Belief drives everything Beliefs are fundamental to the way we see the word. They engage our instinctual and emotional selves. Guiding principles emerge from what we believe. Beliefs shape our perspective, which is why they’re worth looking at.
Belief speaks to the heart If you want commitment and aligned action, then your company’s principles need to embody sincere personal beliefs of stakeholders. Defining your own beliefs allows you to critically evaluate your existing principles. This is the first step toward greater understanding of yourself, of those around you, and of your organizational norms.
Belief has immense power for good or ill Psychosomatic illness is a reality. You can worry yourself sick imagining events that might never happen. But imagine the opposite – psychosomatic health. A placebo pill can make you better because you believe it will. Now extend that idea to your whole organization.
Can you believe in creating a manufacturing environment that’s successful, efficient, productive, and a place people want to come to work; a place of dignity, learning, respect, and fun? First you have to imagine it.
Belief focuses attention You’ve heard the expresion, “seeing is believing.” But believing is a way of seeing. Believing determines behavior. Existing belief filters what you see and what you ignore. It either limits or expands possibilities. If you look hard enough, you’ll usually find what you’re looking for.
If you look for mistakes, you’ll find them. If you look for people giving their best, you’re likely to find that, too. If you believe it’s a dog-eat-dog world, then you’ll spend a lot of time baring your teeth. Conflict and hostility do exist, but so do their opposites. If you look for people smiling, then that’s what you’re likely to see.
Belief is interpretation How you treat other people isn’t based on how they are, but your opinion of them. We interpret our experience based on our beliefs. Shakespeare’s character Hamlet spoke of this timeless wisdom when he said, “[F]or there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” You see people who are underperforming. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion they’re lazy. But what looks like laziness could be exhaustion. Just maybe the person you think of as lazy was up all night with a newborn or had a medical emergency. Everyone can identify physical exhaustion, but there is mental exhaustion, too. Being overwhelmed saps energy. You could judge a person to be confused when really they’re just unfamiliar with a situation. We all learn at different speeds.
Belief is personal This doesn’t mean exclusive. We have beliefs in common. This is what bonds groups together as community. But belief is a personal experience that creates meaning for an individual, and like snowflakes each of us is unique. Personal feeling is important to us. Throughout history untold numbers of people have died for their beliefs. Belief tell us who we are.
Belief (sometimes) trumps logic Because belief operates in the domain of feeling, in times of blind enthusiasm such as during stock-market bubbles, or under threat or stress, belief can override the thinking parts of the brain. When this happens, instinct takes over. Extreme conditions get in the way of thinking.
Belief is infectious Enthusiasm is catching, but so is despair. And this is why creating a workplace where people are given the chance to demonstrate more of who they are and what they can do makes sense.
Belief matters We can measure results, such as turnover rates, innovation, or people smiling at work. But it’s time to take a second look at the old saying, “What gets measured gets done.” Our industry’s default view is to look for measurable results. There is nothing wrong with this. It’s the scientific way.
Feelings are difficult to measure in a meaningful way. Emotional life is fundamental to the human experience and can’t be reduced to a pie chart. If we claim we are 20 percent sad, 30 percent mad, and 50 percent happy, it doesn’t tell us much. We don’t experience our emotional selves this way. Human emotion is far more complex and nuanced. Science is a powerful and effective discipline. We must have a scientific outlook, but too often think science is the only game in town. It’s not.
Sigmund Freud gave up working with hypnotism, not because it didn’t work (it did), but because it couldn’t be measured. Hypnotism couldn’t be systematically reproduced and therefore wasn’t considered scientific. At the time, the new discipline of psychoanalysis was desperate to claim the legitimacy science would bestow. The danger here for us is we ignore what we can’t measure. That’s mistake.
Science doesn’t have a lot to say about belief. Science can’t grasp human experience such as love, loyalty, gratitude, or meaning. It can measure what people say about these things, but not much about feeling experience itself. Belief isn’t something you can examine on the laboratory bench. But belief, like storytelling, has immense power.
Beliefs Change.
