Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #4: Write Your Beliefs
The Write Your Beliefs exercise, much like the 2 previous exercises (3 Raisins and Inner Monologue), is an exercise in learning how to step outside of yourself and become an observer to your own being.
Whereas the 3 raisins exercise and inner monologue focused more on being a passive observer and just noticing what your mind is experiencing, the Write Your Beliefs exercise felt like I had to become more of an active observer. I had to get more meta about my thoughts and ‘think about thinking.’ I almost felt myself going back to the inner monologue exercise, as I frequently caught myself noting and hearing my inner monologue “talk” about what my beliefs are: “Wait…What’s the belief behind this? Why do I do this? What is my belief that tells me this is the right/normal thing to do? Do most other people believe this too? I wonder if this is a rare belief…Is this even a belief? Does this count as a belief? I’m not sure it does…” From that perspective of observing myself, it really felt like this exercise had built on the last two.
In general, as someone who has lived abroad for one third of my life, I taught myself to be hyper-conscious of my own actions and always question my own beliefs and whether they are typical for where I am. The smallest, almost insignificant beliefs or actions in another culture can be highly disrespectful, which I learned the hard way. Because of this hyper-sensitivity and always-questioning attitude towards my own actions and beliefs, the beliefs I wrote down were generally unsurprising to me, though I have never taken the time to write them down before and found the act of writing them all in one place to be really interesting. To have so many of your beliefs all just written out on paper made me feel somewhat exposed and self-conscious. I found myself thinking “What if someone reads this? What will they think of me?” It felt like I was really exposing a very private part of myself, and that was interesting to me. As fundamental as these are to my everyday life, there is probably not a single person on earth (other than me) that knows all of these about me.
The most compelling part of spending a week writing my beliefs was that the sheet I ended up with ends up representing the core fundamentals of who I am as a person, at least in the present moment. As far as I can think of, there isn’t anything else I’ve ever written, including journals, daily to-do lists, or life trackers that could come close to encompassing all that I am as a person, but I feel like my list of beliefs came close. The beliefs described who I am, the ideas that motivate the actions I make, and even revealed some of my flaws. Some beliefs were ones that were only temporary and felt just because of a particularly emotional moment. Others felt like they were core to who I am and never change. All were, in some way, me.
One lesson that this exercise imparted on me was the difference between values and beliefs. Before doing this exercise, I would not have been able to truly understand the difference between a value and a belief, but I feel like I do now. Whereas a value is a consciously made, fundamental concept that I aspire to embody, a belief is not always something that I have consciously chosen to believe. Whereas I always know what my values are, beliefs can be elusive and hard to identify. For example, I value kindness and respecting other people. That is something that is learned, but also something that I recognize is important and decide to embody. But a belief can be an unconscious, possibly dangerous, assumption, like a belief that classical music is good for you and rap is not (not an actual belief of mine, but a belief that I have heard). I might value and enjoy classical music, but if I believe that rap is bad for you and am not careful, my actions or words might easily offend someone. I recognize that beliefs and values are not necessarily mutually exclusive and can deeply affect each other, as well. I even found that sometimes my beliefs were opposite of my values, which was a valuable realization.
The value that I got from this exercise was surprisingly deep. Learning to recognize my own beliefs is a skill that, until now, I primarily used as a tool for navigating other cultures or interactions with other people, but this exercise has made me see the value of recognizing beliefs in the application of self-analysis. Only in being honest and transparent with yourself in your beliefs can you have any hope of growing – recognizing your beliefs, good or bad, gives you an opportunity to decide “is this the person I want to be? Does this belief accurately reflect my values and the person I am trying to be in the world?” It gives you a tool to analyze your own actions – to identify the reasons behind good actions in order to reinforce and encourage more of them, while identifying the reasons behind bad actions in order to block them from happening again.
This exercise is one that has felt so compelling, that after just one week of doing it, I feel like I haven’t done enough. I want to write more. I want to find every single one of my beliefs. It may not be realistic or possible, but there is something satisfying in the process of self-discovery and writing them down. I will certainly be continuing to write my beliefs for the coming weeks.
