[MUSIC] Hi there and welcome back. In this lesson, we will define a belief system and describe how it influences a person's point of view. As we go through this lesson, try to picture yourself in the different scenarios. What do you believe? Where does that belief come from? How might that influence your point of view in general, but also as a manager? These are powerful questions that help you be a better manager as coach. So first let's talk about what is a belief system? So a belief system is a group of thoughts that we have that sort of surround a particular topic that we choose to think and believe on purpose. I might have a belief system that's says everybody should work hard. Now there's a lot of thoughts that also feed that. I should be industrious, I should have motivation, I should be excited to go to work, I should want to look for a job, I should, right, all these kind of shoulds that we put on people. So that's an example of a belief system. The thing about belief systems though is that most of us go through our adult life not really recognizing, or maybe the better word is supervising, our belief systems. We acquire our belief systems, our point of view, through our experiences in life, and then we just keep believing them on purpose. And sometimes what we believe doesn't serve us anymore. So sometimes we inherit belief systems from other people. Sometimes those belief systems support really great success in our lives. Sometimes those belief systems actually perpetuate problems in our lives, and the same is true for managers and people who lead people. Right, if I have an inherent belief system that everybody's lazy and just out to make a buck as easy as they can, well that's certainly going to influence how I show up as someone's manager, right? If I also flip that and believe everybody wants to do the best job they can, and is always trying, we'll that's certainly going to influence how I show up as their manager. Belief systems are a group of thoughts that we believe on purpose, but in many cases they are not supervised, and so we don't even know that they exist. What can happen is a lot of our belief systems trick us into believing that they're actually true, that they're actually facts. For example, some of us believe that if employees are late to work they don't like their job. And I could actually go out to probably a handful of managers and say, hey, I've got this employee and he's been late to work the last 10 of the last 30 days. I don't think he wants to work here anymore. And everybody I talk to, or a majority of the people I talk to, would say, yeah, I know. People start being late to work, they don't want the job. He's probably looking for another job right now. I wouldn't spend a lot of time on that one, right? But that's not really true. All that's happened is the employee is late. [LAUGH] Now I've cultivated this belief system about this employee but frankly it's also coming from a much larger, probably point of view that people should work hard. People shouldn't be late, people should be on time. And I know there's people listening to this or watching this right now who agree with me. They're like, no, people shouldn't be late. [LAUGH] Well, guess what, people are late. Now what your job is as a manager is just to manage the fact that they're late. You don't have to have an opinion about it. You don't have to make assumptions about why they're late, just manage the fact that they're late. So because we have these belief systems that sort of trick us into believing that they're true, they can be kind of insidious, right? They like live there and they talk to us all the time. Our brain is feeding us information all the time, and we're believing it. And one of the examples I have is a client that I was working with. She had an employee who was very disorganized. Couldn't manage priorities, kept missing deadlines, just was a mess really. [LAUGH] And she was very frustrated because her belief system, her beliefs, her thoughts about this employee, first about this employee was they should know better by now. They're over 40, they should know better by now. Her belief system that sort of operated underneath all of that was people should be organized, which is so interesting. How many of you are always organized? Anyway, that's a side note. So, we have this employee who is not organized and we have this manager who believes that she should be organized, and should know how to manage her priorities. And because she believes that so wholeheartedly, shes's not helping the employee learn how to be organized. So when I asked her I'm like so what have you done to help this employee learn how to be more organized? Of course her response was, I shouldn't have to teach her. She's 40 some odd years old, she should know how to be organized. Okay, but she doesn't so now what are you going to do? And she said, well what I did last year for Christmas is I gave her an organizer. [LAUGH] Awesome, I bet that ended up in the garbage [LAUGH] because she doesn't know what to do with it. But this is a perfect example of a manager's belief system interfering with her ability to coach and develop her employee. Here's what we want to kind of get out of this, every single one of us has a point of view of everything. I can talk to you about the sun in the sky, the ocean, the beach, mountains, girls with blonde hair, boys with red hair. I can talk to you about anything and you will have a point of view. It doesn't mean you're right, it doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you have one. And we culminate our point of view, what lives underneath all of that is this belief system, which is anchored in values and all the experiences that we've had, right? As adults, we have an opportunity to pay attention to what we think and decide in a supervised manner if we want to keep believing it. Is what I am believing about this situation serving me? So in the next lesson, we're going to talk actually about how to recognize those thoughts that you're having and how those are influencing how you're coaching and managing your team.
