Reply To: Exercise 6: Unwanted Beliefs
Exercise 6: Unwanted Beliefs
This week, the Leadership Step By Step exercise was to attempt to identify unwanted beliefs everytime you feel an emotion you don’t like.
This exercise felt distinctly different from the past two. Whereas when I was just trying to identify as many beliefs of mine or others felt like it was something I had to constantly remind myself to do, this challenge had a very specific trigger: feeling an emotion I don’t like. With a trigger, I found myself trying to identify not just beliefs when I feel disliked emotions, but I’d start thinking about other people’s beliefs and my own beliefs unrelated to the disliked emotion as well. I found myself going back and starting second pages for my “Write Your Beliefs” and “Write Others’ Beliefs” sections of my notebook. It could have just been that I’m improving at identifying beliefs, but having the trigger seemed to open the floodgates and I was able to find a lot more beliefs.
There were some new questions that arose from this challenge as well. Does a disliked emotion (sadness, anger, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, etc.) always mean there’s an unwanted belief? Sometimes it felt like my anger/frustration/sadness was coming from a perfectly reasonable belief. For example, I may have felt frustrated and disappointed when someone was late to a meeting because I have a belief that being punctual is virtuous and respectful. This is a belief that I rather like and don’t feel is unwanted at all. Other times, it was very clear that my emotion was coming from a belief that I clearly would want to change, like when I felt frustrated that someone else wasn’t doing something the way I would do it, and I recognized that my way is not necessarily the “best” way.
Some of the beliefs I wrote also still felt a lot to me like judgments. Sometimes it felt uncomfortable to write beliefs, and I would feel a need to write a second sentence to try to justify it (“I know this isn’t true!!!” or “I reflected on this and recognized I was wrong later!!!”) as if I was afraid of my own judgment of my past self. I never wrote those second sentences, but sometimes there was a very strong urge to.
I was also surprised at how often the beliefs I was starting to discover felt like they were uncovering bits of who I am as a person. In general, I think we all think of ourselves as a kind of amorphous being that can’t really be defined by concrete, quantifiable measurements, but in some ways, this exercise started to feel like it was getting as close as you can to doing so. Writing many beliefs felt like they were very “core” to who I am as a person – fundamental, basic tenants that I live by to define my everyday self. Very often the beliefs were ones that I’ve never really thought deeply about or put down on paper, and were often beliefs that I take for granted or feel like are obvious and common to everyone. This made the exercise feel very much like an exercise in self-discovery and self-exploration.
Another interesting result of the exercise was that identifying beliefs made me a much “cooler” thinker when problems or conflicts arose. Having this trigger to identify the beliefs of myself and the person I was associating with gave me a way of taking a step back in the moment and thinking, rather than reacting emotionally. It gave me a brief moment to forget the emotion and analyze. This ended up making the emotion itself feel weaker and have less of a hold over me, and allowed me to handle the conflict with a much cooler head. This was one of my favorite results of the exercise. Depending on the situation, identifying the possible beliefs associated with a negative emotion might’ve helped me navigate the issue and come to a better solution than I would have ordinarily.
I can clearly see how this exercise is going to help in the future for leading myself and leading others. Trying to control your emotions is hard. But if you can identify their source, it becomes a much easier thing to do. If you can successfully identify your own beliefs and the beliefs of those around you with a high rate of accuracy, you’re far less likely to overreact, far more likely to think clearly, and will be far more likely to start with a problem, and turn it into a solution that is not just a solution, but also a better connection to and deeper understanding of a person in your life.