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 thing, 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 the plan and the behaviour are not run by the same thing. Your goals are made slowly and deliberately. They are something you decide. What you actually do under pressure is run by the fast brain, which is automatic, effortless and built entirely out of repetition. It is not lazy so much as efficient: 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 fast 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 fast brain and change the thing underneath the behaviour, the beliefs that make up your identity, we have a chance to permanently change behaviour. The 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.

I approach every problem the same way, whether it is a New Year’s resolution or a behaviour at work. What changes is not a skill you use at work. It is who you are under pressure, and you are the same person with your family as with your team.

Where these methods come from

The techniques come from applied behavioural work developed where reading a person accurately was the job and being wrong carried a real cost. What they were built to do is change what a person believes about themselves, so that behaviour follows. I trained in this body of work with NCI, whose founder, Chase Hughes, teaches its ethical application. I use it for one purpose: to help a leader construct an identity they have chosen, rather than keep running one they inherited under pressure.

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 the programme includes

• Thirteen assessments, worked through one at a time in your own time. Most are multiple choice. Two of the more complex ones ask for written answers. They take anything from fifteen minutes to two hours each, depending on which one.
• A one-hour video call every week for the first eight weeks, to work through what each assessment shows.
• A daily practice, put in place once the picture is complete, to hold the change between sessions.
• A one-hour video call once a month after that, until the six months are up.

What to expect

Each assessment builds on the last, and the space between them matters, because the findings need time to settle before the next one starts. That is why this takes six months rather than six weeks.

By the end they build a complete and honest picture of you across three things:
how you see yourself,
what you are really aiming at,
and how you come across to others, including the parts you cannot see for yourself.

From that grounding we build the change.

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.