This is a written Transcription for the Leadership Hustle episode about How Habits of Thought Become Beliefs, from Season 1 Episode 5.

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Habits of Thought: FULL WRITTEN TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Frederickson: Are your habits hurting or helping? In this episode, you'll learn to identify your blind spots so you don't become stagnant. Hello and welcome to the Leadership hustle for executives whose companies are growing fast and need leaders who are ready. Welcome to the next episode of The Leadership Hustle, a podcast for executives whose companies are growing fast and need leaders who are ready. I'm your host, Andrea Fredrickson, and I'm here with my co-host, Michelle Hill. Hello. And today, we are going to work through the topic of habits and beliefs and things that go through our mind that we don't even realize that are making an impact on the people around us. So as we get going today, I think that I think it's imperative that we talk a little bit about habits. I think habits for many of us are really, really important. You know, it's just a habit of how I tie my shoe. I don't think about it. It just happens. Correct? Yeah, because we don't have to use energy for it. Right, Exactly. And, you know, I don't have you know, you're right. That's that's exactly the word. It's an efficiency. I don't have to think about what I'm doing. It's just there.

 

Michelle Hill: And how.

 

Andrea Frederickson: To do something on how to do something. Yes. But the thing that gets in the way are those habits of thought. Yes. And, you know, I think the older we get or the more routine that we get, the more that we really should think about and challenge those habits. So. Well.

 

Michelle Hill: So tell us, you know, so you bring up the habits of thought. How do we get those? I mean, like, what is a good question?

 

Andrea Frederickson: So, so like so habits of thought. Well, first of all, you know, according to research, we have over 56,000 thoughts a day. And those thoughts are, you know, some from when we were young to some that maybe happened a few months ago to just something that may have happened recently. But we're thinking about them over and over and over again. Right. And the more we do or think or hear something over and over again, it goes from our old our new brain to our old brain. And that path becomes strong. Those those repetitions a little bit like marketing, right? When you hear something over and over and over again has a pattern or a a path in our brain, which becomes very, very strong. And that habit of thought becomes a belief. Now, notice I didn't say that the habit of thought was true. Correct? It's simply a habit of thought, Right?

 

Michelle Hill: A lot of assumptions that our brain is making during this whole process, right?

 

Andrea Frederickson: So when I was young, I grew up in small town Iowa, 500 people, and I believed every single person that I knew that wrote or that I saw that wrote a Harley Davidson was a Hells Angel because anything that I ever saw, anybody that I knew who rode a Harley in my mind was part of this biker gang. Right? Long story short, I went to work for a location in Nebraska, and the people that were working with this group of people, all of the people that worked there, had Harley Davidsons. And I remember looking at this and thinking, This is horrible. Like, I don't even like I'm going to go. I'm going to they even interviewed me. They asked me, it's like, so what do you think about this unit that you're going to be working on? And I'm like, Am I afraid of the staff or the clients? Right? I'm like, I'm just kind of worried about this. And so come to find out obviously, that not everybody who rides a Harley is is from a very destructive biker gang. But there are things like that. It's like, why do I believe that? I mean, there's so many stories I could tell you of habits of thought that I had that I no longer believe, right? That I mean, we all have those things that we that we believe certain things that are untrue. And so these things that we think about do over and over again, they become habits of thought so.

 

Michelle Hill: Well, and they're they may not be true, let's say to everyone, because everyone else is viewing the world through their lenses. Right, Right. But it's true to us, if I'm viewing it through my lens, even though I don't have all the facts, I still believe it's true.

 

Andrea Frederickson: That's the story I have in my head. And we know that whatever goes on in your head comes out in your actions. Yes. So, you know, there are habits that we have in the workplace. There are habits of thought that we have about people. There are habits of thought related to customers.

 

Michelle Hill: There's habits of thoughts related to departments like all these people in one area all fall within this belief, Right? And it's like, really?

 

Andrea Frederickson: So. So I think that it's really important to stop and think about do you recognize that you may have a habit of thought, an attitude or a belief? Those are code words about something that really needs to be challenged, Right. And so let's talk a little bit about what what are some of the things that a person can do to. Really check or challenge what some of those habits are. What are some of the things that you're telling your teams or your groups of folks that like, wow, you can you can hear the habit that's not helping them?

 

Michelle Hill: Well, I think there's first it's about creating awareness because if it's a habit, we're not even it's a subconscious. We're not even aware that it's happening. Right. So blind spot. Yeah. Blind spot. Hello. So how do I identify those blind spots? And that can be done a lot of different ways, but a couple that might be easy and something you could do today. Some of it's getting feedback, asking very specific, you know, questions from people around you. What what might be some things that I might say that can impact or make you cause cause you to believe something about my belief about a department or whatever it may be, journaling. At the end of the day, what are what are your thoughts on, you know, how things went and what are some of those thoughts? And if you go back and look through your journal, you know your what you've written throughout the week, month or whatever, you might notice some trends in there that that bubble up as well. We know from just working with clients 360, sometimes the 360 again, because we do ours more, they're not electronic. So we're actually having conversations with people When we are going back through looking at those results, you can trend, you can start looking for some trends of there may be a habit of a thought, a belief about X that they may they may not be aware of, but people feel it through their actions. Sure, they don't. They might not. They may say this is a really great person, but for some reason at times they feel like they favor, you know, just things that will come up.

 

Andrea Frederickson: So so it's interesting. You talk about the Journal. Just last week I was working with an executive team and one of the senior executives on that team mentioned a technique that he's using based upon journaling. He said, Yeah, I remember years ago when I was going through my PhD program, they told us as executives that we should journal, and he said, I thought that was the stupidest idea. It was horrible until I started doing my own version of journaling. Okay, so it's journaling, but it wasn't like I was writing in my diary, right? It was really okay, who did I talk to? What was the impact? What can I do different? What am I doing to make things better? And so this journaling is truly something that you can go back to and say, Why did I think that or why did I believe that? And so just challenging ourselves, you know, I, I think that one of the patterns that we use when we're working on projects with teams is that we will go down, we'll people will go down a path of how to solve a problem and they will come up with a solution.

 

Andrea Frederickson: And what the technique is, is to ask, So what if the opposite were true? Some assumption that we've made in in our in our plan, well, let's use the same technique on. All right. So I think Michelle is doing, you know, is struggling with a specific area in in her daily routine or her responsibilities. What if I ask myself, you know, the opposite is true. She's not struggling. She's simply doing it differently than I am. Like, what would I do differently? What what would I do to challenge how I think? Sometimes I just need to ask myself that question. The other thing is that I might ask the question instead of formulating what my opinion is already and verbalizing it. Because we as senior leaders, when we put our opinion out there before everybody else, what tends to happen is people believe that we've already made up our mind. Yes, Again, that's their perception. That's not necessarily what we believe, but that's the action they see, the story they're telling themselves. That's their.

 

Michelle Hill: Belief. That's their belief. And that will impact how they participate, that will impact how they share.

 

Andrea Frederickson: And and so we need to change our belief in that. I need to explain my belief first so that they know where I'm going. We simply need to say, here's the direction. How would you go about doing it? Or how would you go about solving this issue? Or tell me your ideas and subservient ing our opinions until we hear the other person's perspective. What we're not looking for in those scenarios is I need you to confirm that I know what I know I'm looking for. What are the ways that I can be viewing this differently?

 

Michelle Hill: Well, and I think what what also has to happen that is really, really important because people pick up on this is when you're asking, you know, so what approach did you take? What ideas do you have? How could we do this different? And your people give you ideas. You have to really listen and actually think about it. Sitter it versus listen, but then go back to your idea, because I do hear that often as well, where, yeah, they listen to me. So I felt heard, but they really didn't listen.

 

Andrea Frederickson: So they heard the information so that they could deflect or confirm, Deflect their idea to confirm their idea. Yes. Right. Or to or just.

 

Michelle Hill: Just let you let you talk. And then. But we're still going to do this.

 

Andrea Frederickson: We're still going to do that. Yes.

 

Michelle Hill: And it's so quick. And there wasn't no time really to even process their idea or clarify some things that it's very obvious. And then at that point, you're conditioning your people to, yeah, you can give your opinion, but they really don't listen. They're going to do whatever. They're still thinking.

 

Andrea Frederickson: Challenging. The thought is looking or listening to somebody else's idea or looking for an idea that's different than your own and proving yourself right in that arena. We do this exercise in one of our activities or one of our sessions where you have to argue the opposite of what you truly believe and the number of people who come out of that exercise like that was so hard because I had to. I didn't know when I was going to get my chance to say something, and I couldn't argue something somebody else already said I had to come up with my own. And how often is it that when we are in meetings or we're in discussions, what we're looking for is how can I prove myself right? We don't wake up every day, so how can I screw things up, right? Correct. And our brains are functioning to be right. We're looking for things to confirm what we what we know, which is natural, which is which is so natural. And so, you know, I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg when we're talking about how habits are formed and what we can do about them. So, yes, habits are formed by doing something or believing or thinking something over and over and over again and and finding ways to support that. And then our.

 

Michelle Hill: Brains out there looking for that support. Right. It's looking to justify right at that point that I'm right. Because again, we want to confirm that we're right. And what we.

 

Andrea Frederickson: Look for, we find. Correct. Right. Versus what can I find that is saying something different than what I believe and consciously asking for those things. Because when we do that, well, let's say let's let's look at this scenario. If I'm doing it by myself, I might not have enough perspective or enough ideas to bring something forward. But if I bring a team of people together, whether they're all at the same time or individual and I ask them, shoot holes in this, argue the opposite for me. What's another way I could think about this? Now what we have is a bigger scope of something to choose from a perspective, we're probably getting closer to the truth. Yes. Right. Yes.

 

Michelle Hill: That's the importance of collaboration when working with our team.

 

Andrea Frederickson: Well, and think about how much more your team is going to appreciate the fact that you haven't already made up your mind. Right. Or that you haven't used this habit. This is the way we've done it. How many times do we hear that we have people say, Well, we've always done it that way and there's not another way to do it. We know of different groups of people, different sciences, where what they're doing is intentionally breaking something and making it better. Well, this is breaking your habit of thought and finding a way to make it better. You may discover that your original thought was still good, but my bet is you will find something that will make this conversation, this opinion, this perspective far better.

 

Michelle Hill: Yes, Well, and years ago someone had said that about curiosity and that that belief system that you can learn from everyone and believing that that I can learn from everyone, that I that I interact with today is you start looking for those things and you start looking for they know something different than me. So curious. Why do they believe that we have different beliefs versus defending my belief system, right? Being open to be curious.

 

Andrea Frederickson: I love that curiosity.

 

Michelle Hill: That's a different story. Sorry.

 

Andrea Frederickson: So. So let's go back, tie it up. Understand your beliefs come from habits of thought, thinking things, doing things over and over and over again, but recognizing that there are simple techniques like asking other people's opinions, arguing the opposite, researching things from different perspectives and angles, attending things from a different area of of the world, but just looking at things from different angles and then saying, have I made the right decision or have I made the right decision for now? Thanks again for joining us on the Leadership Hustle. Hit the subscribe button so you never so you never miss close. I know. I'm like so fucking close. Thanks again for joining us on the thank. Again for joining us on the leadership Hustle. Hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode.