CHAPTER 6

Unwanted Beliefs

Michael Feiner is among the top in the field. His book, The Feiner Points of Leadership, still holds a 4.9 out of 5- star rating on Amazon a decade after release. He was Chief People Officer worldwide at Pepsi-Cola, where he worked for 20 years. His course that I took at Columbia Business School ranked among the school’s most in-demand classes and won him multiple teaching awards.

I took his course in the fall of 2005—one of my first experiences formally learning leadership. I loved what I learned and respected him greatly, at first and in the end, though things were shaky in the middle.

I approached him once after class to ask a question. His answer led him to refer to his book.

“Do you have it with you?” he asked.

“I don’t,” I said. “I’m using the library’s copy. It’s on reserve, so I can only use it in the library.”

He looked at me confused. “Why are you using the library’s copy?”

I explained that I’d gone to the bookstore to buy it but a salesman told me that the less expensive paperback would be out soon and suggested I wait for it, so I did, using the library copy in the meantime.

He boomed, “You’re too damn cheap to buy my book?!”

I stood dumbstruck. I couldn’t believe my ears: He cursed at a student! Loud enough for my classmates to hear. And what was wrong with using a library copy?

My mind told me to retaliate. I don’t remember what I did in the moment, but I know that I felt too outraged and confused to form a response. I probably just left, but I was already planning to counterattack.

Soon after, I went to his department to talk with other professors I knew. I intended to use the school’s authority to outrank him, but I was frustrated to find that, while his fellow teachers seemed to agree that cursing at a student was unprofessional, they didn’t act. Meanwhile I had to see him twice a week for class. (I had to admit that the course was still teaching me a lot.)

I was studying leadership outside of his class, too, in particular beliefs (the books I read then called them mental models) and how they affect our perceptions, emotions, and behavior. I began to see beliefs as something you could deliberately change.

What I learned showed me a few things. First, I distinguished my behavior—retaliation—from my emotions—anger, frustration, confusion, self-righteousness, and outrage—which enabled me to understand each more clearly.

Second, despite my fantasies of winning a battle, I noticed that I didn’t like feeling these emotions or the behavior they were motivating. Who likes being angry? I felt like I was experiencing the saying that anger is like drinking a poison and expecting the other person to die.

Third, I saw that the emotions arose from a conflict between my belief about how professors should behave and what happened. I felt self-righteous because I believed I was right, but that was just my belief. He didn’t believe he was wrong. So what did he believe?

Looking at my beliefs revealed a problem in me. They were making me miserable without affecting him at all. How could what felt like a natural response make my life worse? Could I do something about it?

I wondered if another belief might lead me to interpret this behavior differently. I thought: Cursing is sometimes appropriate. Friends curse around each other. Maybe he was being familiar.

I decided to try an experiment: to deliberately and actively believe he was being familiar, not a jerk. I had never tried anything like it before. Until then, I thought beliefs were right or wrong. At the time deliberately choosing to believe something felt weird. I felt like internally I still knew he was a jerk, that this belief wouldn’t stick, and my beliefs would eventually revert. I tried it anyway.

I didn’t tell him about my experiment. Nothing about his behavior changed. But I started to see him as friendly. Behavior that once looked callous looked familiar, even friendly. The more I kept at it, the more friendly he seemed. His jokes in class seemed funnier. He seemed more approachable.

The world didn’t change. I did, and it improved my life. I became more calm, less angry, and less reactive.

After the semester ended, I continued to meet with him in his office for advice and never again saw the hostility of my earlier encounter. I can’t say he and I became buddies, but I came to trust him as an adviser. Years later, when I started teaching, I sought him out for advice and found his among the most useful I got. I cringe at my initial self-righteous beliefs and the relationship they would have kept me from. How many other relationships was I selling short or missing out on?

I included the direct quote of him cursing at me to illustrate how dramatically different beliefs can lead us to interpret the same things. What I once found offensive I have come to see as one of the more barrier-lowering overtures from any professor in my long academic career. I wish more professors and leaders had the courage not to hide behind formality.

Actually, I did see what could have happened, years later, after he left teaching to work for a financial firm. Over drinks, a friend and business school classmate, Brad, told me that he had applied to work at Michael’s firm and that he had interviewed him.

“Feiner was totally inappropriate,” Brad said. “He asked me if I took his course. I said no. He wanted to know why.” Brad said he tried to explain diplomatically that the popular course was hard to get into, that there were other great courses, and that he had to take others. Brad said he felt like Feiner was using his authority to pry and make him feel bad for not taking his course.

I said, “You know, I got to know him after taking his class. Is it possible that what looked like pressing may have been him being familiar?”

“No way,” Brad snapped. “Not possible.” He started to look angry, so I didn’t press. I was scheduled to meet Michael soon after, so I asked him if I could ask about the interaction if I kept him anonymous.

“Go ahead. I don’t care what you say to that guy.”

When I met with my former professor again, I said, “Without mentioning names, an old classmate interviewed with you. I want to ask you your perspective. But I’d like to give you my interpretation first to see if I understand you.”

He said, “Sure.”

I recounted the story. “My friend felt you acted inappropriately by asking why he didn’t take your course,” I said. “But I bet you weren’t being inappropriate. I believe you were trying to be familiar, as opposed to being professional and polite but distant. What he saw as polarizing was you bypassing formalities.”

“Exactly,” he said, smiling warmly. “I was trying to give him the opportunity to talk person to person and not be a résumé.” We talked about how teams don’t perform highly when they are too formal with each other and can’t develop trust and teamwork.

Brad and I saw similar behavior and believed he was a jerk, making us both feel miserable. Brad refused to consider alternative beliefs, stayed miserable, and didn’t get a job. I changed my belief, which calmed me and got me a mentor.

I didn’t see a different side of Michael. There was no other side of him. One belief filtered what I saw one way and created outrage and anger, as with Brad, and a different belief filtered it another way. No intellectual explanation could have revealed how much the change in belief changed my perception, despite my having faked it at first.

The Write Your Unwanted Beliefs Exercise

Beliefs You Don’t Like Still Influence You

This exercise is to write beliefs that contribute to emotions you don’t like. It applies the skills of Write Your Beliefs and Write Others’ Beliefs to beliefs that are harder to grasp.

Emotions don’t appear randomly. They result from your perception of your environment, among other things, which your beliefs influence. Some that you don’t like feeling, like anger, suspicion, impatience, and disappointment, arise from inner conflict. Your emotional system makes you feel a way you don’t like until you fix the situation. Detecting beliefs that cause emotions we don’t like takes skill and practice because parts of our minds suppress them. I think of such beliefs as slippery. When you try to group them to understand them, the emotions they evoke overwhelm and distract you and they slip out of your focus.

What to Do

1.Carry something to write with for a week.

2.When you feel an emotion you don’t like, find what belief or beliefs contributed to it and write it down.

At the end, you’ll have a list of beliefs. You may have difficulty finding or accepting some. You may want to change them more than write them down. For now the goal is to record them without judgment or evaluation. It may take a couple of days to get the hang of it, but if you work diligently, you will.

Examples

Emotions that you don’t like feeling include anger, resentment, frustration, anxiety, impatience, disappointment, rage, jealousy, envy, hatred, and depression. You may feel none or some of them while doing this exercise.

You may, for example, at some point during the exercise, feel frustrated and trace back the emotion to feeling that you deserved something you didn’t get. If so, then you’d write something like, “I deserved the promotion that my coworker got.”

You may feel bored and note that you’re thinking, “Nothing matters anyway because I can’t succeed, so why should I try hard?” If so, you’d then write something like, “Sometimes I believe my work won’t amount to anything.”

After a heated argument, you may write, “I believed I was right and the other person was wrong.” By the time you write it, you may have changed your belief, so you may have to work to rewind to how you felt while arguing. You might also write, “Later I believed the other person wasn’t as wrong as I thought while arguing.”

Why Focus on Beliefs We Don’t Like?

In the movie Rocky II, Rocky’s trainer gave him an exercise to catch chickens. As a heavyweight boxer, Rocky valued size and strength. Chickens aren’t big and strong, but fast, slippery, unpredictable, and hard to grasp, turned out to have value. The exercise developed him from lumbering, slow, aimless, and clumsy to nimble, fast, deliberate, and agile, although he took months to get there and felt vulnerable in the process. Handling unpleasant beliefs develops mental skills like Rocky’s physical skills.

The goal of this exercise isn’t to make you feel more unwanted emotions but to become more aware of them and the beliefs contributing to them and to develop skills to act on them.

Another challenge is that we don’t usually feel like writing when we’re feeling these emotions. We don’t like to acknowledge feeling self-righteous, vulnerable, or whatever unwanted emotion. But those are reasons we benefit from this exercise, to raise our self-awareness. You will want to change beliefs that create emotions you don’t like—in other words, to lead yourself. Later exercises will show you how. For now we’re raising awareness. One step at a time.

Challenges

Some challenges in this exercise include the following:

Not wanting to acknowledge emotions you don’t like

Wanting to blame others for emotions you don’t like

Suppressing how your beliefs contributed to emotions you didn’t like

Not wanting to write while you feel emotions you don’t like and forgetting them

Trying to change the emotions or beliefs and then not writing them down

Feeling so gripped by the emotion that you don’t think of writing about it

Feeling beliefs are too embarrassing, trivial, immature, silly, and so on to write about

Being discouraged by laziness or depression that you don’t do anything

If these challenges affect you, I recommend mentally noting what happened and going back to the exercise. You don’t have to tell anyone beliefs you’re uncomfortable with, but at least write them down to raise your awareness and to give you tools for future exercises.

Post-Exercise

We’re starting to move from awareness of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in general to awareness of specific mental activity useful to leading, particularly leading yourself.

Our minds tend to avoid awareness of emotions we don’t like. They still motivate us. Whether we’re aware of them or not. Lack of awareness means behaving reactively—the opposite of leading. Without the experience of an exercise like this to make us aware of thoughts and feelings we avoid, many of us spend more time reacting to them than understanding or actively working with them.

Writing beliefs that lead to emotions we don’t like often surprises us. For example, you may have found yourself writing, “I’m right and the other person is wrong.” Everyone has felt that way, but few outright say it. Not saying it, even to ourselves, lowers our ability to do anything about it.

Awareness of these emotions—even, or especially, when we don’t like them—enables us to lead ourselves. Consider impatience, for example. If you feel impatient with someone and think, “This person is taking too long,” that’s your belief. They don’t think they’re taking too long, so acting on your belief and interrupting them won’t motivate them to finish faster, no matter how right you think you are. Their beliefs affect them, not yours. Sometimes you take too long. Even if you don’t acknowledge the belief, the feeling it evokes will motivate you. Without awareness, you’ll behave reactively. The same happens with any other emotion we don’t like.

I hope this exercise got you to see some beliefs you want to change and that you found your awareness enabled you to change them more easily. We’ll return to how to change them.

Awareness clarifies how to act on emotions you don’t like. Lack of awareness makes you a slave to them. We often regret acting without awareness. This exercise may have helped you experience that others often act thoughtlessly and reactively. You probably understand and forgive yourself for behavior you regret. Do you understand and forgive others as easily? Do you think doing so would improve your ability to influence them?

Of the emotions we didn’t like, most of us probably tended to notice intense ones most, like anger or envy. As you continue practicing, you’ll notice increasingly subtle emotions you don’t like, such as anxiety. The point, again, isn’t to feel more things you don’t like but to enable you to act on more things you can change. The more you can manage emotions you don’t like, the better you’ll feel and the more you’ll behave how you want, not reactively, controlled by your environment. Also, the more you’ll be able to use the same skills to lead others.

Emotions and Meaning, Value, Importance, Purpose

We’ve worked on the connections between beliefs and emotions. Have you started to notice connections between your emotions and things like meaning, value, importance, and purpose (MVIP)?

This book focuses on the motivation part of emotions. They also have a feeling part. How they make us feel contributes to our sense of something’s MVIP to us. Someone or something that we feel good about we usually think of as having positive MVIP. If it makes us feel bad, we think of it as having negative MVIP. If it generates no emotion, meaning it doesn’t change our lives, we think of it as having no MVIP.

Understanding the connection between MVIP and emotions, and how much our beliefs influence our emotions, shows the value of awareness and skill in creating beliefs. As we move further into Unit 2, we’ll see and experience the MVIP of influencing our beliefs.

This connection between emotions and MVIP points to emotional awareness as useful for creating more MVIP in our lives and the lives of people around us.