Customer Reviews

The Power of Story: Change Your Story, Change Your Destiny in Business and in Life

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I would highly recommend Jim Loehr's "The Power of Story". This high energy, page turner gives a fresh stance on the power of positive thought with a unique twist of Loehr's personal experiences. "The Power of Story" is about controlling your inner voices to tell the same story so you can devote your energy to the things that matter. The concept that Loehr achieves in the book is very attainable in the "normal" everyday life. He has the ability to wrap the concepts so that it is viable for the college graduate, the executive, and the stay-at-home mother. Loehr does an outstanding job of getting readers to acknowledge and recognize the stories that they may be telling themselves. Then he goes deeper, to push the reader to reveal the real story. This is the strongest aspect of the book. You can't get away without being honest with yourself. Then he leads you to the idea that you can change your story, and sequentially, transform your future.

This is a very thought provoking and life changing book. Jim Loehr first brings us face to face with the stories that we tell ourselves. Your first reaction is that you don't tell yourself stories. But you do. We all do. And often the stories we tell ourselves are crafted to fit our excuses for why we do or don't do things. As long as we are telling ourselves stories that are not based in reality, we will continue to live according to the story line we are telling ourself.

The book is not just about stories, it is actually a step by step manual for finding out your old story, discovering where it is wrong and then developinig a new story based around your purpose in life.

When most people list their priorities in life, they go something like this: God, family, work and other. But when they really examine their lives, they have made their career the most important thing in their lives. They devote most of their energy to their career and never have enough left for the other things in their lives. They tell themself one story but live another.

There is another very important lesson in the book. We all think that time is our most important asset. As Jim points out, it is not time but the energy we bring to the time we devote to any activity. He gives countless examples of people spending time with family but not fully engaged. The energy is not there.

If we are not physically fit, we do not have sufficient energy to accomplish the tasks we set out to do.

This is not theory. Jim runs the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, FL and the book is filled with examples from the work he has done with thousands of people.

The book is well written, easy to read and a real eye-opener.

There is a step by step plan for the individual to come face to face with their old story, write their new one and change their lifestyle so that they bring their life into harmony.

Well worth reading. You will never be living your ideal life until you get your life aligned with your story. This book tell you why and shows you how. The rest is up to you.

In an age where it's easy to feel invisible and even impotent, Loehr delivers mental Viagra. Any book that can do that is worth reading. This book takes a big, profound idea and makes it personally relevant. Loehr excavates the basis of free will. Loehr's insight that "if you aren't the author of your life story you're the victim of it" is a way of summing up that the unexamined life will almost assuredly reduce us to supporting actors in someone else's story. One thing I really like is that he goes way beyond the vastly over-simplified idea of The Secret into something much deeper and more actionable. The more I read, the more I was convinced that this was the real secret.
The author has a great way of applying the value of writing our own story to change the conditions of our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. While some other books have touched on these concepts, this book uses the latest research to bring our human habits into full view and offers practical methods to become the "cause" of our lives instead of "the effect" of someone else's. That's the essence of Free Will.

Will Marre'
Founder of the American Dream Project

Jim Loehr has done it again! In the Power of Story, the author has painted a rich mosaic of real life situations gleaned from personal experiences in working with world class athletes, business people,and "average Janes and Joes" who yearn for a formula for self-improvement. I found the "stories" in the book compelling and many hit close to home. The writing style is engaging, easy to follow yet much of the content is profound. If you're looking for a unique way of looking at your life now and searching for a way to create more personal energy and engagement at work or with your family, this book lays out both the theory and practical application.

Ronald B. Woods
Adjunct Professor, University of Tampa and University of South Florida

Jim Loehr works with professional athletes and "corporate athletes." I met him many years ago at a Merrill Lynch meeting in which he compared what stockbrokers do to athletes. We were "corporate athletes" he said- and even more important- our careers were 40 years, not the ten years of a typical pro athlete. He dazzled the crowd with his inspiring story of Dan Jansen winning gold. Why he is not more well known is a mystery to me.

When I heard that a very successful hedge fund manager had a book "The Power of Story" on his reading list, and I saw Jim Loehr as the author, I immediately bought it for my kindle. The book is fast-paced, inspiring, and full of practical tips. He avoids the problem most "self-improvement" books have which is they spend half the book bragging about how much the book was going to change your life. He does none of that - he just gets right into it.

I have summarized my favorite points from the book below, but do yourself a favor and buy this book!

A STORY is our creation of reality; indeed, our story matters more than what actually happens. The most important story you will ever tell about yourself is the story you tell to yourself. After all, you're not just the author of your story but also its mains character, the hero. Heroes are never ordinary. What label would you give the story of your life, the most important story you will ever tell? To me, that sounds like an epic. More important than the "facts" of any life story is the meaning we attribute to the facts. Good stories hinge on dramatic moments, truth... and turning points. By taking control of your story, you must be ready to rewrite it, rewrite it, and rewrite it. Your new story is your blueprint for the future. It exists for you to chart new pathways for energy to flow in all those areas of your life you want to change. Your NEW STORY must be consumed by purpose. It should be inspirational for you when you read it. It must move you powerfully; move you emotionally and move you to take action. The right story supporting you gives meaning and purpose to all the chaos you will experience and the risks you will need to take. Only then will your courage and inner strength surface.

Tough questions:
"What compels you to get up every day and go to work? Money? Status? Power? Fulfillment? Do you feel forced to work or called to work? Are you totally engaged at work? How much of your talent and skill are fully ignited? What's the dominant tone- inspired? Challenged? Disappointed? "

PURPOSE is the thing in your life you will fight for. It is the ground you will defend at any cost. Purpose is not the same as "incentive" but rather the motor behind it, the end that drives why you have energy for some things and not for others. (How would you know if you had it right? First and last, does it move you- really, really move you?) With purpose people do amazing things: good, smart, productive things, often heroic things, unprecedented things."

Your ULTIMATE MISSION is the thing that continually renews your spirit, the thing that gets you to stop and smell the roses. It is the indomitable force that moves you to action when nothing else can, yet it can ground you with a single whisper in your quietest moment; it is at once the bedrock of your soul and the wind beneath your wings. It spells out the most overarching goals you want and need to achieve in your time here, and the manner in which you feel you must do it. An ultimate purpose is never small. It is never minor. It can't be, by definition. It is grand, heroic, epic. You should never put your life on the line for something not fully aligned with your ULTIMATE MISSION. If it is to truly inspire you, then everything in it needs to be aligned. The values it professes need to dovetail with each part of your mission.



(Given its influence over you, your ultimate mission merits being written down as early in life as possible, and modified and deepened with every passing year until death. Committing it to writing year after year, keeps the most important navigational tool we human beings possess always within our reach.)

ULTIMATE MISSION questions:
1. How do you want to be remembered?
2. What is the legacy you most want to leave for others?
3. How would you like to hear people eulogize you?
4. What is worth dying for?
5. What makes your life really worth living?
6. In what areas of your life must you truly be extraordinary to fulfill your destiny?

INNER VOICE:
A. Quiet your inner voice. Shut down the internal chatter by immersing yourself in an activity that engages you fully. Complete absorption quiets the inner voice.
B. Summon your inner voice of reason and wisdom. This voice represents your ability to rise above all the noise, the clutter, the distractions, the cloud of emotions and to see the situation for what it really is and make judgments and decisions accordingly. The ability to see clearly in the storm is neither inherited nor something that develops with age. It comes from lots of hard, focused mental lifting.
C. Summon your inner voice of toughness. Your "fighting voice" is one of the most important voices we possess; to complete our mission in life, we must be great fighters.
D. Summon your inner voice of compassion. Think of emotions such as kindness, empathy and sympathy as if they were muscles that grow and expand in response to the energy we invest in them.
E. Summon your voice of intuition. This is the voice of your gut, a voice of intuitive intelligence that doesn't follow the standard pathways of conscious logic and reason.
F. Consciously increase thoughts of gratitude in one's daily life.

PURPOSE/TRUTH/ACTION story triad.
Purpose: what is my ultimate purpose? What am I living for? What principle, what goal, what end? For my whole life, and every single day? Why do I do what I do? For what? Identify your purpose for being here.

Truth: is the story I'm telling true? Does it conform to known facts? Is it grounded in objective reality as fully as possible? Be truthful about what you're doing to honor your purpose.

Action: A good story is premised on hope-filled action... is mine? With my purpose firmly in mind, what actions will I now take to make things better, so that my ultimate purpose and my day-to-day life are better aligned? What habits do I need to eliminate? What new ones do I need to breed? Take the necessary actions to align what you need and want with how you actually live, and do it energetically and confidently. Action: get the job done. Just do it. Make it happen.

FULL ENGAGEMENT.
Is there someone or something in your life so sacred that nothing and no one could break your concentration? The "power of full engagement" is listening seeing and feeling with full force, experiencing with full force. Either you're fully engaged or you're not. Multi-tasking is the enemy of extraordinariness. If you must, then multi-task when it doesn't matter. Fully engage when it does. By being engaged, we experience true happiness and joy in our lives. We ignite our talents and skills.

PHYSICAL ENERGY.
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, and resolve. The body we start out with is capable of wonderful things. However, if we wish to achieve something truly extraordinary in our lives- be it athletic, intellectual, social, artistic, professional - we must build on this "standard-edition" body and invest it with extraordinary energy.

Eat light and often. Always eat within an hour of waking up. Eat a meal or snack rich in carbs within 2 hours before exercising and after exercising. Eat every 2-4 hours except when sleeping. Drink water every 30 minutes to one hour. Move at regular intervals - we're built to move, not to sit. The more we move, the better we feel. To perform better, you need to move more. When you're not working out, take the stairs, not the elevator. Take a walk after lunch. Downtime is productive time. It is vital to include sufficient sleep and rest (recovery) in your story.

WHEN EXERCISING, ENGAGE.
When exercising, you should not feel comfortable. Exercise has three requirements: do it outside the comfort zone, do it on a regular basis, be engaged when doing it. It's not about the time you give to something, but the energy, the passion, the commitment, the engagement. Come to your workout to work out, to improve yourself physically, not to go through the motions.

RITUALS.
Tell yourself your story again and again and soon enough those neural pathways have now become slick six-lane superhighways. An example ritual: set your watch alarm for 80-minute intervals to stand, stretch, step outside, or recharge with an energy bar. Or, set up pre-work time to only read non-work material, especially something inspiring. Establish a daily accountability system for your rituals: make a ritual checklist for yourself. A particularly valuable ritual is to begin every day by reading your NEW STORY.

"Everybody has a story," asserts Dr. Jim Loehr, in his lifechanging and innovative book, "The Power of Story." Every once in awhile a book comes along that is so unique in how it presents the human condition that it leaves you wondering why we continue to live a life filled with self-imposed limitations that compromise our health and happiness. Jim Loehr has created insights into who we are and how we live in a way that reminds us that we have far more control over our destiny than we think. He's right, of course. We run around with false pretenses about what we "think" must get accomplished, and whose approval we need to feel satisfied. But we are wrong, as he points out in his section on "faulty assumptions" (p. 71). We create stories to justify our storms, our dilemmas, and our failure to live a life consistent with our values - our core beliefs about what we consider important in life that so strongly influences our behavior. For some strange reason, so many of us have "handed over the keys" of our life to others, who we allow to control us. We have lost our mission due to our "old story" that supports our unhealthy habits (or do our unhealthy habits support our old story?). The book's main theme is the importance of being aware of our mission - which lends meaningfulness to our life and to our legacy - and to replace our bad habits with healthy routines. Well done, Dr. Loehr. Afer reading "The Power of Story," how we live our life will never be the same.

A lot of good ideas and theories for self-improvement, but just not great writing. This book was not meant to be read, it was meant to be heard in the seminar. I am sure Jim Loehr's seminar is wonderful, and very helpful to many people wanting to amke changes in their lives, but was not adapted very well to be read in my opinion.

What stories do you tell yourself about your life? That you must spend every waking hour at the office? That you have no time for exercise? That self-fulfillment is an impossible dream? If this is your internal dialogue, then you should not be surprised if it is also your external reality. Acclaimed performance psychologist Jim Loehr spells out a program that will enable you to discard your old negative stories and develop new positive ones that will make your life better. He shows you how to turn these new stories into your new reality. Plus, he explains why physical energy is crucial in this changeover, and what you must do to stay constantly energized. getAbstract believes that anyone who is stuck in a rut will benefit from reading Loehr's inspirational book and putting his transformational principles to work.

Best selling author (The Power of Full Engagement), Jim Loehr, followed his passion, and combined his love of psychology and sports to create a specialized business helping elite athletes achieve optimum performance by changing their story. His initial high-profile clients included Monica Seles, Jim Courier, Mark O'Meara, Grant Hill, among many others. In changing their stories, he redefined how they ate, practiced, rested, recovered and, most importantly perceived themselves. Since then, his clientele has expanded to include the Navy SEALS, Army Special Forces, the FBI elite anti-terrorist force, and high profile businesses and executives.

"The Power of Story" outlines the principles he followed and has applied to achieve "success." His own story was one where he felt he needed to focus his energy on his career to achieve maximum success. He then came to realize in the process of gaining professional success that he was about to lose something far more valuable - his family.

Loehr came to understand the key to almost all of our problems, faulty storytelling of the most important story we will ever tell - the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. This story drives the way we gather and spend our energy.

He provides this example:

"Losing a wallet or being in a car accident is factually what happened but the meaning or significance you give to either of these two events - `I am a careless person' or `bad things happen to me' becomes the reality you create... these form the only reality you will ever know in this life." These stories which we tell ourselves 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 ultimately where we want to go." But they will influence as our destiny "follows our stories."

"The Power of Story" centers on the imperative that we must do everything in our power to get our stories right for personal happiness. The book provides the tools and exercises to identify and rewrite our story, and delivers insights on performance psychology, exercise physiology, and nutrition based on hard data.

Do you know what stories are speaking to you?

Are they good or bad? If yours is bad story, you will continue to give energy to a bad story, and you will almost assuredly beget another bad one, or ten. This diet of faulting thinking will ultimately have long-term negative consequences.

"The Power of Story" will help you seriously edit your story, and create the success and meaning you truly want.

Jim Loehr's latest book is one of a handful of recent, great books dealing with the issue of how the stories we tell ourselves (and others) so shape our lives. Debbie Ford, Steve Chandler and Joe Caruso are authors whose writings on this subject I have highly recommended in previous reviews.

All of these books are convincing as to how our stories shape our lives. All make clear that we can change our life by changing the stories we tell ourselves. Loehr's tops the others by laying out a series of very specific exercises to help readers rewrite their stories. Loehr's deep background as a trainer shines through in his thoughtful exercises.

Now doing self-work is generally a much bigger challenge than merely reading about self-improvement. Loehr's exercises take time and thought....something for which the author (rightly) offers no apology. Few worthwhile things in life are gotten without effort.

Not yet ready to buckle down to change your story and your life; then grab the audios by Ford or Canuso to get some added motivation. Then, use Loehr's process to change your story for the better.

Outstanding book, full of extraordinary potential for those who follow Loehr's prescriptions.