journey articles

• Mental Health

Want to Give Your Life More Meaning? Think of It As a ‘Hero’s Journey’

Y ou might not think you have much in common with Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, or Katniss Everdeen. But imagining yourself as the main character of a heroic adventure could help you achieve a more meaningful life.

Research published earlier this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology touts the benefits of reframing your life as a Hero’s Journey—a common story structure popularized by the mythologist Joseph Campbell that provides a template for ancient myths and recent blockbusters. In his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Campbell details the structure of the journey, which he describes as a monomyth. In its most elementary form, a hero goes on an adventure, emerges victorious from a defining crisis, and then returns home changed for the better.

“The idea is that there’s a hero of some sort who experiences a change of setting, which could mean being sent off to a magical realm or entering a new thing they’re not used to,” says study author Benjamin A. Rogers, an assistant professor of management and organization at Boston College. “That sets them off on a quest where they encounter friends and mentors, face challenges, and return home to benefit their community with what they’ve learned.”

According to Rogers’ findings, perceiving your life as a Hero’s Journey is associated with psychological benefits such as enhanced well-being, greater life satisfaction, feeling like you’re flourishing, and reduced depression. “The way that people tell their life story shapes how meaningful their lives feel,” he says. “And you don’t have to live a super heroic life or be a person of adventure—virtually anyone can rewrite their story as a Hero’s Journey.”

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The human brain is wired for stories, Rogers notes, and we respond to them in powerful ways. Previous research suggests that by the time we’re in our early 20s, most of us have constructed a narrative identity—an internalized and evolving life story—that explains how we became the person we are, and where our life might go in the future. “This is how we've been communicating and understanding ourselves for thousands of years,” he says. Rogers’ research suggests that if people view their own story as following a Hero’s Journey trajectory, it increases meaning regardless of how they initially perceived their lives; even those who thought their lives had little meaning are able to benefit.

While Rogers describes a “re-storying intervention” in his research, some psychologists have used the Hero’s Journey structure as part of their practice for years. Lou Ursa, a licensed psychotherapist in California, attended Pacifica Graduate Institute, which is the only doctoral program in the country focused on mythology. The university even, she notes, houses Campbell’s personal library. As a result, mythology was heavily integrated into her psychology grad program. In addition to reflecting on what the Hero’s Journey means to her personally, she often brings it up with clients. “The way I talk about it is almost like an eagle-eye view versus a snake-eye view of our lives,” she says. “So often we’re just seeing what’s in front of us. I think that connecting with a myth or a story, whether it’s the Hero’s Journey or something else, can help us see the whole picture, especially when we’re feeling lost or stuck.”

As Rogers’ research suggests, changing the way you think about the events of your life can help you move toward a more positive attitude. With that in mind, we asked experts how to start reframing your life story as a Hero’s Journey.

Practice reflective journaling

Campbell described more than a dozen key elements of a Hero’s Journey, seven of which Rogers explored in his research: protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, and legacy. He says reflecting on these aspects of your story—even if it’s just writing a few sentences down—can be an ideal first step to reframe your circumstances. Rogers offers a handful of prompts that relate back to the seven key elements of a Hero’s Journey. To drill in on “protagonist,” for example, ask yourself: What makes you you ? Spend time reflecting on your identity, personality, and core values. When you turn to “shift,” consider: What change or new experience prompted your journey to become who you are today? Then ponder what challenges stand in your way, and which allies can support or help you in your journey. You can also meditate on the legacy your journey might leave.

Ask yourself who would star in the movie of your life

One way to assess your inner voice is to figure out who would star in a movie about your life, says Nancy Irwin, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who employs the Hero’s Journey concept personally and professionally. Doing so can help us “sufficiently dissociate and see ourselves objectively rather than subjectively,” she says. Pay attention to what appeals to you about that person: What traits do they embody that you identify with? You might, for example, admire the person’s passion, resilience, or commitment to excellence. “They inspire us because there’s some quality that we identify with,” Irwin says. “Remember, you chose them because you have that quality yourself.” Keeping that in mind can help you begin to see yourself as the hero of your own story.

Go on more heroic adventures—or just try something new

In classic Hero’s Journey stories, the protagonist starts off afraid and refuses a call to adventure before overcoming his fears and committing to the journey. Think of Odysseus being called to fight the Trojans, but refusing the call because he doesn’t want to leave his family. Or consider Rocky Balboa: When he was given the chance to fight the world’s reigning heavyweight champion, he immediately said no—before ultimately, of course, accepting the challenge. The narrative has proven timeless because it “reflects the values of society,” Rogers says. “We like people who have new experiences and grow from their challenges.” 

He suggests asking yourself: “If I want to have a more meaningful life, what are the kinds of things I could do?” One possible avenue is seeking out novelty, whether that’s as simple as driving a new way home from work or as dramatic as finally selling your car entirely and committing to public transportation.

Be open to redirection

The Hero’s Journey typically starts with a mission, which prompts the protagonist to set off on a quest. “But often the road isn’t linear,” says Kristal DeSantis, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Austin. “There are twists, turns, unexpected obstacles, and side quests that get in the way. The lesson is to be open to possibility.”

That perspective can also help you flip the way you see obstacles. Say you’re going through a tough time: You just got laid off, or you were diagnosed with a chronic illness. Instead of dwelling on how unfortunate these hurdles are, consider them opportunities for growth and learning. Think to yourself: What would Harry do? Reframe the challenges you encounter as a chance to develop resilience and perseverance, and to be the hero of your own story.

When you need a boost, map out where you are on your journey

Once you find a narrative hero you can relate to, keep their journey in mind as you face new challenges. “If you feel stuck or lost, you can look to that story and be like, ‘Which part do I feel like I’m in right now?’” Ursa says. Maybe you’re in the midst of a test that feels so awful that you’ve lost perspective on its overall importance—i.e., the fact that it’s only part of your journey. (See: When Katniss was upset about the costume that Snow forced her to wear—before she then had to go fight off a pack of ferocious wolves to save her life.) Referencing a familiar story “can help you have that eagle-eye view of what might be next for you, or what you should be paying attention to,” Ursa says. “Stories become this map that we can always turn to.” Think of them as reassurance that a new chapter almost certainly awaits.

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Environment

The journey of life, ...and the nature of success.

Posted May 24, 2016

Just what is implied nowadays when we say that someone has led a ‘successful life’? I ask the question in general conversation from time to time and, as might be expected, find that nowadays ideas about what constitutes ‘success’ in life tend to be pretty narrow.

For more often than not, ‘success in life’ is generally taken to be (1), attaining a high degree of financial security; (2) having achieved a good social position; or (3), having acquired a fair number of impressive possessions – all opinions and attitudes which I would say reflect a widely held way of looking at contemporary life.

I remember a distinction made on a Royal Air Force Officer’s Record during World War II between two aspects of his overall performance, using a separate column for each: one headed OQ (Officer Qualities) and the other PQ (Personal Qualities). And it was necessary to have positive reports in both columns in order to maintain rank or be promoted.

I mention this ‘two column’ method here because these two ways of assessing overall competence in war are really also applicable to the struggle for success in normal peacetime living. For the OQ column recorded how intelligently and successfully one has responded to all the practical, day-to-day, ‘action-requiring’ decisions confronting one, indicating firmness of resolve in objective and positive action in responding to external situations of the moment… right now. The PQ column represented the extremely personal, psychological integrity of moral character, and insightful level of ‘wisdomly’ intuition , brought to bear more reflectively when taking action in any situation.

I don’t suppose that many contemporary psychologists would have much trouble in agreeing that the mental partnership of the OQ/PQ formula (as prescribed for wartime conditions), also plays a large part in determining the degree of ‘success’ when it comes to peacetime living.

But there is also one other mental activity at work in consciousness that should be recorded in a third column, one absent from official records, the purpose of which is to reveal those aspects of your own essential nature and character that are responsible for the decisions and the actions you take. For it may be in your nature to be constantly critical, even vindictive…. or generally fair and unprejudiced, generally disposed to be generous in the things you say and do. Judgements of this sort constitute a regular and important side of consciousness, and one should be aware of one’s own tendencies to be either hyper-critical or overly optimistic and generous to others as one goes through the day. Always let that well-known aphorism come to mind, ‘There but for the grace of God go I…’

In any event, the third column’s record indicates important personality characteristics: whether it is in one’s nature to be constantly critical, with a tendency to be condemnatory or more generally optimistic and sympathetic with regard to others. It is important to look over this third column from time to time, for it should be seen as a appraisal of one’s own character, speaking to levels of personal integrity and, as such, revealing just how humane you have become. This may help you determine your essential identity in terms of your humanity.

So I would suggest that success in life lies in coming to be aware of the comments secreted in the three-columned record of your life.

From the civilizations of Greece and Rome has come the injunction, ‘Know Thyself….’ in the belief that to know the content of your personal ‘three-columned record’, in and of itself, constitutes success in life.

(You may also attempt to make a ‘character test’ by trying to recognize the ‘face in the mirror’. Recognize Yourself, that is. Try it sometime. See how long you can manage to look into your own eyes. If you can manage two minutes, it is said you are in good humane shape.)

Dr. Carl Gustav Jung (who I regard as the greatest of 20th Century psychologist-psychiatrists), used the word individuation to describe this ‘three-columned’ mental journey as the course we follow to become unique individuals. And he saw the practice of psychiatry – talking to a patient to bring him or her to reach this very point of ‘Knowing Themselves – as the healing job of the psychologist.

But I am not sure if the following statement would carry much weight nowadays:

We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves. It is the only way in which we can break the spell that binds us to the cycle of biological events….

C.G.Jung: Psychological Reflections

Graham Collier , the author of What The Hell Are The Neurons Up To? , is an exhibiting landscape and portrait artist in Britain, an artist-philosopher in America, and a frequent Antarctic voyager.

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

• Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
• Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
• Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
• Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
• Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
• Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
• Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

• Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
• Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
• Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
• Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

• Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
• Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
• The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
• Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

• Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
• Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
• Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
• Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
• Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
• Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
• Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

• Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
• Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
• Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
• Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

• Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
• Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
• Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
• Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-customer-journey-map

Effective customer journey design: consumers’ conception, measurement, and consequences

• Original Empirical Research
• Published: 07 January 2019
• Volume 47 , pages 551–568, ( 2019 )

Cite this article

• Christina Kuehnl 1 ,
• Danijel Jozic 2 &
• Christian Homburg 3 , 4  

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Recently, practitioners have begun appraising an effective customer journey design (CJD) as an important source of customer value in increasingly complex and digitalized consumer markets. Research, however, has neither investigated what constitutes the effectiveness of CJD from a consumer perspective nor empirically tested how it affects important variables of consumer behavior. The authors define an effective CJD as the extent to which consumers perceive multiple brand-owned touchpoints as designed in a thematically cohesive, consistent, and context-sensitive way. Analyzing consumer data from studies in two countries (4814 consumers in total), they provide evidence of the positive influence of an effective CJD on customer loyalty through brand attitude—over and above the effects of brand experience. Importantly, an effective CJD more strongly influences utilitarian brand attitudes, while brand experience more strongly affects hedonic brand attitudes. These underlying mechanisms are also prevalent when testing for the contingency factors services versus goods, perceived switching costs, and brand involvement.

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A multi-group analysis comparing path coefficients across industries indicated that some industries (fast-moving consumer goods, information and communication technology, and restaurant) show a significant, positive effect while other industries show a non-significant effect for H4a in Study 2. These differences might explain the non-significant finding for this effect in Study 2.

Testing for alternative models by removing paths (as proposed in H1 and brand experience ➔ customer loyalty) from the suggested model shows deterioration in model fit, while adding paths (brand experience ➔ CJD, or vice versa, or experience ⇆ CJD) shows no improvement in model fit or explained variance of our dependent variable customer loyalty. We therefore keep the suggested model in the interest of parsimony.

Anderl, E., Becker, I., von Wangenheim, F., & Schumann, J. H. (2016). Mapping the customer journey: Lessons learned from graph-based online attribution modeling. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 33 (3), 457–474.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Michael Paul, Bernd Schmitt, and Peter Verhoef for their helpful comments on a previous version of the paper. The valuable discussions with Ajay Kohli and the participants of the JAMS Thought Leaders’ Conference and EMAC 2017 are also gratefully acknowledged. Finally, the authors thank the review team for the constructive suggestions.

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Kuehnl, C., Jozic, D. & Homburg, C. Effective customer journey design: consumers’ conception, measurement, and consequences. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 47 , 551–568 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-018-00625-7

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The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey?

By sarah e. bond , joel christensen august 12, 2021.

Campbell passingly cites the stories of Buddhism, Aztec myth, and Ovid's Metamorphoses as examples of virgin birth, then goes on to recount in detail a Tongan folk tale he calls “queer” about a mother giving birth to a clam, which in tum becomes pregnant from eating a coconut husk and gives birth to a human boy. Campbell never specifically explains exactly how the image of virgin birth fits into the heroic cycle as he sets it up.

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LIFE IS A JOURNEY

Where will your journey take you.

"Your journey never ends. Life has a way of changing things in incredible ways." --- Alexander Volkov

Life is a journey filled with lessons, hardships, heartaches, joys, celebrations and special moments that will ultimately lead us to our destination, our purpose in life. The road will not always be smooth; in fact, throughout our travels, we will encounter many challenges .

Some of these challenges will test our courage, strengths, weaknesses, and faith. Along the way, we may stumble upon obstacles that will come between the paths that we are destined to take.

In order to follow the right path, we must overcome these obstacles. Sometimes these obstacles are really blessings in disguise, only we don't realize that at the time.

Along our journey we will be confronted with many situations, some will be filled with joy, and some will be filled with heartache. How we react to what we are faced with determines what kind of outcome the rest of our journey through life will be like.

When things don't always go our way, we have two choices in dealing with the situations.

• We can focus on the fact that things didn't go how we had hoped they would and let life pass us by, or
• We can make the best out of the situation and know that these are only temporary setbacks and find the lessons that are to be learned.

"Going by my past journey, I am not certain where life will take me, what turns and twists will happen; nobody knows where they will end up. As life changes direction, I'll flow with it." --- Katrina Kaif

Time stops for no one , and if we allow ourselves to focus on the negative we might miss out on some really amazing things that life has to offer. We can't go back to the past, we can only take the lessons that we have learned and the experiences that we have gained from it and move on. It is because of the heartaches, as well as the hardships, that in the end help to make us a stronger person.

The people that we meet on our journey, are people that we are destined to meet. Everybody comes into our lives for some reason or another and we don't always know their purpose until it is too late. They all play some kind of role. Some may stay for a lifetime; others may only stay for a short while.

It is often the people who stay for only a short time that end up making a lasting impression not only in our lives, but in our hearts as well. Although we may not realize it at the time, they will make a difference and change our lives in a way we never could imagine. To think that one person can have such a profound affect on your life forever is truly a blessing. It is because of these encounters that we learn some of life's best lessons and sometimes we even learn a little bit about ourselves.

People will come and go into our lives quickly, but sometimes we are lucky to meet that one special person that will stay in our hearts forever no matter what. Even though we may not always end up being with that person and they may not always stay in our life for as long as we like, the lessons that we have learned from them and the experiences that we have gained from meeting that person, will stay with us forever.

It's these things that will give us strength to continue on with our journey. We know that we can always look back on those times of our past and know that because of that one individual, we are who we are and we can remember the wonderful moments that we have shared with that person.

"Life is a journey of either Fate or Destiny. Fate is the result of giving in to one's wounds and heartaches. Your Destiny unfolds when you rise above the challenges of your life and use them as Divine opportunities to move forward to unlock your higher potential." --- Caroline Myss

Memories are priceless treasures that we can cherish forever in our hearts. They also enables us to continue on with our journey for whatever life has in store for us. Sometimes all it takes is one special person to help us look inside ourselves and find a whole different person that we never knew existed. Our eyes are suddenly opened to a world we never knew existed- a world where time is so precious and moments never seem to last long enough.

Throughout this adventure, people will give you advice and insights on how to live your life but when it all comes down to it, you must always do what you feel is right .

Always follow your heart, and most importantly never have any regrets. Don't hold anything back. Say what you want to say, and do what you want to do, because sometimes we don't get a second chance to say or do what we should have the first time around.

It is often said that what doesn't kill you will make you stronger. It all depends on how one defines the word "strong." It can have different meanings to different people.

In this sense, "stronger" means looking back at the person you were and comparing it to the person you have become today. It also means looking deep into your soul and realizing that the person you are today couldn't exist if it weren't for the things that have happened in the past or for the people that you have met.

Everything that happens in our life happens for a reason and sometimes that means we must face heartaches in order to experience joy.

Copyright © 2000 Shannon Spaunburg

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The Metamorphosis of the Hero: Principles, Processes, and Purpose

This article examines the phenomenon of heroic metamorphosis: what it is, how it unfolds, and why it is important. First, we describe six types of transformation of the hero: mental, moral, emotional, spiritual, physical, and motivational. We then argue that these metamorphoses serve five functions: they foster developmental growth, promote healing, cultivate social unity, advance society, and deepen cosmic understanding. Internal and external sources of transformation are discussed, with emphasis on the importance of mentorship in producing metamorphic growth. Next we describe the three arcs of heroic transformation: egocentricity to sociocentricity, dependence to autonomy, and stagnation to growth. We then discuss three activities that promote heroic metamorphosis as well as those that hinder it. Implications for research on human growth and development are discussed.

Introduction

One of the most revered deities in Hinduism is Ganesha, a god symbolizing great wisdom and enlightenment. Ganesha’s most striking attribute is his unusual appearance. In images throughout India and southeast Asia, he is shown to be a man with an ordinary human body and the head of an elephant. According to legend, when Ganesha was a boy, he behaved foolishly in preventing his father Shiva from entering his own home. Shiva realized that his son needed an entirely new way of thinking, a fresh way of seeing the world. To achieve this aim, Shiva cut off Ganesha’s human head and replaced it with that of an elephant, an animal representing unmatched wisdom, intelligence, reflection, and listening. Ganesha was transformed from a naïve boy operating with little conscious awareness into a strong, wise, and fully awakened individual.

This article is about how people undergo dramatic, positive change. We focus on heroic metamorphosis – what it is, how it comes about, and why it’s important. Unlike Ganesha, one need not undergo dramatic physical change to experience heroic transformation. One must engage in any of three types of activities that we describe in this article: (1) training regimens, (2) spiritual practices, and (3) the hero’s journey. Anyone who transforms as a result of these activities emerges a brand-new person, a much-improved version of one’s previous self. Metamorphosis and transformation are both defined as “changing form,” a process that precisely describes the massive alteration undergone by Ganesha. Having undergone the hero’s journey as the pathway to transformation, Ganesha sees the world with greater clarity and insight. The hero’s journey inevitably involves setback, suffering, and a death of some type. What dies is usually the former self, the untransformed version of oneself that sees the world “through a glass darkly” ( Bergman, 1961 ). Ganesha’s decapitation happens to us all metaphorically; the journey marks the death of a narrow, immature way of seeing the world and the birth of a wider, more enlightened way of viewing life.

Overview of Heroic Metamorphosis

Metamorphic change pervades the natural world, from the changing of the seasons to biological growth and decay ( Wade, 1998 ; Allison, 2015 ; Efthimiou, 2015 ). The universe itself is subject to immense transformation on both a microscopic scale as well as a trans -universal scale. Biological cells grow, mutate, and die, and on a much grander scale the galaxies of the universe are in a constant state of flux. Darwinian theory portrays all of life as engaged in an inescapable struggle to survive in response to ever-changing circumstances. Life presents an ultimatum to all organisms: change as all phenomena in the universe must change, or fall.

Heroic transformation appears to be a prized and universal phenomenon that is cherished and encouraged in all human societies ( Allison and Goethals, 2017 ; Efthimiou and Franco, 2017 ; Efthimiou et al., 2018a , b ). Surprisingly, until the past decade there has been almost no scholarship on the topic of heroic transformation. Two early seminal works in psychology offered hints about the processes involved in dramatic change and growth in human beings. In 1902, William James addressed the topic of spiritual conversion in his classic volume, The Varieties of Religious Experience . These conversion experiences bear a striking similarity to descriptions of the hero’s transformation as reported by famed mythologist Campbell (1949) . These experiences included feelings of peace, clarity, union with all of humanity, newness, happiness, generosity, and being part of something bigger than oneself. James emphasized the pragmatic side of religious conversion, noting that the mere belief and trust in a deity could bring about significant positive change independent of whether the deity actually exists. This pragmatic side of spirituality is emphasized today by Thich Nhat Hanh, who observes that transformation as a result of following Buddhist practices can occur in the absence of a belief in a supreme being. Millions of Buddhists have enjoyed the transformative benefits of religion described by James simply by practicing the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path ( Hanh, 1999 , p. 170).

The second early psychological treatment of human transformation was published in 1905 by Sigmund Freud. His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality described life-altering transformative stages in childhood involving oral, anal, phallic, and latent developmental patterns. None of these changes were particularly “heroic” but they did underscore Freud’s belief in the inevitability of immense psychological change. Although Freud suggested that people tend to resist change in adulthood, several subsequent schools of psychological thought have since proposed mechanisms for transformative change throughout the human lifespan. Humanistic theories, in particular, have embraced the idea that humans are capable of a long-term transformation into self-actualized individuals (e.g., Maslow, 1943 ). Developmental psychologists have also proposed models of transformative growth throughout human life (e.g., Erikson, 1994 ). Recent theories of self-processes portray humans as open to change and growth under some conditions ( Sedikides and Hepper, 2009 ) but resistant under others ( Swann, 2012 ). In the present day, positive psychologists are uncovering key mechanisms underlying healthy transformative growth in humans ( Lopez and Snyder, 2011 ; Seligman, 2011 ).

An important source of transformation resides in tales of heroism told and re-told to countless generations throughout the ages. These mythologies reflect humanity’s longing for transformative growth, and they are packed with wisdom and inspiration ( Allison and Goethals, 2014 ). Just reading, hearing, or observing stories of heroism can stir us and transform us.

According to Campbell (2004 , p. xvi), these hero tales “provide a field in which you can locate yourself” and they “carry the individual through the stages of life” (p. 9). The resultant transformations seen in heroic stories “are infinite in their revelation” ( Campbell, 1988 , p. 183). Rank (1909 , p. 153) observed that “everyone is a hero in birth, where he undergoes a tremendous psychological as well as physical transformation, from the condition of a little water creature living in a realm of amniotic fluid into an air-breathing mammal.” This transformation at birth foreshadows a lifetime of transformative journeys for human beings.

According to Allison and Goethals (2013 , 2017 ), hero stories reveal three different targets of heroic transformation: setting, self , and society . These three loci of transformations parallel Campbell’s (1949) three major stages of the hero’s journey: departure (or separation), initiation, and return. The departure from the hero’s familiar world represents a transformation of one’s normal, safe environment; the initiation stage is awash with challenge, suffering, mentoring, and transformative growth; and the final stage of return represents the hero’s opportunity to use her newfound gifts to transform the world. The sequence of these stages is critical, with each transformation essential for producing the next one.

Without a change in setting, the hero cannot change herself, and without a change in herself, the hero cannot change the world. Our focus here is on the hero’s transformation of the self, but this link in the chain necessarily requires some consideration of the links preceding and following it. The mythic hero must be cast out of her familiar world and into a different world, otherwise there can be no departure from her status quo. Once transformed, the hero must use her newly enriched state to better the world, otherwise the hero’s transformation lacks social significance.

The hero’s transformation plays a pivotal role in her ability to achieve her objectives on the journey. During the quest, “ineffable realizations are experienced” and “things that before had been mysterious are now fully understood” ( Campbell, 1972 , p. 219). The ineffability of these new insights stems from their unconscious origins. Jungian principles of the collective unconscious form the basis of Campbell’s theorizing about hero mythology. Le Grice (2013 , p. 153) notes that “myths are expressions of the imagination, shaped by the archetypal dynamics of the psyche.” As such, the many recurring elements of the mythic hero’s journey have their “inner, psychological correlates” ( Campbell, 1972 , p. 153). The hero’s journey is packed with social symbols and motifs that connect the hero to her deeper self, and these unconscious images must be encountered, and conflicts with them must be resolved, to bring about transformation ( Campbell, 2004 ). Overall, the hero’s outer journey is a representation of an inner, psychological journey that involves “leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition” ( Campbell, 1988 , p. 152).

Allison and Smith (2015) identified five types of heroic transformation: physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, and moral. A sixth type, motivational transformation, was later proposed by Allison and Goethals (2017) . These six transformation types span two broad categories: physical transformation, which we call transmutation , and psychological transformation, which we call enlightenment . Physical transmutations are endemic to ancient mythologies that featured transforming humans into stars, statues, and animals. Today, transmutation pervades superhero tales of ordinary people succumbing to industrial accidents and spider bites that physically transform them into superheroes and supervillains. These ancient and modern tales of transmutation offer symbolism of the hidden powers residing within each of us, powers that emerge only after dramatic situations coax them out of hibernation. Efthimiou (2015 , 2017 ), Franco et al. (2016) , and Efthimiou and Allison (2017) have written at length about the power and potential of biological transmutation to change the world. The phenomenon of neurogenesis refers to the development of new brain cells in the hippocampus through exercise, diet, meditation, and learning. This transmutative healing and growing can occur even after catastrophic brain trauma. Efthimiou (2017) describes many examples of transmutation occurring as a result of regeneration or restoration processes that refer to an organism’s ability to grow, heal, and re-create itself.

Epigenetic changes in DNA and the science of human limb regeneration are two examples of modern day heroic transmutations ( Efthimiou, 2015 ).

The other five types of heroic transformation – moral, mental, emotional, spiritual, and motivational – comprise the second broad category of transformation that we call enlightenment. Emotional transformations refer to “changes of the heart” ( Allison and Smith, 2015 , p. 23) involving growth in empathic concern for others; we call this transformation compassion .

Spiritual transformations refer to changes in belief systems about the spiritual world and about the workings of life, the world, and the universe; we call this change transcendence . Mental transformations refer to leaps in intellectual growth and significant increases in illuminating insights about oneself and others; we label this wisdom . Moral transformations occur when heroes undergo a dramatic shift from immorality to morality; we call this redemption . Finally, a motivational transformation refers to a complete shift in one’s purpose or perceived direction in life; we label this change a calling (see also Dik et al., 2017 ).

Purpose of the Hero’s Transformation

The purpose of the hero’s journey is to provide a context or blueprint for human metamorphosis. Why do we need such life-changing growth? Allison and Setterberg (2016) argue that people are born “incomplete” psychologically and will remain incomplete until they encounter challenges that produce suffering and require sacrifice to resolve. Transcending life’s challenges enables the hero to “undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness,” requiring them “to think a different way” ( Campbell, 1988 , p. 155). This shift offers a new “map or picture of the universe and allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature” ( Campbell, 1991 , p. 56). Buddhist traditions and twelve-step programs of recovery refer to transformation as an awakening. Using similar language, Campbell (2004 , p. 12) described the function of the journey as a necessary voyage designed to “wake you up.” The long-term survival of the human race may depend on such an awakening, as it becomes increasingly clear that the unawakened, pre-transformed state is unsustainable at the collective level. As individuals, transformation is necessary for our psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being. Collectively, the survival of our planet may depend on broader, enlightened thinking from leaders who must be transformed themselves if they are to make wise decisions about human rights, climate change, peace and war, healthcare, education, and myriad other pressing issues. Nearly 50 years ago, Heschel (1973) opined that “the predicament of contemporary man is grave. We seem to be destined either for a new mutation or for destruction” (p. 176, italics added).

Allison and Goethals (2017) propose five reasons why transformation is such a key element in the hero’s journey, and why it is essential for promoting our own and others’ welfare. First, transformations foster developmental growth. Early human societies understood the usefulness of initiation rituals in promoting the transition from childhood to adulthood ( van Gennep, 1909 ). A number of scholars, including Campbell, have pointed to the failure of our postmodern society to appreciate the psychological value of rites and rituals ( Campbell, 1988 ; Rohr, 2011b ; Le Grice, 2013 ). Stories of young people “coming-of-age” are common in mythic hero tales about children “awakening to the new world that opens at adolescence” ( Campbell, 1988 , p. 167). The hero’s journey “helps us pass through and deal with the various stages of life from birth to death” ( Campbell, 1991 , p. 56).

The second function of heroic transformation is that it promotes healing. Allison and Goethals (2016) argue that sharing stories about hero transformations can offer many of the same benefits as group therapy ( Yalom and Leszcz, 2005 ). These benefits include the promotion of hope; the benefit of knowing that others share one’s emotional experiences; the fostering of self-awareness; the relief of stress; and the development of a sense of meaning about life. A growing number of clinical psychologists invoke hero transformations to help their clients acquire the heroic attributes of strength, resilience, and courage ( Grace, 2016 ). Recent research on post-traumatic growth demonstrates that people can overcome severe trauma and even use it to transform themselves into stronger, healthier persons than they were before the trauma ( Ramos and Leal, 2013 ).

The third function of transformations focuses on their ability to promote social unity.

According to Campbell (1972 , p. 57), hero transformations “drop or lift [heroes] out of themselves, so that their conduct is not their own but of the species, the society.” The transformed hero is “selfless, boundless, without ego.” The most meaningful transformations are a journey from egocentricity to sociocentricity, from elitism to egalitarianism ( Campbell, 1949 ; Wilber, 2007a , b ; Rohr, 2011b ). No longer psychologically isolated from the world, the transformed person enjoys a sense of communion with others. In his description of the hero’s journey, Campbell (1949 , p. 25) wrote, “where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” Friedman (2017) has introduced the construct of self-expansiveness describing how boundaries between ourselves and others, and even between ourselves and the world, can be seen as permeable. As Friedman puts it, “viewing others as an alternate manifestation of oneself can promote heroism, as one’s individual life is not viewed as separate” (p. 15).

Fourth, transformations also advance society in meaningful ways. The apex of the hero’s journey is the hero’s boon, or gift, to society. It is this gift that separates the hero’s journey from simply being a test of personal survival. For the quest to be heroic, the classic heroic protagonist must put her newly acquired insights and gifts to use in order to better the world ( Campbell, 1949 ; Rohr, 2011b ). The heroic boon to society follows the successful completion of the individual journey, and so we can say that the social boon is entirely dependent upon the hero’s personal transformation that made the individual quest a success. Hero mythology, according to Campbell (1972 , p. 48), is designed to teach us that society is not a “perfectly static organization” but represents a “movement of the species forward.”

Finally, transformations contribute to a deepening of our spiritual and cosmic understanding of the universe. According to Campbell (1988 , p. 152), the hero’s transformation involves learning “to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life.” Myths, he said, “bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual” (p. 19). In every hero tale, the hero must “die spiritually” and then be “reborn to a larger way of living” (p. 141), a process that is the enactment of a universal spiritual theme of death being the necessary experience for producing new life ( Campbell, 1991 , p. 102). Hero transformations supply cosmic wisdom. van Gennep (1909) observed that transformative rituals in early human tribes have “been linked to the celestial passages, the revolutions of the planets, and the phases of the moon. It is indeed a cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of plant and animal life and, by a sort of pre- scientific divination, joins them to the great rhythms of the universe” (p. 194).

Internal and External Sources of Transformation

Allison and Goethals (2017) distinguished between sources of transformative change that come from within the individual and sources that originate from outside the individual. There are several types of internal sources of transformation. For example, transformation can arise as a result of natural human development. An initial transformative event, a sperm cell fertilizing an egg, leads to a zygote transforming into an embryo, which then becomes a fetus, a baby, a toddler, a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a mid-life adult, and an elderly adult. Another internal source of change resides in people’s needs and goals. According to Maslow’s (1943) pyramid of needs, an individual is motivated to fulfill the needs at a particular level once lower level needs are satisfied. Once the needs at the four lower levels are satisfied, one is no longer concerned with them or driven by them. In effect, one transitions to higher levels and eventually achieves self-actualization, during which one might enjoy peak experiences of having discovered meaning, beauty, truth, and a sense of oneness with the world – a transformative state reminiscent of James’ (1902) description of the religiously converted individual.

A third internal source of transformative change is human transgression and failure. People often undergo significant change after being humbled by their “fallings and failings” ( Rohr, 2011b , p. xv). Campbell (2004 , p. 133) cautioned that not all heroic quests conclude with heroic triumph. “There is always the possibility for a fiasco,” he said. These occasional fiascos can inspire heroic transformations by producing the kind of suffering needed as impetus for a greater hero journey. It is a general truth that for substance abusers to be sufficiently motivated to seek recovery from their addictions, they must reach a profound level of pain and suffering, commonly referred to as “hitting rock bottom.” Suffering, according to Rohr (2011b , p. 68), “doesn’t accomplish anything tangible but creates space for learning and love.” This space has been called liminal space ( Turner, 1966 ; van Gennep, 1909 ), defined as the transitional time and space between one state of being and an entirely different state of being. In liminal space, one has been stripped of one’s previous life, humbled, and silenced.

Transgressions, and the liminal space that follows them, are the fertile soil from which heroic transformations bloom.

Another internal source of transformation is what Allison and Goethals (2017) call an enlightened dawning of responsibility. This dawning is captured in a simple phrase, composed of 10 two-letter words, “If it is to be, it is up to me” ( Phipps, 2011 ). There is a long history of social psychological work devoted to studying the forces at work that promote the dawning of responsibility in emergency settings ( Latane and Darley, 1969 ). Research has shown that in a crisis a small but courageous minority of people do step up to do the right thing even when there are strong pressures to avoid assuming responsibility. These fearless social aberrants, most of whom are ordinary citizens, are able to transcend their circumstances and transform from ordinary to extraordinary. For example, about one-third of the participants in Milgram’s (1963) obedience study defied the authority’s command to continue applying painful electric shocks to another participant. Whistleblowers are another notable example; they have the mettle to step up and do right thing at great potential cost to themselves ( Brown, 2017 ). Bystander training is now available to cultivate this dawning of responsibility in situations where transformative leadership is needed ( Heroic Imagination Project, 2018 ).

External situational forces can also evoke transformative change. Situations, for example, can trigger emotional responses that transform us. This idea is consistent with the wisdom of James (1902 , p. 77), who observed that “emotional occasions……are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements.” Emotions need not be negative to induce change. Feelings of elevation can transform people psychologically and behaviorally ( Haidt, 2003 ). People become elevated after witnessing a morally beautiful act, and this elevated feeling has been shown to produce altruistic acts ( Thomson and Siegel, 2013 ). A second external source of transformation is the series of trials that all heroes must undergo during their journey. Suffering can be an internal cause of transformation when it results from self-destructive actions, but suffering caused by outside forces can serve as an external source of transformation. Campbell (1988 , p. 154) argued that “trials are designed to see to it that the intending hero should be really a hero. Is he really a match for this task?” The time of greatest peril for the hero occurs when she enters the belly of the whale ( Campbell, 1949 ). In stories of Jonah and Pinocchio, the belly can be entered literally, but typically the belly is symbolic of the hero’s deepest inner-demons which must be “disempowered, overcome, and controlled” (p. 180). According to Campbell (1988) , the hero’s journey consists of the psychological task of overcoming one’s fears and slaying one’s dragons. This transformative process has been explored by positive psychologists who refer to it as part of the journey of post-traumatic growth, during which people are able to transform tragedy into triumph ( Rendon, 2015 ).

A third external source of transformation is the vast hero literature and mythology to which we are exposed throughout our lives. Allison and Goethals (2014 , 2016 , 2017 ) have long argued that narratives about heroes, pervasive in all of storytelling from Gilgamesh to the present day, serve as a nourishing catalyst for transformative change. The central premise of the heroic leadership dynamic (HLD) is that our consumption of heroic tales takes place within an interactive system that is energetically in motion, and drawing us toward rising heroes and repelling us from falling ones. The HLD framework proposes two transformative functions of hero stories: an epistemic function and an energizing function. Hero narratives supply epistemic growth by offering mental schemas that describe prosocial action, reveal basic truths about human existence, unpack life paradoxes, and cultivate emotional intelligence. The epistemic value of hero tales is revealed in Campbell’s (1988) observation that hero mythology offers insights into “what can be known but not told” (p. 206) and that “mythology is the womb of mankind’s initiation to life and death” ( Campbell, 2002 , p. 34). Hero tales also offer energizing benefits, providing people with agency and efficacy. Narratives of heroism bring about moral elevation, repair psychic wounds, and promote psychological growth ( Kinsella et al., 2015 , 2017 ; Allison and Goethals, 2016 ).

The fourth external source of transformation is the social environment of the hero. In hero narratives and classic mythology, the hero’s journey is populated by numerous friends, companions, lovers, parent figures, and mentors who assist the hero on her quest ( Campbell, 1949 ). The hero is always helped along the journey by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Campbell also discussed the importance of encounters with parental figures; male heroes seek atonement with father figures, and female heroes seek it with mother figures.

Campbell also described the hero’s brush with lovers and temptresses, who can either assist, distract, or do harm to the hero. Most people who are asked to identify their heroes describe a mentor or coach who exerted a transformative effect on them ( Allison and Goethals, 2011 ; Goethals and Allison, 2012 , 2014 ).

Campbell (1949) argued that the appearance of a mentor during the initiation stage of the hero’s journey is a critically important component of the quest. Mentors help heroes become transformed, and later, having succeeded on their journeys, these transformed heroes then assume the role of mentor for others who are at earlier stages of their quests. In short, “transformed people transform people” ( Rohr, 2014 , p. 263). Mentors can have a transformative effect with their words of advice, with their actions, or both. Words can fall on deaf ears but one’s actions, attitudes, and lifestyle can leave a lasting imprint. St. Francis of Assisi expressed it this way: “You must preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary use words” ( Rohr, 2014 , p. 263). A mentor can be viewed as a type of hero who enhances the lives of others ( Kinsella et al., 2015 ).

The hero’s journey offers a transformative experience toward wisdom that can be shared later with others. In short, the journey prepares people for leadership roles. According to Burns (1978) , transforming leaders strive to satisfy followers’ lower needs (e.g., survival and safety) in preparation for elevating them to work together to produce significant higher-level changes. Burns portrayed transforming leadership as collaborative engagement “in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality” (p. 20). Followers are thus “elevated,” creating a “new cadre of leaders” (p. 20). This conceptualization is consistent with Campbell’s (1949) emphasis on the role of mentorship during the hero’s journey. The mentor elevates the hero and prepares her for her future role as a mentor to others. Burns’ framework also makes explicit a notion that is largely implicit in Maslow’s (1943) model, namely, that the self-actualized person has become an elder, a mentor figure, and a moral actor who wields transformative influence over others. Erikson’s (1994) theory of lifelong development makes the similar claim that older generative individuals, having been given so much early in life, are now in a position to give back to younger people.

Other theories also point to the transformative effect of mentoring and leadership.

Hollander (1995) proposed a two-way influence relationship between a leader and followers aimed primarily at attaining mutual goals. Hollander defined leadership as “a shared experience, a voyage through time” with the leader in partnership with followers to pursue common interests.

For Hollander, “a major component of the leader–follower relationship is the leader’s perception of his or herself relative to followers, and how they in turn perceive the leader” (p. 55). Tyler and Lind (1992) have shown that these perceptions are crucially important in cementing good follower loyalty. Followers will perceive a leader as a “legitimate” authority when she adheres to basic principles of procedural justice. Leaders who show fairness, respect, and concern for the needs of followers are able to build followers’ self-esteem, a central step in Maslow’s (1943) pyramid, thereby fostering followers’ transformative movement toward meeting higher-level needs.

Three Transformative Arcs of Heroism

Allison and Goethals (2017) identified three deficits of the hero at the initial stage of her journey. The untransformed hero is lacking (1) a sociocentric view of life; (2) an autonomy from societal norms that discourage transformation; and (3) a mindset of growth and change. Below we explain how the arc of heroic metamorphosis bends toward sociocentricity, autonomy, and growth.

Egocentricity to Sociocentricity

Campbell (2004 , p. 55) believed that one of the central functions of hero mythology is to “get a sense of everything – yourself, your society, the universe, and the mystery beyond – as one great unit.” He claimed that “when we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness” ( Campbell, 1988 , p. 155). In most hero narratives, the hero begins the journey disconnected from the world. She is a self-centered, prideful individual whose sole preoccupation is establishing her identity, her career, and her material world. The entire point of her hero journey is to awaken her to the broader goal of thinking beyond herself in achieving communion with the entire world and universe ( Friedman, 2017 ). To the extent that we spend the first stages of our lives selfishly building our personal identities and careers, we may be designed to awaken in later stages to our original predisposition toward sociocentricity ( Rohr, 2011b ). Campbell (2001) urged us all to cultivate this greater purpose of forming compassionate unification with all of humanity. He believed this awakening is the central function of hero mythology.

Dependency to Autonomy

A person’s willingness to deviate from the dominant cultural pattern is essential for heroic transformation. Heroes do the right thing, and do what they must do, regardless of authority, tradition, and consequence. Maslow (1943) called this characteristic autonomy . “There are the ‘strong’ people,” wrote Maslow, “who can easily weather disagreement or opposition, who can swim against the stream of public opinion and who can stand up for the truth at great personal cost” (p. 379). Fulfillment of the lower needs in the pyramid is essential for autonomy to develop in individuals. “People who have been made secure and strong in the earliest years tend to remain secure and strong thereafter in the face of whatever threatens” (p. 380). Zimbardo (2008) has championed the idea that heroes are people with the ability to resist social pressures that promote evil, and that such resistance requires the moral courage to be guided by one’s heart rather than by social cues. Zimbardo and other hero activists drive home the point that “the opposite of a hero isn’t a villain; it’s a bystander” ( Chakrabortty, 2010 ; Langdon, 2018 ). While the transformed hero enjoys “union with the world,” she remains an autonomous individual who can establish her own path in the world that is unfettered by pressures to conform to social pressures.

Stagnation to Growth

One can be autonomous but not necessarily growing and stretching toward realizing one’s full potential. The pre-transformed hero naturally resists change, and thus severe setbacks may be her only impetus to budge. Without a prod, she will remain comfortable in her stagnation, oblivious to the idea that anything needs changing. The hero’s journey marks the death of pretense and inauthenticity, and the birth of the person one is meant to be. Campbell (1988 , p. 168) described the process as “killing the infantile ego and bringing forth an adult.” Sperry (2011) has argued that people are so attached to their false selves that they fear the death of the false self even more than they fear the death of their physical self. Our growth can also be inhibited by a phenomenon called the crab bucket syndrome ( Simmons, 2012 ). This syndrome describes the consequences of our entrenchment with our families, our friends, and our communities, and they with us. Any attempt we make to crawl up and out of the bucket is met with failure as the crabs below us pull us back down. For most of us, the hero’s journey represents the best way, and perhaps the only way, to escape the bucket and discover our true selves. Campbell (1991) argued that a healthy, transformed individual accepts and embraces her growth and contradictions. “The psychological transformation,” wrote Campbell, “would be that whatever was formerly endured is now known, loved, and served” (p. 207).

Three Activities Promoting Transformation

Can anything be done to promote heroic transformation? We noted earlier that one cannot be in charge of one’s own heroic transformation. According to Rohr (2011a) , engineering our own personal metamorphosis on our own “is by definition not transformation. If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego” (p. 5). There are things we can do, however, to make transformation more likely. From our review of theory and research on heroism, developmental processes, leadership, and spiritual growth, we can identify three broad categories of activities that encourage transformation. These activities include participation in training and developmental programs, spiritual practices, and (of course) the hero’s journey. On the surface these activities appear dissimilar, yet engaging in these practices produces similar transformative results.

Training and Development Practices

In examining the characteristics of people who risked their lives to save others, Kohen et al. (2017) discovered several important commonalities. They found that these heroes “imagined situations where help was needed and considered how they would act; they had an expansive sense of empathy, not simply with those who might be considered ‘like them’ but also those who might be thought of as ‘other’ in some decisive respect; they regularly took action to help people, often in small ways; and they had some experience or skill that made them confident about undertaking the heroic action in question” (p. 1). With this observation, Kohen et al. (2017) raise four points about preparation for heroism. First, they note the importance of imagining oneself as ready and capable of heroic action when it is needed. This imagination component involves the development of mental scripts for helping, an idea central to Zimbardo’s Heroic Imagination Project (2018) hero training programs. Established a decade ago, the Heroic Imagination Project aims to encourage people to envision themselves as heroes and to “prepare heroes in training for everyday heroic action.” The group achieves this goal by training ordinary people to “master social and situational forces as well as their automatic human tendencies in order to act in ways that are kind, prosocial, and even heroic.” Participants are trained to improve their situational awareness, leadership skills, moral courage, and sense of efficacy in situations that require action to save or improve lives.

Second, Kohen et al. (2017) emphasize the importance of empathy, observing that heroes show empathic concern for both similar and dissimilar others. A growing body of research supports the idea that empathy can be enhanced through training, an idea corroborated by the proliferation of empathy training programs around the world ( Tenney, 2017 ). Svoboda (2013) even argues that empathy and compassion are muscles that can be strengthened with repeated use. Third, Kohen et al. (2017) note that heroes regularly take action to help people, often in small ways. Doing so may promote the self-perception that one has heroic attributes, thereby increasing one’s chances of intervening when a true emergency arises. Finally, Kohen et al. (2017) observe that heroes often have either formal or informal training in saving lives. These skills and experiences may be acquired from training for the military, law enforcement, or firefighting, or they may derive from emergency medical training, lifeguard training, and CPR classes ( Svoboda, 2013 ).

In a similar vein, Kramer (2017) has devised a methodology for helping people develop the courage to pursue their most heroic dreams and aspirations in life. He identifies such courage as existential courage , consisting of people’s identity aspirations and strivings for their lives to feel meaningful and consequential. Kramer’s technique involves fostering people’s willingness to take psychological and social risks in the pursuit of desired but challenging future identities. His “identity lab” is a setting where students work individually and collaboratively to (1) identify and research their desired future identities, (2) develop an inventory or assessment of identity- relevant attributes that support the realization of those desired future identities, (3) design behavioral experiments to explore and further develop those self-selected identity attributes, and, finally, (4) consolidate their learnings from their experiments through reflection and assessment. Kramer’s results show that his participants feel significantly more “powerful,” “transformative,” “impactful,” and “effective” in pursuing their identity aspirations. They also report increased self-efficacy and resilience.

Another example of training practices can be found in initial rituals and rites of passages found in many cultures throughout the world. Although modern Western cultures have eliminated the majority of these practices, most cultures throughout history did deem it necessary to require adolescents, particularly boys, to undergo rituals that signaled their transformation into maturity and adulthood ( Turner, 1966 ; van Gennep, 1909 ). In many African and Australian tribes, initiation requires initiates to experience pain, often involving circumcision or genital mutilation, and it is also not uncommon for rituals to include a challenging survival test in nature. These initiation tests are considered necessary for individuals to become full members of the tribe, allowing them participate in ceremonies or social rituals such as marriage. Initiations are often culminated with large elaborate ceremonies for adolescents to be recognized publicly as full-fledged adult members of their society.

Child-rearing can serve as another type of transformative training practice. A striking example can be seen in Fagin-Jones’s (2017) research on how parents raised the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Fagin-Jones found that the parenting practices of rescuers differed significantly from the parenting of passive bystanders. Rescuers reported having loving, supportive relationships with parents, whereas bystanders reported relationships with parents as cold, negative, and avoidant. More rescuers than bystanders recalled their parents as affectionate and engaged in praising, hugging, kissing, joking, and smiling. These early cohesive family bonds encouraged other-oriented relationships based on tolerance, inclusion, and openness.

Rescuers reported that their family unit engendered traits of independence, potency, risk-taking, decisiveness, and tolerance. Bystanders, in contrast, recalled a lack of familial closeness that engendered impotence, indecisiveness, and passivity. Rescuers’ parents were less likely than bystanders’ parents to express negative Jewish stereotypes such as “dishonest,” “untrustworthy,” and “too powerful.” Overall, rescuers were raised to practice involvement in community, commitment to others’ welfare, and responsibility for the greater good. In contrast, bystanders’ parents assigned demonic qualities to Jews and promoted the idea that Jews deserved their fate.

Spiritual Practices

For millennia, spiritual gurus have extolled the benefits of engaging in a variety of spiritual practices aimed at improving one’s mental and emotional states. Recent research findings in cognitive neuroscience and positive psychology are now beginning to corroborate these benefits. Mindfulness in particular has attracted widespread popularity as well as considerable research about its implications for mental health. The key component of mindfulness as a mental state is its emphasis on focusing one’s awareness solely on the present moment. People who practice mindful meditation show significant decreases in stress, better coping skills, less depression, improved emotional regulation, and higher levels of resilience ( Hofmann et al., 2010 ). Mindful meditation quiets the mind and thus “wakes us up to what is happening,” allowing “contact with life” ( Hanh, 1999 , p. 81). Tolle (2005) argues that living in the present moment is a transformative experience avoided by most people because they habitually choose to clutter their minds with regrets about the past or fears about the future. He claims that “our entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself” (p. 99). Basking in the present moment is the basis of the psychological phenomenon of “flow” described by Csikszentmihalyi (2008) . When experiencing flow, people are “in the zone,” fully present, and completely “immersed in a feeling of energized focus” (p. 45).

Related to mindfulness is the process of non-dualistic thinking ( Loy, 1988 ) also called right thinking ( Hanh, 1999 ), contemplative thinking ( Rohr, 2009 ), third-force thinking, and the third eye ( Song, 2002 ). The Indian “tika” placed on the human forehead is more than decoration; it signifies a non-dual way of viewing the world. According to Rohr (2009) , non-dual thinking is deemed necessary for understanding phenomena that defy rational analysis: love, death, God, suffering, and eternity. The transcendent nature of mindful, non-dual thinking shares many of the characteristics of the heroically transformed mind that we have discussed in this article.

The spiritual attribute of humility can also be transformative. When asked to name four cardinal virtues, St. Bernard is reported to have answered: “Humility, humility, humility, and humility” ( Kurtz and Ketcham, 1992 ). Humility has been shown to be linked to increased altruism, forgiveness, generosity, and self-control ( Worthington et al., 2017 ). One can argue that humility cannot be practiced, as the idea of getting better at humility runs contrary to being humble. However, we suspect that one can practice humility by adopting the habit of admitting mistakes, acknowledging personal faults, avoiding bragging, and being generous in assigning credit to others.

Gratitude is another transformative spiritual practice validated by recent research. Algoe (2012) found that gratitude improves sleep, patience, depression, energy, optimism, and relationship quality. Practitioners have developed gratitude therapy as a way of helping clients become happier, more agreeable, more open, and less neurotic. Moreover, neuroscientists have found that gratitude is associated with activity in areas of the brain associated with morality, reward, and value judgment ( Emmons and Stern, 2013 ). Closely related to gratitude are experiences with wonder and awe, which have been shown to increase generosity and a greater sense of connection with the world ( Piff et al., 2015 ). Enjoying regular doses of wonder is a telltale trait of the self-actualized individual ( Maslow, 1943 ).

Another transformative spiritual practice is forgiveness. Research shows that people who are able to forgive others have improved relationships, better mental health, lower stress and hostility, improved blood pressure, less depression, and a healthier immune system ( Worthington, 2013 ). “Letting go” is another spiritual practice that can produce transformation. It has also been called release, acceptance, or surrender. Buddhist teach Hanh (1999 , p. 78) claims that “letting go give us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness.” James (1902) also described the beneficial practice of letting go among religiously converted individuals: “Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing” (p. 110).

Finally, we turn to the complex emotion of love as a transformative agent. In addition to starring in Casablanca , Humphrey Bogart played the lead role in Sabrina , another film demonstrating the transformative power of love. In Sabrina , Bogart played the role of Linus, a workaholic CEO who has no time for love. His underachieving brother David begins a romance with a young woman named Sabrina, and it becomes clear that this budding relationship jeopardizes a multi-million-dollar deal that the company is about to consummate. To undermine the relationship, Linus pretends to show romantic interest in Sabrina, and he succeeds in winning her heart. Despite the pretense, Linus falls in love for the first time in his life, resigns as CEO, and runs away with Sabrina to Paris. Love has completely transformed him from a cold, greedy businessman into a warm, enlightened individual. Similar transformations in film and literature are seen in Ebenezer Scrooge (in A Christmas Carol ), the Grinch (in How the Grinch Stole Christmas ), Phil Connors (in Groundhog Day ), and George Banks (in Mary Poppins ).

In Man’s Search for Meaning , Frankl (1946 , p. 37) wrote, “The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Hanh (1999 , p. 170), moreover, weighs in that “love, compassion, joy, and equanimity are the very nature of an enlightened person.” Loving kindness also transforms us biologically ( Keltner, 2009 ). People who make kindness a habit have significantly lower levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. Making an effort to help others can lead to decreased levels of anxiety in individuals who normally avoid social situations. Being kind and even witnessing kindness have also been found to increase levels of oxytocin, a hormone associated with lower blood pressure, more sound sleep, and reduced cravings for drugs such as alcohol and cocaine. Loving others lights up the motivation and reward circuits of the limbic system in the brain ( Esch and Stefano, 2011 ). Research also reveals that people who routinely show acts of love live longer compared to people who perform fewer loving actions ( Vaillant, 2012 ).

The Hero’s Journey

We opened this article by noting that the only way most of us undergo transformation is to embark on the hero’s journey. While we have complete control over whether we receive training that can facilitate a heroic metamorphosis, and over whether we engage in spiritual practices, we have far less control over our participation in the classic hero’s journey. We can only remain open and receptive to the ride that awaits us. As we have noted, our departure on the journey can be jarring – we often experience an accident, illness, transgression, death, divorce, or disaster. The best we can do is fasten our seatbelts and trust that the darkness of our lot will eventually transform into lightness. But we cannot remain passive. During the journey we must be diligent in doing our part to secure allies and mentors, and to take actions that cultivate strengths such as resilience, courage, and resourcefulness ( Williams, 2018 ). After being transformed ourselves, we feel the obligation to transform others in the role of mentor. Having traversed the heroic path, we may use our heroism to craft a newfound purpose for our existence, a purpose that drives us to spend our remaining years making a positive difference in people’s lives. Bronk and Riches (2017) call this process heroism-guided purpose .

Additional Issues Worth Pondering

Several unexplored issues involving heroic transformation deserve more thorough treatment than we can devote to them here. These issues focus on education, religion, gender, inclusive transcendence, and barriers to transformation. We give brief attention to these topics below.

Education and Transformation

On July 16, 2003, legendary President of South Africa Nelson Mandela delivered a speech in support of the Mindset Network, a non-profit organization designed to improve educational opportunities for children of all ages. “Education,” he said, “is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” This statement attracted widespread media attention and remains a highly recurring internet meme today. A Google search of “education can change the world” yields thousands of hits echoing Mandela’s claim and extending the idea to include education being the key “to success,” “to happiness,” “to freedom,” “to the world,” and “to the future.” Summing up our supreme collective confidence in education, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock declared that “Education is the key to everything” ( Theirworld, 2017 ).

Are these claims true? We believe it is a mistake and perhaps even dangerous to equate education with transformation. Consider, for example, the link between education and crime. Some studies suggest that education mitigates crime ( Buonanno and Leonida, 2006 ; Machin et al., 2011 ) while other studies find that education either plays little or no role in preventing violence. Bergen and Pandey (2005) report that the vast majority of terrorists who perform violent acts are college educated. For example, all 12 men involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attack had a college education. All the pilots in the September 11 th terrorist attacks and their collaborators, as identified by the 9/11 commission, attended universities. The lead pilot, Mohamed Atta, was college-educated, and the operational planner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina. The chilling masked figure on many ISIS beheading videos was Mohammed Emwazi, who had a college degree in computer programming. In the same vein, Ramsland (2015) has found that some of the most notorious serial killers of our time were highly educated, including Ted Bundy and the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.

We do not wish to undersell education’s positive consequences for individuals and societies. Improving educational opportunities for citizens no doubt helps people satisfy needs in Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy, especially those at the lower levels of the pyramid. Nelson Mandela was no doubt correct about education improving the quality of life for communities operating near subsistence levels. Our claim is that education is insufficient for meeting higher level needs of esteem and for cultivating social belongingness, self-transcendence, union with the world, and self-actualization. In short, education is a beginning step toward transformation but falls short in fully producing a truly awakened individual.

Religion and Transformation

As noted earlier, James (1902) described the psychological consequences of religious conversion as including feelings of peace, the ability to see clearly, the sense of union with all of humanity, a feeling of newness, the experience of happiness, the desire for generosity, and the sense of being part of something bigger than oneself. While these results of conversion are all signs of healthy religion, many of us are very well aware of “religious” individuals who preach war instead of peace, who exclude rather than include, who display anger in lieu of joy, and who show greed instead of generosity. In short, being “religious” and even engaging in religious practices such as attending church does not guarantee the kind of religious conversion experiences described by James. In fact, going through the motions of religion can heighten one’s sense of righteousness and arrogance, setting in motion a dark transformation toward principles that are antithetical to James’ observation of mature religion. Many people who are “holier than thou” end up holier than no one. Rohr (2010) argues that the litmus test for healthy spiritual transformation is whether one shows “a movement toward the edge, the outside, the lower, the suffering, and the simple. It’s never about climbing.”

Women as Transformers

In his studies of initiation rituals worldwide, Rohr (2005) observed that non-western cultures throughout history have been more likely to require males to participate in these rites of passage as compared to females. Underlying this gender difference is the widespread belief that young males require initiation rituals to transform them into men, whereas young females tend to be naturally capable of transforming into womanhood without formal rituals. Differences in biology and culturally assigned gender roles have been posited to explain this difference ( Rohr, 2005 ; Formica, 2009 ). For women, transformation is corporeal. Women personally undergo biological transformations in processes such as menstruation, pregnancy, labor, and breastfeeding. Throughout most of human history, women have also been assigned culturally mandated activities involving transformation. For example, child-rearing traditionally involved women transforming children into adults. Moreover, most human cultures have historically assigned women the task of preparing food for the family, during which women transformed wheat into bread and cream into butter.

If, as we have argued, transformation involves promoting unity and adopting a sociocentric mindset, then women may be agents of transformation. Throughout history, men have built things, fixed things, and defended us from things ( Rohr, 2005 ) – all in the service of satisfying lower level needs. True transformation, however, occurs at higher levels where women may have the advantage. Rohr has even boldly claimed that “transformation is deeply embedded in feminine consciousness” (see also Ross, 2017 ). In her review of research on gender differences in leadership effectiveness, Hoyt (2014) found convincing evidence that women may be more transformative as political leaders. Compared to men, women leaders are more likely to improve standards of living, education, and healthcare. They enjoy more success in peace negotiations and are more likely to reach across party lines. Women more so than men are likely to adopt democratic and participatory styles of leadership. Moreover, women are more likely to follow ethical guidelines, engage in philanthropy, and promote the welfare of women, children, and families. With all their accomplishments as leaders, women may also show more humility than men ( Fumham et al., 2001 ; Perry, 2017 ). Over 2500 years ago, the Tao Te Ching offered this wise description of women as humble, transformative leaders:

Can you play the role of woman? Understanding and being open to all things… Giving birth and nourishing, Bearing but not possessing, Working yet not taking credit, Leading yet not dominating, This is the Primal Virtue.

Transcend and Include

Central to the phenomenon of transformation is the principle of transcend and include ( Wilber, 2001 ). Higher stages of transformation do not discard the values of the lower stages; they include them. When we are young, we hold strong opinions that later seem naïve to us, yet we are not necessarily “wrong” at the time; we are merely incomplete. An illustration of this idea can be found in our musings about our childhood baseball heroes, Willie Mays (for George Goethals) and Willie Stargell (for Scott Allison). We both freely admit that our taste in heroes has evolved and matured since the 1950s and 1960s, yet if you ask us if that means that Mays and Stargell are no longer our heroes, we will quickly tell you that they remain our heroes to this very day. Maintaining this preference exemplifies the principle of transcend and include.

Transformation to a higher level of consciousness always transcends but also includes the lower levels ( Rohr, 2011b ). This does not mean that we equate Mays and Stargell with Gandhi and Mandela. It means that we appreciate their heroic influence on us during a crucial time in our development.

Campbell’s (1949) understanding of the transform and include principle is seen in his description of the transformed hero as the “master of both worlds.” At the end of their transformative journey, heroes are as comfortable navigating in their original world as in the new world that they now inhabit. There are implications of this principle for gender roles. Male- oriented activities of making, fixing, and protecting must be transcended by female-oriented activities of inclusion, participation, and harmony. But with transcendence must come inclusion, as we cannot expect to survive as a society without always leaving room for those so-called male activities.

Transformation Toward Psychopathology

Heroic transformation does not always lead to improvement in an individual’s well-being. Recent research has revealed that adopting a heroic self-concept can at times produce significant psychological maladjustment ( Shahar, 2013 ; Israeli et al., 2018 ). From this perspective, a heroic self-representation may develop when people experience personal threat, stress, and challenge, either in themselves or in others to whom they are close. These heroic self-representations can assume the form as the self-as-savior , the self-as-conqueror , or heroic identification . When confronting these psychological challenges, people may identify with the ideal heroic image of the person who can conquer any difficult obstacle or who can heroically remove those obstacles for suffering others. The consequences of taking on this role of a hero can be significant increases in perceived stress, self-criticism, lack of a sense of coherence, general psychopathology, maternal overprotection, dissociative depersonalization and absorption, transliminality, PTSD severity, and attachment anxiety.

Shahar (2013) and Israeli et al. (2018) have uncovered convincing evidence for this type of pathological heroic transformation. These scholars studied adults during a prolonged exposure ‘Operation Protective Edge,’ which occurred in Israel between July 8, 2014 and August 26, 2014 ( Israeli et al., 2018 ). The operation measured Israeli citizens’ emotional states while they were exposed to extensive air strikes, ground fighting in Gaza, and continuous large-scale rocket fire from Gaza to Israel. The results showed that participants’ heroic identification predicted increased anxious mood and negative affect. Moreover, participants who viewed themselves as self-as-savior showed an increased anxious mood under high levels of perceived-stress related to the missile attacks. Israeli et al. (2018 , p. 23) concluded that “under stress, heroic identification increases characterological self-blame/self-criticism and experiential avoidance, and decreases help-seeking.” These findings are fascinating in pointing toward the potential harm associated with undergoing a heroic transformation. Whereas we argue that heroic transformation is a necessary and positive step toward mature growth and achieving one’s full potential, it seems clear that taking one’s heroism to an extreme under stressful circumstances can lead to psychological harm. We believe that the research reported by Shahar (2013) and Israeli et al. (2018) is extremely important in identifying boundary or delimiting conditions of positive heroic transformation effects. Future research might productively be directed toward further establishing the circumstances under which adopting a heroic self-representation yields favorable versus unfavorable consequences for people.

Barriers to Transformation

We now turn to factors that can stand in the way of people undergoing a positive transformative experience in life. The largest barrier, of course, is a person’s unwillingness to heed the call to go on the hero’s journey. We all know people, including prominent world leaders, who are “stuck” in early stages of development. It would behoove the world to understand why so many people are stuck and what can be done to nudge more of us along the transformative journey. Earlier we reviewed activities that promote transformation, and one might argue that any barriers to change are merely the inverse of these promotional activities. While there may be some truth in this idea, it is also true that some barriers are less intuitive or obvious than one might suspect. The great Islamic poet Rumi once offered this advice to those seeking enlightenment: the task is sometimes not to pursue a transformative loving experience “but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it” ( Barks, 2005 , p. 18).

A major source of arrested development is the problem of self-ignorance. A recurring theme in psychological research is that people are unaware of much of their own psychological functioning ( Nisbett and Wilson, 1977 ; Wegner, 2002 ; Bargh and Morsella, 2008 ; Alicke, 2017 ). This lack of self-awareness may explain people’s resistance to transformative growth. Early psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Adler, and Horney were the first to point to the destructive effects of behaving unconsciously. Jung (1956) described the shadow as the dark, unknown aspects of our personalities that prevent us from transforming into our full potential. Building on Jung’s work, Campbell observed that all “the images of [hero] mythology are referring to something in you,” and that our shadow impedes our ability to make the best use of these images (p. 68).

A second barrier is found in impoverished environments that deny people opportunities for transformation. Maslow’s (1943) model of hierarchical needs suggests that people can get stuck at lower stages of the hierarchy that focus on satisfying basic biological and security needs. Heroic potential may be suppressed when individuals are afflicted by poverty or safety concerns that hinder their ability to progress upward in the hierarchy toward higher-level goals. Resolving this problem is easy in theory but extremely difficult in practice, as most world societies either lack the will or the means to eliminate poverty. Related to this idea is another barrier – exposure to traumatic events that can impede people’s ability to undergo transformative growth. Trauma disrupts people’s sense of safety and their ability to cope with the overwhelming threat and danger, damaging their physical, emotional, and cognitive functioning processes ( Keck et al., 2017 ). Safety and security needs become paramount to the traumatized individual, rendering higher level needs unimportant. The good news is that most people can show great progress in recovering from the deleterious effects of trauma. This healing is the basis of the hopeful phenomenon of post-traumatic growth ( Rendon, 2015 ).

A fourth barrier to transformation is people’s strong tendency to self-identify as victims.

Individuals who have been harmed and who derive their entire personal identity from being wronged by someone else, or by society, may find it difficult to grow and transcend their victimhood. We are not making the claim that there are no legitimate victims; there most certainly are people who have been harmed and have real grievances. Our argument is that adopting a strong and permanent victim identity is a sure way of avoiding growth and moving beyond the pain of having been harmed. A highly unfortunate consequence of harboring a victim mindset is the need to scapegoat. People tend to reason that if someone has harmed them, then that perpetrator must be punished. There is no doubt that scapegoating others has been the primary cause of most violence and warfare throughout human history. Until people learn to take individual responsibility for their lives and for their anger, the deadly duo of victimhood and scapegoating will continue to work in concert to thwart heroic transformation.

Another barrier to transformation lies in the absence of good mentorship. Social sources of wisdom, inspiration, and change are critical elements of the hero monomyth as described by Campbell (1949) . These social sources appear in the form of friends, mentors, peers, and allies, all of whom represent rich and essential sources of transformation. There are times, moreover, when people encounter the wrong mentor whose advice does more harm than good. Allison and Smith (2015) used the term dark mentors to describe these damaging guides who not only undermine people’s ability to walk the heroic path; they encourage us down the wrong path.

Severe mental and physical illness can also impede people’s ability to undergo heroic transformation. Most individuals facing severe mental or physical disability are unable to reap the benefits of the hero’s journey because they are preoccupied with managing their condition. Related to this problem is the prevalence of narcissism. Psychologists believe that roughly 6% of US adults are afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder ( Bressert, 2018 ), which means that at least 15 million Americans may be narcissists. The characteristics of narcissism are a heightened sense of importance, a drive for unlimited success, a belief in one’s special nature, exploitation of people, little empathy, and an arrogant attitude. Narcissists are unlikely to undergo heroic transformation because they don’t believe they need one and thus avoid it entirely ( Worthington and Allison, 2018 ). The narcissist assigns blame for his problems to others, leading the him to believe that other people need to change rather than the narcissist himself.

Finally, people may avoid heroic transformation because they lack psychological flexibility, defined as an individual’s ability to adapt to fluctuating situational demands. Those classified as low in psychological flexibility have been shown to experience less growth and development ( Kashdan and Rottenberg, 2010 ). To help people overcome inflexibility, Hayes et al. (2011) developed a therapeutic approach called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The goal of ACT is to increase people’s ability to remain in the present moment as a conscious human being, and to learn new behaviors that serve desired goals. Psychological flexibility can be achieved through six core ACT processes, several of which sound like mindful pathways to Buddhist enlightenment. The six elements of ACT are acceptance, cognitive defusion, presence, seeing the self in context, values, and committed action. All of these processes reflect positive psychological and spiritual skills that enable people to grow and evolve into healthy adaptive human beings. They also resemble Franco et al. (2016) skillset of heroic eudaimonia, which includes mindfulness, autonomy, and efficacy (see also Jones, 2017 ).

This article has reviewed the functions, processes, and consequences of the hero’s transformation. William James once observed, “Whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from an individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and even wonder at it, as a transformation” ( James, 1902 , p. 70, italics added). James’ use of the word “wonder” implies that people are moved by the transformations they see in people, and also that these transformations are a rare occurrence. As did James, we suspect that many people spend their entire lives resisting change, denying the need for it, and suffering as a result of avoiding it. As Jung (1945) observed, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” (p. 335).

The transformed hero exemplifies the zenith of human development. Psychologists have called this state self-actualization ( Maslow, 1943 ), the condition of well-being that allows people to flourish ( Seligman, 2011 ), the achievement of “bliss” ( Campbell, 1988 ), and the experience eudaimonia ( Franco et al., 2016 ). From their journey, heroes accumulate wisdom about their place in the world; they acquire the courage to face their deepest fears; they connect with all of humanity; they seek justice no matter the cost to themselves; they show humility; and they embark on a journey that “opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence” ( Campbell, 2014 , p. 40; see also Friedman, 2017 ). The wisdom of writers and philosophers, from Homer in 800 BCE to Phil Zimbardo today, informs us that we are all called to lead a heroic life. Yet most people are unaware of this fact, or they face impediments that impede the realization of their heroic potential. If the ultimate goal of the hero’s journey is for the hero to bestow the world with transformative gifts, then one would think that the world would be doing everything possible to promote the hero’s journey for everyone. We hope that this article represents progress toward shedding light on why transformation is elusive and what can be done to promote it.

Author Contributions

All authors contributed equally to the development and expression of the ideas in this article.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding. This research was supported by Summer Research Fellowships awarded to SA, AM, SS, and MS.

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What You’re Getting Wrong About Customer Journeys

• Ahir Gopaldas
• Anton Siebert

Companies often believe they should make their customers’ experiences as effortless and predictable as possible. But the authors’ research shows that this approach is overly simplistic—and can even backfire. While in some instances (say, watching movies on Netflix) customers want their journeys to be easy and familiar, in others (working out on a Peloton bike or playing World of Warcraft) they want to be challenged or surprised.

This article outlines four kinds of journeys: Routines are effortless and predictable and are suited to utilitarian products. Joyrides are effortless and unpredictable and work with products that deliver an on-demand thrill. Treks are effortful and predictable and are associated with products that help people achieve challenging long-term goals. Odysseys are effortful and unpredictable and are perfect for products that facilitate customers’ passion projects.

Each type of journey has its own design principles. Routines should offer consistent touchpoints in familiar sequences; joyrides, endlessly varied moments of delight. Treks require goal-posting (breaking big objectives down into small ones), and odysseys, substantive variation and journey tracking.

They shouldn’t always be effortless or predictable.

Idea in Brief

The context.

Marketing experts agree that the best way to keep your customers coming back for more is by facilitating a compelling series of experiences called a customer journey.

The Problem

Most experts promote an effortless and predictable journey—or a routine—as the gold standard. In many instances, that’s a mistake.

The Solution

Companies can keep customers engaged with not just routines but also joyrides, treks, and odysseys. All four types of journeys can help companies achieve long-term success in the marketplace.

Most marketing experts agree that it’s not enough to give customers a satisfying initial experience with a product. Instead, product managers must offer them a compelling series of experiences—a customer journey —to keep them coming back for more. The design of customer journeys is the new marketing battleground.

• AG Ahir Gopaldas is an associate professor of marketing and currently holds the Robert B. McKeon Endowed Chair in Business at Fordham University.
• AS Anton Siebert is a lecturer in marketing at Lancaster University in Leipzig.

Partner Center

How do we manage the change journey?

In Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), McKinsey’s Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger draw on their long experience, and the most comprehensive research effort of its kind, to provide a practical, proven guide for executives managing corporate transformations. “ A better way to lead large-scale change ,” the first article in the series, explains how and why the authors’ approach works. The second, “ Getting personal about change ,”  provides an in-depth look into the mind-set shifts required for generating meaningful change.  The third, “ The forgotten step in leading large-scale change ,” examines the most often neglected stage of the change process. This fourth article discusses how to generate ownership and energy for success.

Change is a journey, and few journeys go according to plan. Leaders who follow the transformation methodology explained in our new book, Beyond Performance 2.0, take companies through what we call the five stages of performance and health. 1 The five stages, and the questions that must be answered in each of them, are aspire: Where do we want to go?; assess: How ready are we to go there?; architect: What must we do to get there?; act: How do we manage the journey?; and advance: How do we continue to improve? This article focuses on the fourth: act. To ensure that plans developed in the previous stage ( architect ) stay on track and evolve when necessary, leaders must give employees a sense of ownership in the process, as well as the energy needed to change. This article shows how.

Instilling ownership

The previous stages of our five-stage program will give employees a significant degree of ownership. But don’t assume it will continue throughout the act stage. To see that it does, establish strong governance, scale up initiatives appropriately, and monitor and adjust them as needed.

Establish strong governance

Research shows that change programs with governance structures clearly identifying roles and responsibilities are 6.4 times more likely to succeed. The vast majority of successful programs include four such elements: an executive steering committee (ESC), a change-management office (CMO), executive sponsors (ESs), and initiative owners (IOs) and their teams.

An executive steering committee typically includes the most senior leader and a senior executive team. It owns the change program’s overall direction; makes critical ongoing decisions, such as approving changes in execution plans, reallocating resources, resolving issues, and reshaping initiatives; and holds people accountable for results. When the ESC communicates the progress of change programs frequently during the act stage, they are a whopping eight times more likely to succeed.

The change-management office coordinates the overall program, tracking its progress, resolving issues, and facilitating transparent, effective interactions between the ESC and the initiatives. It seldom leads them but sometimes helps share best practices and acts as a thought partner for initiative teams. Typically, a full-time senior leader responsible for the overall change program runs the CMO. Its size depends on the transformation’s nature, but it typically includes resources for monitoring and reviewing activities, metrics, budgets, and impact, as well as for communications and change management.

Executive sponsors provide guidance, judgment, and leadership for initiative teams by reviewing their progress, helping periodically to solve problems, suggesting and validating changes to execution plans, and focusing on the business impact. They may be either members of the ESC or senior leaders, one level down, who directly own particular initiatives. The ES strives to optimize particular initiatives; the ESC, the full portfolio.

Initiatives are executed by initiative owners and their teams, who typically work for line organizations but may also come from staff functions. IOs generally help formulate the initiative charter; identify resources, operating expenses, and capital requirements; determine the scale-up approach; and develop timelines and milestones. Their responsibilities include both problem solving and people solving.

The CMO provides support and oversight. But accountability for the impact of initiatives should be placed, so far as possible, with line management and built into relevant budgets—no aspect of a change program is complete until they fully reflect it. Programs with clear roles and responsibilities are six times more likely to succeed than programs that don’t; those with effective CMOs, twice as likely.

To understand this governance model, consider the case of a retailer restructuring its global operations after quarterly losses. When an organizational-health survey identified many health issues, the CEO created an ESC comprising senior leaders from the retailer and its parent company. The retailer then created a CMO led by the respected senior manager of its most profitable business line. He enlisted one of his top performers and two respected middle managers from other departments and hired an external change expert and a retail-turnaround specialist. Each of the 25 health initiatives identified in the architect stage had an IO and ES who helped ensure that teams remained committed to targets and had the necessary resources. The teams also included part-time “project amplifiers,” who publicized initiatives to the organization and communicated its concerns back to the teams.

This clear ownership model helped the retailer to reorganize its 75,000-strong workforce and to cut costs by 12 percent within six months. The whole company’s health improved significantly. The program’s light yet robust structure was easily dismantled, and the business then took responsibility for the ongoing effort.

Choose scale-up methods

Companies implement the vast majority of initiatives by testing ideas, learning from failures, and scaling up successes quickly—an approach that limits damage, provides valuable lessons, and builds an appetite for change. But impatient organizations often implement pilots too quickly.

Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change

Consider the experience of the Netherlands-based insurance group Achmea. Spurred by the government’s radical healthcare reforms, the company launched a change program in one of its divisions. The initiatives included a plan to raise the call center’s efficiency by 25 percent and to improve the customer experience. Achmea’s initial pilot was a huge success, but the company soon found that the approach of the manager who led the effort was hard to replicate because he had relied on personal influence, not new systems . As this example shows, the pilot phase should include two tests: proof of concept (to establish that an idea creates value) and proof of feasibility (to ensure replicability). Often, this second test also trains leaders for later waves of implementation. Once Achmea adopted the double-pilot approach, the change program proceeded successfully.

Companies can choose among three broad “flavors” for scaling initiatives: linear, geometric, and “big bang” (Exhibit 1). In the first, the proof-of-feasibility pilot is replicated across the organization, but no area starts until the previous one finishes. This works best if a company rolls out an initiative in only a few areas and isn’t in crisis, the stakes are high, deep dives by experts are needed, resistance to change is strong, and the tool kit and solutions require extensive customization.

In geometric scale-ups, implementation occurs in progressively bigger waves. This makes sense if multiple areas share a few common features, many areas must be transformed, a linear approach would take too long, capable implementers are readily available (or can be trained ahead of demand), and the organization can absorb the changes. In big-bang scale-ups, implementation occurs across all relevant areas at once. That takes many resources, but for a relatively short time, and makes sense if multiple areas share many features, the transformation is urgently needed, little resistance is expected, and the company can deploy a standard tool kit.

A multinational energy company, for example, used the linear approach to roll out unified HR software that replaced freestanding national systems. Senior management understood that if the company switched in one go, or even region by region, technical issues might overload the project. The new software represented a major shift, so the company also wanted to ensure that all country organizations embraced it and that concerns at any one location could be addressed before the rollout continued.

But this company chose a geometric approach to implement its new global procurement strategy. An analysis of vendor relationships uncovered similarities among markets in buying patterns and levels of procurement sophistication and vendor choice. Grouping similar markets into clusters enabled the company to increase its leverage with vendors. It then used the geometric approach to roll out the project in increasingly large groups of regions and countries. Procurement teams got up to speed quickly, approaches were progressively refined, and cost savings escalated rapidly.

Another initiative revamped public-relations processes. The company had recently experienced a crisis it hadn’t handled well, because of a decentralized approach to managing its public image. One initiative therefore centralized stakeholder management and PR, installed new policies and guidelines, and aimed to make the general public and key stakeholders aware of the company’s efforts to improve transparency and accountability. A big-bang effort fully implemented the program in two months.

Monitor progress and adjust the program dynamically

To work effectively and scale up multiple initiatives during the act stage, the CMO must provide both an initiative- and program-level view of progress and impact through relevant metrics and milestones. When it does, change programs are 7.3 times more likely to succeed. This mandate requires good data. As N. R. Narayana Murthy, former chairman of Infosys, put it, “ In God we trust; everybody else brings data to the table .”

To have a robust view of how much progress you’re making, regularly measure your change program on at least four dimensions:

• Initiative level. Track initiatives not just by time (milestones) and budget (money spent versus planned) but also by operational performance (cycle times, waste, wait times, quality).
• Health. Are management practices and their underlying mindsets and behavior shifting appropriately? Targeted analytics, surveys, focus groups, and direct observation of work sites offer a good read.
• Performance. Measure key business outcomes (revenues, costs, risks) to confirm that improvements happen where you expect and don’t cause problems elsewhere.
• Value creation. Constantly focus on the ultimate goal: shareholder (and other relevant stakeholder) value.

The particular metrics to monitor in each dimension will be specific to individual programs, but less is more: metrics often cascade into unwieldy, complex permutations. A McKinsey analysis shows that organizations use only 29 percent of the metrics they claim to follow in change efforts .

Next, decide how often to measure and review the metrics. In large-scale change programs, initiatives should be reviewed weekly by their teams; health and performance, monthly or quarterly by sponsors and steering committees; and enterprise value, once or twice a year by everyone in the program. Reviews enforce accountability, identify issues and best practices, determine remedies, spotlight successes, and instill a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

Don’t confine the monitoring and review to the past. As Telefónica de España’s former managing director and COO Julio Linares warns, “The market is going to change constantly, and because of that you need to make a constant effort to adapt to the market. Of course, some parts of the program will end, but new ones will come up.” Change programs led by CMOs that adjust them as needed are 4.6 times more likely to succeed. 2 McKinsey global transformational-change survey of 2,314 executives, conducted in January 2010.

No matter how well you plan initiatives during the architect stage, some will probably flounder when you get to act: 28 percent of well-planned initiatives don’t deliver the results forecast , so the CMO should expect to redirect or stop some initiatives, launch new ones, and reallocate resources quickly. Our data show that, on average, the execution end dates of 31 percent of initiatives change once , 28 percent twice, and 19 percent three times. The CMO’s role is to ensure that this happens for the right reasons, with rigorous problem solving and no last-minute delays or surprises—a reason to monitor metrics weekly.

Health: Generating energy

During change programs, employees must conduct everyday business while changing the way it’s done. That additional work requires additional energy, so change leaders must ensure that programs generate more of it during the act stage than they consume. Change leaders can create energy by mobilizing influencers, making change programs personal for a critical mass of leaders, and engaging the workforce with two-way communications.

Mobilize influencers

Senior leaders aren’t the only people who guide employees; influencers deep in organizations can disproportionately affect their colleagues’ energy levels  if a change program excites them. Regardless of their official title or status, they draw power from the many personal contacts who respect and emulate them. Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller The Tipping Point 3 Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown and Company, 2000. describes three types: “mavens” accumulate knowledge and share advice, “connectors” know many people, and “salespeople” can naturally persuade others. Our research indicates that engaging influencers in change programs makes them 3.8 times more likely to succeed.

Consider the example of a change program for maternal healthcare in Africa. No traditional form of intervention (such as pamphlets) worked. Eventually, the leaders realized that hairdressers were extremely influential—hair salons were among the few places where young women could talk about the health of mothers. When the campaign refocused on hairdressers, the message got through.

You can find these sometimes-hidden influencers through social-network analysis (Exhibit 2). One application—“snowball sampling”—uses techniques social scientists developed to study hidden populations: two- to three-question surveys ask employees to nominate (anonymously) three to five people whose advice they respect. These five are also surveyed, and the survey ends when names are repeated—often, after only three to four rounds. Leaders frequently find the results surprising because influence patterns rarely reflect organizational charts.

Companies can mobilize influence leaders effectively in many ways–for example, enrolling them in pilots. At the very least, create a two-way pipeline giving influencers early access to information, so that you gather important feedback on the program’s implementation. By using this group to refine new ideas, you can also increase the effectiveness and acceptance of the ideas you implement.

Make change personal for a critical mass of leaders

Mindsets created by an old stimulus last far longer than the stimulus itself, so if you rely solely on changes in the work environment (a new stimulus) to shift mindsets, you’ll wait a long time. What’s more, changes to the work environment won’t affect everyone similarly. Finally, and perhaps most vexingly, to change the work environment, programs must rely partly on leaders to role model the new behavior, even in the absence of any significant external stimulus. Companies must therefore recognize that the biggest barrier to personal change is overcoming the propensity to see other people as the problem.

At one company, for example, we asked leaders to estimate how much time they spent tiptoeing around other people’s egos. Most said 20 to 30 percent. Then we asked these leaders how much time an employee might spend tiptoeing around their egos. Most were silent. Our research shows that 86 percent of leaders claim to role model behavioral changes, but only 53 percent of the people who report to them agree.

Our journey to find ways of kick-starting change among leaders has led to the development of what we call personal-insight workshops (PIWs), which mostly take place offsite, in groups of 20 to 30, over a couple of days. During PIWs, facilitators who understand the principles of adult learning and human-potential techniques take participants through the “U-process,” which involves three phases.

The first, sensing, typically takes 30 percent of the workshop’s time. Participants explore the company’s change story  in the context of their own. During the second phase, presencing, which typically accounts for some 40 percent of the workshop’s time, the session turns further inward.

Participants examine their beliefs about what’s possible in the workplace, reflecting on questions such as “when do I feel in the ‘flow’ and what takes me out of it, into fight-, flight-, or freeze-type responses?” “What has conditioned me to respond in this way?” “Can I respond in a different way if I frame situations differently?” “What are the benefits and risks if I do?” “How would these different ways of thinking and acting create a more powerful personal legacy?” “How does all this link to the bigger organizational change discussed in the sensing phase?” These techniques help participants to understand their attitudes toward (and more fully embrace) the change program’s organizational mindset and behavior shifts and therefore increase their impact as role models.

Now the U-process enters its third phase: realizing, which typically accounts for 30 percent of the workshop’s time. Here participants decide how they will apply the insights from the previous phase in their day-to-day work, how to use their personal networks to mobilize support, and what the group will do collectively.

Companies will see material shifts in the leadership’s role-modeling impact once a critical mass of 25 to 30 percent of their people leaders attend such programs. At this point, many leaders are replacing the “if only they would change” mentality with the ethos of “if it’s to be, it’s up to me,” so that it becomes contagious and spreads to the whole population. 4 For example, see Andrea Baronchelli, Joshua Becker, Devon Brackbill, and Damon Centola, “Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention,” Science, June 2018, Volume 360, Number 6393: pp. 1116–19, science.sciencemag.org. Not every successful change program uses PIW techniques, but in our experience every change program that did succeeded. In particular, we’ve seen PIWs thaw the change-resistant “frozen middle” of managers more quickly and effectively than any other approach.

Use high-impact two-way communications

The final element of the act stage—high-impact two-way communications that energize the organization—makes change programs four times more likely to succeed. Consider an experiment involving two groups of people: “tappers” and “listeners.” 5 Chip Heath and Dan Heath, “The curse of knowledge,” Harvard Business Review, December 2006, hbr.org. In a preparatory session, the tappers were told they would drum out the rhythm of famous tunes, such as “Happy Birthday to You,” with their fingers. The listeners would have to guess what it was. Then the experimenters asked the tappers to predict what proportion of the songs the listeners would identify correctly. They guessed half. The actual result was 2.5 percent. As the tappers tapped, they became visibly frustrated with the bewildered listeners. The lesson: if you know something, you find it hard to imagine not knowing it—“the curse of knowledge.”

We constantly see it at work in change programs. Leaders who have been deeply involved in creating the change story assume that others will absorb it quickly. But when anyone first hears the story, what leaders consider carefully crafted messages come across as disconnected ideas. To break the curse, use a combination of four approaches.

First, leaders who retell a story should understand what it’s like to hear it for the first time by testing it on others. Second, make the message stick by relentlessly repeating simple, memorable language; Walmart’s “ten-foot rule,” for example, supports customer service by reminding frontline employees that whenever they are within ten feet of a customer, they should look him or her in the eye, smile, and ask how they can help. As Willie Walsh, who has been chief executive of several airline companies, puts it, “The simpler the message, the easier it is to deliver. The simpler the message, the more likely it is to be consistent. The simpler the message, the easier it is to control and manage the communication.” 6 Personal interview.

A third way is to move from “telling” to “asking,” which uses even chance encounters effectively. Emerson Electric’s CEO David Farr asks virtually all employees he meets four questions: “How do you make a difference?,” “What improvement ideas are you working on?,” “When did you last get coaching from your boss?,” and “Who is the enemy?” 7 The right answer is competitors, not some other department. This way of engaging employees has far more impact than simply exhorting them about the company’s health themes: alignment, continuous improvement, coaching, and collaboration.

The fourth way of overcoming the curse is to ensure that many channels—speech, print, online, symbols, rituals—reinforce your messages. In fact, the best two-way communications programs not only tell the same story through multiple channels but also tell different aspects of it through different channels. Companies should use channels creatively—particularly social media. We’ve seen successful two-way communications strategies involving blogs, tweets, videos, podcasts, “jams,” 8 Online, topical, time-bound problem-solving sessions often involving thousands of employees. and online Wiki-like resource centers tailored to employee segments. These become even more powerful when interwoven with in-person formats, such as large group offsites and unannounced visits.

Equally important, create bottom-up channels. When Lisa Hook was Neustar’s CEO, she sponsored a video competition to communicate the company’s performance-and-health strategy. Employees submitted videos and voted for them online; the executive committee chose the winner and the CEO presented an award. Likewise, during a change program in the early 2000s, employees of the Australian telecommunications company Telstra created a “rogue” comic strip to challenge cynicism about a change program. The corporate center can seed such bottom-up efforts, but they must spread autonomously. Infrastructure and funding may be needed, and some companies give influence leaders a small budget and a mandate to “start a fire” (create energy for change).

Some powerful channels for changing mindsets and generating energy are often underutilized—for instance, new rituals. When a mining company made safety a theme of its change program, it started meetings with announcements about emergency exits and safety hazards. Another underutilized channel is the outside world. As Banca Intesa’s former CEO Corrado Passera reflects, internal results matter little “if everyone keeps reading in the newspapers that the business is still a poor performer, is not contributing to society, or is letting down the country as a whole.” Change leaders should look for ways of leveraging customers, users, and other stakeholders to generate energy for change.

Organizations can maximize a multichannel strategy’s power by starting with an employee segment and mapping its change-experience journey. Employees may, for example, learn about the change program in an offsite interactive story-cascade session, read about it on the company’s home page, and see posters about it on walls at work. At home, they may learn about it in the press. Next, they could take part in a skill-building “field and forum” journey to improve as change leaders. Eventually, they will notice how changing structures, processes, systems, and incentives are realizing the change story’s vision and plan. Employees experience a coherent, reinforcing journey taking them from their previous mindsets and behavior toward those needed to make change programs succeed.

Masterstroke: Motivate through social contracts

In each of our five stages of performance and health, we emphasize a masterstroke: counterintuitive lessons from the field of predictable irrationality. Discounting them causes frustration and delay; leveraging them can greatly accelerate a change program’s impact. In this, the act stage, the masterstroke involves incentives.

Conventional wisdom is clear: if compensation isn’t linked to the objectives of a change program, employees believe that it isn’t important. Unfortunately, however, the upside to linking change objectives to financial compensation is generally limited, practically and psychologically. In practice, compensation can rise only within limits and reflects many metrics: overall company performance, the P&L of individual areas, and so forth. No one metric affects overall results significantly. Changing a company’s approach to compensation is also hard—typically requiring board approval—and unintended consequences may ensue.

From a psychological standpoint, the benefit of increased income on happiness greatly decreases beyond $75,000 a year. Besides, financial incentives become less effective the more organizations use them. 9 Angus Deaton and Daniel Dahneman, “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 107, Number 38, September 2010, pp. 16,489–93. Fortunately, leaders needn’t rely heavily on compensation to drive change; they can stimulate motivation by using what the field of predictable irrationality calls a social—not a market—exchange. Say you go to someone’s house for dinner and afterward ask your host how much money you owe her. The offer of money changes a social interaction into a cringeworthy market transaction. Yet if you had brought your host a bottle of good wine, she would have accepted it gladly. A gift is a symbol of long-term, reciprocal social norms rather than short-term, transactional market norms. 10 Dan Ariely, Predictable Irrationality: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

This social approach to shaping behavior is cheaper and often more effective. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), for example, once asked lawyers to give discounted prices to retirees. The lawyers declined. Then the AARP, understanding the lesson we have described, went to other lawyers and asked them to work free of charge. Most agreed. 11 Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012. Compensation invoked market norms; pro-bono work, social ones.

The best change leaders use small, unexpected nonfinancial rewards and recognition to great effect. When John McFarlane was CEO of ANZ bank, he gave every employee a bottle of champagne for Christmas, and that had far more impact than a bonus equaling the champagne’s cost. As CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi sent thoughtful, hand-written letters praising her top team not only to its members but also to their spouses, creating enormous additional motivation for change. You can take people to lunch, leave laudatory Post-it Notes for them, or give them public recognition among their peers. As Walmart founder Sam Walton said, “Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free—and worth a fortune.” 12 Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made in America, New York: Bantam, 1993.

The first three stages of the change journey ( aspire, assess, and architect ) typically take months; the act stage, years. Don’t count on the initial excitement to last; instead, generate energy and create ownership methodically to keep your change program on the right path throughout its twists and turns. We often liken the act stage to sports. When a team takes the field, it has a game plan, but once the whistle blows, points rarely come from well-rehearsed plays. The ability to improvise within the game plan usually makes the difference between winning and losing, in sports and business alike.

Scott Keller is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Southern California office, and Bill Schaninger is a senior partner in the Philadelphia office.

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Music and Concerts | Journey’s 50th anniversary tour makes its way…

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Music and concerts, music and concerts | journey’s 50th anniversary tour makes its way to norfolk with a ‘dirty dozen’ in store.

Journey is back with its 50th-anniversary tour, headlining arenas this spring before spending a chunk of the summer on a stadium tour with Def Leppard.

Guitarist and founding member Neal Schon and keyboardist/guitarist Jonathan Cain say that today’s band has never played better.

“Finally, it sounds like the Journey everybody knows,” Cain said of the group, which formed in 1973 in San Francisco. “It’s back to the ’80s, that’s what it sounds like.”

Journey with special guest star Toto is coming to Scope Friday.

Schon and Cain are the two remaining members going back to the early 1980s when Journey was churning out hits like “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Any Way You Want It” and “Open Arms.” The two reflected on the band during a recent video interview, including on recent lawsuits, disputes and personnel changes, and regaining a level of popularity that has Journey back on the road.

But there were more issues to come – this time between Schon and Cain. Schon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Cain after Cain joined a sing-along of “Don’t Stop Believing” at a November 2022 event for former president Donald Trump. Cain’s wife, Paula, had worked as a spiritual advisor to Trump. Schon took offense to Cain’s performance, noting that Journey never was and never would be a political band.

Then last year, Schon and Cain traded lawsuits over a financial account for the group. The bandmates hashed out their differences without the courts, they said.

“All we really did was get fed up with the legal and having legals talk instead of us,” Schon said. “We talked for a couple of hours and we talked through it all. I think that’s what fixed everything.”

Now Schon and Cain are leading Journey (with Pineda, Castronovo and Jensen) on one of the band’s biggest touring years. Fans can expect to hear Journey’s biggest hits — the “Dirty Dozen” as the band has nicknamed them — with a handful of new or deeper cuts. This makes crafting set lists a challenge but it’s a problem many bands would welcome.

“We just have a massive catalog,” Cain said, “with so many great songs that we don’t get to.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Scope, 201 E. Brambleton Ave., Norfolk

Tickets: Start at $49.50

Details:  sevenvenues.com

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Sophia Bush Gets Candid About Her 'Hard and Painful' Fertility Journey: 'Most Clarifying Experience'

"It feels like society is finally making space for brutally honest conversations," Bush says

Lauren Dukoff

Sophia Bush is opening up about her fertility journey.

In Glamour's April cover story, the actress, 41, gets honest about her experience with fertility in a personal essay for the magazine. She explains in the article that after her wedding to ex-husband Grant Hughes , she was in "the depths and heartbreak of the fertility process," which Bush calls the "most clarifying experience of my life."

"It feels like society is finally making space for brutally honest conversations about how hard and painful any fertility journey is, but I kept mine private," she says.

"I was trying to get through months of endless ultrasounds, hormone shots, so many blood draws that I have scar tissue in my veins, and retrieval after retrieval, while simultaneously realizing the person I had chosen to be my partner didn't necessarily speak the same emotional language I did."

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Bush separated from Hughes after 13 months of marriage last August. A few months later, the actress was seen stepping out with soccer star Ashlyn Harris, who split from her wife and fellow soccer pro,  Ali Krieger .

After they were first seen together in October,  an insider from Bush and Harris' circle  confirmed to PEOPLE that the two were together after splitting from their respective partners.

"After being friends for years, and running in the same social circles, Sophia and Ashlyn went out on their first dinner date a couple of weeks ago. This is so recent, and they are both beginning new chapters," the source said at the time.

In early January, Bush reflected on her year that “changed everything" in a lengthy  Instagram  post.

“No more playing small. No more turning my back on myself. No more settling for what falls short because ‘who am I to ask for more?’ This year put me back in my body. I left it a long time ago, in such a way that I forgot what it felt like to inhabit my own skin. I feel my whole self from the tops of my ears to the tips of my toes now. It’s breathtaking. Life giving. Affirming," said Bush.