Chris Collins explains how cognitive dissonance undermines leadership. When a leader holds conflicting beliefs, like valuing the environment but driving a gas-guzzling car, they're avoiding truth. He recommends internal work: owning outcomes, taking responsibility, focusing on what you control, and leading from authenticity instead.
Donna asks how cognitive dissonance can influence leadership decisions. That's a great question, Donna.
Welcome to leadership therapy. I am not a licensed therapist, but I know a lot about leadership and fixing businesses and wrote a book on leadership called I Am am Leader. And when somebody purchases the I Am Leader book, they get to activate the book and there's a community and inside of that community you can ask questions and we have conversations and sometimes members of the community have better answers than I do at stuff, believe it or not. Pretty, pretty cool group in there. But let's just establish what cognitive dissonance is before we answer the question. So I'm going to go to chat GPT and let's, let's ask it what it is and for some examples. What is cognitive dissidence and could you give me some examples?
Dissidence is essentially a disagreement or opposition to a prevailing idea, policy or authority, often within a political context. Dissidents are individuals who challenge established norms or governments, often at great personal risk. Here are a few examples.
What is cognitive dissonance and could you give me a couple examples?
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort experienced by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values. This discomfort can lead to an alteration in one of the beliefs or attitudes to reduce the discomfort and restore balance. For example, imagine a doctor who smokes cigarettes. They know smoking is bad for their health, one belief. But they continue to smoke contradictory behavior. This creates cognitive dissonance. To reduce the dissonance, they might justify their behavior by downplaying the risks of smoking or by emphasizing the stress relieving benefits they perceive from it. Another example is is someone who values environmental conservation but drives a gas guzzling car. They might feel dissonance between their environmental values and their choice of vehicle to alleviate this discomfort. They might rationalize that their car is necessary for their long commute or plan to offset their carbon footprint in other ways.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
So my experience with cognitive dissonance in myself and with others is that it most of the time is coming from not wanting to face the truth. It lacks truth in a, in a sense, right? Like we're justifying something because we don't want to face the truth about it. And in leadership that is the kiss of death. Because to be a leader we have to function from a perspective of truth, especially when we're designing a strategy or an outcome that we want to create. So if cognitive dissonance is a, is a thing and something that we need to fix and we are putting ourselves in that trick bag a lot and we find kind of this internal conflict between our actions and what is reality or what is true, then we probably aren't at the level of leader yet. We're, we're working on ourselves. We need to work on the. I am part of us. The us.
You know, some, some things that I've found personally for myself is, you know, developing an internal locus of control, owning the, the outcome for every area of my life, taking responsibility and focusing on the things that I can control.
And really working on my magic, what I'm good at and becoming more authentic as, as a person in that process. Also what I find is that your self esteem will come up and part of cognitive dissonance and in wanting to avoid the truth also is connected to our self esteem and wanting to be something that we're not or appear or act in a way that isn't authentic to our true self in that way. So.
It'S something that you can address and you can work on. But I think, I think it starts with, with you. And you certainly won't be effective leading others if you have these conflicts because you, you will look confusing to your people, you will attract the wrong kind of person.
All kinds of, you know, very toxic.
Actions and behaviors can come into play there too, just from the, the wrong energy and the conflict in what is happening versus what the truth is. Because in a sense, just, you know, lightly think about this. But I, I say this to myself sometimes is like it is a version of gaslighting, right? You're gaslighting yourself if you're doing something and you are trying to justify it. But at the end of the day, the truth is something else, right? Smoking is bad for you or you know, flying on a private jet isn't as good for the environment as flying commercial. And flying commercial isn't as good as if you walked. And that, that is what it is. So we want to function from a position of truth and so we need to back up and work on us, become authentic and learn our own personal magic and then, you know, step into.
The next level of our development, which would be leadership.
