The Top 3 Beliefs to Adopt in the New Year to Become a Better Leader, Happier Person & Someone Everyone Loves

Change and improvement in any area of life is impossible without changing your beliefs. Change a belief, and you can change your reality; hold your beliefs constant, and your life is guaranteed to stay the same. This is fact. And this is probably the number one mistake I see people make in striving to achieve their goals - they don’t analyze and adjust their beliefs. This is like beating yourself up because you don't wake-up as early as you’d like when the real problem is that you go to bed at 2am every night. We must address the core issue in order to create the change we want to see. 

I’ll be the first to admit that the beliefs I’ve listed below did not always belong to me. In fact, my beliefs used to be just about the exact opposite of what I’ve written here. It is only through time, a countless number of mistakes, some victories, a great deal of self-reflection, and even more reading that I have absorbed these beliefs into my everyday life. These beliefs are now the foundation of my mental and emotional framework, and keeping them present in my mind has perhaps had the greatest positive impact on my life. My life as an entrepreneur, business leader, husband, friend and just a person trying to give back my fair share to the world. But it requires constant effort, continual affirmations, and perpetual reminders.

I come to you today purely from the place of shared experience. These beliefs have made all the difference for me, and as a result, I believe I’m more content and effective than I’ve ever been (and I understand that I still have a long way to go). It is my hope that these beliefs, if adopted, will have a similar impact on you.

But I must warn you. These will likely seem counter-intuitive, and your biology and frame of mind will often tell you to think the opposite. I simply encourage you to stand-up to your current belief system and give these new beliefs a chance. What’s the worst that can happen? 

You can always stay the same! But it’s the New Year - this is the popular time for change and improvement. So let’s try and stick with the trend, good people.

And even if after reading these beliefs you don’t immediately believe them (I didn’t the first time I cycled through), just ask yourself, if you did force yourself to believe them, would you and those around you be better off? To me this is the key question we must always ask ourselves when considering whether or not to adopt a new belief. Would our lives be better if we believed these things? If the answer is a resounding “yes” then maybe, just maybe, it makes sense to fake it ’til you make it.

So here they are, the three top new beliefs that if you absorb and take ownership of can completely change your life for the better.

Belief #1: The way others are around us is a reflection of ourselves, not them.

Your spouse always seems to be in a bad mood and isn’t as loving as you’d like them to be. Maybe instead of seeing it as their fault, you recognize that you haven’t completely taken ownership in the relationship, and haven’t exactly presented the best version of yourself to your spouse. Then you see that you could do much more to inspire them, support them in their goals, and give them love without the expectation of love in return. Sure enough your spouse becomes the loving person you first fell in love with. Magic ensues. 

Your company culture isn’t where it needs to be. Your employees aren’t as engaged as they should be, don’t care as much as you’d like them to, and there always seems to be in-fighting and difficulty with effective collaboration. Is this their fault, or is this a reflection of you as a leader? How can you expect your team to be fully engaged with your organization when you’re not fully engaged with them? When’s the last time you sat down with each of them just to connect and see what’s happening in their life? Perhaps they seem to be distrustful of you and your vision because you’re distrusting of them, quick to jump on them when they make mistakes rather than giving them an unreasonable benefit of the doubt. Is it possible that you exert your authority, show anger and frustration in meetings, and dominate the conversation in interactions, thus making it difficult for others to relate to you while encouraging fear amongst your workforce? When you really look at it, are you actually a part of the problem?

When we start to take complete ownership of our surroundings it forces us to look at ourselves and see how we can improve. This comes down to radical responsibility. When we take radical responsibility over every aspect of our lives, we feel a sense of freedom and control that is uncanny and difficult to describe. With this mindset of ownership and responsibility, we’re free to create the life we want and are no longer held hostage to the way other people are. This allows us to live the reality we want to live and have maximum positive impact on ourselves and those around us. 

Belief #2: The way we view the world says much about ourselves and very little about the world.

As human beings we love to label people and things. That person is arrogant. That activity is stupid. But what do these labels, and these perceptions, say about us?

Perhaps the person you’re calling arrogant is simply more confident than you, and that makes you feel bad about yourself. Or maybe they’ve had a lot of success which in turn makes you think about those successes you haven’t yet achieved. Or even if the person acts more proud than they should, what if instead you recognized their positive qualities, and thus were attracted to them, became relatable to them and were therefore at least able to experience a positive interaction with them?

After calling an activity stupid, ask yourself, is it really? Or are you yourself afraid of participating in the activity because of how you think it would make you look or how it would be inconsistent with the identity you’ve created for yourself? If you had a growth mindset, and weren’t scared about making mistakes and not being great at everything and just testing things out from time to time, would you look the same way at the activity? We’ve all created identities for ourselves, and often times these identities that we hold so dear do not serve us. They become the enemy of a more ideal you.

And remember, the world has a funny way of meeting our expectations. If we expect people to treat us poorly, they typically will. If, on the other hand, we expect to be loved, held in high regard, and that the universe will continually be conspiring in our favor, that reality is often created. Be very careful with your expectations because they just might come true. 

Belief #3: Those things that we resent in others are typically due to deficiencies or dislikes we see in ourselves.

Resent is a very strong word. But most of us have resentments. And many of us can even think of a person we resent. Let’s try this.

Think about a person you resent, or a particular trait of a person that you resent. Dig deep here. What does this resentment say about you?

Perhaps you resent a co-worker for always leaving work at 5pm so they can see their kids and have dinner with their family. You think “Geez, here I am crushing it at work and staying at the office every night until 8pm and Bob is leaving every day when the clock strikes 5pm. He’s a bad team member that isn’t aligned with our organization and should be fired.” Is this really how you feel? Remember, we promised to dig deep here. Do you really care when Bob leaves the office? How does that impact you? More than likely, you’re frustrated with yourself that you don’t have a strong enough why to leave work at a particular hour or you’re not yet disciplined enough to get all of your work done more efficiently (earlier in the day). It’s not about Bob - it’s about you. And by the way, Bob may very well be achieving all of his goals, logging onto his computer at 8pm after hanging out with his family to finish his work, and also gets in earlier than you do. But, you didn’t notice those things, did you?

Or maybe it’s that person in your friend group who is always happy and acts so damn optimistic, and seems to do so authentically. First off, since when is that a problem? You resent them because you haven’t yet found out how to exude that same optimism, joy and cheer youself. Maybe you don’t even try. 

Or perhaps it’s your spouse. Those unique things they do, those unique qualities and skills and habits that you fell in love with way back when. You fell in love with those things because you didn’t possess them in yourself (but very likely wish you did). That’s why you found them so attractive! But now it’s been 10, 15 or 30 years, and those things you used to be attracted to now remind you how you don’t have them in yourself. You thought they would have rubbed off by now gosh darnit. So when you see them, you feel deficient and recognize what you don’t have. You adopt a scarcity mindset without realizing it. You feel bad. So you resent your spouse, treat them poorly, and this leads to your relationship suffering. All because of how you view yourself.

If your resentments in others had nothing to do with you and how you feel about yourself, then why the heck would you resent somebody for being that way? You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t really care. You wouldn’t let that person bother you.

By believing that our resentments are actually signals showing us how we feel about ourselves, it allows us to focus on what we can control (ourselves) and not what we can’t (other people). That’s the key here! That’s the key with all of these beliefs. By having these beliefs, it allows us to focus on things that we can alter and not get caught up or invested in those things we can’t. When we spend our efforts on things that we can change instead of those things we can’t, we can create a significantly better life for ourselves. When we spend time trying to change things we can’t, we will likely end-up insane, depressed and/or just feeling burnt out on life.

Self-awareness is the guide which lightens the path to a better life, a more exciting reality, and a more fulfilled existence. That’s what this beliefs are all about.