Two people can sit in the same office, do the same work and report to the same boss, yet still have entirely different views of their job. One might feel trapped in a toxic workplace while the other feels energised by it. The difference? It’s not to do with their work, it’s what they believe about it.
You’ve no doubt built mental images up of everyone that you work with. One person might be lazy, the other super smart, and there’s always a colleague that we tend to put in the ‘difficult’ basket. We spend so much time thinking about how to change other people’s behaviour, but what if the solution to improving our workplaces started with challenging our own invisible thinking?
That’s what Nir Eyal, the author of the new book Beyond Belief says. I spoke with Nir this week as his book hit The New York Times bestseller list, the third of his to do so after Hooked and Indistractable.
“We do not see people as they are, we see them as we believe them to be,” he says. “We see our beliefs about them because the brain doesn’t see reality, it sees what it predicts about reality.”
Some of the research behind this is what psychologists call the ‘fundamental attribution error’. This is our tendency to assume that other people’s flaws come from their personality, whereas our own mistakes are caused by the situation that we’re in.
It was coined by psychologist Lee Ross in the 1970s, and explains why when a colleague misses a deadline, we blame their personality (“they’re lazy!“), but when we do it, we blame the surrounding circumstances (“I’m busy!”).
If you can shift some of those beliefs, you might just find your job may suddenly feel a little bit more energising than it did before.
There are three ways we perceive the world, through facts, faiths and beliefs. Facts are objective truths, like the fact that water freezes at zero degrees, or the speed at which light travels. At the other end is faith, a conviction that doesn’t require any proof, yet can still be inspiring.
Between the two of these are beliefs, with Nir says should be viewed as tools not truths. “The brain is incapable of seeing reality accurately, so it sees it through this tiny keyhole of attention.”
Take your co-worker, the one you’ve dismissed because every little thing they do helps prove your point that they’re not adding much to the workplace. What would happen if you believed something different?
“You could try on, for size, the belief that this person is not lazy, they just haven’t been given the right job to flourish,” suggested Nir.
The aim is not to deceive, or even gaslight, yourself. Nir says there are four questions you can ask yourself if you want to expand some of the existing beliefs that we hold: ‘Is it true?’, ‘is it absolutely true?’, ‘who am I when I hold on to this belief?’ and ‘who would I be without this belief?’ Get to the bottom of those with honesty, and you’ll learn that you can hold multiple beliefs at the same time, both limiting and liberating.
Of course, none of this means excusing bad behaviour or pretending that problems don’t exist. What it does mean is realising that you have a lot more control over the world around you than you think.
And if you can shift some of those beliefs, even just slightly, you might just find that the same office, the same boss and the same job can suddenly feel a little bit more energising than they did before.
Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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