CHAPTER 9

Adopt a
Challenging Belief

What do you do when you have a boss or join a team you don’t get along with? Since nearly everyone will have problems with some bosses, managers, teammates, and coworkers in their careers, if you leave every job every time you have a problem with one, you’ll have a résumé a mile long filled with two-month jobs. Here’s how I applied the skills from Adopt a New Belief.

As business school ended, a friend told me about a venture he was cofounding in educational consulting. The team was finding high demand from important clients, including helping create the prestigious King’s Academy in Jordan, modeling itself after the elite Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, which the King of Jordan graduated from. The team of about a dozen mostly came from Columbia’s Teachers College and Business School. They had diverse, complementary skills relevant to market needs.

Despite the valuable clients and able team, the team wasn’t gelling. They didn’t have startup experience and I did, so they invited me to join. I saw what was keeping the team from gelling, as well as what was generating the valuable clients. The CEO, Tom, had what I would call a strong personality. Tom dressed impeccably—stylish yet academic. He quoted literature, philosophy, and popular culture. He impressed clients, which drew them in. His confidence told them his team would deliver. Hence the demand they saw.

Internally, however, his forcefulness pushed hard on his teammates. He demanded a lot of everyone but didn’t support them. You wanted to deliver for him while wanting to leave at the same time. With everyone feeling similarly, you didn’t know if the team would make it.

It didn’t take me long to decide I didn’t want the position. I’ve dealt with bosses I didn’t like. Why put myself through it?

Before declining the invitation, I thought, “I just spent two years in school learning to handle challenging work situations. I should know how to handle these things. Why don’t I join the team and try putting what I learned into practice? I’ll go as long as I can, and if it becomes too much I can always leave. The next time I have a challenging boss, the stakes might be higher and I might not have the choice to leave, so I should take this as far as I can.” Mentally, I made it into my professional testing ground for what I’d learned academically. I joined the team as chief operating officer.

There remained how to handle Tom. As able as I found him, as much as we shared the desire to deliver to clients, and as confidently as I decided to join the team, he still grated on me. I probably grated on him, too.

I noticed that preparing to meet him felt like preparing to go to the gym—anticipating challenge, which felt daunting, and growth, which felt encouraging. I had to steel my nerves, plan my actions, prepare how to handle problems, and so on. Instead of stressing muscles to develop them, I was stressing my mind to develop it.

Lifting heavier weights builds stronger muscles. As I developed my leadership practice through working with him, I adopted this belief:

Tom (or any challenging person) is a leadership equivalent of a heavy weight, and working with him is like lifting heavy weights at the gym.

Once the belief took root, I noticed that working sessions left me exhausted but not stressed. I felt the exhaustion of a job well done, not exasperation. My belief was adding meaning beyond my expectations, relaxing and calming me. I came to look forward to interacting with Tom the way I looked forward to going to a gym—a big difference from walking away from practicing what I had learned in school.

After about a year, the team coalesced and I moved on to other projects. I look back now with gratitude at my relationship with Tom.

After the project I found a pleasant surprise, following my Tomas-heavy-mental-weight belief. Having mastered that level of business challenge, I decided to look for a heavier weight—that is, for a more difficult person.

The pleasant surprise was that I couldn’t find one. That is, I still found difficult people, but all their difficulties were within my skill to handle. The world didn’t change. It had as many difficult people as ever. I changed. I found my world no longer had difficult people in it. I couldn’t find one then, and I haven’t since. It’s hard not to say I created a better world, but more accurately, I learned to perceive it differently, through the lens of a different belief.

Years later I decided to apply what I’d learned to a bigger challenge—my relationship with my father. We’d never been close, argued a lot, and hadn’t had a meaningful conversation since high school. I only visited with my sisters for holidays. I felt decades of resentment that I believed we could only overcome by getting to the root of everything and resolving it—a Herculean task I believed neither of us wanted to do.

My success with Tom led me to try something simpler. I chose to adopt the belief that if I behaved like I’d want to behave in the type of relationship I wanted with my father, he would respond in kind and behave in a complementary way.

For the first time in decades, I chose to visit him in Philadelphia on a weekend with no holiday, without my sisters. We walked in the park near his place and caught up and then cooked dinner together. There were some frictions, but I didn’t lose my calm. In other words, I behaved as I intended. He seemed to follow suit, and decades of resentment felt overcome. Changing a belief worked where decades of debate failed.

Before trying it, I would have called that belief crazy or too difficult to try. Instead, it taught me, through experience, to value flexibility in beliefs and develop skill in changing them.

The Adopt a Challenging Belief Exercise

To sense a counterproductive belief and deliberately change it is one of the most effective skills in leading yourself. This chapter’s exercise is to repeat Adopt a New Belief in a more challenging situation. Experience has shown me how much more people learn the second time. We’ll apply the skills you learn in leading yourself to leading others, so your effort here will reward you for the rest of the book and every time you lead.

What Makes a Belief More Challenging to Change?

A few things make a belief more challenging to change. The main ones are:

It creates more intense emotions,

Other beliefs depend on it,

It takes longer to change.

If you do this exercise for one week, try to pick a belief that works on a time scale of about a week or less.

What to Do

Find a new emotion coming from a new belief to change, where the belief is more challenging to change than last time. Follow the same steps as last time with that greater challenge:

1.Find a belief that leads to emotions you don’t like.

2.Think of emotions you would prefer in that context.

3.Think of a belief that would create one of the emotions you prefer.

4.Consciously and deliberately think the new belief.

Post-Exercise

For me, learning and experiencing this ability to effectively change my world felt like finding a holy grail—to create new habits effortlessly.

I hope you enjoyed and got insight from this exercise and that it reinforced and developed your skills in adopting new beliefs from chapter 8.

I hope you also saw more of how beliefs take root. Many new beliefs feels fake at first. When they create an outcome you want, you feel emotional reward—the feeling that this outcome is right and you want it to happen more—which makes them feel true. Indulging in the feeling of emotional reward they create accelerates the process.

Practice enables you to change your beliefs deliberately. Change your beliefs and you’ll feel like you changed your world because you changed your perception of it. Then your behavior will change to fit your new view. In other words, new beliefs lead to new strategies and behavior.

Other helpful side effects of this exercise include firmness in your beliefs but also openness to change them if others showed you a benefit to it. Most of all, you will have more confidence in acting on your beliefs.

I’ve experienced feelings of doubt, uncertainty, and fakeness, too. Since they always come on the way to personal growth, I’ve learned to appreciate and look forward to them, where I once feared them.

Following the steps above and starting with knowing your old emotions and the ones you prefer ensures you’re moving in a direction that’s right for you.

We’ll build on these skills with beliefs in later exercises.