CHAPTER 4

Write Your Beliefs

Peter Drucker told the parable of the three stonecutters in his 1954 book The Practice of Management:

Many years ago, a passerby saw three workers cutting stones in a quarry. Though they were doing similar work, one looked unhappy, another looked content, and the third looked overjoyed. The passerby asked them what they were doing.

The unhappy stonecutter replied, “I’m doing what it takes to make a living.”

The content one answered, “I am a stonemason practicing my craft.”

The overjoyed one looked up with a visionary glance and said, “I am building the greatest cathedral in the land.”

Drucker, who focused on management, called the third stonecutter “the true manager” for understanding the importance of the whole enterprise, not just one’s part. Harvard University president Drew Faust interpreted the parable similarly, saying, “The third stonecutter reminds us that the individual is not enough, that we want to make a difference in and for the world—as it is today and as it will be in the future.”

I believe that they undervalued the parable, at least for aspiring leaders, in its ability to show that you can become a cathedral builder. The cathedral builder is the happiest of the three, is probably the most productive, and probably finds the most meaning in the work. The difference between their viewpoints is not innate or superhuman. Anyone could believe what the cathedral builder does, including the other two. They differ in what each chooses to believe.*

What I Mean by Belief in This Exercise

Our environments have more information than our brains can store or process. To make sense of everything we perceive, our minds filter out most of the information our senses give us and keep only what they think helps. Consider how complex your environment is. Other people are as complex as we are, and we don’t understand ourselves perfectly. And there are seven billion other people, plus everything else—dogs, cats, trees, planets, stars, and so on. Our brains didn’t evolve to represent reality perfectly. They evolved to handle what affects us. They simplify reality for a purpose. That’s what I mean by belief (or mental model): a representation of reality for a purpose. We’ll learn a lot more about beliefs, so you don’t have to get everything now.

A younger me would have said about the stonecutters, “Well, one belief is right and the rest are wrong,” but each stonecutter’s belief is in some sense right. They aren’t logically exclusive, although we may happen to be conscious of one at a given time—that is, only one may be in our inner monologue. Likewise, many beliefs that are in some sense wrong help us lead, like when someone says, “The Constitution is a living, breathing document.” The differences in beliefs weren’t about right or wrong but effectiveness.

Let’s look at how beliefs affect perception, behavior, and our environments.

If you grew up with a pet dog and I was once bitten by one, we might have different beliefs about the same dog. You might see a cuddly pet. I might see a scary threat. You might feel calm and approach it. I might feel fear and back away. Your behavior might lead the dog to play with you while mine might lead it to growl at me. We both might conclude opposite things about the dog yet each feel right, with evidence.

The dog example illustrates how beliefs influence perception, moods, meaning, and behavior and how we influence our environments, which influence us back. The next few exercises will show that we have more control over our beliefs than most of us expect. Choosing our beliefs enables us to become cathedral builders and more. Leading effectively often means working with beliefs more than with facts and logic. What you consider irrefutable facts often turn out to be beliefs.

A psychologist who studied intelligence once told me that flexibility with beliefs was a major part of intelligence, which surprised me. They seemed unrelated. She explained that if you could only solve a problem one way, you would be unable to solve problems when your first perspective didn’t lead to a solution. The more ways you can look at problems, the more problems you can solve. So besides helping you lead, the next few exercises may increase your intelligence.

Our beliefs affect how we perceive and interact with our environments—a tremendous and useful leadership tool. Few learn to use it because most people confuse their perception of their environment with the actual environment, concluding that they can’t change things that they can. Your beliefs about the dog are not the dog, and you can change them more easily than you can change the dog. Many people understand the difference in the abstract but have trouble changing beliefs or even considering alternatives. People’s greatest resistance to grow and develop often stems from inflexibility in changing beliefs or considering alternatives.

I could talk about beliefs and the skills to use them all day, but you’ll learn more, faster through experience.

Speaking of Peter Drucker, by the way, he also called Frances Hesselbein the best leader in the country. In his words, “Frances Hesselbein could manage any company in America.”

The Write Your Beliefs Exercise

Beliefs Filter Your Perception

The exercise is to pay attention to your beliefs and write them down. I recommend doing it for about a week or until you’ve written a few dozen beliefs, drawing from several areas of your life.

Beliefs manifest in our inner monologue, so this chapter’s exercise builds on the exercise in chapter 3. This exercise looks at what Write Your Inner Monologue did, but a level up—at the idea level instead of at the word level. It also prepares us for the next few exercises.

We generally don’t notice how our minds work with beliefs. For example, we often model other people with a few adjectives despite them being as complex as we are: “John is a good guy. He gets the job done and has a great sense of humor.” You wouldn’t want to be so simplified, but even such gross simplifications work most of the time.

Because beliefs filter out information, they never perfectly represent what they model. In that sense, every belief is wrong. But they still help. Because different people filter out different information, we all develop different beliefs, meaning that we perceive and react to the world differently, leading the world to react differently to us. Your own beliefs change over time.

When we plan and decide, we do so based on beliefs, not the objects of the beliefs. If you believe that there is a lion right behind you, you’ll feel fear, even if no lion is there. You won’t feel fear if you don’t believe one is there, even if one is. You act based on your beliefs about John, not based on John. Since everyone has different beliefs, everyone chooses and acts differently despite living in the same physical world.

Those who recognize how beliefs work and know how to use them have an advantage leading themselves and others compared to people who think or insist that everyone sees the world in one way.

Examples

Consider the following beliefs about school:

School is a place for learning.

School is my last chance to have fun before working for the rest of my life.

School is something my parents make me do.

School is a place to get a job.

People with different beliefs will act differently even at the same school in the same class. You might believe one of those beliefs at one time and another at another time.

You and a friend might go to a party together. If you believe “this party is for talking and meeting people,” your friend believes “this party is for dancing,” and the music is loud, you might feel miserable and your friend might enjoy it. People with fixed beliefs might see that they can’t change the party and get stuck in their misery. If you change your belief, you might like the party more.

Later chapters will cover ways to change beliefs and become cathedral builders. For now we’ll work on awareness and flexibility with them.

Beliefs and Leadership

Motivating others often involves their beliefs more than the world directly.

Not all beliefs leading to different behavior contradict each other. For example, one person may believe “corn syrup is unhealthy.” Another may believe “life is for enjoying.” The former may avoid some foods sweetened with corn syrup that the other enjoys. Although they do opposite things, their beliefs aren’t opposite. Subtle differences like that can lead to misunderstandings that undermine teamwork if a leader assumes beliefs based on behavior alone. Subtle changes in beliefs can lead to big changes in motivation and behavior in yourself and others.

Note that to believe something means that you believe it is true and right. But since all beliefs are simplifications and leave out information, scrutinize any belief you hold, no matter how right you consider it, and you will find flaws in it. It’s still a belief. Just because you believe something is right doesn’t mean someone else’s beliefs wouldn’t work better for you, like the cathedral builder. If you believe one thing and someone else believes something different but you think you both believe the same thing, you’ll misunderstand each other.

Trying to impose our beliefs on others with different beliefs feels to them like self-righteousness and will provoke argument and resistance more than teamwork. (If you disagree, your reaction illustrates my point.)

What to Do

This exercise is like Inner Monologue, which it builds on. Instead of writing thoughts at the word level, this exercise is to write higher-level beliefs. They manifest themselves in your inner monologue, which is why we did that exercise first.

1.Carry a pen and paper with you for a week. (You can use your phone, tablet, or computer if you prefer.)

2.When you notice a belief, write it down.

That’s it. It takes a few minutes a day. At the end, you’ll have a list of many of your beliefs. It may take a couple days to get the hang of it, like with Inner Monologue, but if you practice diligently, you’ll get it.

To clarify, if the exercise was to write what you observed with your senses, you might write something like, “My boss walked into the room,” but that’s not the assignment. For this exercise, you would instead write, “My boss sucks,” “My boss rocks,” “I hate working for other people,” “Bosses make you do things you don’t want to,” or whatever beliefs you thought then.

That range of possible beliefs implies a range of different worlds. It helps to know which your mind lives in.

Some beliefs you’ll notice once during this exercise. Others you’ll see daily. Some more. Some will annoy you. Others will calm you. The point is to write them without judgment—just with awareness.

When I first did this exercise, I expected in a week I’d write 5 or 10 beliefs. By the end of the week, I had written about 70 and was writing new ones faster than when I started. Some were obviously beliefs when I wrote them. Others I wrote as strategies or in my own idiosyncratic way, which I had to disentangle to find the underlying belief. I saw that beyond identifying beliefs, I was developing a skill. Some students have written far fewer and some far more. There’s no right number. The point is to develop the skill to identify them across a range of situations.

The Differences Between Beliefs, Behaviors, and Strategies

We all try to live as best we can based on our beliefs. Because different people believe different things based on their unique experiences, simplifications, and so on, we behave uniquely. This book calls these behavioral choices strategies. Everyone’s mental processes are the same: Beliefs lead to strategies. Like a computer, different inputs lead to different outputs even for the same hardware and software.

For example, if you read that corn syrup was unhealthy, you might believe “corn syrup is unhealthy” and develop a strategy of avoiding it, thinking things like, “I should check ingredients to avoid corn syrup.” The belief about corn syrup being unhealthy leads to a strategy of reading ingredients. If you believe “life is to be enjoyed,” never reading that corn syrup was unhealthy, you might develop a strategy to eat what tastes good without bothering with ingredient lists.

We spend more time thinking about strategies than beliefs because we perform them more. We may think about a belief for a moment and then implement a strategy based on it for decades. I occasionally find myself acting on some random thing a teacher told me in elementary school that I believed and never reconsidered in decades.

People doing this exercise often inadvertently write strategies instead of beliefs. You can usually distinguish strategies from beliefs because they focus more on verbs, action, and the word “should.” Beliefs focus more on statements. If you find yourself writing, “I should check the ingredients to avoid corn syrup,” or some other strategy, take the step to find the belief or beliefs prompting it until you find something like “corn syrup is unhealthy.” Sometimes that’s easy but not always.

Awareness of beliefs is more subtle but often more useful than awareness of strategies. Changing a belief will cause your strategies to change. If you try to change a strategy but not the belief that led to it, you’ll likely eventually revert your behavior and reinforce the belief motivating it, which is counterproductive.

For example, if you have a strategy to cook at home more and eat at restaurants less, you’ll have a hard time following it if you believe you’ll never learn to cook. Whereas if you believe that home-cooked food is healthiest and with practice more convenient, even without a strategy, you may start cooking at home more.

Post-Exercise

Many people find the exercise challenging until it clicks and they start seeing beliefs everywhere, especially if they didn’t do Inner Monologue thoroughly. Beliefs can be hard to recognize at first. Some challenges people often have include the following:

They think that if something is a fact, then it can’t be a belief. You may consider something a fact. You still believe it. I believe the sun rose this morning. Even if it did, I still believe it.

They suppress beliefs that make them feel bad. The point of the exercise is to identify and record your beliefs without evaluation or judgment. Later exercises will show the value of working on beliefs that you normally suppress. The more you can identify your beliefs, the more you can work on them.

They are embarrassed by their beliefs or consider them unimportant. Everyone has beliefs that seem weird, embarrassing, or whatever. The more you identify them, the more you can improve them. Suppressing them lowers your self-awareness. You don’t have to tell them to others if you don’t want to.

They think that if something is wrong, it isn’t a belief. People used to believe the world was flat. Many believed smoking was healthy. We consider those beliefs wrong now, but they were still beliefs.

They don’t work at it enough. Identifying beliefs takes skill, which takes practice developing. At the beginning of the exercise, you may find identifying them hard. Practice makes it easier. With enough practice, you’ll start seeing beliefs all the time.

They write strategies instead of beliefs. Strategies result from beliefs. We spend more time thinking about strategies, so most of us can access them more easily. If you write something like, “I have to do X,” “I like to do Y,” or “I should do Z,” you’re probably talking about strategies. A belief motivates that strategy. With practice, you can find beliefs from strategies easily, which is a common way to access them.

They avoid writing contradictory beliefs. We all have beliefs that contradict others we also have. At one moment we think we’re an idiot. A minute later we think we’re a genius. Beliefs can’t describe everything perfectly all the time, so some contradict others. Our brains didn’t evolve to be perfectly self-consistent. They evolved by helping our ancestors pass their genes to us.

*Many say “what mental models each chooses to hold.” I use the word belief to mean the same thing, preferring the single word. If you prefer calling what I call beliefs mental models, feel free. People often associate belief with religion, but I use the term secularly.