6 Steps to Dismantle a Belief

Beliefs are the lens through which you see, sort and process the world. If you believe something is impossible, it probably will be for you. If you believe you’re no good at something, you probably won’t be. If you believe someone else is no good at something, they probably won’t be.

Beliefs are essential cognitive short-cuts – believing that touching hot metal will hurt me, saves me from regularly getting blisters. Believing that it’s a good idea to indicate when driving, helps society keep its roads safe. These are the essential and helpful beliefs we hold.

Then there are the insidious little automatic negative beliefs that are often untrue and unhelpful. “I’m no good at…. Bob never… It’s impossible to…”. These are the beliefs we need to ferret out and challenge if we’re going to become the most effective leader possible.

What leaders need to know about confirmation bias, self-fulfilling prophecy and cognitive dissonance

Beliefs self-perpetuate through the process of confirmation bias “the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or strengthens one's prior personal beliefs or hypotheses.”

Beliefs determine our outcomes due to self-fulfilling prophecy “the process through which an originally false expectation leads to its own confirmation”.

Given that, the solution seems simple, right? So simple that you can summarise it on a bumper sticker:

“Beliefs become things…

pick the good ones.”

It sounds incredibly simple. BUT… beliefs are insidious little suckers. They swill around below the level of consciousness, like shortcuts in a computer program. Our brains lay down neural pathways over them, transforming them so they become deeply held, pervasive truths. We are don’t even have awareness of, let alone agency over, them.

That’s when it’s helpful to understand and apply cognitive dissonance theory “where conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.”

Simply put if you identify an unhelpful negative belief then flood it with evidence which contradicts it, the belief will shift… eventually!

Your leadership experiment: Dismantle a belief

Step 1: Identify a limiting belief you have – this could be about yourself, a co-worker, a project, a task, a business. Anything from: “I’m no good at finances...” to “Bob doesn’t like/value me” to “xxx will never happen/work”

Step 2: Ask yourself, “In what way is the belief serving me?”

Step 3: Ask yourself, “In what way is this belief NOT serving me?”

Step 4: Search for at least 10 pieces of evidence to disprove the belief (e.g., for “I’m no good at finances”, this may be, “I always keep my accounts in credit, I’ve never paid a tax bill late, I don’t have credit card debt, when I set my mind to it I do a very thorough job of my books/expenses, I can read a spreadsheet if I have to.”

Step 5: Flip the belief to its positive opposite (e.g., “I’m no good at finances” becomes “I’m great at finances,” and ask yourself, “How would I behave differently if I believed this to be true?”

Step 6: Act that way for 1 day.

Let me know what you discover…