The Power to Transform: 90 Days to a New You - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Majer is founder and CEO of The Human Potential Project, a pioneer in the design and delivery of transformational education for athletes, the military, and corporate organizations. Majer's innovative work has been written about in Time, Esquire, and Leaders Magazine. As a result of his stunning successes, he has been featured on Today, The News Hour, and Charlie Rose. He resides in Spokane, Washington.

John Brant is a frequent contributor to Inc., the New York Times Play Magazine, Runner's World, and Best Life. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two children.

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ONE

THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN POTENTIAL PROJECT

THE GREATEST DISCOVERY OF MY GENERATION IS THAT HUMAN BEINGS CAN ALTER THEIR LIVES BY ALTERING THEIR ATTITUDES OF MIND.

--WILLIAM JAMES

This is a book for and about you.

It is for the you who watches in amazement as what you once thought to be solid and permanent institutions, businesses, and beliefs dissolve in front of your eyes, as you wonder if you have the capacity to cope with all of the change. It is for the you that asks if this is all there is to life, if you are somehow missing out on possibilities for something more meaningful. It is for all of you who have the desire to create a better life for yourselves and those that you care for and about. It is for the you that believes deep down inside that it must be possible to realize more of your human potential and use it to make a difference in the world. It is for the you that longs for a life filled with passion, power, and purpose. What you have in your hands is a handbook for an internal transformation: a rapid and substantial change in who you are, how you experience life, what you are capable of, and what you can accomplish.

This book will provide you with some insight into how you have become the you that you are. More importantly, it will open the possibility of both designing and delivering a new future for the you that you want to become: a new you. I intend to enable you to become that you, the you that you always wanted to be.

I have set out to lead you through a process that is meant to enable you to create a new and improved version of yourself: a more expanded, competent, and satisfied you. I know that right now you may not believe that it is possible to change who you are and have a future that is radically different from the one you are currently facing, but 25 years of experience tells me that it is possible. With that experience to back me up, I will believe it for you until you are ready to take over.

To realize more of your potential will require that you trust me to take you through the process detailed in the pages that follow. If you complete all of the work as set out, you can move through the process in 3 to 6 months. I know that as soon as you hear those charged words, "trust me," you probably start to get twitchy, most likely with good reason. Any number of speakers, writers, and would-be gurus make that same request. I'm sure many of you have spent valuable time and money in the pursuit of your potential, only to be disappointed. You found that change was nowhere near as easy as you had been led to believe, and this often-spoken-of potential of yours proved to be a bit elusive.

While authentic, lasting change may seem like the hardest thing in the world, that's because the current wisdom about how to make change happen is largely wrong. Before I tell you why I believe that, and why you can trust me to help you craft a new version of you and a new future for yourself, I want to start by introducing myself and explaining why I'm uniquely qualified to help you through this process.

With perfectly straight posture, his battle fatigues crisp and immaculate, and his fingers lightly laced together on the table in front of him, General John Woodmansee, a West Point graduate, Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, and commander of the Second Armored Division, United States Army, sat in a conference room in Fort Hood, Texas, waiting to hear how I could help transform his troops into stronger, faster, and more lethal soldiers.

Thirteen years earlier, with my hair down to my shoulders and my fist punching the air, I had marched down Seattle's freeways, participating in and eventually leading student protests against the Vietnam War while I was at the University of Washington. I had arrived on campus as a freshman in the fall of 1969, and by the spring of 1970 everything, including me, had changed. I participated fully in what seemed to be a new golden era. I played rugby, experimented with the exotic offerings of the day (yes, I even inhaled), and was social chairman of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house. At the same time, I earned my "student radical" moniker and, like many of my peers, set my sights on changing the world.

I had been protesting the Vietnam War while Woodmansee fought it. Now, in the spring of 1983, I found myself standing in front of the general and his staff, hoping to do business with them.

As head of a Seattle-based company then called SportsMind (the original incarnation of the Human Potential Project), I, along with my team, had used a collection of practices we bundled together as Mental Fitness to show athletes how they could make their games and their lives more satisfying, meaningful, and triumphant. We combined our work on mental fitness with contemporary physical-training methodologies, and, in conjunction with work on developing passion, belief systems, and values, we offered a new and potent mind-body-spirit approach to sports performance. Our success with athletes had earned us a shot at convincing the leaders at Fort Hood to adapt our comprehensive approach for their troops. I knew we could help the Army. I just had to convince them.

The base's current physical training program was a relic from World War II and had proven woefully inadequate for the demands of the late 20th century. The troops were trained and tested on a set of exercises unrelated to situations they would face in combat and were evaluated by fixed scores. Failing to hit a benchmark filled a soldier with anxiety, as it singled him or her out for remedial work. Despite the exceedingly modest standards of the physical training test, a shocking number did fail, which resulted in our invitation to Fort Hood. Once there, we learned that the Army faced a host of other issues as well: generally low morale, too many overweight soldiers, too many sick calls, and rising levels of alcohol and substance abuse.

While soldiers lacked a sense of purpose and confidence, officers were being sent to business school to learn how to be managers. Still suffering an emotional hangover from the Vietnam War, the Army had lost touch with some of its vital history, and in its rush to learn how to manage, had forgotten how to lead. To its credit, the Army was clear that things needed to change and was willing to try our methods to solve its problems. We proposed techniques for enhancing spirit, passion, and teamwork along with our innovative process of building physical and mental fitness. We were, in short, using contemporary methods to reconnect the Army with its own core values.

"Your biggest dilemma is that you've been operating as if all your problems are separate and unrelated," I told Woodmansee at the briefing. "You're taking the business-school approach and putting poor physical-training scores in one box, low morale in another box, too many sick calls in a separate box, and drug and alcohol abuse in still another. You then have a remedial program designed to attend to each of the boxes. That burns a lot of time and money. You are pulling all of the threads apart, forgetting that they are part of the same cloth."

The notion that physical fitness could be "achieved" via exercises and techniques, for example, was a false, self-defeating premise. Fitness, I explained, was a process rather than a product; a way of life, not an achievement. The physical, mental, and spiritual development of each soldier and each unit were intertwined, contributing to morale, cohesiveness, and mission performance.

"Because all of your issues are related," I continued, "they can't be resolved with a series of narrowly focused remedial programs. We propose to help you solve all your problems at once."

This was a bold statement, and it caught the attention of everyone in the room. However, in order for General Woodmansee to accept it, he...