Leadership Insight Series
Don't Believe Everything You Think
Cognitive & Behavioral
Published
"We suffer more in imagination than in reality."
Leaders make decisions constantly, but many are made in reaction to thoughts, not reality. A story forms fast: what someone meant, why something failed, whether you're equipped. The thought feels like a fact. You act on it before you've examined it.
These four questions, adapted from Byron Katie's The Work, slow that down. Not to dismiss the thought. To examine it. The goal is to see clearly before you move.
Name the thought. One sentence. "[Name] doesn't trust me." "I'm not equipped for this." "They're undermining the team." Now run it.
Not "what if it were false," that's denial. This is imagination. Same room, same person, same moment. The thought simply isn't there.
In your body: Where does the tension go? What relaxes? What opens up? In the room: How do you listen differently? What do you notice that you couldn't see before? In your leadership: What decision or conversation becomes available that wasn't a moment ago?
More than most leaders realize, and in ways that are hard to catch in real time. Every decision gets filtered through a set of assumptions: about what's true, what's possible, who can be trusted, what the team is capable of, and most of those assumptions were formed long before the current situation. When the assumptions are accurate, the decisions are good. When they aren't, the decisions compound the error. The problem is that assumptions feel like facts from the inside. The leader isn't aware they're making them. They're just deciding, and the decision feels self-evidently right.
It means slowing down long enough to ask: what am I taking as true here that I haven't actually verified? Most leaders are fast thinkers in fast environments, which means the assumption-checking step gets skipped. The practical version is asking one extra question before acting on a strong conviction: what would need to be true for the opposite to be right? If that question is impossible to answer, the assumption probably hasn't been examined. If it's easy to answer, you've found the thing worth checking.
When you keep arriving at the same conclusion regardless of the information in front of you. When the feedback you're getting from the team doesn't seem to be landing anywhere in your decision-making. When you find yourself certain about something that a reasonable person in your position should have questions about. These are the signals that the thinking has become the answer rather than a path to the answer. Byron Katie's work on "The Work" asks a simple question of any stressful thought: is it absolutely true? It's a deceptively useful question, because the honest answer is almost never yes.
Often because their intelligence becomes the problem. Smart leaders build mental models quickly and confidently, which makes them fast, and which also makes them more committed to those models when they're wrong. The faster you can build a convincing case for a position, the less likely you are to question it. Research on cognitive bias shows that intelligence doesn't reduce bias, it just makes people better at rationalizing the bias they already have. The smartest leaders tend to make the best decisions and the worst decisions, depending on whether there's someone around them willing to push back. Without that friction, the intelligence just runs faster in the wrong direction.
Go deeper → Why Your Leadership Team Avoids Hard Conversations