I’ve got a story about a seven-year-old who out-coached her own father. But first, you need to meet Byron Katie.

Freedom From Our Own Suffering

Byron Katie is the author of Loving What Is, and her core insight is simple: it’s not situations that cause our suffering, it’s the thoughts we believe about the situations. As she puts it: “I discovered that when I believed my thoughts I suffered, but when I didn’t believe them I didn’t suffer […]” She goes further to suggest, “suffering is optional.” That got my attention!

Freedom from suffering, in her telling, isn’t about fixing the world. It’s about “learning freedom through the very thoughts that had caused suffering” in the first place. An elegant way to think about our lived experiences. Also mildly infuriating if you’re attached to being right.

Katie’s method, known as “The Work,” boils down to four questions you can ask yourself about any stressful thought:

1. 1. Is it true? (Usually the gut answer is “well… yes.”)
   2. Can you absolutely know it’s true? (This is where the floor drops out a little.)
   3. How do you react (what happens) when you believe that thought?
   4. Who would you be without the thought?

I love these questions because they don’t ask you to think positively, manifest your way out of a bad quarter, or pretend everything is fine. They just ask you to check your homework. Most of us walk around treating our thoughts as factual news alerts, when they’re really more like unsolicited opinions from a slightly panicked brain (ours).

The Questions in Action

Here’s that story about the 7-year-old protégé. One of my clients, a leader who’s plenty comfortable interrogating a P&L, less comfortable interrogating his own thoughts, started using these four questions with his daughter. A friend doesn’t want to be her friend anymore…  “Is that true?” Sibling squabble was all their fault … “Is that true?” You get the idea. She’d usually say yes, it was true. He’d follow up with, “Can you absolutely know it’s true?” And she’d pause. “Well… not absolutely.” Then, “What happens when you believe that thought?” He said he could watch her roll the situations around in her mind, thinking about them like she had new information.

He did this often enough that it became expected when she shared with him. Then one day, he was telling her about something he believed, and she fired the first two questions right back at him, quick as anything. He chuckled. Then she asked the third. He was gobsmacked. Turns out the kid had been taking notes the whole time.

How I Use It With Clients

I don’t wheel this out for every session, but when a leader is stuck in a story that’s clearly running the show (“my board doesn’t trust me,” “I’ll never be as good as my predecessor,” “if I show vulnerability I’ll lose credibility”), I’ll ask them to write the thought down, plainly, in one sentence. Then we walk it through the four questions. By the time we get to #4, people often realize that their thought wasn’t protecting them from anything and it was in fact, incorrect. All it was doing was exhausting them.

A few situations where I’ve seen these questions really shift something:

• • Before a high-stakes conversation. When a leader is convinced the other person is “out to get them” and is about to walk in armed for battle.
  • After receiving tough feedback. Separating “I did something that didn’t land well” from “I am fundamentally not good enough.”
  • In succession or promotion anxiety. Untangling “they’re grooming someone else to replace me” from the actual, observable facts.
  • Team conflict. When a manager is certain a direct report is “being difficult on purpose,” rather than being potentially overwhelmed, scared, or having a genuinely bad week.
  • Imposter syndrome spirals. The 3am inner monologue that convinces very capable people they’re one call away from being exposed as a fraud.

Fast and Cheap Leadership Intervention

None of this means your thoughts are wrong. Some day you may be overlooked by a new up-and-coming whipper snapper, and no amount of Byron Katie will change that. But question one, “is it true?”, is the fastest, cheapest leadership development intervention I know. It costs nothing, takes ninety seconds, and occasionally gets outsourced quite effectively to a seven-year-old.

Want more Byron Katie?

Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’: https://thework.com/ 

‘Loving What Is’ (the book): https://thework.com/books/