Values and Beliefs
This article is designed to help get you thinking about your
Values and what drives those values and
Beliefs and how they might be affecting the way you feel about leadership and leading.
A value is something that we hold most dear in our lives and as a coach, I often see passion sitting right at the heart of people’s values.
Passion inspires us to expand our lives; to ‘go get’, despite and often because of the obstacles we face.
Belief - an idea with legs!
A belief is different from a value in that it is something that we form largely through our experiences.
Motivational speaker, Tony Robbins shakes up the concept of belief by suggesting that a belief is ‘just an idea’ which like a table top, only becomes stable when you give it legs!
We may all have heard the term ‘limiting belief’. This is something that does not necessarily always serve us well. If our table is about 'people’s poor attitudes to disabled people and leadership' then it's going to be a difficult belief to change ... or is it?
Connecting with Passion!
Sync member, Jo Paul, talks about passions that come from the disabled experience.
'What I do know is that these experiences can make one more passionate, more shrewd and astute ....'
Connecting with passion can be a very important driver for us.
In order to connect with it, we need to look at our values more closely and we can do this using an exercise developed by the IHD - Institute of Human Development. Here goes...
Get some 'post-it' notes and without thinking too much, write down your top 10 values, do it now, before reading further. (Values can be things like 'honesty', 'fairness', 'power' etc)
Now, give up one of these 10 values, remove it from your life. Not easy! Continue until you can, if you are able, to give up all of your values, bar one.
Think for a few moments what passions fuel this one particular value. What are you left with?
When people first do this exercise, they often find it incredibly powerful in showing more clearly why they work in the way they do and what they want to achieve.
Click here to find out more about IHD - Institute of Human Development
Empowering Beliefs
If we dare to put a different idea out there in terms of leadership; that we can lead, that we must lead, that we are already leading and that leadership is ours for the taking it may just constitute a whole new furniture section in an Ikea catalogue!
The point being is that sometimes our beliefs can be so strong, so strongly set in stone, that they don’t allow us to see other perspectives and be balanced in our judgements of what is going on around us and also what we are going to do about it.
Sync member, Melissa Mostyn talks about 'fervour' - now there's a passionate word.
'if you have an issue that you want to address, and you have an idea of how to do it - and are not afraid to try - then you already have potential to be a leader, and no-one can stand in your way.'
I would be interested to ask Melissa about how she gave this idea legs so it became an empowering belief for her working life.
Philosopher Wayne Dyer has written an interesting book about ideas and intent, called 'The Power of Intention'.
Over to you...
So what are your thoughts about values beliefs and passion?
Are you going to throw your values, beliefs and ideas around, or are you going to stick with what you know and go for that.
Either way, leadership is about movement, so contemplating where we get stuck and how our leadership thinking is being fed, is useful.
Sarah Pickthall, Sync Coaching
