The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  No, I wish to examine the most compelling story about storytelling—namely, how we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. Indeed, the idea of “one’s own story” is so powerful, so native, that I hardly consider it a metaphor, as if it’s some new lens through which to look at life. Your life is your story. Your story is your life. When stories we read or watch or listen to are triumphant, they are so because they fundamentally remind us of what is most true or possible in life—even when it’s an escapist romantic comedy or sci-fi fantasy or fairy tale. If you are human, then you tell yourself stories—positive ones and negative, consciously and, far more than not, subconsciously. Stories that span a single episode, or a year, or a semester, or a weekend, or a relationship, or a season, or an entire tenure on this planet. Telling ourselves stories helps us navigate our way through life because they provide structure and direction. “Just seeing my life as a story,” said one of my clients, head of HR for a national hotel chain, “allowed me to establish a sort of road map, so when I have to make decisions about what I need to do, [the map] makes it easier, takes away a lot of stress.” Indeed, we are actually wired to tell stories: The human brain, according to a recent New York Times article about scientists investigating why we think the way we do, has evolved into a narrative-creating machine that takes “whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random” and imposes on it “chronology and cause-and-effect logic.” Writes Justin Barrett, psychologist at Oxford University, “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us, and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation” (which feeds one possible theory for why we need, or even create, God or gods). Stories impose meaning on the chaos; they organize and give context to our sensory experiences, which otherwise might seem like no more than a fairly colorless sequence of facts. Facts are meaningless until you create a story around them. For example, losing your wallet or being in a car accident is what factually happened but the meaning or significance you give to the lost wallet or the car accident is the theme of your story—for example, “I’m a careless person” or “Bad things happen to me” or “I often get into trouble but always escape without major damage.” A story is our creation of a reality; indeed, our story matters more than what actually happens. Is there really any difference, as someone famously asked, between the life of a king who sleeps twelve hours a day dreaming he’s a pauper, and that of a pauper who sleeps twelve hours a day dreaming he’s a king?

  By “story,” then, I mean those tales we create and tell ourselves and others, and which form the only reality we will ever know in this life. Our stories may or may not conform to the real world. They may or may not inspire us to take hope-filled action to better our lives. They may or may not take us where we ultimately want to go. But since our destiny follows our stories, it’s imperative that we do everything in our power to get our stories right.

  For most of us, that means some serious editing.

  To edit a dysfunctional story, you must first identify it. To do that, you must answer the question: In which important areas of my life is it clear that I cannot achieve my goals with the story I’ve got? Only after confronting and satisfactorily answering this question can you expect to build new reality-based stories that will take you where you want to go.

  Is this all starting to sound a little New Agey? I’m not surprised. But hold on. I understand you may be thinking: Life as story? The whole concept strikes you, perhaps, as a tad…soft. I don’t look at my life in terms of story, you say.

  I disagree. Your life is the most important story you will ever tell, and you’re telling it right now, whether you know it or not. From very early on you’re spinning and telling multiple stories about your life, publicly and privately, stories that have a theme, a tone, a premise—whether you know it or not. Some are for better, some for worse. No one lacks material. Everyone’s got a story.

  And thank goodness. Because our capacity to tell stories is, I believe, just about our profoundest gift. Perhaps the true power of the story metaphor is best captured by this seeming contradiction: We employ the word “story” to suggest both the wildest of dreams (“It’s just a story…”) and an unvarnished depiction of reality (“Okay, what’s the story?”). How’s that for range?

  The problem? Most of us aren’t writers. “I’m not a professional novelist,” one client said to me, when finally the time came for him to put pen to paper. “If this is the story of my life, you’re damn right I’m intimidated. Can you just give me a little help in how to get this out?”

  That’s what I intend to do in this book. First, help you to identify how pervasive story is in life, your life, and, second, to rewrite it.

  Every life has elements to it that every story has—beginning, middle, and end; theme; subplots; trajectory; tone. Earl Woods, Tiger’s father and coach, early on taught his son that during each professional round of golf that Tiger would someday play, there would be at least one troublesome shot—in deep rough, behind a tree, buried in a bunker, wherever—that he would hit so brilliantly it would never be forgotten in the annals of golf. Sure enough, years later, on Tiger’s toughest shots and in his most competitive situations, the trajectory of his story (not to mention the flight of the ball) has always soared: To him, such moments aren’t obstacles but opportunities. In fact, what Tiger is perhaps most fondly known and admired for—more even than his gorgeous swing, his clutch ability, his consistency, his game face and fist-pump—is his astonishing capacity to make a great shot out of what, just seconds before, had appeared to be an impossible lie. Some of that comes from talent, of course. But more of it comes from a sureness that is the product of a compelling, enduring story embedded deep in his psyche.

  Story is everywhere in life. Perhaps your story is that you’re responsible for the happiness and livelihoods of dozens of people around you, and you’re the unappreciated hero. If you see things in more general terms, maybe your story is that the world is full of traps and misfortune—at least for you—and you’re the perpetual victim. (I’m always so unlucky…I always end up getting the short end of the stick…People can’t be trusted and will take advantage of me if I give them the chance.) If you’re focused on one subplot—work, say—then maybe your story is that you sincerely want to execute the major initiatives with which your company has entrusted you, yet you’re imprisoned by technology (e-mail, cell phone, BlackBerry) and thus can never get far enough from the forest to see the trees. Maybe your story is that you must keep chasing even though you already seem to have a lot (even too much), because the point is to get more and more of it—money, prestige, power, control, attention. Maybe your story is that you and your children just can’t connect, as once was true of me and mine. Or your story might be essentially a rejection of another story—for instance, you may denounce your restrictive religious upbringing, and everything you do is filtered through that rejection.

  Story is everywhere. Your body tells a story. The smile or frown on your face, your shoulders thrust back in confidence or slumped roundly in despair, the liveliness or fatigue in your gait, the sparkle of hope and joy in your eyes or the blank stare, your fitness, the size of your gut, the tone and strength of your physical being, your overall presentation—those are all part of your story, one that’s especially apparent to everyone else. We judge books by their covers not simply because we’re wired to judge quickly but because the cover so often provides astonishingly accurate clues to what’s going on inside. What’s your story about your physical self? Does it truly work for you? Can it take you where you want to go in the short term? How about ten years from now? What about thirty?

  You have a story around your company, though your version may depart wildly from your colleague’s or your boss’s or your direct report’s or your customer’s. You have a story about your family. Your country. Anything that consumes our energy can be a story, even if we don’t always call it a story. There’s the story of you and your faith. The story of your marriage.
The story of you and public service. The story of you and alcohol, or you and food, or you and anger, or you and impossible expectations. The story of you, the friend. The story of you, your father’s son or your mother’s daughter. The story of you and TV-watching. Some of these stories work and some of them fail. According to my professional experience, an astounding number of these stories, once they’re identified, are deemed failures—not by me, mind you (though given the descriptions I hear, I’d agree), but by the people living them.

  Like it or not, there will be a story around your death. What will it be? Will you die a senseless death? Perhaps you drank too much and failed to buckle your seat belt and were thrown from your car, or you died from colon cancer because you refused to undergo an embarrassing colonoscopy years before when the disease was treatable, or after years of bad nutrition, no exercise, and abuse of your body you suffered a fatal heart attack at age forty-nine. “Senseless death” means that it didn’t have to happen when it happened; it means your story didn’t have to end the way it ended. Think about the effect the story of your senseless death might have on your family, on those you care about who you’re leaving behind. How would that story impact their life stories? Ask yourself, Am I okay dying a senseless death? Your immediate reaction is almost certainly, “No! Of course not!” Yet so many of the people I see, every one of whom responds exactly that way, are following stories that will lead them to that senseless death as assuredly as a gun glimpsed in Act I, as Chekhov told us, must go off in Act II.

  I’m not trying to be morbid. Story—which dies if deprived of energy—is not about death but life. Yet if you continue to tell a bad story, if you continue to give energy to a bad story, then you will almost assuredly beget another bad one, or ten. Why is abuse so commonly passed from one generation to the next? How much is the recurrence of obesity, diabetes, and certain other diseases across families a genetic predisposition, and how much the repetition of a dangerous story about food and physical exertion? Harry Chapin’s poignant ballad “Cat’s in the Cradle”—in which a busy father continually promises to “get together” soon with his son, who dreams of growing up to be just like dad—breaks your heart not merely because it chronicles the tragedy of their non-relationship but because, in the final, devastating verse, the father, an old man now, finally does have time to get together with his son…only now it’s his son, a grown man, who has no time for his dad, proof that the terrible story has looped, and may loop again.

  Unhealthy storytelling is characterized by a diet of faulty thinking and, ultimately, long-term negative consequences. This undetectable yet inexorable progression is not unlike what happens to coronary arteries from a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet. In the body, the consequence of such a diet is hardening of the arteries (among other maladies); in the mind, the consequence of bad storytelling is hardening of the categories, narrowing of the possibilities, calcification of perception. Both roads lead to tragedy, often quietly. The buildup of plaque in the arteries caused by a poor diet is impossible to recognize at the time: We eat unhealthily but are unable to detect any immediate negative consequences, certainly not from one given meal, no matter how unhealthy. It’s almost as if we got away with it (“I don’t feel anything bad!”). It’s Boiling Frog Syndrome: The frog in the pot doesn’t sense the gradual rise in temperature, can’t detect the danger he’s in—until it’s too late and he’s cooked. The same holds true for faulty storytelling. While we do it, we can’t sense the full negative impact it’s having. “It’s not all that bad,” we conclude. Our marriage is “okay.” Our job is “not terrible.” Yet whether we sense it or not, the energy we repeatedly give to bad stories actually reconfigures our neural architecture. The cumulative effect of our damaging stories will have tragic consequences on our health, happiness, engagement, and performance. Because we can’t confirm the damage our defective storytelling is wreaking, we disregard it, or veto our gut reactions to make a change. Then one day we awaken to the reality that we’ve become cynical, negative, angry. That’s now who we are. Though we never quite saw it coming, that’s now our true story.

  It’s not just individuals who tell stories about themselves; groups do it, too. Nations and religions and universities and sports teams and political parties and labor unions each tell stories about themselves to capture the imagination of their constituencies. Companies tell their stories to engage their customers and, increasingly, their workforce, stories which must be internally consistent and powerful if they’re to succeed over time. The Starbucks story: Our home is your home away from home, a place where strangers are transformed into members of a community; to give our story integrity and durability, we aim to treat all our people, from customers to employees to independent coffee-growers around the world, with equal dignity and respect. AARP’s story: Retirees and the elderly need and deserve to feel that, as we age, life gets better, full of health, happiness, and balance; to be credible, those in our organization must model this life, too. I’ve worked with companies that desire to enhance both their bottom lines and the lives of their stakeholders. How do they accomplish that at a fundamental level? By editing their story. Intel has done it, as has Estée Lauder, as has Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The same with smaller companies like San Juan (New Mexico) Regional Medical Center, which is now “telling a story” that has changed the very way they do medicine and interact with the community they serve. Throughout the book I will detail how such organizations and their employees have reworked their story to the great advantage of both their business and their culture.

  For twenty-five years, my business partner, Jack Groppel, and I and now our team at the Human Performance Institute (HPI) have studied human behavior and performance, and we’ve been privileged to witness many success stories of positive behavioral change: better relationships at home and at work, better job performance, weight loss and all-around improved health and lowering of health risks; love, excitement, joy, and the discovery of talents heretofore buried. My experience has led me to see that these changes may be brought about by a unique integration of all the human sciences, most important among them performance psychology, exercise physiology, and nutrition. My scientific training has led me to a belief in hard data.

  We’ve gathered a wide range of meaningful information from more than 100,000 individual clients, from several hundred companies and affiliations, across a wide demographic of geography, background, and market segments; 70% of our clientele come from the corporate world, 85% of that from the Fortune 500. Our clients are in their 40s (46%), 50–56 (22%), 34–39 (26%), with some younger or older. We measure physical data such as the participant’s blood chemistry, body fat, and dietary, exercise, and sleep habits; personality data such as 360 evaluations (assessments from the key people in one’s professional circle—colleagues, direct reports, superiors—along with one’s family), as well as extensive self-analysis (multiple choice and fill in). Increasingly in the last five years we’ve included a “storytelling” inventory, in which the participant is asked to describe, candidly and often for the first time, the message, or story, that his or her choices convey to the world.

  As a psychologist by training, I believe in the usefulness of data as a guide; as a businessman, one who deals frequently with businesspeople, I know that we succeed or fail by results. That’s nothing new: When coaching athletes, I’ve always worked on retainer fees too small even to cover my expenses; the big payday happened only if I made something extraordinary and tangible happen. So, say, if a player ranked 100 in the world came to me, we might draw up a contract that stipulated that I got paid only when (if) he or she cracked the top 10, or made the final of a Grand Slam, or achieved some other indisputable signpost of competitive success. The burden was always on me to deliver.

  The same is true now. We expect success and usually achieve it. Early on in the executive workshop we run fifty to seventy-five times a year, I ask, “How many of you, when you really make up your mind to do something, almost always do it?” I
t’s the rare occasion when even one person in the room doesn’t raise his or her hand. By the second day, it’s not atypical for a C-level executive or the like to look as if he or she had been hit by a lightning bolt of recognition that will change his or her life for the better, and presumably forever. Of those who come through our Orlando headquarters, our data show that 30% are “profoundly” moved (their preferred word), while another 50% make smaller but inarguably significant changes. Kirk Perry, VP at Procter & Gamble, a company that has sent hundreds of employees through our program, said that a six-month follow-up found “80% [of those who’d been through our workshop] had some specific, measurable improvement in their lives.”

  Of course, some people who pass through our doors are utterly unaffected by what we do and what they’re exposed to. Why? Some feel their “story” needs no major reworking (and perhaps they’re absolutely right). Some fail to buy in to what we do because they’re just moving too fast. For some, the timing isn’t right (though, as I intend to show, there can only ever be one time to make changes: now). Whatever the reason, for virtually every group we encounter, 20%—the percentage is like clockwork—are simply not interested in what we have to say.

  I respect that. Our program was not designed to push an agenda or a political view. While I passionately believe that the story metaphor is universal and, with awareness, can be extraordinarily beneficial, it “works” only when the individual is willing to look hard at the major problem areas in his or her life, explore why they’re problems (up to a point; this is not psychotherapy), then meaningfully change the problem elements, be they structure or content, which are causing a profound lack of productivity, fulfillment, engagement, and sense of purpose. We work with people. We don’t stand over them and make them do something they don’t want.

  Unlike many practitioners in the field of performance improvement, I do not believe you can have it all. It’s an absurd proposition. I don’t believe that every day will be a great day, that you can eliminate regret and despair and worry, that you will always be moving forward, that you will always succeed, that you won’t veer off track again. I do believe that you can have what is most important to you. And that this is achievable if you’re willing to follow the steps of the process advocated within these pages.