Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #8: Adopt a New Belief
For the next exercise, I had to adopt a new belief, using the book’s methodology: identify a negative emotion that comes up frequently, name it, identify the belief that brings rise to it, then identify the new emotion you want to replace it with, and come up with a replacement belief to think of everytime that negative emotion comes up.
Ever since I moved to Hawaii and then my baby was born, I’ve felt frustrated that I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to do during the day. It felt impossible to schedule anything or know how much to put on a to-do list since, depending on whether the baby naps or not, or how active he is, I may have little or no time at all to do anything I want, much less decide on what time I will commit to doing something. Also, towards the end of the year every year, I get pensive about my goals and productivity in life, and have been reading the book Getting Things Done to try to revamp my productivity system and rethink my goals. It seemed only fitting that I try to change a belief related to these.
I decided on the following for my exercise:
- My negative emotions: Frustration, powerlessness, and sometimes anger.
- The belief that leads to those emotions? I don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do.
- The emotions I’d rather feel: Control, confidence, and calm.
- The new belief to consider: There are people who get a lot done in a day and still raise children, author books, maintain full time jobs, etc. I have the same amount of time as anyone else, and I can control how I use it.
It’s hard to tell exactly whether it was purely this exercise or the combination of this and the productivity revamping I’m working on, but after I took on this belief, I started to see results within 2 days, and they were quite surprising: I found myself feeling like I had too much time and found myself having times during the day where I’d be trying to figure out what to do with my time, and not feel like I had anything in particular to do.
Part of it was the productivity revamping: due to the new system I’m working on, I’ve started to note down a lot of the thoughts and things I have to do in my head immediately when I have them. This meant that a lot of the stressing about “Oh no, I have to remember to do this later! Oh, and I can’t forget that! And I still haven’t finished this either!” disappeared, or at least was greatly reduced – now I was tracking all of those things and actively deciding when it’s reasonable to do which things. I wasn’t stressing about trying to remember things I can’t deal with right now anyway.
The change in emotions was also due to the belief change. Everytime I started to feel like “I don’t have time!!!” I would just try to tell myself “I have as much time as anyone else. You decide how you use this time.” and would find me asking myself “What’s the most important thing I can do now? What do I WANT to do now? Can I accomplish two things at once here?” and I started to realize that the negativity in thinking “I don’t have time!” was preventing myself from taking control and taking action. It wasn’t that I didn’t have time – I was convincing myself I didn’t have time. I had that feeling very strongly about twice throughout the week, and it did indeed feel empowering. And it felt like I had suddenly gained a lot of time.
Thanks to the success of the first belief-changing exercises, I really felt how useful of a skill this could be, and decided to try with another belief through the week. I am now trying to change how I feel about waking up early (From “waking up early is hard” to “others can do it, I can too”), though this one still hasn’t taken as well as I’d like, and will continue to try. It feels like it may require some adjustment, and that maybe I just got lucky with that first one being so easy. This one feels more like a challenge.
I’ve recognized how valuable it is if you can actually get your new belief to take, and now find myself looking for beliefs that I can try to change. If I were able to do this regularly and with more ease, I can imagine how a lot of stressful or uncomfortable situations in life could be turned around – it’s like the ultimate version of finding the silver lining and staying positive, but better, since it’s less focused on just “being hopeful” or focusing on the positive, and instead actively changing your own perspective and the belief that is leading to the negative feelings.
For the next exercise, I will need to find a more challenging belief to change, so it is the perfect place to continue to practice. I will most likely continue to try to change my belief about waking up early, but also am trying to find one more hard-to-change belief. This exercise is another that feels like it’s part of a neat set of skills I’m learning that are all leading up to something powerful, and am excited to keep moving forward.
