The method

Behaviour follows belief

Most leadership development works on the surface, at the level of symptoms. It teaches skills, techniques and behaviours to address those symptoms. It rarely delivers permanent change, because it works on the wrong part of the brain, and that is why change fails most of the time. It is not for want of willpower. Think how often you attended an amazing seminar, left the event super pumped, and three months later completely abandoned any of the changes you had committed to make.

Willpower was always going to lose

The reason these seminars often fail to make permanent change is that your goals sit in the prefrontal cortex, the planning or thinking brain. Your behaviour, however, is run by the primitive brain beneath it, and the primitive brain is lazy by design: its job is to save energy and keep you safe, which means it wants predictability. So it protects one rule, and places it above everything else, including your new goals: do not violate the story of who you already are, what we call your identity.

Discipline can hold a new behaviour in place, but only briefly, because you have so little of it. It is a small reserve, not an engine. It is what drags you to the gym every January, and then it runs dry, as it always does. Unless repetition has had time to turn the effort into a habit, the primitive brain quietly pulls you back to who you were, and by February you are back on the couch, watching television and eating crisps.

The discomfort that does the work

If we stop fighting the primitive brain and change the thing underneath the behaviour, the beliefs that make up your identity, we have a chance to permanently change behaviour. Our tool is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort you feel when your belief and your behaviour do not match, and the brain will not hold that discomfort for long, because inconsistency reads to it as danger. It brings the two back into line. What most people miss is which one moves. Behaviour follows belief, not the other way round. Believe you are lazy and you will not keep training, however badly you want it. Change those beliefs to “I am a fit and healthy person”, and going to the gym is simply what that person does. So to change the behaviour, you change the belief first, and the behaviour comes with it.

We approach every problem the same way, whether it is a New Year’s resolution or a behaviour at work. That is why the method is life changing: it can be applied to every part of your life, and to every relationship in it.

Where these methods come from

Changing a belief that deep is what is commonly known as brainwashing. It is the mechanism behind coercive persuasion, the real methods studied and practised by the military and intelligence services, and adopted by cults. Chase Hughes, the founder of NCI, teaches the ethical use of that same body of work: changing a person’s beliefs so that their behaviour comes to match a new identity.

By consciously constructing a new identity, you address the limiting beliefs that have held you back from becoming who you want to be. Now it is those old beliefs, the remains of your old identity, that sit in cognitive dissonance with the new one, and so they lose their grip. Change the story, and the behaviour follows, and it stays.

What I teach

My career at Cisco spanned twenty-seven years, culminating in a senior executive role. Since leaving, I have had the time to reflect and take stock: the things I got right, the mistakes I made, and the realities of corporate culture. Applying what I have learned about behavioural science to myself has shown me how it can be applied to many of the challenges I faced, and that leaders still face today.

Self-mastery is not some trendy self-help process promising transformation in ten easy steps. It is a practical process that fundamentally changes how you see yourself and the people around you. The process asks for deep self-reflection and real candour, which can be challenging but is genuinely enlightening. That has been true for me, and for those who have begun the work with me. It is not a set of techniques to perform, but a change in the identity underneath the performance. The result is not a more convincing mask. It is a leader who no longer needs one.