“Belief is about collecting ideas and investing in them. Faith is about having your ideas obliterated and having nothing to hang onto and trusting that it’s going to be all right anyway.”
– Barbara Hall (b. 1960), American TV Producer and writer
Typically, I reserve this topic for Good Friday. On that weekend, the topic is “Faith” with an upper-case “F.” Every year I post some version of this post from 2013…
This is different. Let’s consider a lower-case “f” application.
In business, particularly in disciplines like sales, project management and client relationship management, we will suffer setbacks. In some cases, circumstances will be easy to understand and cause and correction fairly simple to “get.” In other cases, there may be no readily discernible cause or correction. Or, as Granny often said to Jed in The Beverly Hillbillies, “That don’t make no sense, Jed!”
We’ve all been there, some of us more than others. Some of us more recently than others. Something goes upside down for reasons we don’t see or understand.
That brings us to Barbara Hall’s quote above.
Belief, according to Ms. Hall, calls on us (in and after the moment) to collect ideas and invest in them. To learn. Adapt. Put in context. Seek others’ perspectives and advice. Examine and explore and connect the dots we can connect, even if there are more that we can’t…
faith, with the lower-case “f,” calls on us to trust — to know that it’s going to be all right anyway. Is all faith “blind?” Perhaps. But in our careers and lives, we’re rarely completely blind, especially if belief is in play. Collecting and investing means that we dig, challenge and assess — the kind of things that reaffirm or redirect our belief. Once we’ve honored our belief, letting go and trusting means — well, I guess it means letting go and trusting.
Hmmmmm. Maybe this isn’t different than the Good Friday staple…
Maybe Faith with the upper case “F” is the only kind, after all.
Russ Pierce says
So true. In the banking world there were people who didn’t want change. It was critical to find those people and work to convince them to believe this change would be better for everyone or isolate them so as not to poison the water
Steve Heston says
Thanks, Rusty, for joining the conversation! Change will only occur when the fear of change is overcome by the pain of remaining the same — and we get numb to the pain too easily!