CHAPTER 8

Adopt a New Belief

On a cold, rainy, windy, late-autumn New York evening, I found myself hurrying up Sixth Avenue to my friend’s birthday party. Gusts blew the rain in all directions. I huddled under my umbrella, trying to keep as much of myself dry as I could. I was still getting cold and wet, especially my feet. I was miserable and tense.

A few minutes later I found myself striding confidently, relaxed, and open in the same cold, rain, and wind. I felt joyful. When I noticed the change, I laughed out loud.

What happened in between? Where did the joy and confidence come from?

I had been working on increasing my self-awareness for about a year by then and had reached a level where I could create and adopt new beliefs without thinking about it.

I later retraced my thoughts. When I had noticed the cold making me miserable, I thought, “I don’t like being cold, but does it have to make me feel miserable? When I ski I get cold and still enjoy myself.” When I noticed the rain making me miserable, I thought, “I don’t like getting wet, but does it have to make me miserable? I get wet in the shower and it feels good.” These two lines of unconscious thought led me to think, “Cold and wet aren’t bad. I just don’t like them,” and they stopped making me miserable.

The same environment was making the same physical sensations, but different beliefs were filtering them—beliefs I had chosen to adopt. You can adopt new beliefs, too. When you do, you change how you perceive and react to the world.

When I arrived at the party, I was no less wet or cold than I would have been otherwise, but I felt great. Everyone else arrived miserable. I had to wait a few minutes while they warmed up and overcame their misery. Since they didn’t change their beliefs, they had to wait for their environments to change, which was less under their control.

Don’t think you can change your beliefs? Consider this situation. You wake up one morning to find you left the window open, so it’s cold, and you overslept, so you don’t have enough time to get to an important meeting. You jump out of bed. You figure skipping breakfast will save you 10 minutes. You need to save more. This meeting is important. Being late could be disastrous. A long shower isn’t as important as this meeting so you tell yourself you’ll take as short a shower as you can. You turn on the water and jump in. Two minutes, tops! You’ll do what it takes to keep it short.

Then you feel the hot water. The cold goes away. It feels so good. You think to yourself, “I can relax for a few minutes. I don’t have to take such a short shower.”

In an instant, your belief about the importance of the meeting relative to the shower reverses. You remember all the other meetings you arrived a few minutes late to and realized they weren’t that bad. Your beliefs and values change. They can do so in an instant.

You can explain it how you want, but the change remains. If your mind can do it, your mind can do it. The next time, you can do it deliberately.

A shower is a simple, short-term change, but we can change complex, long-term beliefs, too.

Three books that influenced me the most illustrate this skill by ordinary people confronted with challenging situations—The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Gimp by Mark Zupan, and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the author tells about his experience after a stroke paralyzed his body except his left eyelid. Before his stroke, he was a successful journalist with a family.

Near total paralysis sounds unbearable. Most of our beliefs about how to live a good life wouldn’t help in such a situation. He changed his. He wrote the book by blinking to a transcriber, over 10 months, working four hours a day, about 200,000 blinks at about two minutes per word. He wrote about his unique experience.

The book was published in 1997 to excellent reviews. It became a number one bestseller, with sales reaching the millions, and then was made into a movie nominated for four Oscars, winning awards at Cannes and other festivals.

What were his beliefs? While he saw his body like a diving bell—a heavy chamber to lower divers underwater—he saw his mind like a butterfly. In his words,

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.

You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

Different views than most of us would expect! You can imagine how his views on life changed.

Gimp’s author tells his experience after a drunk driver partially paralyzed his arms and legs. Before the accident, he was a successful athlete. Now his beliefs on living a good life failed him. Yet he later said that if he could go back, he would not change what happened. Why not? Because he lived a better life after the accident. He took time to transition, but he won a Paralympic gold medal; played a major role in an Oscar-nominated movie that won Sundance; met the U.S. president; spoke to children and troops across the country; appeared on the Tonight Show; performed on stage with his favorite band, Pearl Jam; rock climbed; and did many other things he would not have otherwise. In his words,

Rather than fight an impossible battle, one that was beyond my ability to win, I chose instead to focus on the life that was within my grasp, and that life happened to be in a chair. You can say I was surrendering to my injury, but I chose to look at it another way. I was surrendering to my desire to live a happy, fulfilling life. I found I could now align my expectations with my abilities. Instead of concentrating on what I couldn’t do, I tried to focus on how far I had come. When I first arrived in the hospital, I was almost fully paralyzed. Two years later, I could bench two hundred pounds. I could walk close to three-quarters of a mile with my crutches. I had sky-dived. I had crowd surfed. I had realized that most roadblocks existed only in my mind. But my physical limitations were different. They were real. By accepting them, I wasn’t admitting defeat. In fact, I was doing the exact opposite. I was realizing I had done everything in my power to overcome them. And if I related all this back to my old ideas of winning and losing, I guess I was declaring myself a winner once and for all. It had just taken me some time to recognize what victory was going to look like for me.

Again, different views than most of us would expect—more happiness and fulfillment, not just from someone who became paralyzed but for anyone.

Man’s Search for Meaning tells Victor Frankl’s story of living under Nazis for three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. Before World War II, Frankl was a physician and therapist.

He wrote of his discoveries about beliefs,

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves.

When he couldn’t change his environment, he changed himself—in particular, his beliefs. The result? He inspired millions. His book remains a bestseller today, named one of the 10 most influential books of the twentieth century. More relevant to him, changing his beliefs led him to find more meaning in life, even in Auschwitz—not only to endure suffering, but in his words, amid torture he was able to find not just tolerance or comfort, but bliss:

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

. . . a thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

Bliss! He didn’t just endure. He made his life about love, salvation, and aspiration.

These stories’ value is not that their authors were superhuman but the opposite. They were regular humans with the same emotional systems you and I have. Anyone can become a cathedral builder. When you look, you find countless examples of people changing beliefs to create happiness, MVIP, emotional reward, and more in situations more challenging than you or I face. Henry David Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience,” considered himself more free in prison when imprisoned unjustly. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” echoed the belief. Susan B. Anthony believed she had the right to vote and could act on it. Nelson Mandela believed he could make a difference, even imprisoned for life. Think of Napoleon in exile, Michael Jordan after not making the varsity team, Gandhi after being thrown from the train for his skin color, Oprah Winfrey after her network failed publicly, Steve Jobs ousted from Apple, and so on. Most of all, think of yourself in the face of your adversity. You aren’t reading this book because you believe you can handle every challenge leadership may bring. You’re reading it, in part, to change that belief.

What they can do, so can we. Through practice.

They inspire me not just to admire them but also to believe when I feel miserable or even less than as good as I could imagine: “If anyone, anywhere, at any time overcame greater material challenges to enjoying life than I am facing now but created more joy than I am, then I can too.”

Since I’ve never considered my physical condition more challenging than paralysis or Nazis torturing me, they inspire me to change my beliefs as they did to get results like theirs.

The Adopt a New Belief Exercise

Becoming a Cathedral Builder

We did several exercises to raise awareness about beliefs in Unit 1, Understanding Yourself. This exercise acts on that awareness.

This exercise is to change a belief deliberately. We know from experience that our beliefs change. Now we’ll do it intentionally. We aren’t changing reality, just our internal representations.

Start with Your Emotions

Use your emotions to find beliefs to change. Emotions you don’t like arise from conflict between what you want and what you observe. Emotions you like arise when your beliefs are in sync with your observations. Bauby, Zupan, and Frankl’s message was that when you can’t change the world, you can change your beliefs and create as much meaning in your life as you want. You work with your beliefs, but your emotions guide you.

Trying to adopt a belief that will make your life worse won’t work. New beliefs rarely take root without considering the emotions they will create. For example, thinking, “I can go to the gym twice a week for a year,” if it means sacrificing something you like more than the gym, like time with your children or some equivalent, fails for most people. It creates too much emotional conflict. Instead of seeking a behavior, which takes willpower, seek an emotion, which motivates without willpower, like joy from exercising.

What to Do

The exercise is to adopt a new belief following these steps, which I’ll elaborate on:

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 an emotion you prefer.

4.Consciously and deliberately think the new belief.

The first three steps of the process are fast. They can take a few minutes. The fourth usually happens over several days. You don’t have to dedicate time to it, though; you can do it in the background of your regular life.

For example,

1.I feel miserable from the long, cold winter and believe the weather is causing my misery.

2.I’d prefer to feel fun, like a child anticipating or playing in snow.

3.I’ll believe that snow makes me feel like a child.

4.[Then think the new belief.]

I happened to do this belief during one long, cold New York winter and found that it worked.

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

In Write Your Unwanted Beliefs, you wrote beliefs that led to emotions you didn’t like. You’ve probably noticed others since. Starting with one of them usually works, though you can find a new one.

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

I recommend thinking of how your relevant role models feel in such situations.

Say you feel nervous asserting yourself in meetings, believing “people will think poorly of me if I say something stupid.” If you know people who don’t feel nervous, how do they feel? Maybe confident, responsible, or something like that.

You may think of several candidate emotions. You can choose which to work on in the next step.

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

Thinking of alternative candidate beliefs can feel weird at first. Frankl, Bauby, and Zupan had strong motivations to adopt new beliefs. Yours may not be as strong. Still, this step is a major part of becoming a cathedral builder.

The first time may take a while. If you want to feel confident, you might think of a belief like “High-ranking people say odd things and nobody has a problem with them,” “Nobody has considered anything I’ve said so far too odd, so it probably won’t happen,” or something like that.

You can copy others’ beliefs if you want. If you know a role model, you can ask that person what he or she thinks in similar situations for ideas. There is no prize for originality, only feeling emotions you prefer.

Make sure the new belief has two properties:

1.That it is plausible—that your mind won’t reject it without giving it a chance.

2.That genuinely believing the new belief will improve your life.

Write the belief concisely. It may take editing. The more clearly you can think it, the easier the next step will be. For example, to feel better about asserting yourself, you might write, “People understand and support people who speak out more than people who stay silent.”

I don’t recommend choosing the opposite of your current belief. Notice in Mark Zupan’s quote how he first struggled with beliefs that clashed with his world. Choosing beliefs that enable you to take responsibility to act on them usually works better. Effective beliefs usually both enable you and require you to take responsibility. When he realized he couldn’t overcome his paralysis, the belief “I lost” didn’t create emotions he wanted. Blindly choosing the opposite, “I won,” wouldn’t be plausible. “I will find a new definition of victory” met both properties and gave him something to act on.

Examples

Here are a few examples:

OLD	NEW
I can’t lose weight.	If others have lost weight so can I.
Commuting wastes my time.	I can use my commuting time productively.
The weather is cold and miserable.	People in colder weather find ways to be happy.
I have nothing to do but watch TV.	I have plenty to do besides watching TV.

STEP 4: Consciously and deliberately think the new belief.

For this exercise, when you find yourself thinking the old belief, consciously put the words of the new belief into your inner monologue.

At first you’ll feel like the new belief is wrong or fake. Remember that all beliefs are simplifications, so they all have flaws. Scrutinizing any belief will undermine it, even your old ones that don’t feel wrong. You aren’t trying to change anything external, just a mental representation. Frankl reached bliss.

Keep going past that “wrong” feeling if you feel it. Fake it until you make it.

Since you chose a belief that you expect to create feelings you prefer, the new belief will increasingly lead you to feel emotions you like. When you feel them, indulge in feeling the emotional reward that accompanies it. Emotional reward makes the new belief stick and motivates you to keep developing the skill. You are training yourself to believe something.

You will also sometimes feel the new belief is wrong. Accept that it may be, but then so is any other. If you feel emotionally punishing feelings, do the opposite of indulging in them. I recommend acknowledging them and moving on to other thoughts.

Believing a new belief takes time, but usually a week will do it. Try to pick beliefs that

You think many times in a week.

Don’t generate overly intense emotions.

You expect will improve your life.

The value of this exercise is the skills it develops. Once you develop them, you’ll be able to change beliefs at any time. You’ll also become more aware of beliefs where changing them will reduce unwanted emotions. You’ll feel more emotions you like, which will lead to a lifestyle with more MVIP.

The more you can change beliefs, the more aware you’ll become of emotions you don’t like because you can do something about them, and then you’ll act on them.

Like the journey of a thousand miles beginning with one step, this exercise gives you the rudiments of a basic skill you’ll learn to apply faster and more comprehensively with practice. Each time you do it, your skills will grow. Eventually you’ll change beliefs fast and easily, making yourself a cathedral builder. You’ll also learn to influence others’ beliefs—an important part of leading we’ll return to.

If It Doesn’t Take Root

If the new belief doesn’t take root, try again with a different belief or emotional situation. Beliefs that are easier to take root are usually less related to intense emotions, less connected to other beliefs, and work on shorter time scales.

Stop reading. Put the book down and do the exercise.

Post-Exercise

I hope you enjoyed, developed skills, and got insight from this exercise. The exercises are becoming more active. We’ll keep building on them.

When I first did this exercise 10 years ago, it felt alien. My existing beliefs felt right. Trying to change them because I didn’t like them felt wrong, like putting lipstick on a pig. Since then I’ve learned that believing doesn’t make it right—all beliefs have flaws, so they can’t be completely right—and that initial beliefs are often less likely to be helpful than ones I intentionally create after reflection.

The skills this exercise creates help me every day. Instead of getting stuck looking at problems one way, I have the mental flexibility to look for other solutions until I find one. Inflexibility in beliefs restricts your ability to solve problems, as I learned from the psychologist who studied intelligence.