The Power Broker In Your Life
In his work with hundreds of world-class performers, the performance psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr spent many years listening to the stories people tell themselves. He would even have athletes wear microphones and articulate out loud everything that they said to themselves during competition. “And I began to realize that what really matters, in a really significant way, is the tone and the content of the voice in your head,” he said. “The power broker in your life is the voice that no one ever hears. How well you revisit the tone and content of that voice in your head is what determines the quality of your life. It is the master storyteller, and the stories we tell ourselves are our reality.” Stories about the stories people tell themselves—that’s what this SIX at 6 is all about.
A Way of Saving Your Presence of Mind
At one point during the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, director Steven Spielberg stormed off and climbed up an 8-story scaffolding structure. In addition to being behind schedule and over budget, Spielberg was feeling enormous pressure to top the success of his previous blockbuster, Jaws. Close Encounters was filmed mostly in a 400- × 200-foot abandoned dirigible hangar in Mobile, Alabama. When he got to the top of the 8-story scaffolding structure, Spielberg said, “looking down at this 400 × 200-foot concept…I laughed.” He laughed at the absurdity of “expecting myself to have two blockbusters in a row…Nobody expects one mega-hit, let alone two.” After he had a good laugh, Spielberg slightly tweaked the story he was telling himself. Instead of telling himself he should feel the pressure to top the success of his previous hit, he told himself he should feel the confidence of his competence, proven by the success of his previous hit. The computer scientist Alan Kay famously said, “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points,” and, Spielberg said, “a way of saving your presence of mind.” With his change in perspective and his renewed presence of mind, Spielberg climbed back down the scaffolding structure and finished filming Close Encounters, which went on to be another critical and commercial success, grossing $306.9 million worldwide.
If You Change That Story, I Believe It Can Change Your Life
One of the athletes Dr. Loehr worked with was the speed skater Dan Jansen. At both the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, Jansen was the favorite to win the 500- & 1,000-meter races. He didn’t medal at either—the media was brutal:
“Jansen Chokes Again”
“Greatest Choke in Sports History”
“The Buffalo Bills of speed skating”
So his agent called the performance psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr, and said, “Would you consider working with Dan Jansen?” It turned out: hours before the 500-meter race at the ’88 Olympics, Jansen received a phone call and learned that his 27-year-old sister died unexpectedly. “He’s been struggling, mentally,” Jansen’s agent told Loehr. “If we can get his head right, he’ll be an Olympic champion. If we can’t, he’ll go down as the greatest choker in sports history.” “I know about Dan’s story,” Dr. Loehr replied. “I’d love to work with him.” So Jansen started working with Loehr leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. During their first meeting, Loehr learned that Jansen hated the 1,000-meter event. “He felt like he was a fast muscle twitch kind of a guy,” Loehr explains. “He thought of himself as a sprinter. So he loved the 500 and hated the 1,000.” Loehr started attending Jansen’s training sessions, and after watching Dan skate over and over and over again, he became convinced that Dan’s best shot at winning a gold medal was not in the 500, but in the 1,000.
“You need to change your mindset,” Loehr told Jansen. “You need to change the story you tell yourself about the 1,000. If you change that story, I believe it can change your life.”
Jansen kept a daily training log—“From now on,” Loehr told him, “on the top of your training log, I want you to write, ‘I love the 1,000.’”
“But,” Jansen said, “I hate the 1,000.”
“I know,” Loehr said. “But we’re going to recondition the way you think and feel about the 1,000.”
So for 2 years, at the top of his training log, Jansen wrote, “I love the 1,000.” “And before Lillehammer,” Loehr said, “Dan came to me and said, ‘You know, I’m actually starting to like the 1,000. I think I might even like the 1,000 better than the 500.’”
At the games in Lillehammer, in the 500, Jansen slipped and finished 8th. Before the 1,000 (four days later)—which Jansen knew would be the last time he ever skated competitively—“We created a mindset,” Loehr said. “and the mindset we created was—instead of a gold medal or a world record or anything else—think about what a gift the sport of speed skating has been to you. Think about the joy it’s brought you.”
With that mindset, Jansen lined up for the 1,000-meter event at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.
With that mindset, he not only won his first Olympic gold medal, he set a new world record time in the 1,000.
I Performed A Little Mental Jiu-Jitsu On Myself
On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen said, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.” “I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing, so I’ve got nothing to lose…If nothing happens, I’m going to walk out of here the same person as when I walked in.’” What Springsteen called “mental jiu-jitsu” is known in psychology as “cognitive reframing.” Whether it’s public speaking, a big game, or a potentially life-changing audition, it can be helpful to reframe the situation as something that isn’t actually that important. By doing that, Springsteen said, instead of panicking, he walked into the audition feeling confident. He performed his song, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records…That was wonderful.’” Springsteen signed a ten-album deal and would go on to record with Hammond and Columbia Records for the next fifty years.
Express Every Mental Modification In Some Active Way
Of course, the stories you tell yourself are useless if you don’t take action. “No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess,” the psychologist William James wrote, no matter how good one’s stories may be, “if one [does not] act, one’s life may remain entirely unaffected for the better.” One’s life, as James puts it, “is an aggregate of tendencies to act.” A tendency to tell ourselves good stories “only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the frequency with which actions actually occur…There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the sentimentalist and dreamer [who] never takes a concrete action.” Jansen modified the story he told himself about the 1,000, but that story was ingrained through his actions on the ice. Spielberg and Springsteen modified their stories, but those stories were ingrained through concrete actions. So make it a rule, James says, “that no mental modification ever occur without expressing it afterward in some active way.”
In The Way You Craft Your Narrative…
“If you listen to people, if you just sit around and listen, you’ll find there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves,” the writer Michael Lewis said. Some people are always the victim. Some people are always getting unlucky. Some people are always in the middle of some impossible project. Some people are always having the worst day. Some people are always feeling like that have so much to lose, and others, like they have nothing to lose. “There are lots of versions of this,” Lewis says, “and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become your reality. You are, in the way you craft your narrative, crafting your character.” You are, in the way you craft the stories you tell yourself, as Dr. Loehr said, crafting your reality.