I recommend reflecting on your experience with this chapter’s exercise before continuing. You can reflect about anything you found relevant, but here are some questions you may want to consider:

Did you notice any trends?

How did identifying beliefs feel?

Did you feel like you developed a skill?

How accurate do you think you were?

Did you feel differently about people when you thought of their beliefs?

Does reading people’s beliefs make you think differently about leadership?

Where and how might you apply your experience in the rest of your life?

Data from Exercises

This exercise has you write others’ beliefs. It builds on the self-awareness of Write Your Beliefs by putting your focus outward, to others’ beliefs. It also develops your sensitivity to how people’s beliefs show in their behavior. It’s our first empathy-developing exercise of several to come. It will also continue to develop your awareness of your beliefs.
Others’ Beliefs and Leadership People often lead and manage people through external incentives, like bonuses, promotions, and vacations for success and threats of loss of responsibility and demotions for failure.
While external incentives motivate, they do indirectly, through internal motivations, which motivate directly. Connecting with people’s emotions motivates them directly. This exercise develops the skill to connect with other people’s motivations through their beliefs.
This exercise is only about identifying and recording beliefs, not judging or disproving them, which hurts your ability to lead. We reason from beliefs, not to them. We often don’t notice them because they feel like truths about the world. People with different beliefs believe different things are true. That’s a problem for a command-and-control authoritarian manager who would prefer everyone to follow orders but an advantage for leaders who see how teams contributing diverse strengths can lead to outcomes beyond what they could envision alone.
The best way to see others’ beliefs is through practice. Most of you will struggle at first. It’s easy to read my words and think, “That’s useful to know. Next time someone has a different belief than mine, I’ll notice it and avoid problems like Christine’s,” but you’ll forget soon if you don’t practice and revert.
After you do the exercise for about a week, you’ll start sensing beliefs other people may not know they have. You’ll start to discern beliefs from increasingly subtle cues. That is, you’ll develop intuition, like a baseball batter who can hit a ball thrown faster than he can consciously react. People will think you were born with it.
Later exercises will use this awareness to inspire people. For now, we’re still focusing on awareness.

What to Do

1. Carry something to write with for a week.

2. When something leads you to notice another person’s belief, write it down.

3. When something leads you to notice a belief of mainstream society, write it down. You can’t directly access others’ thoughts, so you have to deduce them from their behavior and communication. You can’t verify your conclusions, either, but you’ll likely find your skill improving. At the end, you’ll have two lists of beliefs—one of other individuals’ beliefs and one of society’s. It may take a couple days to get the hang of it, like Write Your Belief, but you’ll get it.