Reply To: Exercise 5: Write Others’ Beliefs and Write Society’s Beliefs
Writing Others’ Beliefs
The exercise of the week was to write the beliefs of others (to the best of my ability, based on observations of behavior and words of others). I found the exercise to be more difficult than I anticipated it to be.
Observing others with the goal of trying to identify their beliefs is harder than it sounds. First of all, I would frequently just forget to do it while I was having interactions with people – it usually takes most of my focus to stay fully engaged in conversations and enjoy time with people, and adding an extra challenge of trying to analyze their behaviors was certainly pushing the boundaries of my mental capacity. Most of the time, I would have to take some time to try to reflect on conversations I just had, and then I’d find myself doubting whether my “beliefs” that I’m assigning to their behavior were right or not: “I mean they said this…But is it REALLY because they believe this? It sounds kind of like a stretch..I guess I’ll write it down since this is just to the best of my ability…” Most of the beliefs I wrote never “felt” like they were right. It felt like I was judging or assuming things of others, which felt slightly uncomfortable.
It was easier to do when I thought about entire groups of people as a whole, rather than individuals. With the recent election, I found myself trying to think about what Trump supporters believe, or what Kamala supporters believe. I thought a lot about if you take society as a whole, what do we believe? Oftentimes I felt myself feeling like I was judging people, which made me go back and rethink the belief I just wrote down. For example, I might have thought “Trump supporters are racist”, but after writing it down thinking, “you know, that’s not really fair…Not ALL Trump supporters are racist…I guarantee there are racist Kamala supporters somewhere in the country too…” and started to regret some of the things I wrote. This was one of the more interesting outcomes of this exercise: it forced me to think about what my beliefs of others are, and it opened my mind and made me less likely to quickly group people into categories and label them. In a way, the activity felt like an exercise in empathy.
Doing this exercise, identifying other people’s beliefs certainly felt like a skill that I had to develop. At the beginning, it felt very difficult (and it still does, a week later), but as I did it, I did feel like I was improving, albeit slowly. Making myself conscious of the beliefs of others feels like a difficult skill to learn that takes a long time – it almost requires an entirely different mindset, which is, maybe quite obviously, something that takes a long time to adjust to.
I can see why this skill of becoming aware of others’ beliefs is a useful one in a leadership course. Leading others requires first listening and learning about the people you want to lead – you have no chance of leading someone if you can’t identify with them or show them that you’re listening to them and that you understand them. I certainly wouldn’t be interested in being led by someone who doesn’t know me, doesn’t understand what I’m trying to achieve, or have dissimilar ideas as I do, so I wouldn’t expect anyone else to want to be led by me either, if I’m not able to do the same.
Much like the last exercise, I think this is one I’m going to continue doing for the next few weeks. I still feel like it’s a skill I’m weak at, at best. I can imagine a version of me that is able to identify beliefs quicker and more accurately, but I feel like I’m still weeks away from that.