Belief System

What do you believe? This is not an easy question to answer. We are complicated beings living in a complicated world. With that in mind, let’s make the answer easier to get by being honest with ourselves. A fearless moral inventory will only be useful if it is based in reality and honesty.

A good question to start with is who owns your beliefs? Did you come to them by means of your own intellect and life experiences or were they given to you by your family, boss or some other significant person in your life.  If your belief system belongs to someone else, you are living someone else’s life through your choices and consequences.

If you do not own your belief system, you will have a hard time being consistent with it when decisions need to be made. You will also have a hard time living with the results of those decisions, leaving you frustrated or in denial. It is essential to a fulfilled life that you operate on what you believe and on what passes your own reality test.

If, in honesty, you find that your belief system is not of your own making, take steps to correct this problem.  I wrote an article sometime back titled “30 Things I Believe” this was my effort of ensuring the origin of my belief system. Being honest with myself while creating this document, my manifesto, was life changing.

An added complication is that your belief system has more than one component. Two common ones are religion and politics. These are also the most likely to be influenced by your friends and family. It is also common for these belief systems to be in conflict. Religion is based upon prescribed absolute truths and politics is based on marketing where truth is situational and always in flux. When you combine these two they make a toxic mix unless you synchronize them with what you value.

This becomes the second piece of defining what you believe. Your belief system should map to what you value. Testing the accuracy of your mapping is a reality check. Let me give you an example. If you are a Christian, you must accept the axiom that you can’t love Jesus if you don’t love people. If at the same time, you find it easy to attack and hurt others (especially those you disagree with), your belief system is not in sync with your values. Either you are fooling yourself about what you believe or you are fooling yourself about what you value.

In a fearless moral inventory, you must honestly evaluate the synchronization of your belief system to what you value. If you are out of sync, you are living a lie.

Moral Compass

Your moral compass is a combination of your belief system and a definition of what you value, which provides you a degree of guidance in decision making. Another way to state this is that your moral compass provides you with a definition of true north in your life. True north for some is defined by their religion, for others it may be their family or maybe just their own wellbeing. To be truly healthy and happy, your true north needs to be based upon a bed rock principle, not on opinion.

People get in trouble here because they bounce around between religious beliefs, a family focus, and a selfish focus. This approach is much like the guy who is switching lanes and using excessive acceleration in traffic only to find the cars he passed sitting next to him at the next stop light. A lot of wasted energy and frustration is the result. No one is perfect, but highly successful people are more consistent in paying attention to the position of true north in their lives than those who live moment to moment. They generally do not have to apologize to their family about a selfish decision they just made.

True north in your life does not bounce around. Circumstances in your life make it harder or easier to follow your moral compass, but true north is always true north. Simply put, your moral compass helps you to make decisions that take you where you want to go in the big picture of your life. This makes for clearer and cleaner decision making. A decision either takes you where you want to go or it doesn’t. Please don’t get me wrong, though.  I know that there are situations where short term thinking has to prevail. Even in those cases, though, your moral compass will enable you to better understand what you are risking.

All of this being said, ask yourself the following two questions. What is true north in your life and do you consistently consult your moral compass in decision making. One way to answer these questions is to look at decisions you have made and ask yourself whether you were true to your moral compass at the time. Would decide differently now? Why or why not?  Be honest and allow yourself to experience the feelings that result. These feelings will serve as a reality check when similar decision points are reached.

Consistency of Purpose

Purpose is related to action. Having purpose in your life gives you the “why” and the drive to take action. Everything we do in life has a purpose. The question is whether the purpose is in alignment with the philosophical underpinnings of your life. These underpinnings are your belief system and your moral compass.

To test this alignment, ask the following question. Does your adherence to your belief system change according to the situation you are in? Your answer to this question is probably “yes”. We are all human and subject to human emotions and instincts. Don’t consider this an excuse though. There is a difference between what we feel and how we act on our feelings. There are many of us who behave quite well in church, but lose our faith trying to fight traffic to get out of the church parking lot. If character is what you are in the dark when no one can see your actions, than what you truly value is demonstrated by your actions when under the pressure of difficult circumstances.

Here is another uncomfortable question. Do you hold yourself accountable to the same standards that you hold others to? You should, but it isn’t easy. This is why we see so many people in leadership fail. I once heard a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company say that his greatest accomplishment was making decisions that allowed him to sleep good at night. Being true to what he saw as his purpose allowed him to live comfortably with his actions.

This is only possible when you have a purpose to guide your efforts in the various roles you fill in life. When consistent with your belief system and moral compass, consistency of purpose will allow you to make decisions that you can feel good about . To define the purpose in your various life roles, ask yourself what roles you fill in your daily walk. Some examples are being a father/mother, husband/wife, son/daughter, brother/ sister, employee, friend and so on. List these out and next to them write the purpose you have in each of them.

Now comes the hard part. Next to each purpose evaluate on a scale of 1 to 5 (poor to excellent) how well you are performing in meeting your expectations in these roles. Be honest. The areas where you see the need for improvement become targets for a “Consistency of Purpose” action plan. In other words, you will have purpose to create a plan of action to bring alignment into your life.

If you really want to put it out there, ask the significant others in your life to evaluate how well you are performing.

Your Fears

Everyone has fears. It is human nature and part of our self-defense instincts.  There is no shame in fear unless you let irrational fears control you. There are two aspects of controlling your fears. These are gaining an understanding of the source of your fear and taking action to mitigate them.

Fear will knock your life out of alignment. This is how political and sales operatives work. If you create a fear of something in a person’s life, you make it easy to hijack their belief system and moral compass. As a result, if you are to protect yourself, you must take action to understand and mitigate your fears.

Let me give you a personal example.  I began writing a book a few years back. The subject matter was being challenged by a particular group of people, so I spend a great deal of time editing and re-editing trying to achieve perfection. My fear of rejection froze me in the edit mode until I took all of the teeth out of my manuscript. When I realized what was happening (someone else was in control of my creative process), I went back to my original manuscript and sent it to a publisher. I am now a published author with a product that has wide acceptance. Oddly enough, it even has acceptance with the very people that I perceived to be challenging me. My fear was unfounded, even though it seemed real to me.

To establish control over your fears, make a list of situations that create fear for you. For example, being in a dark room might make you fearful. Be thorough and honest. You want to document the situation that brings on the fear, not the fear itself.

On the same list, add a column titled “afraid of…” and fill in the blank beside each situation with what you are specifically afraid of in that situation. The fear you feel in a dark room, for example, is a typical human reaction, but what is its source? Psychologists will tell you that fear of the dark is nothing more than fear of the unknown. In this case, you can hear a sound, feel something or even smell something, but your fear will not be allayed until you see what it is. This is because of our dependence on vision as the primary sensory device on our bodies. Knowing this gives you power over your fear.

Next, you will need to have an action plan to face up to the fear. Fear of the dark, for example, can be mitigated by conditioning yourself to become more comfortable with what you can’t see. Just as a blind person must find a way to deal with what they cannot see, a person afraid of the dark must deal with the unknown.

Being the best that I can be requires that I perform this fearless moral inventory from time to time. I don’t always like what I find, but that is just part of being human. As I grow to understand myself better, I am also making adjustments to keep my life in alignment. Understand that if your belief system, moral compass and purpose in life are based on bed rock principles, these adjustments in alignment are made to your behavior, not the principles.