The Power of Focus

I jumped on a plane and flew out to Florida to work with the Human Performance Institute. Dan Jansen, who is a famous ice skater, who won a gold medal in the 1992 Olympics, had just been there telling his story about the only way he could win the Olympics. He had tried so many times and had won every single record in the speed skating events that he performed, but he couldn’t win an Olympic gold medal. It was really in working with Jim Loehr at the Human Performance Institute that he was able to overcome his nervousness, and just focus on the ice and win. It’s just a thrilling story that he’s telling visitors here. Dan is just a wonderful human being.

Focus is everything. Watching Tiger Woods lose the PGA tournament that he was leading due to getting what is called the yips in golf can show you how the power of focus can either undue you or make you a champion.

The Dream Team

I’ve been working non-stop with the development team that is creating the health and wellness education for the Human Performance Institute. It’s a very exciting projec,t because we are teaching people how to increase their energy to achieve the things they really value. It’s an amazing and complicated project. We’re striving to make it very engaging, with video, testimonials, stories, and very creative ways of teaching. It’s amazing when you work with a dream team who are very experienced, award-winning designers. I’m sure it’s sort of like working with Spielberg on a movie. This is a team that has an acute sensitivity to knowing when less is the best or when more is better. It’s really a gift. I wish we could all use it in our personal lives with the same kind of intelligence and sensitivity this team is doing on this project.

A Healthy Employee is a Productive Employee

I am off to one of the large computer companies in Silicon Valley to talk about the Human Performance Institute’s, Health and Performance Program. It seems remarkable that most people don’t equate that it is necessary to have healthy employees in order to have productive employees. Yet, when people get the connection that fit, healthy, high energy employees are much more likely to create things of value, take care of their customers, and be productive they get excited that there is a business reason along with a health reason, to give people the information and motivation to lead their lives in a healthy way.

Increase Our Energy – Solve Health Care Costs

On Monday I was with some researchers from Johnson & Johnson talking about our heath care crisis. Much of our crisis is invisible. For instance, this number really blew my mind…

The current estimate for the annual productivity lost due to preventable illness is $1 trillion dollars a year.

That’s about the same as any health care cost of any new plan or that is being discussed for ten years. The cost of our lifestyle has reached unbelievable proportions. I’m here at the Human Performance Institute looking at health care’s ultimate answer.

80% of chronic illnesses are preventable and most of the causes of the chronic illnesses are simply bad lifestyle choices.

We know how to live, we just don’t. How we eat, how we don’t exercise, and how we don’t sleep makes us very vulnerable to our bodies breaking down. We also don’t do a very good job recovering from stress. HPI’s secret is that they know how to change that behavior permanently. Their evidence is pretty overwhelming. The underlying premise is that most people don’t change their behavior because they don’t have the energy to. We’re simply too tired to exercise, too tired to think positive thoughts, and too tired to interact with each other in positive ways. We’re just too tired to do anything that isn’t really easy, and it’s in that choice of doing something easy that we make ourselves sick.

So it all begins with how to increase your energy. HPI seems to have found a way. If we can simply get more of us taking better care of ourselves because we have the energy to do it, things might change. The best way to solve the cost prices in health care is to get a whole lot healthier!

Our Ultimate Mission

There is a new movement in psychology called “acceptance and commitment therapy” (“How Obama Is Using the Science of Change” Time Magazine).  It’s a kind of no excuses approach to changing our behavior and our lives.  It’s very simple.  As simple as facing the truth of what is really going on in our lives and then deciding to do what it takes to change ourselves in order to change our results.  It’s catching fire in the behavior change industry because it works immediately, powerfully and completely if it’s key elements are followed.  Ah yes, that’s the tough part.  More on that in a minute.

So who’s into face the truth and change your life therapy?  Well according to Michael Grunwald (Time Magazine writer), President Obama is.  His speeches and press conferences focus on how painful our present economic collapse is.  He stresses that a fix will neither be quick or easy.  Then Obama elevates his message to one of hope of positive change.  What’s necessary he says is an absolute commitment to clean energy, reinventing American manufacturing, scientific research and educational excellence.  It’s the similar psychological formula followed by Ronald Reagan in the early ‘80s when we were struggling with a muscular Russia and grinding stagflation.  Reagan’s commitments were to expand government spending on defense industry and reduce taxes.  The point here is not whether you agree with the policy agendas of Reagan or Obama; it’s the example of powerful, consistent communication contrasting our too-tough present state versus a shiny new future if we are willing to step up to our challenge by doing something new.

Lately I’ve been working with Dr. James Loehr, a renown performance psychologist who has coached 16 number one athletes in the world from Pete Sampras to world chess champion Josh Waitzkin (Searching for Bobby Fischer).  Jim is at the Master’s Golf Tournament where he’s coaching one of the top five golfers.  He tells me that our behavior changes when we mentally and emotionally tie whatever it takes to break a habit to our ultimate mission in life.  He cites tons of evidence to support this including smoking cessation in pregnant women.  It turns out the most successful single intervention to motivating women to stop smoking is getting pregnant.  And the reason is obvious.  For most women smokers the idea that smoking may cause a variety of gruesome risks to their own child is a powerful reason to just stop.  Many stop permanently and of course others relapse as soon as their baby is born because their new story is that now it doesn’t matter.  And that’s the point.  It’s got to matter.  Matter deeply.  At the level of our core values.

What Dr. Loehr is great at is getting people to reflect on is whether their behavior is the expression of their deepest values.  It turns out for most of us this connection is not as direct and conscious as we would expect.  Most of us cut ourselves a lot of slack because we have good intentions.  I think it was my mother who taught me that those are the thoughts that pave the “road to hell.”  She wasn’t kidding, and the hell are the parts of our lives and the habits of our society we’ve come to accept even though we don’t agree with them.  Once I started to see myself and our culture through the lens of “facing the truth” I got annoyed at my excuse making ability.

I think most of us know what our ultimate mission is.  All we need to do is look to the people we most admire.  As one philosopher put it, the purpose of life is to be useful to humanity.  How?  In the very best way we can.  By showing up.  By fully engaging our current circumstances right here, right now.  To stand for the difference that is our difference.

There is no doubt that the world must change if our children are to thrive.  And the most important change we can make is the one we most resist.  The one we deny that we must.  It’s time to be both responsible and relevant.  Responsible for our own habits and relevant to the needs of a desperate world.  We will not recreate our future or optimize our lives by accepting the unacceptable.  If there was ever a time to stay constantly connected to our ultimate mission, it’s now.

So what’s the best thing we can do? Face our own truth.  And examine the consequences of not changing what we should.  Then elevate our vision of what’s possible to the same level as what’s most desirable.  While it’s true there are many things we cannot change, the one thing we can is ourselves, our habits of thoughts, our choices, our behavior.  And that’s the most important change of all.

Do you have any examples of changes you’ve made by facing the truth?  What changes would you like to see our society, culture, country make?

How to Cure Our Own Healthcare

I know the title of this blog is overly ambitious.  But it’s undeniable that America’s health care system is on life support.  I just came from a private meeting of Johnson & Johnson “wellness” executives that was inspiring.

Johnson & Johnson is one of those all-too-rare companies that is serious about their social responsibilities and have been for over 100 years.  Yes, I know they are not perfect.  What $65 billion enterprise is?  But their annual direct contributions to human health exceed a half a billion dollars.  Once more, their famous operating credo points customers first, employees second, community third, and share holders last.  It was written in 1943 by their only shareholder, General Robert Woods Johnson.  Remember, they took Tylenol off all the store shelves in the world when a few capsules were found laced with poison in a deadly prank. What other company has handled a recall with such concern for our safety?

Well let’s just say J & J is serious about making our wellness and healthy aging a big strategic priority for the next 150 years.  They talk in 50-year terms, which is breathtaking in an age where most executives think long-term means a week or 10 days.   Yes of course they plan to make good health a profitable business.  That’s what makes their plans sustainable.  It’s what I call socially strategic leadership…business that makes money by benefiting humanity.  That’s the good news.

The challenge is that American health care is completely compromised by the intense lobbying culture in Washington.  Today we have over 200 ex-congressmen lobbying for their special interest instead of our common good (See Stuck in the Revolving Door in the Washington Post).  When asked why lobbying had become such a huge business in Washington, Robert G.  Kaiser, former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee said, “There’s just so damn much money in it.”  That’s not funny.  Lobbyists actually write many of the bills that become laws.  For instance, they wrote the drug Medicare benefit passed by George Bush’s congress in 2003, which made it illegal for the government to negotiate with drug companies on the price of the drugs Medicare now pays for.  It’s called corporate welfare, reverse wealth transfer, or as Jack Abramoff called it, “legalized bribery.”

So, where has this gotten us?  In very deep yogurt, that’s where.  The U.S. spends 50% more on health care per person than the next highest spending country (Norway).  We have the fastest growth in health care spending in the world.  Yet we have below-average life expectancy, the largest number of uninsured in any industrialized nation, higher infant mortality here than in Poland and 3 times higher than in Japan, and a growing obesity epidemic caused by our lifestyles.

So who’s going to fix this?  Well, Tom Daschle was presented to us as the most knowledgeable man in America to fix our system.  But it turns out his part of this Washington D.C. culture of I’m-so-special I-don’t-have-to-pay-my-taxes.  Damn.  (Unlike Rush Limbaugh I am rooting my brains out for President Obama to succeed.  But please.  Paying one’s taxes is a very low standard for anyone who’s going to serve in our nation’s cabinet to reach.  It’s disappointing the corrupting influence of Washington has made even that standard too high for some of our best potential public servants.)

Our health care problems are astoundingly complex.  Solutions are beyond government alone or the so-called free market to solve.  Greed, incompetence, demographics, and complexity are causing costs to skyrocket while causing massive unnecessary suffering.  So what’ the best thing we can do?  Well, first, today begin to make the changes in our lifestyles that are known to promote our and our family’s health.  If you could do just one thing, what would it be?  Get moving.

According to Dr. Jim Loehr of the Human Performance Institute of Johnson & Johnson, if Americans just got our large muscles (legs) moving more, we would begin to get healthier.  I know a business leader who lost 30 pounds over the past 18 months simply by wearing a ped-o-meter on his belt to make sure he walks a total of 5 miles a day.  Usually he does half of this on a 40-minute walk in the morning or evening.  The rest he does by moving throughout the day.  He takes the stairs, walks to other people’s offices and takes every other opportunity to walk he can.  The payoff Loehr says is that getting moving changes our blood chemistry, our muscle tone, our strength, our energy, our blood oxygen levels and jacks up our motivation to make other changes with our diet, our sleep, and our stress resilience.  I was going to suggest a few more things we could do to reduce our personal vulnerability to our broken health care system but let me stop with this.  Get moving.  Today.  We’ll all be healthier for it.

So what do you think of our health care mess?  Obama’s blunder with Tom Daschle?  Your personal advice on how we can live more healthy?

Corporate Sustainability and HPI

Last week I was at one of San Diego’s largest employers, a huge global high tech company.  I was watching a training program called the Corporate Athlete that pioneered 30 years ago by a renowned sports psychologist, Dr. Jim Loehr.  Recently Jim’s business The Human Performance Institute has exploded with demand from the world’s biggest companies like Proctor and Gamble and Dell.  Why?  Because Jim teaches everything we forget and most of what we need to know to live our best life.  When I say everything I mean stuff you’d not expect to hear in the work place.  His staff of exercise psychologists and nutritionist tell corporate work warriors how they can get more restful sleep, achieve fitness without dieting, and to keep moving to increase blood flow to the brain.  Companies are anxious to pay for this because companies need creative, collaborative people creating new value in a world full of me-too products and me-too people.

Most companies are lumbering bureaucracies full of fear clinging to the status quo.  Their way of growing is to work people to death.  What Jim Loehr points out is that fatigued, stressed-out, over weight employees are irritable, risk prone and problem-focused.  All the things we don’t want.  Companies full of employees that are well rested, fit, and feel their job aligns with their values are hives of innovation.  These are companies that will grow in this economic downturn.  They will grow because their employees will re-invent the value they offer customers.

So there I sat with 40 engineers.  These very smart people are lapping up the kool-aid.  They are shocked their employer is paying for a program that partially takes place in a gym.  It turns out when senior leaders become advocates for the personal health and satisfaction of their employees, their employees recommit to their employer.  It’s pretty simple.  How do you create a sustainable workplace?  Advocate that people live and work at a sustainable pace.