🔥 5 Minutes of Leadership Fuel
✉️ This post is part of The 5-Minute Mentor — my weekly leadership newsletter. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, click here to subscribe.
Welcome to The 5-Minute Mentor — your weekly dose of leadership inspiration, curated resources, and practical action. All in under 5 minutes.
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🫶 A Dose of Inspiration
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin
Read that again slowly.
It’s not just a beautiful thought… it’s an invitation to live and lead differently.
This week, we’re asking: what filter are you leading through?
đź“Ą Download the quote graphic to use in your next staff email or meeting.
🤓 A Dose of Learning
​Tony Robbins opens a conversation with Theo Von with a deceptively simple exercise. He asks Theo to look around and notice everything that’s brown… really take it in. Then he asks him to close his eyes and name everything he saw that was red.
Silence.
Then he asks Theo to open his eyes and look specifically for red. Suddenly, red is everywhere.
His point? “Once you develop a belief, you find what supports it.” And it goes even deeper than that. He observed that Theo was willing to count burgundy as red or beige as brown, to stretch what qualified, just to feel successful. [Watch the short clip here: This Test Exposes Your Beliefs.]
What this means for you as a leader
Your brain isn’t a neutral observer. It’s a filter… shaped by what you already believe. And as a leader, that filter doesn’t just affect how you see situations. It shapes how you see people.
If you believe a team member has limited potential, you’ll notice every piece of evidence that confirms it, and unconsciously look past the moments that don’t. If you believe someone is capable, you’ll find that evidence instead. The person hasn’t changed. Your belief has.
This is where leadership gets both powerful and sobering: the beliefs you hold about the people you serve become the lens through which you develop, challenge, and invest in them.
The collective layer
Now scale that up. What happens when an entire team shares a belief?
Research on collective efficacy, a team’s shared belief in its ability to succeed, shows that it’s one of the strongest predictors of team performance. More than individual talent. More than resources. When a team believes it can find a way, it looks for the way. It notices opportunities, builds momentum, and interprets setbacks as problems to solve rather than proof of failure.
The reverse is equally true. A team that believes it’s behind, incapable, or stuck will find evidence for that, too. And they’ll stretch what counts… just like Theo calling burgundy “red.”
This is why culture is so much more than perks and posters. Culture is the collective belief system of your team… and it shapes what everyone in that room is looking for, every single day.
The leader’s role
You are often the first seed of that collective belief. What you name, celebrate, and return to consistently begins to shape what your team looks for. When you say “I see what’s possible here,” you’re not just being optimistic, you’re setting the filter.
So the question worth sitting with: What beliefs are you planting… in yourself, in the people you lead, and in the room you share?
🌀 A Dose of Action
This week, try a brief belief audit for yourself and your team.
For you:
- Pick one person on your team you’ve been frustrated with lately. Write down three beliefs you’re holding about them. Now ask yourself: Am I looking for brown… or am I looking for red? What would you notice if you shifted the filter?
- Name one belief your team seems to hold about itself, about what’s possible, what’s allowed, or what they’re capable of. Where did that belief come from? And is it one you intentionally planted?
For your team: Try the brown/red exercise to open your next team meeting. (You can watch and share the clip here.) Then use it as a springboard for one of these conversations:
- What do we collectively believe about our ability to (solve this problem / hit this goal / support each other)?
- What are we looking for… and what might we be missing because of it?
- What’s one belief we want to be intentional about building together?
You don’t have to have the answers. Just opening the conversation plants a seed. 🌱
You got this. Let’s lead with belief.
In your corner,
​Melody​
​Founder, Culture of Belief
PS: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 🍀
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