Identity and Beliefs

Owners buy techniques: delegation frameworks, morning routines, sales scripts, a new system. The technique works for a week or two and then quietly disappears, and the owner concludes they lack discipline. The technique was fighting a belief, and the belief won, because a belief is a rule you run on.

Behaviour follows belief. If you believe good people cannot be found in your trade, no recruitment process will help, because you will interview defensively, hire late, and prove yourself right. Change the belief and the behaviour changes on its own. That is why this comes before the plan rather than after it.

How the belief loop seals itself

The loop has four steps and it turns quietly, for years.

1. Belief — what you hold to be true. It drives…
2. Behaviour — what you do. Which produces…
3. Result — what the business gets back. Which you then read as…
4. Proof — see, I was right. Which strengthens the belief, and round it goes.

Nothing in that loop requires the belief to be true. It only requires you to keep behaving as though it is. The reason it is so hard to spot in yourself is that step four feels like observation rather than interpretation. It feels like experience, even when twenty years of it ran inside the same loop.

Above beliefs sits identity: the sentence you would use to describe the kind of owner you are. “I am a details person.” “I am not a salesman.” “I am the one who holds it together.” Identity is more stubborn than any individual belief, because it does not present as a claim about the world, it presents as a fact about you. And the business gets shaped to fit it. An owner whose identity is “the one who holds it together” will, without meaning to, build a company that falls apart without them.

Where owners’ beliefs come from

Usually from a small number of vivid early events, usually painful ones. One bad hire becomes “you cannot get good people”. One customer who did not pay becomes “always take a deposit”, which is fine, and also “never trust the friendly ones”, which is not. A recession that hurt becomes a permanent policy of holding too much cash and never investing.

Each of those started as a reasonable conclusion from a single data point, and none was ever re-tested. Businesses re-test their pricing, their suppliers and their software. Owners rarely re-test the rules they are running on, even though those rules were written by a younger, less experienced version of them with far less information.

Which beliefs to examine

“We do not work for people who treat our team badly” is a belief, and a good one. Examine the ones with three markers:

• They are stated as general truths about the world rather than as choices you have made.
• They explain a limit rather than a decision.
• You get faintly irritated when somebody questions them.

That last marker is the most reliable signal available to you.

The pattern is easiest to see in the belief that if you want it done right you have to do it yourself. An owner who holds it hires a manager, then keeps final say on the schedule, checks the work, and reverses a couple of the new manager’s decisions in front of the team. The manager stops making decisions and starts asking — which is rational behaviour for somebody who has learned that decisions get overturned publicly. Months later something is missed because it was not theirs to call, the owner deals with it personally at eleven at night, and the belief is confirmed with feeling. The loop manufactured the evidence for the belief.

How to work on this, this week

Write down the sentence

Take the part of the business that has not moved in two years and finish this line about it: “the truth about this is…” Whatever comes out unedited is the belief you are running on.

Date it

Ask when you first concluded that, and what happened. Most beliefs have a single origin event, and putting a year on it does more to loosen it than any amount of positive thinking.

Ask what evidence you have ignored

Look for cases against it, including ones involving other businesses like yours. If you cannot find any, note that.

Design one test that could prove you wrong

Make it specific, time-boxed and structured so the other person can succeed. Hand over one type of decision completely for six weeks, with a written limit and no override.

Write the result down at the end

Write it in sentences, before your memory tidies it back into the old story.

The mistakes to avoid

The first is attacking the behaviour and leaving the belief alone. So owners force delegation through willpower, hate every minute of it, and revert the moment something goes wrong.

The second is the affirmation approach: telling yourself the new belief until you believe it. That does not stick either, because you know it is not evidenced, and beliefs are built from evidence. The only reliable route is a real experiment, run properly, that produces a result the old belief cannot explain.

Questions to ask yourself

• What do you believe about your team, your market or your own ability that you have never once tested?
• Out of 10, how much of what you call experience is one bad year, repeated in your head?
• If your strongest belief about this business turned out to be wrong, what would you do differently on Monday?
• What is the sentence you use to describe yourself, and what has the business had to become for that sentence to stay true?

Where this fits in coaching

Identity and Beliefs is worked through in Personal Coaching, and it sits alongside two related mindsets: The Identity Iceberg and The Knowledge Pie.