Some of the most startling shifts in my understanding have occurred as a result of the insights that my children have made and shared with me. One case in point was a conversation that I had with my son, Michael, when he was twelve years old. 

It went like this:

 

 

 

Mike: I don’t understand belief.

Dad: What don’t you understand?

Mike: Why do we need it?

Dad: Because it’s part of life.

Mike: But Dad, if we know something, we know it, right?

Dad: Yes.

Mike: And if we don’t know something, we don’t know it, right?

Dad: Uh-huh.

Mike: And if we are not comfortable with not knowing, then we make something up and call it a belief, right?

Dad: Right.

Mike: Well, why don’t we just say what we know, not say what we don’t know, and save ourselves the trouble of having to create belief?

In his youthful innocence, my son had stumbled on an obvious fact: Most of the content in the human mind functions as a buffer for a large group of sensitive egos who simply can’t tolerate not knowing. My son had clearly seen that the emperor had no clothes. 

In my previous post I teased out the difference between concept and experience. I pointed out that leaders today many times have lost the ability to distinguish between the two. In fact, I concluded that the map is a conglomeration of our concepts and that experience is the land of leadership upon which we are all required to walk. If concepts create our map, then belief becomes the mountains that cannot be scaled and the oceans that cannot be penetrated. Belief is the enshrining of locations on our map that make them more dense than their very nature. Belief is the crystallization of concept. Much like when we travel to our favorite destinations, our beliefs become like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building. We can’t help ourselves but to return to our favorite belief sites again and again.

But think about this for a moment. If leadership requires the space in experience for you to respond and arise in that specific defining moment, then the loving embrace of our long-held beliefs may very well keep us from that leadership moment. When humans engage in the addiction of belief it tends to accentuate the believer to the detriment of the followers. True leadership is not in the act of one man, but in the act of that man as properly situated within the whole of humanity- never losing touch with that totality.

So I want you to consider the possibility that your long cherished beliefs may block the very essence of who you are and the response of the leader that you hope to be. 

Can you suspend belief and stand in the unknown and unmarked place that all great leaders embrace?

Tags: belief, concept, experience

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Alan Shelton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.