Change Your Story, Change Your Destiny The Transforming Power of Stories

One That's Your Story? Slow death. An uglier two-word phrase it's hard to find. But if you're at all like the people I see in our workshops, then I'm afraid you understand the phrase all too well. How did it come to this? What am I doing? Where am I going? What do I want? Is my life working on any meaningful level? Why doesn't it work better? Am I right now dying, slowly, for something I'm not willing to die for? WHY AM I WORKING SO HARD, MOVING SO FAST, FEELING SO LOUSY? One man I heard about was quite literally going through slow death. A senior executive at a big firm, he was home the last few weeks of his life, in the final stage of cancer, in and out of lucidity, medicated so heavily that his tongue loosened and he regularly spewed his unfiltered, apparently truest thoughts. He cursed at his wife as never before, using vile, demeaning language -- all while she was caring for him day and night, knowing these were his last days on earth, the final days of their long marriage. He did the same to his kids when they visited, making an already difficult situation for them nearly intolerable, and certainly bringing them nothing remotely like peaceful closure. Mostly, though, the man's most shocking, blistering commentary was reserved, in absentia, for his boss: vicious, intermittently coherent paroxysms of resentment and contempt for the president of his firm who, it was painfully obvious now, the dying executive blamed for most of the anger, frustration, and general rottenness he'd felt the past two decades. Slow death. It comes in different forms. Two years ago a heart surgeon came to our institute. The first morning he had his blood work done and took a turn in the BodPod (a chamber inside which one's lean body mass can be measured with exceptional accuracy, through the displacement of air rather than water). His results were borderline alarming -- extremely elevated levels of cholesterol, glucose, blood lipids, triglycerides, C-reactive protein. He was given a copy of the results. When his turn came to discuss the meaning of the numbers and how to approach them, the surgeon said, "I don't want to talk about it." "You know what these numbers mean," said Raquel Malo, our director of nutrition and executive training. "Of course I do," he snapped. "I'm a doctor!" "What if I was your patient and I got these numbers?" "I'd be all over you." "Yet you're telling me -- " "I said I don't want to talk about it." "But -- " "Change the subject or I'm on the next plane home," he said. "Don't bring it up again while I'm here." Two days later the doctor left, having done nothing to address his perilous health, or even to acknowledge there was anything to address. He returned to his thriving medical practice, where he would continue to caution patients to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease. (Of all the demographics we see, health care providers as a group hover near the bottom in fitness and physical well-being.) Slow death: what a harsh phrase. Is that really what's happening to all those people, the ones who start out contented by what is good and pure in life -- a simple cup of coffee, a few seemingly reasonable life goals (a nice salary, say, and one's own home) -- and who, once they've achieved those goals, can't even be satisfied because they've already moved on to life's next-sized latte (six-figure salary, second home, three cars), only to move on to something double-extra grande when that's achieved, a continual supersizing that guarantees one can't ever be fulfilled? Okay. Not everyone I see or hear about is dying slowly. But to judge from the responses we get, workshop after workshop, year after year -- and each year it gets worse -- whatever it is they're doing sure doesn't sound fun. It doesn't even sound like getting by. I reLoehr, Jim is the author of 'Change Your Story, Change Your Destiny The Transforming Power of Stories', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743294522 and ISBN 0743294521.