by Jim Loehr
Praise for The Power of Story
“Dr. Jim Loehr’s concept of Old Story/New Story is so transformational that I introduced it to my entire senior leadership team. Today our New Stories, supported by daily rituals, are enabling Panda Express restaurants to continue our rapid growth toward two billion dollars in revenue.”
Tom Davin
Chief Executive Officer
Panda Restaurant Group, Inc., and former Captain, U.S. Marine Corps
“You might think you’ve heard it all before. I know I did, but not like this. Jim Loehr’s remarkable combination of experience, wisdom, and authenticity provides a unique and powerful formula for getting fully engaged with your life. The information and tools in this book are among the most appreciated elements of our leadership development work and have made a real difference in many people’s lives.”
Jon Anastasio
Vice President, Learning & Development
Nordstrom, Inc.
“Jim’s principles, one of which is changing your story, are without a doubt the most powerful tools available for individuals and companies in order to thrive in today’s fast-changing global business climate. By applying the gems of wisdom within this text, you can literally transform your future. The true testimony is in the life of the author. I have witnessed Jim walk this talk for over a decade.”
Phebe Farrow Port
VP Global Management Strategies
The Estée Lauder Companies
“Jim Loehr’s The Power of Full Engagement has had a powerful effect on my life and career over the last few years. The Power of Story provides new perspectives and a compelling recipe to recharge the spirit and plan for an exciting and fulfilling rest of your life.”
Kerry Clark
CEO
Cardinal Health
“Jim Loehr’s latest book is ‘mission critical’ for anyone looking to expand their capacity in their personal or professional lives. The Power of Story offers wonderful insights into how we can all increase and manage our energy and, more importantly, focus it on the things that matter most to each of us.”
Peter K. Scaturro
Former CEO
U.S. Trust
“Jim Loehr’s practice-based work on story is consistent with a recent wave of academic research on self-narratives in psychology. The upshot: what we say to ourselves creates our reality and guides our actions. Jim’s work teaches us that through the stories we tell ourselves and others about what is possible and impossible, we limit ourselves or unleash unimagined potential.”
Susan J. Ashford
Associate Dean for Leadership Programming & the Executive MBA Program
University of Michigan
“Just recently, we announced a plan to bring a condensed version of the program to all of our 2,300 employees. Jim’s new book, The Power of Story, brilliantly captures the essence of how and why the program works.”
Paul N. Leone
President
The Breakers
“Jim Loehr has done it again! The Power of Story is an amazing book that will powerfully impact your life by helping you change the stories you tell yourself and tell to others. The book is filled with profound insight and wisdom and yet is extremely pragmatic and useful. Many books say they can change your life; this is one of the few that actually can.”
Stephen M. R. Covey
Author
The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything
“The health care industry is focused only on cost and not on the whole story. Changing peoples’ stories is the solution to our health care crisis. The Power of Story is a model of success for addressing out nation’s health care crisis.”
Steve Altmiller
President/CEO
San Juan Regional Medical Center
“The Power of Story provides great insight into the importance of understanding the stories that shape us and how to create new stories. After reading the book, I felt reconnected with my purpose in life and have even more clarity on my training mission. As always, it is a joy to read anything written by Jim Loehr. He is a great coach and inspiration to us all!”
Anne Whitaker
Vice President & Business Unit Head, Acute Care Specialty Division
GlaxoSmithKline
ALSO BY JIM LOEHR
Mental Toughness Training for Sports
Breathe In, Breathe Out
Toughness Training for Life
The New Toughness Training for Sports
Stress for Success
The Power of Full Engagement
FREE PRESS
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2007 by Jim Loehr
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Note to Readers The names and identifying details concerning some individuals have been changed.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loehr, James E.
The power of story: rewrite your destiny in business and in life / Jim Loehr.
p. cm.
1. Change (Psychology). 2. Success. 3. Self-perception.4. Storytelling—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
BF637.C4L64 2007650.1—dc22 2007028654
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4579-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-4579-4
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
To my mother, Mary,
for her relentless efforts in helping me get my
story straight,
and to my three sons, Mike, Pat, and Jeff,
who have been and always will be the epicenter of
my life story.
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
—JAMES M. BARRIE
Contents
Introduction
Part One
Old Stories
Chapter 1
THAT’S YOUR STORY?
Is Your Company Even Trying to Tell a Story?
Presenteeism
Old Stories
Your Story Around Work
Your Story Around Family
Your Story Around Health
Your Story Around Happiness
Your Story Around Friends
Write Your Current Story (or Try to)
Chapter 2
THE PREMISE OF YOUR STORY, THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE
The Words on Your Tombstone
Your Ultimate Mission, Out Loud
Outing False Purpose
Purpose Is Never Forgettable
Questioning the Premise
Lining Up
Flawed Alignment © Flawed Ending
Chapter 3
HOW FAITHFUL A NARRATOR ARE YOU?
Faulty Assumptions
“Because I Can” Syndrome
Cooking the Books
The Four Scenarios
Pessimists, Watch Out
Optimists Should Watch Out, Too
Chapter 4
IS IT REALLY YOUR STORY YOU’RE LIVING?
Big Battle for a Little Voice
Lessons in Storytelling 101: Communist China
Everyday Indoctrinations
Promises, Premises
How Your Values and Beliefs Affect Your Storytelling
Where Do Our Values and Beliefs Come From?
> The Dilemma of Flawed Values and Beliefs
Your Crap Detector
Chapter 5
THE PRIVATE VOICE
When Stories Collide: The Two Voices of the Storyteller
Voice Lessons: Ten Inner Voice Skills
Chapter 6
THE THREE RULES OF STORYTELLING
I Couldn’t Be Happier
Rewriting: Turning Points
The Three Rules of Storytelling
Write Your New Story
Part Two
New Stories
Chapter 7
IT’S NOT ABOUT TIME
What Mr. Rogers Teaches Us
The Lie of Time
A Different Kind of Energy Problem
The Energy Pyramid
From Stories Flows Energy
Chapter 8
DO YOU HAVE THE RESOURCES TO LIVE YOUR BEST STORY?
Our Physical State Influences the Stories We Tell
Getting Your Story Straight About Eating
Getting Your Story Straight About Exercise and Movement
Getting Your Story Straight About Recovery (Rest and Sleep)
Chapter 9
INDOCTRINATE YOURSELF
Deep Diving
From Subconscious to Conscious and Back Again
Embedding
Chapter 10
TURNING STORY INTO ACTION: TRAINING MISSION AND RITUALS
The Training Effect, the Story Effect
Ritualizing
Chapter 11
MORE THAN MERE WORDS: FINISHING THE STORY, COMPLETING THE MISSION
Accountability (About Work)
Accountability (About Everything Else)
Chapter 12
STORYBOARDING THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS IN EIGHT STEPS
The Final Chapter
RAYMOND’S STORY
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
I drink too much, exercise too little, am 35 pounds overweight, have high cholesterol, have already had heart surgery. My father died relatively young from a heart attack. I have four young children.
I don’t feel I’m doing a good job anywhere—home, work, family, self. I’m overwhelmed.
I accomplish all these things, I have 2,200 people under me, but I lost God, the most important thing in my life. I lost my spirituality.
I spend too little time playing with my kids. They look forward to the babysitter coming because she plays with them more than I do.
I feel unappreciated and taken for granted—my spouse does not understand the magnitude of my workload. Work consumes all my energy.
The career I have chosen and love threatens the most sacred part of my life, my relationship with my three sons.
I’ve lost my passion for what I’m doing, both in my career and in my personal life.
—Seven representative fragments, from a database of tens of thousands, of high-achieving, “successful” businesspeople, who were asked to describe the themes and tone of their life stories. One of them is mine.
INTRODUCTION
It sounded like a good story, once upon a time. I’d finally taken the bold step of resigning from the satisfying, commanding position I’d had for years—head of a progressive community mental health center in rural Colorado—to pursue my long-held professional dream: combining my loves of psychology and sports by establishing a business that specialized in helping athletes to achieve optimum performance, redefining how they ate, practiced, rested and recovered and, most important, perceived themselves. The leap was both exciting and scary to me. This was the early 80s and I knew of no one doing anything quite like it. But after weathering my initial anxieties—financial uncertainty; scrambling to establish credibility and get clients; moving to Denver, where there was more activity—my dream began to morph into reality. I came into contact with world-class athletes, especially tennis players, eager to have me aid them in fulfilling their professional dreams—of becoming their best possible competitive selves. The idea of helping to pioneer a new area in psychology was intoxicating. From the indications, I was making a difference in the lives of my clients. The work ignited levels of passion and commitment in me I’d never known.
With my new career, though, came travel, lots and lots of it. Tokyo this week, London the next, then on to New York; no sport involves more globe-trotting than professional tennis. And because of my increasingly high-profile success with tennis players (among them Monica Seles, Jim Courier, Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario, and the Gullikson brothers), I began to attract clients from other sports, too—golfers (like Mark O’Meara), hockey players (Mike Richter, Eric Lindros), Olympians (speed skater Dan Jansen), basketball players (Grant Hill), football and baseball players, collegiate stars and All-Pros. Sure, my career frequently took me away from my children, the most important thing in the world to me, but this was the time of life—this, right now, I thought—to devote my best energy to my career, so that I might achieve maximum success and thus be the best person and role model I could for them.
Anyway, that’s the story I told myself as a father.
The reality was different. Every time I returned home, I felt like a stranger. Increasingly, my three sons didn’t know very much about who I was or what I was doing. So accustomed did they become to my not being there that when I was home I felt like a fringe character. Most frightening of all, I didn’t know who they were becoming.
Gain professional success but lose something far more precious in the process—what kind of story was that? I had long thought of myself as a father who would do anything for his kids, yet increasingly I wasn’t seeing or knowing them. Was that a story I would ever want to share with others? Was it a story I could live with? Couldn’t I just ignore it and deal with it later? Like, in a year or two (or three), when I would really, truly be established professionally?
More and more, the way I was letting my life play out haunted me. My greatest failure would be to fail my boys. Yet the way I was going, I was fast-tracked for it. I felt guilty, desperate to come up with a better way—either that or return to my career as staff psychologist, where I had no travel demands but also minimal professional fulfillment. To maintain my current career, I needed to correct something or watch as my story as father fossilized into tragedy.
When I could, I brought my sons with me to sporting events, especially over the summer; the U.S. (tennis) Open, right before school started up again, was a particular treat. But as much as we enjoyed being together, these were special occasions—a bit unreal, hyperkinetic, not on home turf.
The true turning point was a simple promise I made one day to my boys. “Any night I’m not home,” I told them, “I’ll call without fail at eight PM. You don’t even have to answer the phone. Just know when it rings at eight that it’s me. And I’m thinking about you. And missing you. And wanting to connect with you.”
I vowed to myself that it wouldn’t matter if I was in the Far East or Florida, at dinner with a client or out on the court banging forehands at the reigning Wimbledon junior champion. From that day on, somewhere between 7:55 and 7:59 PM, I would excuse myself to make my call.
So I started to call, every night I was out of town. And an amazing thing happened. The boys, I was told, didn’t just answer the phone; they dove for it. For that special interlude, we were apart but we weren’t. I could keep up with what they had done in school, what sports they had played, what was exciting them. The incidental stuff, the mortar of their day. If they had a conflict or got a bad grade, we talked it through. My energy and focus were fixed completely on them. The nightly call was confirmation for them that I was thinking about them every single day, no matter in what corner of the earth I found myself, and that every single day they were a part of my life. And they could hear what I’d been up to.
It was one little ritual between my sons and me but it made a huge difference. It only helped me to rewrite my story as a father.
Stories that don’t work h
appen to everyone, not just to the weak or incapable. In fact, they may happen more often to the “successful” among us. I see it every day, at the Human Performance Institute, in Orlando, Florida, where we moved our business in 1995. After my two oldest boys had gone off to college, I left Colorado in search of the place where the most world-class athletes trained and lived. That place turned out to be southern Florida. Although I had begun my new calling by working with athletes, our clientele soon expanded to include high achievers in the medical profession; in law enforcement, including Navy SEALs, the Army Special Forces, and the FBI’s elite anti-terrorist force; and businesspeople, who now make up the bulk of our work. Their companies—Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Citigroup, GlaxoSmithKline and KPMG, to name a few, as well as mid-sized and smaller companies, too, across a wide range of sectors—began sending us their CEOs, CFOs, other senior leaders, and entire departments or business units (sales, HR, operations), in the hopes of improving the three P’s: performance, productivity, profitability. The only way for my team and me to help the thousands of individuals we see each year to improve in these areas—short of dynamiting and rethinking the many tired, entrenched practices and beliefs of corporate culture (that’s for another book)—is to help those who come through the program to commit genuinely to improving themselves. And the only way to do that, we have learned, is to get participants to confront the truth about their current flawed stories.
What do I mean by “story”? I don’t intend to offer tips on how to fine-tune the mechanics of telling stories to enhance the desired effect on listeners. And though this book very much concerns itself with the American businessperson (among others), by “story” I do not mean the boilerplate, holier-than-thou pronouncement often found in the Mission Statement area of corporate websites, or the Here’s-why-we’ll-absolutely-meet-our-fourth-quarter-numbers!-narrative-yarn-turnedpep-rally that team leaders often like to spin to rally the troops.
