Understanding our Credo, through the sayings we use.

Have you ever done something and felt horrible about it? You may not have let anyone know but you just knew what you did, did not sit well with you. This type of reaction is your mind and body knowing that what happened was against your beliefs. In these moments, such as when you didn’t go to an event to support your friend when you said you would, we attempt to justify our actions to ourselves and others. We spend a lot of time thinking about why we did it or reinforcing the justification. We are focused on the wrong thing.

These days it is fashionable to start with why, but in this case, we need to start with what, sorry Simon. We will look at two scenarios to understand the “what”, in this case, our belief.

You have a good friend at work. You respect each other and in turn, you spend time together and share gossip, the friend you turn to when things are going or not going your way. Your friend is having an important party at their house on the weekend and they want you to attend. They are relying on you to show up and you promise to attend. On the day of the party, you get a call from an old friend from out of town who is only there for the day and wants to meet up. You are so excited because you haven’t seen them in a long time, so you decide to see your friend from out of town and skip the party. Monday comes and you see your good work friend, you feel bad about missing the party.

You are in a work meeting and you have been working hard with a team to prepare for a pitch for a new line of business. Some people on the team you get along with and others not so much. Just before going into the meeting, you receive a call from a potential customer giving feedback on the new business idea. The meeting starts and the presentation is going okay but you see it is not going to fly with the Senior Executives. The person on your team leading the pitch is floundering but you think the feedback from the potential customer might help show that that the idea has a real market. You keep quiet during the presentation. The Executive team does not approve the new line of business, and you feel bad wondering if the new information would have made a difference. The team takes the rejection of the pitch poorly and some of the people on the team are let go.

These two scenarios are very different and in reading both cases I would guess you were having a conversation with yourself that started to justify or judge your actions. You would have handled it differently, no doubt. You have however done exactly what we all do and that is justify our actions to ourselves or change the narrative, tell the story differently, to not have the feeling that tells us something went wrong. Our bodies triggered by our minds are good feedback on the unfiltered reality of a situation. But what is it that triggers this reaction when you supposedly do the same thing to two different people? Something is different.

Let’s look at the promise not kept. You feel bad, we have no idea how the person at work reacted. What is causing you to feel bad about missing the party? You made a choice based on the situation so why feel bad? There is something else there. Let’s say you agreed to stop by a different friend’s place for a party and didn’t go but that seemed okay, you didn’t feel bad about missing the party. Maybe it was that for the different friend you saying you would stop by is a non-committal way of avoiding an uncomfortable “no” at the moment. While your good friend at work is someone you genuinely committed to, you promised and so it is not the same.

In not going to the party you promised to, you broke a rule you set for yourself. The belief you have is that if you really commit to something you should follow through. This is a shared expectation you have with other people and is the basis of a relationship with others. To you a true friend doesn’t make a promise and not follow through, you would expect that of someone who promised you to show up to your party. The credo is “treat people as you want them to treat you”. When our actions don’t mesh with our beliefs it makes us feel uncomfortable. It is like eating something that doesn’t agree with us.

Working through this example helps us unpack what belief we are really dealing with and in turn, helps us understand our core beliefs and the credos by which we live. If we understand, at the most basic level our moral code, then we can better judge situations and decisions that align with it. To look at the promise example from the standpoint of having an understanding of your credo “treat people as you want them to treat you” you may have handled it differently and with more confidence, as the core of who you are expressed to others tends to garner respect.

Perhaps you would have explained to your old friend that you have already promised to attend a party, and that although you do want to see them, you would not want to break the promise. Your credo is your belief system, and understanding it can help you make decisions that feel right.

Let’s look at the second scenario. You have information that may have made a difference and you didn’t react at the moment. Now you feel bad. There are so many implications to that decision to hold back, and now what to do. First let’s understand what the self-imposed rule you broke, what belief.

The belief is that you are not just a participant, you are an active contributor to your team. Everyone can contribute, and your contribution should be 100%. You also believe that decisions should be made on all available information, not only the information that supports a conclusion. There are several credos at work here. One is about your participation on the team, a second is about the nature of this contribution, and the third is about perception vs reality, where reality is represented by known information. This is more difficult to rationalize to oneself as there are other “factors” we consider.

In looking at these factors we are engaging in the justification of the situation or the avoidance of the topic altogether. If we make something so complicated for ourselves we engage a fail-safe belief that we cannot understand it. The credo we often hear is “it is what it is”, this is an ejection seat for your mind to get out of thinking about something deeper. When you hear someone in a business setting say this, we all know they are throwing in the towel and abandoning the issue.

So if we are not throwing in the towel and are trying to understand the beliefs then we might arrive at statements such as “don’t be a battery”, “see something, say something” and “don’t make a decision looking through a straw”. Statements such as these, make up your credo, your belief system, and is what your mind uses to assess if you are doing things or are in situations aligned with who you think you are.

It is very difficult to understand what we believe in and to communicate that to others in hopes they understand. We use sayings to help us stop and understand the situation and reference the core beliefs we have. Sayings are easy to remember, simple, and have a universal understanding.

The next time you hear a saying, or use one, think of what the core belief behind it is. Understanding this can help you relate to life around you more directly. You may find that you start to question core beliefs you have held for some time, but just know that our beliefs do evolve in life and as Plato said “an unexamined life is a life not worth living”.