with seventeen of his colleagues, as part of a P&G pilot group. While he was himself signed up for the two-and-a-half-day seminar, Raymond saw his mission more as one of due diligence—to assess whether the program might benefit other P&G executives. Anyway, he’d already been through numerous “health-wellness” programs that spelled out various constructive, common-sense strategies: regular physical and spiritual renewal, especially meditation; drinking lots of water; and other behavior modifications, small and large. But while Raymond remembered some of the ingredients of these programs, he was never able to put them all together in a sustainable manner. He found that the ideas were presented “in a hodge podge,” and that no mechanism really compelled him to stick with the whole system—if there was such a mechanism to begin with.
As with everyone who came through our program, Raymond spent the first hour of the first morning getting BodPod and blood chemistry evaluations. His results put numbers, unequivocal and alarming, to various health indices of which he was aware but hadn’t felt like confronting. Despite his being on Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering medication, Raymond’s blood lipids and specifically his triglycerides were in the “dangerous” range. His body fat was 37%, and for his body frame he was sixty pounds overweight. Yet for the past eight years he had spent an hour a day, five days a week, pedaling a stationary bike! Raymond admitted that no one would guess he was even related to his relatively fit brother—his identical twin brother.
Although Raymond had long been aware of these health “red flags,” at any given time he
could tell himself one of three stories to justify why he’d done little to confront and reduce the jeopardy in which he was now in: It was “just too hard” to make the necessary changes; he was working like crazy and didn’t have the time; a better time would eventually come around and he would fix the problem then. (Raymond would later dub this story “New Year’s resolution syndrome.”)
For Raymond—or anyone—an obstacle perhaps more daunting even than the timing of making changes, or the difficulty of accomplishing them all, was unearthing the very mechanism of change—that is, the trigger that could persuade you, once and for all, that to change was to gain your life, and that not to change was slowly and inexorably to let your life slip away, to die slowly. The toughest part was finding incentive sufficiently powerful that you embraced and stuck with the program long after the initial thrill of measurable self-improvement had passed.
A rational, intelligent, high-energy, and passionate man, Raymond had believed that data and discipline alone would rescue him. If he just kept riding his bike, if he just kept drinking lots of water, if he just kept succeeding at work, then his problems—stress, wild dips in energy, his gut, his blood work scores, the disconnection he often felt from his family, his perpetual lack of time and balance—would go away. “When I rode the bike,” said Raymond, “I perspired like crazy, yet I always failed my stress test. It really wasn’t helping me.” And yet he didn’t change his routine. He kept riding at a speed that allowed him to concentrate on what he was reading or watch a movie on DVD. Worse, he exercised as soon as he woke up without taking any breakfast. He didn’t realize that he was burning his muscles, not fat. He just believed that his overweight and his other physical problems would go away. Or at least subside significantly. Somehow.
Of course, the problems didn’t subside. Data and discipline could not save Raymond. What would?
Story. Just as he had subconsciously leaned on stories to explain himself to himself—those reasons why he simply couldn’t change—so, too, it would be a story—a new, better, conscious one—that would compel him to see why he absolutely had to change.
By the middle of the first day of the workshop, the P&G executives began sharing their stories—stories that rivaled so many others we’d heard over the years: life trajectories that failed the individual and, in the long run, didn’t really work for the company, either. Amazingly, so many of these brilliant, analytical, successful types had never recognized this until they told their stories aloud and began to examine them.
As the day unwound, Raymond revealed a poignant, tragic fact to the group: his father had died of cancer without getting to see his grandchildren, who were now eight, six, and three. Expressing this aloud got to Raymond, deeply.
“I was in a bad place,” he would say later. “I wasn’t behaving in accordance with my values. I’d started taking Lipitor three years before, at thirty-eight, and now I realized, as if for the first time, ‘At the rate I’m going, I might damage my liver.’ My wife was worried. I said I loved my wife and children but what exactly did that mean?”
Raymond admitted that his old story was stagnant, shot full of blind spots. He knew deep down that important things in his life just weren’t working; for heaven’s sake, he barely resembled his much fitter identical twin. Wasn’t that evidence enough that even a smart, capable person could get way off course?
Once Raymond rediscovered what mattered to him, he felt a huge burst of strength. He wanted to write and follow a new story, one that was purpose-driven, grounded in truth, and which empowered him to do things he had long ago stopped thinking he could do.
“I needed a new set of tools. In Florida, I learned the scientific reason behind interval training—how it was far more beneficial than simply pedaling a stationary bike for an hour five times a week, and also takes less time. I learned why I needed to exercise with the proper intensity—not so that I could be reading at the same time. I came to understand genuinely how nutrition affected health. But the tools weren’t just technical. They weren’t about weight loss. They were about giving me a comprehensive, detailed appreciation for the concept of energy. How nutrition affected energy levels, and thus how you could use nutrition to manage your energy. Same with exercise—how, if you did it properly, you could manage your energy better. It was surprisingly simple. Do you have enough gas in your tank? Is it good quality energy? Are you hopeful about things? If not, then how can the quality of your energy be good?”
Raymond told us that his goal was to live longer. To live to see his own grandchildren. To take care of himself so that he could continue to take care of others.
Acknowledging that his old story wasn’t working, he vowed now to confront his values, which, over time, had slowly but profoundly become misaligned. Because he wanted desperately to be there as long and as vibrantly as possible for his family—his Ultimate Mission—he’d found the mechanism to compel him to make this a reality. And while this new story centered around his family, the impact of his renewed commitment had implications for those he worked with at P&G.
When the two-and-a-half-day program ended, Raymond told several of us, “Watch me in four to six months.”
As much as Raymond believed he would have no trouble keeping his commitment, immediately upon his return to China he built outside accountability into what he was doing. He wrote frequent e-mails to Chris Jordan, our extraordinary fitness director and a member of our team with whom he’d really hit it off. “To keep my new story alive, I wanted to put more pressure on myself,” said Raymond. “I relished it. I’d always been confident but now I consciously made myself into a role model.” The periodic reports to Chris became increasingly positive “because what I was doing got easier and easier,” said Raymond.
“I consciously spread positive news about the things I learned,” he said. “I pushed our president to bring Jim to China to do a program with us.”
Raymond was able to stick to his new routine because he began to ritualize it. “Monday is my rest day,” he said. “On the other days, I wake up at 6:30. Breakfast at 7, exercise at 7:30, out the door by 8:15. One reason I didn’t find the routine difficult was because it was really a return to basics. So many of those things we learned growing up—with our parents creating morning rituals, real regimentation to develop good habits in us—frankly, we kind of lose that as we get older and more scattered and more stressed.” Raymond felt as if he was merely, and familiarly, returning to a way that had worked for him long ago.
Six weeks into his Training Mission at home, Raymond had achieved real results: His bloods lipids were back in the normal range and he stopped taking Lipitor for the first time in three years. He’d lost twenty pounds, down from 220 to 200.
He had no trouble extending his new discipline to work. In each management meeting he led back in China, he would insist on frequent breaks, and make available the kinds of healthful snacks we’d advocated in Orlando. Other P&Gers began to see the changes in Raymond. “I felt as if there was nothing I was not capable of doing, and I think people noticed. I couldn’t be rattled. I wasn’t getting wound up like I used to. Things weren’t fazing me or scaring me.”
Nor did anyone at work view these breaks during the day as a sign that Raymond had gone off to Florida and come back less committed and productive than before; just the opposite, actually. “People knew I was a really disciplined person, and now they saw that I used that discipline to take more frequent breaks, to drink water more regularly, and that I did it with more composure. And how I felt energetic throughout the day, without fading like I used to.”
For all the benefit his colleagues got from watching his example at work, the people happiest at Raymond’s transformation were his family. Said Raymond, “Following through on my commitment proved to them that I meant what I said when I said I loved them.”
Why was Raymond able to write this new story—easily, even joyfully, and without falling back? Because purpose fueled the change.
Four months later—s
ix months after going through our program—Raymond took a business trip to Cincinnati, where P&G is headquartered. Before heading back to China, he detoured to Florida to get tested again. His body fat—at 37% just a half year before—was now 21%! He’d lost fifty-five pounds; he was down to 165. He was still off Lipitor. His other indicators were all in the normal range. And “though I had thought I was always a high-energy person,” he said, “I had never felt better in my life, never had so much energy.” He felt as if his energy had increased “exponentially.” Daily, he was experiencing a clarity of mind that outstripped what he was used to.
He also had a new appreciation for the quality of energy, not time, that one spends on any activity. “I learned better how to stay in the moment,” he said. “People told me that I used to always say, ‘Life is too short,’ but back when I was saying that, I was still wasting lots of my life—on worry, on anger, on being stressed, on not being fully engaged in what I should have been doing or thinking about. Now, I was much, much better about not being angry about the past or worrying about the future. I really saw how useless it was. People around me marveled at the fact that a Type A personality like me could seem calm, under pressure or not. A lot of it had to do with being in better physical shape, which allowed me to get through things better.”
At Raymond’s next performance appraisal, his boss, the president of P&G for Greater China, commented that of all the many improvements Raymond had made, none stood out more than his “ability to handle stress.” The president also commented on a remarkable uptick in Raymond’s performance, as well his growth as a manager.
Just a few weeks later, Raymond found out that he had skin cancer. “The word ‘cancer’ is a horrible, stressful thing for anyone to hear; for someone who’s Chinese, the phrase ‘skin cancer’ is close to a death sentence. And if I’d had the diagnosis a year before, I would have been unbelievably stressed. But when I heard it now, it wasn’t nearly as terrible. Learning to live in the moment helped me to deal with it—not to be so stressed, to take things in their own time.” From the time he was diagnosed with the skin cancer to the time he went to the States for treatment, it took around seventy-two hours. He focused on what he could control and stayed calm while sorting out his next steps. “Fortunately, it turned out that I had the mildest form of basal cell cancer,” he said, “but the whole experience was dramatically different from what it would have been.”