Chad Silverstein describes a Build to Lead practice where team members share personal "I believe" statements at work. Newcomers are often surprised, but the goal is clarity, not persuasion. Knowing and sharing your beliefs builds deeper connection and stronger teams.
Chapters
I'll never forget, I was in a team practice and we do these worldviews and someone was standing up and they wanted to share it, you know, and at work, that's kind of a weird thing, someone standing up, sharing out their beliefs. And we had a couple of new people that started, and this was their first practice and they knew nothing about Built to Lead. And so this person stands up and they start talking about their religion and what they believe about a lot of practice, personal things. And I remember looking at the newbies faces and their jaws hitting the floor. They could not believe that we were doing this at work. But one of the things I love about Build to Lead and the model of being distinct and deeply connected is that we don't push our beliefs onto other people. We know what we believe, and we're challenging you to know what you believe. But make no mistake about it, you're not to go push that onto other people and push your beliefs down other people's throats. For me, I am attracted to people who know what they believe. I don't care what you believe. I just want to know what you know, what you believe, because it means you're thoughtful and you've actually thought about it. You know, Chet and I are. We have different religions, and I love the guy, he loves me. And he challenges me, and I challenge him. And we have such respect for each other and for each other's faiths and for each other's devotion and disciplines that we are so deeply connected. And. And if you look at most of the people in the buildtooly community, you're gonna feel that and see that, and it's why it's such a tight community of builders and clients. And there's something really special when you know who you are, you know what you believe, you know how you wanna show up, and then you just let other people be that for themselves. And if you're a leader and you're leading other teams and you can promote this within your team and encourage people to, like, figure that out, you're light years ahead of what most companies will ever do. And so, yeah, it's a little weird to be doing that at work, but man, oh man, did I watch people's lives transform. I cannot tell you. This was the most powerful piece of the core outside of Opus and the whole framework where I saw people getting clear on what they believed, how they reframed and saw things from a different perspective and changed their beliefs because it made more sense to them, and then saw them just pick up this steam of just not only motivation, but confidence, competence, and just an overall general positive self esteem. You have a worldview, you wear it. You know when people come in and interview and they have tattoos all over, or they're showing all their skin, or they're dressed like they just came out of a bar on Saturday night, they're telling you something about themselves and it's based on what they believe. And if you have someone come in in a suit, that's a different type of worldview. They believe that you're supposed to be professional, you're supposed to. That's what they believe. And again, they may not have thought about that. They may have googled it, which most people do. But it's much better when you know who you are because you know what you believe and you know why. So there's a lot of cool nuances to the worldview. The first one is just to write out your I believe statements. And so just put pen to paper and get going on that share that we're sharing with you. My worldview, Chet's worldview, you can see other people' is probably in the community at this point. But just to get you going, it's not to get you to believe what we believe. It's just to let you see how we went about the process. And it's really important to understand that between Chet and myself, there's probably more than a couple decades worth of time being poured in where every word is in here with purpose. So again, you're not expected to have this done yourself. You get to this point, this is your aim. Some people start by writing out a narrative, some people write out bullets. There's no right or wrong. Just put pen and paper and start writing out what you believe.
