When you challenge your own thinking, you find room to grow

A few years ago, I was at lunch with a business leader whom I had recently met. We were having an interesting conversation about her work and mine when somehow the conversation veered into politics. It was shortly before the date of a very contentious election, and we discovered to our mutual shock that we were backing the opposite candidates.

I wish I could tell you that we then entered into a thoughtful discussion of the reasons behind each of our choices. But instead, we both sort of froze and the lunch ended shortly afterward. We never met again. 

What a lost opportunity! What a failure on both our parts! And what a common story this is in our highly polarized nation and world.

Dare to discover people who are different from you

It is essential that business leaders engage with people who think differently from us. We all know the dangers of “group think”— surrounding yourself with people who will merely echo what you say. It’s like the proverbial lemmings who all jump over a cliff together. (By the way, I just fact-checked that statement, and apparently it’s a myth. See the benefits of challenging one’s own thinking?) 

The ability to challenge our perspective is critical to being an effective and impactful person and leader. My colleague, Dr. Rob Weinberg, recommends the question, “What else might this be?” Rob uses it with his coaching clients when they attribute motivations or make assumptions about the reasons for another person’s actions, such as, “She is such a jerk and always will be, nothing I can do about it.”

Rob tries to help clients consider other reasons for the behavior, which can open up the possibility of change or at least empathy. Sometimes the question also helps the person to explore reasons for their own behavior other than “I’m just bad at this” or “I have no choice.”

It’s a good idea to wonder if you’re wrong

Another useful question is, “How could I be wrong about this?”

No one is immune from getting stuck in our own perspective. But we can make choices to challenge our thinking. We can respectfully engage with people who think differently from us. And we can cultivate mental habits of questioning the “truths” that make us comfortable. 

In a recent podcast, Dr. Joshua Kulp reflected, “Part of the function of scholarship is to make people a little less certain about the truth of their own narratives.” That was certainly true when I went to business school and spent two years with people who saw the world very differently from me. It was one of the most important experiences in my life.

If you’d like to learn more about challenging your own narrative, contact me at ggolden@gailgoldenconsulting.com.