The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  The next day, I got an e-mail from someone else at the same company. “Why is guilt so rampant in the business world and how do you coach people to deal with it?” he wrote. One of the main sources of guilt, we have learned over the years—from speaking with clients and from the surveys we’ve done—is the idea that taking care of oneself is frivolous, indulgent, off message. Employees feel guilty when they are not working; then, when the hours at work start to run particularly long, they feel guilty that they aren’t home. They feel guilty about exercising, feel guilty about reading a book. They feel guilty about taking a real lunchtime, so instead they eat on the run in an attempt to be more productive.

  Now here’s the math I really don’t get: If the rising cost of health care is almost single-handedly making profitability difficult for many, if not most, businesses—and it is—then wouldn’t everyone up and down the chain, including shareholders, approve of a culture that places greater value on the physical health and well-being of its workforce? Of course they would. And wouldn’t our culture, and the individuals who comprise it, benefit up and down by creating environments that replaced the sense of guilt workers now feel for taking care of themselves with a sense of obligation—that it is one’s individual, familial, communal, professional imperative always to be at one’s best possible physical self?

  I believe that energy management is the answer to most individual health problems, which for most people requires a change in their story about physical energy. With that change will come an understanding that physical energy is actually one of four dimensions of human energy, and that if the physical dimension fails, the other three fail, too; if the physical dimension flourishes, so can the other three.

  Only by recruiting all four dimensions of human energy can you hope to fulfill your ultimate mission in life.

  THE ENERGY PYRAMID

  You are—tiresome as the cliché may be—what you eat. You are also how, and how often, you exercise. You are how well you sleep and recover. In short, you are how you take care of yourself. It’s hard to imagine a legitimate counterargument.

  Energy is at the heart of everything. As much as I believe in the “power of full engagement,” it’s an empty theory, a meaningless collection of words, if you lack physical energy. To live fully engaged for even just a week, or a month, or a year, and certainly for an entire lifetime, requires a reliance on daily, renewable, physical energy. To maximize and corral that energy requires eating right, exercising regularly, getting proper sleep, and allowing your body frequent opportunities to recharge. It’s not a complicated equation (though I’ll provide some specifics later).

  By doing these good things for your body, you of course increase your chance to fend off all kinds of illnesses, maintain strength, and perhaps live longer. But there’s more to it than that. When you take care of yourself physically, you have a bounce in your step both literally and metaphorically; your mood is likely to be sunnier, your thoughts sharper, your mission more realizable. You exhibit calm, confidence, resolve. Conversely, when you lack physical energy, then the other “energies” in your life also fail—your emotional energy, your mental energy, your spiritual energy. The great majority of the time, there is a correlation between what you have in your physical “bank account,” on one hand, and what you have in your heart, mind, and spirit, on the other.

  These four distinct yet related types of energy can be portrayed hierarchically:

  As modeled above, it’s apparent that the greater and better your physical energy, the more fully engaged you will be on an emotional, mental, and spiritual level, too, and the likelier it is that your stories will work for you. To be blunt, a lousy breakfast (i.e., what fuels your physical tank) does more than just make your stomach grumble. It can actually topple the whole energy pyramid—and, unless you’re the exception, it likely does precisely that for you, on some level, every day.

  Physical energy, then, is the first, largest, and foundational component, the energy we need for survival. All human energy originates in the physical body and begins in the union of glucose and oxygen. Without it, we are, quite literally, dead. Conversely, it stands to reason that the more of it we have, the more alive we are. Without sufficient physical energy, all emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy eventually cease. One might say that this type of energy defines that we are.

  Emotional energy is the energy associated with feelings, emotions, mood. This energy influences the quality of our stories and the way in which we do things—intensely or indifferently, patiently or hyperactively, loudly or quietly. This energy may be said to define how we are.

  Mental energy influences the focus of our stories, our precision in thinking, cognition and logic; the alertness, sharpness, fineness of our thoughts and ideas; our efficiency and self-awareness. This energy may be said to define where we are.

  Spiritual energy influences the intensity of our stories. It is the energy of purpose, our values and beliefs. It compels us to go beyond ourselves in ways no other energy can, the force behind what we do. This energy defines why we are.

  To take one example: An athlete lacking sufficient physical energy also lacks the emotional strength to manage the storms of competition (e.g., a tennis player unraveling after a bad line call). At crucial moments, she doesn’t perform well mentally and makes bad strategic decisions. The final kicker to real competitive success—that deep hunger that makes you fight harder than your opponent—is also gone; bye-bye, spiritual energy. If you lack physical fuel, there will be a ripple effect on every story you tell and everything you do or attempt to do.

  If we lack sufficient physical energy, then, we will individually face an energy crisis that rivals the one the world faces with petroleum-based energy: We continue to consume at unprecedented levels with little or no concern for the supply side of the equation.

  Let’s return to that lousy breakfast I mentioned, and how it does more than just make you feel bloated or depleted or jittery. It can actually influence the core of your stories—your values and beliefs, aspects of your character you would have thought free of the influence of such pedestrian concerns.

  Richard runs out of the house at eight without eating breakfast, as usual. No matter: He gets his charge from two large cups of black coffee and the adrenaline rush of walking into the office. By ten o’clock, though, he’s starting to flag. He’s only dimly aware that this is also the time when his mood turns darker: He’s reminded of all the work that’s still to be done, how much he’s behind on his weekly calls and reports, how he’s done nothing this week to advance the rather ambitious initiative he’s recently been tasked with, to overhaul the reporting system for his unit. He even snaps at his wife when she calls to tell him that tonight’s dinner with old friends they haven’t seen in ages had to get bumped to an hour earlier. (She’s said more than once that she hates calling him around this time because of his grouchiness; he thinks she’s imagining things.) He inhales three cookies which sit unattended by the office kitchenette, and this gives him the temporary high of a sugar boost, but it won’t last long. His emotional energy is suffering.

  He’s also not using this time particularly well. He’s suddenly in the midst of a frenzy of multi-tasking, to recharge himself, and he’s working inefficiently; as it hits eleven o’clock, he realizes that he’s reread the same e-mail three times because it’s not making complete sense to him. Which is particularly galling since he wrote it. His focus is gone. His mental energy is depleted.

  Spiritually? Often he relies on this little trick: closing his eyes and seeing his children’s faces, to spur him to work harder, to remember why he works so damn hard. Yet that’s not really doing it for him now. There is practically zero engagement in the job at which he’s toiling and, God knows, certainly no pleasure in it, even though the organization he works for and the work they do—developing training and education programs for older people in the workforce—is something he usually takes great pride in! Depleted physically, he begins
to question whether what he does is worth it. Why am I doing this? he asks himself. Is this what I want from life? He’s losing his spiritual connection to his story because he’s out of fuel.

  To advocate better eating, exercising, and sleep habits, then, is not merely to improve one’s physical existence, though of course that will happen. Our lives, our stories, are most deeply felt when we experience them in all ways—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. It is at this point, and not before, that we are fully realized human beings.

  FROM STORIES FLOWS ENERGY

  Individual energy is the resource that creates—wealth, innovation, money, fulfillment—and yet we’re expected to create energy itself faster than we can replenish it. That’s a problem. Government won’t fix the problem. Neither will industry as a whole. Your company? Unlikely, as I have said—but even if it did, it probably wouldn’t make enough of an effort to solve the problem meaningfully. As with many large-scale social changes, this one may have to come from the bottom up—that is, one individual at a time.

  Every day, both worker productivity and organizational profitability seem to demand increasing workforce engagement. You accomplish this through skillful storytelling and skillful energy management. The foundation of all energy management is good storytelling: Energy follows our stories; we give life (energy) to something with every story we tell. Some stories engage us deeply in our work while others have the opposite effect. As I said earlier, our experience at HPI has made it abundantly clear that managing energy, not time, is the most important key to success—by which I mean bottom-line productivity and profitability. It’s not the time we invest in a mission or project that matters most, but the energy we bring to the time that we have. Investing time simply takes us from absenteeism to presenteeism. To get the return we want for the time we invest requires that we be engaged; full engagement, in turn, makes the time invested priceless. We’ve all experienced the consequences of setting time aside for things we care about but, because we failed to skillfully manage our energy—we were too tired, too frustrated and angry, too distracted and unfocused—the time invested actually worked against the mission. It was a waste. What we meant to accomplish wasn’t, at least not well. And what’s the point of doing something just to do it? The “failure” of a lunch with a valued direct report that’s abbreviated and incomplete, of a long-awaited anniversary dinner where you feel distracted, of an all-too-rare weekend with the extended family where you’re mostly exhausted, of an indifferent session on the treadmill—those aren’t time management failures but energy management failures.

  One of the exciting discoveries we’ve made is the almost perfect correlation between engagement, on one hand, and happiness, on the other. Engagement is an acquired skill that allows us to be in the present space; it’s in that space where people feel happiest. (The happiness we feel about an upcoming event is really not future-oriented, but rather present-oriented happiness in the anticipation.) The more engaged we are in something, the more alive we tend to feel; the more alive we feel, the happier we feel. Becoming fully engaged in a mission that deeply matters brings a rich sense of meaning, depth, and dimension to our lives. Disengagement has the opposite effect. Disengagement pulls us from the core of life—characterized by intensity, passion, and meaning—to its boundaries, characterized by safety, protection, and disassociation. By being engaged, not disengaged, we experience true happiness and joy in our lives. We ignite our talents and skills. We are aware early and precisely of necessary course corrections we may need to make.

  If you have a full supply of energy that you manage efficiently, are able to burn off robustly, and can replenish continually, you help not only yourself; there is a positive ripple effect for you and your company. This requires that you get your story straight about the dynamics of engagement, health, happiness, diet, and exercise. A study published in MIT’s Sloan Management Review in 2003, which examined the effect of fully engaged workers—called “energizers”—on their colleagues as well as on the larger organization, found that energizers were not just the highest performers but also more likely to have their ideas considered and put into action; were better able to motivate others to act; and elicited more from those around them—that is, others tended to devote themselves more fully to interactions with an energizer (such as giving undivided attention in a meeting led by an energizer). Those around energizers were even found to be more likely to devote discretionary time to an energizer’s concerns (they would, for example, spend their commuting time working on a problem put forth by an energizer, or would send an extra e-mail or two to find necessary information, or would go out of their way to introduce the energizer to a valued contact). Moreover, the reputation of energizers spread quickly throughout the organization, and people positioned themselves to work for these engaging colleagues.

  “The desire to work for or with energizers seems to account for our last finding about energy and performance,” said the study. “Not only are energizers better performers themselves, but people who are strongly connected to an energizer are also better performers…in short, we systematically found that energy is more than just a New Age concept. It has a substantial and predictable effect on performance and innovation in organizations.”

  It should be emphasized that to be an energizer does not necessarily mean to be entertaining, charismatic, or intense. It means bringing yourself fully to a given interaction, so that you can keep your attention on the people you are involved with at that moment. Is that not what our best salespeople do? Our best chief executives? People are energized in interactions, says the study, “when hope becomes part of the equation. Hope allows people to become energized when they begin to believe that the objective is worthy and can be attained. They get excited about the possibilities and stop looking for the pitfalls.” Energizers, it goes on to say, are notable for two characteristics that influence others’ willingness to hope: People feel as if they’re getting the truth from energizers, even when it’s not necessarily pleasant; people feel that there’s integrity between what energizers say and do.

  How does all this connect with the idea of storytelling?

  Fatigue puts you into survival mode and colors every story you tell. Increased physical energy will play a huge and fundamental role in the creation of your New Story. So let’s see how, with some vital but still relatively unobtrusive changes, you can eliminate your personal energy crisis.

  Eight

  DO YOU HAVE THE RESOURCES TO LIVE YOUR BEST STORY?

  The car in front of you drifts, slides back into the lane, drifts again. You crane your neck to see what’s up. Again the vehicle drifts…Of course. The driver is struggling to stay awake.

  According to Charles Czeisler, a leading authority on sleep, 80,000 drivers fall asleep at the wheel every day, 10% of them will run off the road and, every two minutes, one of them crashes.

  It’s no way to drive. It’s no way to live. If you’re one of those 80,000 people per day, it’s probably not a story you want to tell.

  So many of us have hit our “engagement limit” and zoomed past it. Demands are made on us from multiple sides and we’re expected to have energy for it all, as if the fuel supply were endless. But it isn’t, and just because we sometimes treat it as if it is doesn’t make it so.

  If you have any hope of living out your best story, then you need to have a maximum amount of high-quality energy to spend, which means you need to produce that maximum amount of high-quality energy. And that simply can’t be done without eating right, exercising regularly, and resting and recovering appropriately.

  Yet way more than half the people we see do not. Here are some typical storylines that block exercise:

  If I exercise when I get home, it takes time away from my kids.

  If I exercise at work, it jeopardizes my standing.

  If I exercise early in the morning, I won’t get enough sleep.

  If I exercise before I go to bed (as if I have any energy left then), it
may lead to divorce.

  Here are some storylines that have the opposite effect:

  Exercising with my wife gives us valuable time together doing something important to both of us—and as exercise partners we make each other accountable.

  Exercising for thirty minutes during lunch hour sets a great example for those who work for me.

  By exercising in the early morning, I require less sleep due to my improved fitness, and have more energy for my kids when I get home.

  Without proper exercise, nutrition, and rest, the body slowly begins to break. You’re operating at a perpetual deficit. You’re always exhausted. You’re seriously disengaged. Your body is now in survival mode. Your stories change. To rationalize how and why this happened requires that, at some fork in the road, smart people must become suddenly stupid; pragmatists, illogical; straightshooters, gullible. There are other, totally defensible factors that bring us to this overtaxed point, of course—lots of responsibility, good intentions, aging, ambition, sudden change in circumstance—but they are almost never the only factors. You tell yourself things you can’t possibly believe—for example: Getting just a few hours of sleep night after night, year after year, is the best option or the only option for me to get everything done and to make it through. Or this: When others neglect their bodies, it shows, but for me it will be different. Or: I can overcome the tug of sleeplessness by sheer will. Or: My life is only marginally affected by my being out of condition. Or: I am not in fact what I eat.

  Come on. In an impoverished physical condition, how can you hope to live a good story? How can you hope to have the energy even to figure out what that story is?