The Three Levels of Leadership - Scouller Leadership Blog » Where Did My False Beliefs Come From?
Where Did My False Beliefs Come From?
After The Three Levels of Leadership came out in 2011, readers followed up with questions on leadership, leadership psychology and self-mastery – all of them interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I’m releasing my answers here as they supplement the “Three Levels” material and others may find them useful. Here’s the fourteenth in the series. I’ll post the others over the coming months…
Q14. Where did my False Self beliefs come from, especially my negative self-image ?
“In a sense it doesn’t matter where they came from. What only matters is that you have a False Self self-image.
I say that not to dismiss the importance of the question, but to focus you on the practical challenge before you. You see, it’s interesting to understand the origins of your False Self beliefs, but it won’t necessarily help you move beyond them, to let them go.
The Key: Self-Mastery
The key is to see clearly what those False Self beliefs in your mind are – especially those comprising your self-image.
I am not suggesting you should do this all at once. Indeed, I would strongly recommend you do not because otherwise it could leave you with an identity crisis. But I am suggesting that you see your False Self piece by piece and challenge it bit by bit; dissolving it as you go. This is the practice of self-mastery and it will allow your leadership presence to flow.
Having said all this, let me give you one example of how a False Self self-image can arise…
How Limiting Self-Image Beliefs Can Arise
Imagine an infant, say three months old. Now the infant has the power of self-awareness, but it has very little sense of self (self-image) to put in that awareness. So how does the infant acquire a sense of who it is? The answer is that it builds a sense of self-image from how it interprets its early experiences.
Now an infant can’t describe its self-image in words because it’s in what psychologists call the pre-verbal stage of life. Nonetheless, the basic capacities of awareness and intellect are alive and functioning in the infant. Thus, if parents continually ignore the infant – for example, if they don’t change its nappy when the infant needs or don’t feed it when it’s hungry – you can understand why the infant might develop the basic idea that it’s not important to its parents.
You see, we human beings seem to want to make meaning of everything. It seems we can’t bear to not make meaning of our circumstances – even if the meaning we confer is frightening, negative or depressing. Thus, is it not logical for the infant to infer in a primitive, pre-verbal way that being constantly ignored means it’s not important, that it’s insignificant?
At that time in its life, the infant doesn’t have the ability to say to itself, “Now hold on, of course I’m important. It’s just that my parents are having a hard time in their marriage right now. And anyway Auntie Sarah and Uncle Jack always pay me attention, so that shows I’m important to some people.” So the infant’s belief about its unimportance sticks.
And if that belief persists throughout childhood and then adolescence and into early adulthood it can cause serious problems because holding the belief that you are insignificant, that the world wouldn’t notice if you weren’t around, is inherently shaming. And shame hurts – I talked about the chronic pain that shame causes in answering the first question here. And it’s the pain that drives people to protect themselves from these feelings of shame through defensive mindsets and behaviours.
How This Affects Leaders
Now you will find senior managers – senior leaders – who have versions of insignificance-related limiting beliefs in their minds. There are more subtle versions of them, but they are merely variations on a theme. And insignificance-related beliefs will make it very hard for a person to come into contact naturally with people they don’t know well (or at all).
It will force them to develop defensive, unnatural behaviours to protect themselves against the experience of being ignored, which would only remind them of how unimportant they are.
In the main, you will see two opposite types of defensive behaviour in dealing with an insignificance belief. You will either see leaders reluctant to be visible, to speak up or to connect with people they don’t know well. Instead they will stay around people they are close to or to work behind closed doors. Or you will see them go to the opposite end of the scale and behave “over-socially”, where they’re driven to be loud, visible and ultra-sociable in a way that others will often see as unnatural, superficial and off-putting.
I don’t want to say more than that, but I hope that gives you an idea about how the False Self can develop.
The Practice of Self-Mastery
To finish on a practical note, the key to breaking free though is not usually to have brilliant insights into the origins of your False Self, but instead to understand what form it takes today, prise apart its constituent beliefs, challenge them and let them go. This is the process of self-mastery, which I cover in chapter 9 of The Three Levels of Leadership.”
The author is James Scouller, an executive coach. His book, The Three Levels of Leadership: How to Develop Your Leadership Presence, Knowhow and Skill, was published in May 2011. You can learn more about it at www.three-levels-of-leadership.com. If you want to see its reviews, click here: leadership book reviews. If you want to know where to buy it, click HERE. You can read more about his executive coaching services at The Scouller Partnership’s website.
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