Powered by Feel

The following sections are included:

• DEDICATION

• PREFACE BY JAMES

• PREFACE BY DOUG

• CONTENTS

Tony Athos had been on the cover of Time magazine as one of the country's best teachers. When I arrived at the Harvard Business School as a doctoral student, he was a senior faculty member. For some reason, he looked kindly on me and took me under his wing. Later as a member of the faculty, teaching a course he designed, I asked him to come watch me teach which he agreed to do. I was up half the night preparing my teaching plan, board plan, contingency plans, key questions, etc. I really wanted to impress him. He sat in the back, and I taught my class. Afterward, I ran down to his office, salivating like Odie the dog, looking for feedback. I sat down … and he said, “Jim, you're boring.” THUNK! An arrow to the heart. My mouth went dry, my palms were sweaty, and I whispered, “Okay, tell me about boring.”…

How do you want to feel?

It seems like such a simple question. It seemed too simple to me as I interviewed hundreds of world class performers about their lives and careers expecting to hear about hard work and perseverance and goal setting. Those words were rarely spoken…

Clearly they weren't getting it. As I looked around the room, most eyes were glazing over or exuding anger. Much like Doug's client in the previous chapter, but in aggregate. It was perplexing to me. The first time I heard Doug's explanation and discussion of feel, it hit a deep chord with me … it resonated. But clearly that wasn't happening here. We were consulting with a client of mine and the session on resonance was not going well. They couldn't see the relevance of “feel” or “resonance” and the more we talked, the more irritated they got. The session ended unsatisfactorily. Many were confused, some were angry, a few genuinely inspired…

If you ask children of a certain age what they are doing, they simply respond “Playing” in a way that suggests it is a stupid question.

Soon they start playing a game and then a sport. They specialize, the day comes when they perform. Eventually they invite and receive judgment. They care more about winning and losing and what others think of them … and play becomes work so they stop playing. Most kids who do not measure up quit and find something else to do. Or worse, they avoid doing anything they might not be good at, avoid judgment, cower from feeling not good enough…

“How much of your life do you live inside-out versus outside-in?” That is, are you letting society define for you what success means or are you defining it yourself? Consider Figure 5.1. When we live outside-in, we are allowing the outside world to influence us. When we conform to the culture surrounding us, when we imitate those around us, when we censor what we otherwise would do or say because of our concerns about what others would say, we are living outside-in. When we say what we think, when we are honest with others, when we are transparent, when we do as we believe, we are living inside-out…

There are many reasons people who love doing something do not put in the time to get better. Most reasons are very personal and often misunderstood.

My experience with the world-class performers I interviewed and those people I consult with who are stuck in their lives provide me clear data about the difference…

Does how you think inform your energy? People tend to be creatures of habit. Over the last four years I have been privileged to travel to most continents around the globe conducting executive education leadership development seminars. In these seminars I ask people a series of questions that point out the difficulty in getting people to change what they do…

Many of the people I interviewed — from the pro golfer and the pro tennis player to the pilots, the surgeons, and even the CEO — followed routines they created for one specific purpose. Following these routines helps them feel the way they want to feel when it mattered most. In many cases, the use of a routine allows the body and mind to reset, to recalibrate. Routines allow them to focus on something they can control that also prepares them to perform well…

Be a good one. How does feel relate to being good at something? When I visited Doug's lecture that first night, and he asked how did I want to feel, I couldn't answer the question. No one, not my mother, not my father, none of my teachers or employers have ever asked me that question. I couldn't sleep that night. It took me, in fact, eighteen months and about 40 drafts to come up with what I thought was a for-the-moment satisfactory answer: light, unhurried and engaged…

The most critical and consistent preparation world-class performers do is probably not what you imagine. It involves feeling their energy, setting it in motion — what I call informing it — through practice and ongoing learning, testing that energy privately and publicly, and protecting it…

Practice and prepare. Does one do that from choice or from obligation? Obligation is an outside-in process; that is, when you feel duty or obligation, it came, in the first instance, from the outside. You never have to do anything unless you were told at one point by someone else to do so. You may have internalized those thoughts and they may have become semi- or sub-conscious values or assumptions or beliefs for you, but in the first instance, they came from somewhere else. In the end, it's very hard if not impossible to get world-class out of duty or obligation…

One day I happened to be sitting in the audience, an audience full of surgeons, when Jim told the story of Ironman Dave Scott. Sitting in front of me were what I will call “old school” surgeons. When Jim presented Scott's strategy, one of them leaned in toward the other and whispered, “So I guess that must work for everybody” and they both laughed. They didn't get it, did not understand what Jim was saying, and I suspect they never would…

How should one feel?

There are many obstacles to experiencing flow or resonance, or the zone. These might include lack of energy (lack of passion), lack of innate (genetic) skill, superior competition, and living too much outside-in listening to others' definitions of success (as Jeff Rouse did). Another one is focusing too much on results, something that Jeff learned the hard way. In a results-oriented world this is a common phenomenon. Some if not most believe that results are the only thing…

I had been working with a world-class competitive archer for about six months when he called me to talk about his preparation for the national championships. He was in a position to win Archer of the Year based on his performance and his thoughts about winning (and not winning) were causing him stress. He even said to me, “I am trying to think about the process, but I keep worrying about not winning. I really want to win.”…

In the previous chapter, Doug described what it's like to be “found,” that is to “revisit your dream,” that is, to remember and re-engage with how you felt when you were at your best. There are people out there, people performing in highly stressful and highly demanding professions who have learned how to manage this process in their lives. For me, that's huge — that there are professionals in many different professions who have learned how to manage their performance upward by paying attention to how they want to feel and organizing their lives to make that happen more often rather than less. I had no idea this could be so until I met Doug and we began what has become now a 15-year series of discussions/collaborations…

I will never forget the first day I went to talk with the third-year medical students of the Department of Surgery at the University of Virginia's Medical School. They were mad. They didn't like long hours, lots of work, sick patients — and, I suspect, a sense of being overwhelmed…

Telling your story.

What does one say? What's socially acceptable? The best parts only? The worst parts only? Nothing because they shouldn't know? They don't need to know? Who are they to know? My story, after all, is me. It's who I am. Dare I share that with others? What if they reject who I really am? Familiarity breeds contempt after all…

I started using the Jimmy Buffet exercise with groups by accident. I loved the idea of describing one's life in 400 words or less so I sent the Buffet story to my friends to hear their thoughts. Their reactions were fascinating. They would either judge Buffet or they would describe him as “happy” or “sad” although he used few if any emotional words in the description. It is simply a statement of some facts in his life, limited to 400 words…

Making life a “living” place.

It seems to me that most of us, deep down, want to do that, yet many if not most of us end up in jobs and organizations that squeeze the probabilities of interesting living out of us. This squeezing I guess begins with parents teaching us what's okay and what's not okay. We learn that quickly. Then, when we go to school, the okay/not-okay lessons continue and the range of acceptable behaviors narrows like the chutes leading to the branding station on a cattle ranch. At the branding station, graduation, society puts its mark on us and we are pronounced a bachelor of science or a master of business administration or a doctor of medicine. We are branded “learned.”…

Why do we learn? It seems to me we learn so we can evolve. We can say it is about growth, about change, about competition, but ultimately, we are given the gift of learning so everything can move forward. I am not necessarily talking about Darwin's idea of survival, but I am not excluding it either. Religion requires learning in order to reach a state of grace no matter what the religion. Sports and Surgery and Mathematics and Physics require “seeing the field” as a whole, transcending the individual skills. And sometimes we learn by unlearning because what we've learned before blocks our path…

Can you perform when people are watching? Can you sing outside the shower? What happens to you when people are looking over your shoulder? Do you freeze? Do you tighten up? Do you become more self-conscious?…

We were down three points with six seconds left. We had the ball out of bounds at the far end of the court. My coach, Terry Holland, said, “Dribble down and make the three.”…

An international association once asked me to be a plenary speaker after lunch. I didn't know the group well so I was not finalizing my thoughts until the last minute. I'd gone to the conference early to scope out the audience. They were a formal group. There were lots of suits, white shirts, and ties. Very polished, shiny shoes. Like Doug, I knew what to do, how to do it, and usually it felt really good. I'd prepared two options, one more academic and one more impactful but a bit of a stretch from the requested title. I'm warming up to the experience looming…

Despite its title, this chapter is about compensation. It is where all the pieces come together — the individual, organizational, and the overlap. It is also about work and I mean that in the most exciting manner…

Inspiration. Education. Evaluation. Compensation. Combine these into “work” that creates well^th. Well^th would be a good thing. Many would argue that wealth would get them to well^th. For some, perhaps, and for so many, the central focus on the collection of wealth becomes ultimately a frustration. Where does all this take us? If the “haves” make too much more than the “have-nots” and the “haves” also remove all the chances or hope for getting more, eventually, history shows, the “have-nots” will rise up and take it by force. So, it is to the advantage of the “haves” to “share” enough that all can enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The research data suggest that the “haves” tend not to do that, even among young idealistic students…

The people I interviewed almost never talked about being, “in the zone.” They were very specific about how they wanted to feel and when they wanted to feel that way. In some cases, they described the way they need to feel to perform. I once heard golfer Retief Goosen described this way. Off the course, when he is not competing, he is very outgoing, even funny. When he competes, he knows he needs to feel calm, even stoic…

The thing for me about rhythm is that I've found myself so many times in life trying to force it. I think this tendency evolved from or emerged from lots of repeated counsel over the years, beginning early in life, that you can do more. It's a concept that is rampant in business — more, more, more. My father once said, I remembered it, “Sometimes you have to horse it.” By that he meant sometimes brute force was the only way to go. Looking back on it, whenever I tried to do that, things didn't work out so well…

Joseph Campbell once wrote that the best way to learn is to read something you like then follow the trail of the author's influences, read what the author read. I've spent the last few years reading about physics because of a long drive I took with friends. Between Los Angeles and Vancouver British Columbia, we listened to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything…

By chance, I'm reading Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot as Doug sends his chapter on physics. There are a lot of numbers in the book — even though it's written for the lay person. The numbers representing the distances in the cosmos, the probabilities of life, the sizes, the length of light waves and radar waves, are so beyond our daily experience they are hard to comprehend. Mastering the numbers is critical to understanding space…

Right after reading Jim's chapter on the numbers game for the first time, I watched on TV people climbing up a face of K2 that had not been climbed before. On the way up, one man died. On the way down, another one died…

The expedition that summited K2 in the summer of 2007 led by Chris Warner was the most successful summit summer on K2 ever. K2 is far more deadly than Everest proportionately yet that summer, 22 people reached the top. Many seasons no one successfully summits K2. I know this because, by coincidence, we are writing a case² on the K2 expedition. Doug didn't know that. Chris Warner came to our studios at the invitation of one of his team members, a former student of mine, Joel Shalowitz…

Work is meaningful movement, from here to there, from where you are to where you want to be. You supply or define the meaning of that movement. That meaning is impacted or influenced or even defined by how and what you feel…

Freedom and Responsibility are siblings. There's a fine line it seems to me between responsibility and obligation. We noted earlier in Chapter 9 that obligation becomes an obstacle to experiencing resonance or the kind of feel that individuals have within them that allows them to perform at their best…

I first met Jeff Rouse in the winter following the 1992 Summer Olympics. I was interviewing him as part of my dissertation on world-class performers. I didn't know at the time we would become good friends and that I would play a part in preparing him for the next Olympic games…

Power is the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. As such, power is often viewed as a “Level One” concept in that it is usually directed at what others do regardless of how they think or feel. To have power is to be able to get others to DO what YOU want them to do…

Although theorists have defined power for hundreds of years as, “The ability to get others to do what you want them to do,” I believe power is the ability to do work well. And how you define well is, well, up to you…

Love is a positive and powerful emotion. Freud once said that the purpose of life was “arbeiten und lieben” — work and love. Combining the two, loving what you do for work can be wonderful and essential for world class performance. But while love is a many splendored thing, it can also be abused. We see this in its extreme forms in the news from time to time; people who imprison their “loved ones” or who abuse them against their will. In the end, I think, love, like leadership, must be based on a voluntary response. If the other does not love you voluntarily and without pressure or need, how can you call it love? Likewise, if others do not follow you out of choice, how can you call it leadership?…

How do you feel what you never touch?

One NBA coach I interviewed told me he checks in with how he feels every half hour. Athletes often have routines to reset how they're feeling in the middle of competition. Surgeons play songs in the operating room that help them feel the way they need to feel when it will matter most. In each case, the world-class performers are choosing how they want to feel and for the most part they get in that neighborhood more times than not…

At the gym when you lose or you're too tired to continue, you leave the court. The team(s) on the sidelines know they have “next.” You stretch a little, hydrate, and take a leisurely hot shower. You feel good all over, even if you left everything on the floor. Then as you walk back out into the world, you stand taller, feel cleaner, stronger, and you glow from the inside out…

So you've got next, but next what?

As I began this chapter I struggled with what to write, not because I didn't know what to say, but because there seemed so much to say — and yet that betrays the most fundamental lesson I learned about world-class performance…