The Beliefs We Buy

There's one formula that seems to be largely responsible for the way we understand the world:

Beliefs + information-consistent processing.

In other words, we move through the world mostly attempting to confirm what we already believe to be true.

That process leads to a host of cognitive errors downstream.

Notably, it also seems like we have a core set of beliefs about the world that we constantly seek to justify.

Here’s a look into several beliefs that are common for high performers that also limit achieving our full potential.

"My experience is a reasonable reference."

In the early days of psychology, Freud popularized the idea of "projection" - the notion that we take something that we feel or believe about us, and "project" that onto the experience of other people.

That concept stems from the first core belief that many of us hold that leads to biased reasoning - the idea that our own lived experience is a framework for making sense of the world.

This fallacy leads to things ranging from the curse of knowledge, or the idea that it's hard to take a perspective that's less informed than our own, all the way to more harmful, subtle biases like microaggressions and other identity-laden thinking processes.

This bias also leads to a host of challenges for coaches and leadership.

For example, sports coaches (incorrectly) believe that their perception of performance is more accurate than athletes. In a study wherein both athletes and coaches were asked to estimate the speed of a boat of rowers, the athletes (without a speedometer!) were significantly closer to the correct speed than their coaches, who had a tool at their disposal to anchor their estimates more realistically (a speedometer!) (Millar, S. K., Oldham, A. R., Renshaw, I., & Hopkins, W. G. (2017). Athlete and coach agreement: Identifying successful performance. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching,12(6), 807-813.).

Similarly, this belief combined with belief-consistent processing leads to things like misunderstanding of intentions, alignment, and the importance of specific events.

When you believe that your own experience is a reasonable and relevant reference, you're more likely to overestimate the extent to which other people think about you (spotlight effect), to overestimate the extent to which you believe other people understand your emotions and intentions (illusion of transparency and illusion of transparency of intention), and to overestimate the extent to which you believe other people are like you (false consensus effect).

I've seen each of these come up across the spaces I work.

Leaders who believe that their teams understand their vision, or assume their people know what they mean when they give feedback. Coaches who provide feedback with minimal context because they believe their connection with the athletes is good enough to transfer intention.

The simple way out of this bias is to slow down, ask questions, and seek alternative perspectives. In my coaching, when I’m helping executives or high performers or athletes think through challenging conversations, one of the first recommendations I make is to ask the other person what they’d be thinking, doing, or feeling if the roles were reversed. This simple act of perspective taking allows the leader to better understand another reference point and forces both parties out of their default view. The end result is often a deeper, more collaborative conversation that builds empathy. When we get out of our own head and see the world through someone else’s eyes, we can better bridge the gap between what we believe and the truth that lies somewhere in the middle.

This same fundamental belief is also responsible for some of the interesting findings in mindset research. For example, Navy SEALs who possess an attitude toward stress that suggests the best way to manage is to “will your way through it” tend to be worse teammates, simply because they can’t understand why their teammates can’t also just push through (Smith, E. N., Young, M. D., & Crum, A. J. (2020). Stress, mindsets, and success in Navy SEALs special warfare training.Frontiers in psychology,10, 2962).

When we believe or assume that our starting point is shared, we end up missing critical context that would allow us to operate more effectively.

“I make correct assessments.”

An adjunct to the first belief, the idea that we make correct assessments of ourselves and others leads to biased reasoning in several ways.

First, it leads us to believe we’re good judges of character and that we can easily understand what contributes to another person’s, and our own, success and failure. This leads to biases like the fundamental attribution error (the tendency to ascribe others’ failures to internal characteristics, while ascribing our own to external circumstances) and, ironically, the bias that we don't have any biases (after all, we make correct assessments!)

This bias runs rampant in sports, business, and life. Coaches and front offices alike believe that they've identified the best talent every year. Venture capitalists dole out million-dollar bets at volume to account for the fact that, underneath it all, their assessments aren't all that accurate - but each time they write a check, they build "conviction" that they've made the right assessment.

Conflict also stems from holding this fundamental belief too tightly. After all, if I make correct assessments, then you must be prone to more bias in your reasoning than I am, and therefore you are more likely to be wrong. Whenever you raise a divergent point of view from mine, I'm likely to view your take as coming from a place of inaccuracy, rather than your own experience, and as a result am less likely to adjust my own ideology. We see this at play in the larger discourse in our society that can hardly stand to invite alternative viewpoints.

"I am good."

88% of US drivers believe themselves to be safer than 50% of drivers on the road. 46.3% believe that they are in the top 20% of driving skills. 93% believe themselves to be better drivers than 50% on the road (Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta psychologica, 47(2), 143-148.)

How can this be?

We default to believing we are better than the average.

It's of course adaptive to see ourselves this way. Nobody wants to walk around feeling like they're worse than the majority of their peers, or like they don't have anything special to offer.

Seeing ourselves this way also gives us a very unrealistic view of the world.

We overestimate our view of our own performance and we tend to give ourselves too much credit.

When we are evaluating the performance of other people, this belief underlies many of the more critical views we tend to take. It leads to the trouble many high performers feel managing their frustrations that other people don’t perform to the same standard. This belief also leads us to see most other people as worse than us, which is why someone appearing “more successful” than we are feels so upsetting.

A much more functional way to view ourselves is to recognize that we are simply good at some things.

And we’re average, and below average, at plenty of others.

This isn’t to take away from what makes us special. It’s simply to acknowledge our own humanity and to see ourselves more accurately.

When people ask how I deal with the egos of professional athletes, this foundational belief and bias give me the evidence for my answer: we're all a lot more normal person than we think we are.