I’ve recently been doing a lot of training with leaders about our relationship with money.
I hear a lot of really interesting things from nonprofit leaders.
Things like:
People just aren’t generous.
Donors don’t care about the populations that we serve.
Money is hard to come by.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Many of these perspectives are stated as facts, but what if they’re just opinions?
We accept “facts” as things we think all of the time and we gather data through the lens of our existing beliefs. It’s a phenomenon called confirmation bias.
Because for every “fact” above, I can provide counter-examples.
We see the world as we are, not necessarily as it is.
If you see the world as resource-scarce, threatening and ungenerous, you’ll pick up on examples of that.
If you see the world as generous, friendly and inviting, you’ll receive confirmation of that.
Ask yourself: are the “facts” that you’ve gathered about how the world is based on data or your curation and interpretation of data?
For us to go beyond the boundaries of belief, what are we willing to be wrong about?
The more that we’re willing to be wrong, the bigger the boundaries of possibility expand.
After all, it used to be a “fact” that humans would never fly, we would never be able to communicate without being in the same room and that we would never have huge computing power in our pockets.
Things change.
And they’re changed by people who are willing to change their own minds about “facts.”
