TO BE OR NOT TO BE?

What Shakespeare can teach us about Business Success

Here’s a simple but illuminating thought experiment that you can try for yourself, with your family, work colleagues. Select a room of your choice and make yourself comfortable. Then take the next 30 seconds to look around and count all the things that contain the colour Red. They could be completely red like a carpet or a mug. It could be something that contains a splash of red like a painting or a pencil. Be as observant as you can. OK - 30 seconds, anything red, ready, set, go……… OK. Time’s up! Now, what I’d like you to do is to tell me all the things that you counted that were the colour Blue. Blue!! What do you mean blue?? You asked us to count everything that was red. Those were the clear instructions. This is crazy. You tell us to look for one thing, then ask us for something completely different. I’m done with this….. Welcome to the Prison of Our Beliefs! To find out how we find ourselves incarcerated we need to return to the times just after our birth. As babies and infants we are continually bombarded with stimulus from our various senses. This stimulus which is then processed by the juvenile brain to start to build a model of the world, which it can then react to. For example, certain actions lead to facial expressions which come to be associated with nice feelings and get us a hug or food. So, hopefully, we do more of those. Others tend to lead to different expressions and tones of voice and seem to result in us being left alone in our cots to cry. So, hopefully, we do less of those. In this way, over time, we start to develop a “model” of how the world works. Rules of thumb for how one thing can lead to another. We go through a continual process of trial and error to test our hypotheses, incorporating ever more complex stimulus. We start to move our bodies in certain ways and find that we can “get around” more easily if we do so. We try and use our mouths and tongue to copy the sounds that come out of the mouths of our parents, and find that if we do so in certain ways they miraculously seem to understand what we want, and give us what we want. Brilliant! And so begins the process of building our Beliefs about the world. If I do this, and react like that, then this happens. Over time, if this process is repeated over and over again and the results are consistently the same, then that belief becomes ever stronger and more firmly entrenched. And we attach a label it. For example, I have an empty feeling in my stomach, and if I put food in my mouth, it goes away. We give the feeling a label called “hunger” and over time we test a hypothesis that if we put “food” in our mouths then the “hunger” goes away. And that hypothesis becomes a firmly held belief - “Food gets rid of hunger.” And this process, evolved over the millennia of human evolution, is critical for our survival. Imagine the opposite. Imagine that every time you had a craving and certain sensation in your mouth or stomach you had no idea how to get rid of it. Or that every time you saw a very large animal with long, razor-sharp teeth that you had no idea what it might do to you. It’s clear that you would very quickly starve, die of thirst or be the next item on the menu for the nearest sabre-tooth tiger. So this process of forming beliefs and a working model of the world is hard-wired into our brains. Over time those beliefs become ever more complex, allowing us as children to interact more successfully with our environment and then, as we get older, to begin to learn the behaviours and skills that can enable us to build effective and harmonious social relationships with others - be they parents, school friends, team mates, work colleagues etc. Necessarily we also begin to build beliefs about ourselves. About the type of person we are, the way we look, what we do or don’t like to do, what we are “good” or “bad” at doing. By now we have become so skillful in this process of building our beliefs that we never even stop to think about it. And therein lies the first step towards the “Prison of Our Beliefs”. Consider an innocuous fictional example. As a young child I knock over a glass of water. Mum says, “oh do be careful, Jonathan, try not to be so clumsy”. The moment passes. In a couple of days I knock over a paint pot. Mum says with a sense of exasperation “Oh Jonathan, you can be so clumsy sometimes”. A pattern is apparently emerging. A week later I spill milk all over the table when I’m pouring it over my breakfast cereal. The drama escalates. “Goodness me, you are so clumsy, I don’t know what to do with you sometimes”. And so in a short space of time I’ve gone from having an accident, to being “clumsy”, and I’ve got a nice label attached to that belief. Over time maybe the family get on board. And every time a similar accident happens it’s “there goes Jonathan again, he’s so clumsy you know.” Over time the layers of “supporting evidence” and reinforcement build so that eventually, from the grain of sand of a simple accident, I and others create a beautiful, perfectly formed “oyster” of a belief that “Jonathan is clumsy”. Time moves on and that belief becomes a part of my identity, of who I am. If another accident happens it merely strengthens my belief - “there I go again, I can’t believe I’m so clumsy”. I share the belief with my friends and colleagues, I celebrate and laugh about the stories that confirm the belief. The belief has now become a fact beyond any reasonable doubt - “Jonathan is a clumsy person”. Now, to emphasise again, building a structure of beliefs about ourselves and the world is critical for our survival. We need to know that cars drive on a certain side of the road, that if we cut ourselves then we will bleed, that clapping is interpreted positively, that reciprocating kindness is generally a good thing. However, the potential danger inherent in our belief structures lies in the fact that they are often held unconsciously and can therefore lie unchallenged and unquestioned, whether they are helping or harming us. Looking again at my “clumsiness”. I may believe that I am clumsy. But how do I know that I am clumsy, where is the evidence? How many accidents have I actually had? How does that compare to the population norms for accidents? How many accidents did I compared to my brothers and sisters? Was it just the case that my parents happened to be around when I had the accidents? Or maybe I was just more honest about reporting them? So, returning to our initial thought experiment - do you look for the Red or the Blue? The point is that our brain will look for whatever it is told to look for, and ignore the evidence to the contrary, that’s the way it works. So if you want it to look for red things it will look for red and ignore the blue. And vice-versa. It has no preference between red or blue, it just does as it is told. And this process is equally true for our beliefs. If we start to develop a belief then our brains will take that as an instruction to find the evidence to support that belief. I will note and remember all incidents where I was clumsy, and ignore the many, many more days and mealtimes that pass without incident. In many cases our beliefs can be helpful, supportive and makes us feel more positively about ourselves. But what about those instances where that isn’t the case. Those times when that little voice inside our heads is whispering those silent words of doubt, those stories from the past, manifesting the fears that sap our confidence, drain our energy and undermine our performance. We might call these our “limiting beliefs”. And their prevalence in so many aspects of our lives reflects their success in slipping under the radar of our psychological defences. Consider the following examples; Personal “I’m not good enough to ever achieve what I want in life” “I’m always overweight. I lose the pounds then just pile them back on again” “I’m unlucky in relationships, I never seem to meet the right person” “Joe is such a naughty child, I can’t do anything with him” School “I’m terrible at Maths/English/French/Art” “There’s no way I could ever get an A in that subject” “I always mess up under the pressure of exams” “People like me don’t go to Oxbridge” Business “We’ll never hit that target, it’s impossible” “We’re in the X business, not the Y business, we don’t have the skillset to do that” “Sam is just so political, not a team player at all” “I’m terrible at public speaking” Sport “Leicester will never win the Premier League” “We always mess up in penalty shootouts” “Those players would never come to a club like ours” “Footballers are all just greedy mercenaries” These are just a few examples of the “Prison of (Limiting) Beliefs”. I’m sure we could come up with hundreds in any area of our lives that we chose to think about. However, that would probably be a pretty depressing experience. So, let’s get into a more constructive frame of mind. How do we escape the Prison? At this point I will turn to a good old-fashioned mnemonic - The Three R’s 1) Recognise 2) InteRrogate (ok, a bit of artistic licence I admit) 3) Replace Recognise The first step is simply to recognise and acknowledge the presence of a limiting belief. The examples above display the common characteristics. Most typically the language of a belief is a definitive assertion, framed in a negative or imperative context. “Always, must, never, can’t, won’t, should, is/isn’t…..” You get the picture. The key is that the belief is portrayed as “the truth”. No point in questioning it, that’s just the way it is. InteRrogate As the name suggests we begin to loosen our attachment to the belief by simply questioning it. Some people find it helpful to think of the belief as a real physical entity and to bring it out of their minds and talk to it as if it were a person right there in front of them - think Hamlet talking to the skull! And then you start to pose the questions which challenge the assumptions underlying the belief; How do you know that? What’s the data that supports that? How many times have I done that versus the number of times that I haven’t? How do we compare as a group to other similar groups? When have I been successful in achieving the goals I’ve set myself? Under what circumstances would we be able to do that? What would we need to believe about ourselves in order for this to be true? Is this helpful in getting me to where I want to go? The list isn’t exhaustive, but you get the picture. The objective is use questions to begin to undermine the foundations of the beliefs, to create doubt in our minds as to whether they are in fact a “truth” that will continue forever, or simply a passing thought to which we attach no particular importance or significance. Replace It may be that at this point we can simply replace the old belief with a different one which we find more helpful and energising. However, beliefs can be tough to get rid with one quick wave of the mental wand, especially if we’ve been carrying them around for a long while. So be patient with yourself. Ask the questions, raise the internal doubts and just feel the strength or power of the belief begin to weaken its hold. It may not disappear entirely straight away - but the process has begun. To really get rid of this mental baggage it’s best to try and begin to experience the “new you”. Again, this may not happen in one go. One powerful tool for starting the journey is, again, a question. An “animating question”. One that challenges the core of the belief and begins to open up pathways of possible actions that we might take to eliminate it entirely. Moving towards something that serves us, and away from something that doesn’t. “What would it take for us to……” “In what circumstances could we…..” ‘What steps would I need to take in order to…….” Again, you get the picture. Over many years we’ve developed a level of mastery in forming our beliefs unconsciously. So it may take a little while to make a habit of doing so in a conscious way. The critical first step is to recognise that there is a process at play here. Once we know that then we can start to take steps to change it. We can indeed become prisoners of our beliefs. However, the good news is that we also have the keys to unlock the prison door – right there in our own minds. Of course that master of the human condition William Shakespeare knew this hundreds of years ago. As our old friend Hamlet said to Rosencrantz in Act 2, Scene 2, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” These processes are just as prevalent in companies as they are in individuals, there is such a thing as the “corporate mind”. When times are good a company’s beliefs about itself can be a powerful source of unity and positive morale. However, at times of stress and uncertainty those beliefs can cause the organisation to become too narrow in its thinking about potential ways forward, and effectively paralyzed. Typical alarm bells would be internal dialogue or media reporting along the following lines; - “The company is in a declining sector” - “Its consumers are dying off” - “The team isn’t up to it”” - “Technology is making it obsolete” - “We can’t change the industry that we’re in” - “We don’t have the resources to compete” As we now hopefully understand, the above statements are not “the truth” but rather a set of unconsciously created “limiting beliefs”. And, as such, we know there is a process which we can use to begin to question and undermine those beliefs, stop the paralysis and build the energy for change. The role of leaders in such a situation is not to have all the right answers. But rather to pose the right questions. It seems to me that “Not who are we, but what do we want to be?” – that is the question!