Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
We live in a world that bombards us with opinions, identities, and belief systems from our families, our politics, our media, our religions, and many of us absorb them without question. But what happens when you mistake your beliefs for your values, when the things that you think are true become the core of who you are so defended that you can no longer learn, grow, or truly connect with others who see the world differently? My guest today is Gavin Finn. Gavin has spent decades as a technology CEO and leader, and he’s spent just as long thinking deeply about what it means to truly know yourself, to lead from authentic values, and to help others do the same. And Gavin asks, are you truly a free thinker, or are you just repeating someone else’s conclusions? This frank conversation will challenge you to separate your values from your beliefs, build an identity that’s authentically yours, and lead others in a way that invites independent thinking rather than dependence. Gavin, welcome to the Life Fulfilled podcast.
Gavin Finn [00:01:22]:
Thank you so much for inviting me, Bernie. I’m so happy to be here.
Bernie Borges [00:01:26]:
Well, thank you, Gavin. I’m looking forward to our conversation. And we’re here to discuss what a lot of people confuse between their beliefs and values and really what’s created for some people, an identity crisis, and what it means to build your identity around your values and not your beliefs. And I know you’ve put a lot of thought into this, Gavin, because we’ve talked about that. So why don’t you give us a little bit of your backstory and how you kind got to thinking so deeply about this.
Gavin Finn [00:01:54]:
Well, I’ve spent almost all of my life moving from one role or position to another, and in each new case trying to fit in. And this, I think, is probably true of most kids when you’re in school and you go from one school to the next, and then you perhaps go to college and you find the same thing is true, and then you might get a professional job or a career. And the question always arises, I think, at least in many people’s minds, how do I fit in with this group? How do I find myself succeeding and thriving and being accepted into this community? And early on in my career, I found that, particularly in my work career, I found that I was fairly young in the peer group of people in the room that I was sitting in, and I felt that I had to adapt to their mannerisms, their style, but more importantly, their substantive positions on subjects. And it wasn’t necessarily politics, but it might be a particular approach to solving a technical problem or a business problem. And over time, I was reflecting on how much sort of shape shifting I had been doing. And it didn’t really sit well with me. Not because I felt like I had done anything wrong, but I always felt that I wasn’t clear on what it was that I was thinking and what I stood for and what my positions were. And I know a lot of people are very strong in those ways when they’re young and they continue that and they’re just gonna say what they think and believe.
Gavin Finn [00:03:50]:
But it took me a while to evolve into an understanding that thinking about very small, tactical things and very large life changing things in a way that arrived at a solution or a position that was my own was a challenge. So I started to try to figure out how to get there. From the time that I was, you know, in school all the way through my career. And it didn’t really happen for me until much later in my career where I could. I felt that I was confident enough in my own ability to substantiate a position or a philosophy or a belief without having to explain myself or defend myself.
Bernie Borges [00:04:38]:
And I know that one point that you make, Gavin, is the distinction between our values and our beliefs. You want to. You want to speak to that.
Gavin Finn [00:04:50]:
These are things that I think everybody subconsciously takes for granted. But this was brought to my attention in some readings that I’ve been doing over the last couple of years in why our society, and perhaps the whole world is becoming more and more polarized and the effect that’s having on individuals and their relationships and how impossible it seems to have a conversation with somebody who doesn’t agree with you and make that not be about challenging their identity or their sense of self, but being able to have a conversation about a political position or a technical position or a religious philosophy without it necessarily feeling like somebody was being attacked. And I learned that a distinction between what a value system is and a belief system is fundamental to our ability to solve that problem. And that values are things we care about. And it sounds trite, but if you think about it, anything that’s of value is something that’s of importance to somebody. And that can be physical, material, things, or it could be, you know, in certain geographies they valued, let’s say, for example, in Europe, they valued sugar very highly because they didn’t have any. And so in a variety of places around the world, there was an abundance of sugar. So it was seen as a very fungible commodity, very easily accessible, was not particularly highly valued.
Gavin Finn [00:06:21]:
Same thing with spices and other things around the world. And so values are things that we care about they can be those kinds of material things, but they can also be emotions and feelings and the way you treat people or the way you like to be treated. So values are things we care about. Belief systems are things we think are true. That’s part of our personal growth as well, is to understand what do we care about, what’s important to us, and then various dimensions of what things do we think are true. Do we believe in evolution? Do we believe in sort of religious stories about the origins of mankind? We believe in certain political philosophies because they resonate in some way. And when you think about it as a belief is a recognition that that’s in our mind. What we think is true.
Gavin Finn [00:07:26]:
That’s very different from what we care about. The reason you have to separate those two if you’re going to solve this problem of polarization and even self awareness is for people who are truly honest with themselves. If we think something is true, then we ought to be open to some evidence or some other kind of proof that it may not be true. We think it’s true, but it may not be true.
Bernie Borges [00:07:55]:
And that’s what you mean by being a free thinker, right? Just giving yourself the permission, my words, not necessarily your words, to think freely and to draw your own conclusions based on the information that you again, give yourself permission to consume versus a set of beliefs that have been sort of given to you that you just accept because you just choose to accept them at face value without really doing your own free thinking. Is that right?
Gavin Finn [00:08:29]:
You know, it’s very interesting because we all think of ourselves as free thinkers. If you ask somebody, you’re a free thinker, there’s very few people who will say, no, not me, I am a conformist. Just tell me what to do and tell me what to think and tell me what to believe. Perhaps there are a few people like that, but I doubt that there are very many. We all think of ourselves as free thinkers. But free thinkers, as you said, are people who, out of a sense of curiosity and responsibility to themselves, do their best to determine on their own what their values are and what belief systems they’re likely to subscribe to. And it’s most visible in some of the belief systems that are very common in our cultures. So as you pointed out early on in the intro, a religious belief system might be one, a political belief system might be another, a community belief system or a national belief system.
Gavin Finn [00:09:27]:
And these are things that are very often taught all through a person’s life from a very young age or inherited right through family, a hundred percent, they may be just by osmosis. You absorb this through the family discussions or listening to your parents or your uncles or aunts. And so you absorb these ideas and then you try to distinguish between somebody else’s idea and your own. And it’s very hard because you’ve grown up this way. It’s always been this way. And so I find that early thinkers who developed the scientific method had a really good way of understanding how to sort of suck yourself out of this quagmire of conflict. Is this my idea? Is it somebody else’s idea? By just challenging everything that you think is right about that idea and then prove to yourself it actually is not that important that you prove to other people. It’s important that you prove to yourself.
Gavin Finn [00:10:28]:
I’ve gone through it this way and I’ve looked at it, and a lot of people call this first principles thinking. I’ve gone down as deep as you can, and I think about it and I think, well, I’ve satisfied myself that I can teach this. I can identify with it. And it’s true to the best of my knowledge because I’ve studied it or I’ve looked at it in more detail, as opposed to, this is the story I’ve always been told. It must be true because thousands, millions of people believe it. So who am I to challenge that? And in fact, this is the way that religious structures and organizations, organized religion, created their doctrines. And they did not want people to challenge. They didn’t want people to think for themselves.
Gavin Finn [00:11:17]:
And that’s where the word heretic comes from. As we’ve mentioned, it comes from the original Greek, which means free thinker. So anybody who thought outside of the doctrinaire, the dogma, was a heretic. And I think it’s actually much more authentic to come to those conclusions on your own by being a free thinker, by challenging those beliefs. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to agree at the end of that journey, but your journey is going to be yours.
Bernie Borges [00:11:46]:
I think the interesting thing about this, your point, Gavin, is that sometimes being a free thinker, giving yourself the permission, taking the opportunity to kind of check things out on your own, do your own research, you’re going to arrive wherever you choose to arrive. If you are true to being a free thinker, you may arrive that you agree with certain doctrine because you got there on your own and you felt validated, or you may not. You may arrive not agreeing with a certain doctrine, but giving yourself the permission to actually do the homework. Do the research, validate it or invalidate it according to where you end up on your own. I think that’s how I’m interpreting what you’re saying. And I can get a little personal. I got to my religious doctrine by giving myself the permission to actually do the research. And I arrived at agreeing with the doctrine because I did the research.
Bernie Borges [00:12:49]:
And I said, yeah, you know, I agree with it, I agree with it. But instead of it being not forced, Gavin, but like I said earlier, inherited, if it was just kind of pushed on me, you know, and assumptively placed on me, then there’d be no free thinking there because it was kind of imparted on me without my free thinking. Makes sense.
Gavin Finn [00:13:18]:
Absolutely makes sense. And that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to do that is because you’re not determining or predetermining the outcome. You’re doing sort of a scientific experiment in a way. You get into the lab, you’re putting some chemicals together and some mixtures, and you’re going to see what happens, right? And if you are open about that process, then when you arrive at the result, and in your case, it’s true of many, many examples, you arrive at a conclusion that this is something that is, in my mind, the right answer. It resonates with me. It comports with all of my analysis and my thinking. Then it’s yours. Then it’s not somebody else’s doctrine, it’s your doctrine.
Gavin Finn [00:13:59]:
And then you can argue and you can sometimes even persuade because you have a sort of an authoritative knowledge. And this sort of gets back to that question we asked, or something I brought up earlier about polarization. It’s very difficult to persuade people. Most people don’t like to change their minds, even subconsciously. But it’s even more difficult when you aren’t able to get to the understanding of how they arrived at their conclusion and. And have the discussion about each one of those elements of that. Think about it as a ladder. You’ve arrived at a conclusion.
Gavin Finn [00:14:36]:
Each rung is an element of that conclusion. So when you get down to that elemental level and you discuss openly and with respect to being potentially shown that where your original position might be wrong, then you can actually have a discussion about how people climbed that ladder and got to their conclusion. But if you at the top of the ladder, you have no idea what those rungs are. You’re just there. It’s almost impossible to have an intellectual conversation, an intelligent conversation about is this the right place? Is this true because you didn’t climb those rungs. And I think that’s one of the reasons, when you get back to it, is people are at the top of that ladder, or somewhere on the ladder, maybe not the top yet, and they determine this is my identity. I believe this, this is my core belief, and therefore this is who I am. So going from what I believe to who I am is what I’ve come to learn can be a big mistake because then it does not allow you, as you said, that permission to challenge the what is that belief? When you do and it turns out not to be what you thought it was, it’s crushing because it’s the sense of self.
Bernie Borges [00:15:59]:
I also think the subconscious mind is in play there, Gavin, because when it’s truly your identity and you are deep rooted in that identity, then I don’t think your subconscious mind will even allow you to question it because it’s just so deep rooted in your identity.
Gavin Finn [00:16:16]:
And that becomes a wedge between you and the other people who may not agree with you. And it’s very hard these days, I think, to have meaningful, deep conversations with people that don’t agree with each other because they have. They’ve conflated that sense of belief with their identity. And I really, I believe we have the opportunity to get back to a lot of commonality in our culture and in our political systems and in the communities that we’re in. If we focus on those things that we do agree on, which might very well be the value system, things we really care about, and then we let the things we believe to be true be variable. You might believe something, I might believe something else, but it’s not challenging our ability to be friends or colleagues or neighbors because we share those common value systems. And that is the core of our identity, not the belief system. And I really think that that’s true in business as well.
Gavin Finn [00:17:23]:
We are able, I think, to help convey complex ideas or to change organizations, create transformations if we can get down to those elemental levels, talk about what’s working, what isn’t working, why, as opposed to you just have to change this, because I know this is the right answer. And at that point, nobody has the opportunity to examine each of those rungs on that ladder. So I think it’s really a lesson that is important for everybody to understand if they’re going to become what you know. One of the trendy fad terms is growth oriented. It’s impossible to grow if you don’t change. And if you’re so fixed in your mindset about those belief systems, you will Never change.
Bernie Borges [00:18:15]:
Yeah. So, Gavin, in the work that I do, where I teach leaders to lead through the lens of fulfillment through my method called Fulfillment centric leadership, there’s 10 components to it. And the first two components are value alignment and self awareness. And what I do is I invite people to list their values and I use the same words. What do you care about? Those are your values. Write them down, and then where are you fulfilled and not fulfilled. And then do a sort of a gap analysis and understand where your values are misaligned with how you’re living your life today. And the interesting thing about that exercise that I think is relevant to this conversation is that a lot of people are struggling with an identity across a variety of different dimensions.
Bernie Borges [00:19:04]:
We’ve discussed here multiple dimensions, and that exercise helps them become more self aware. We haven’t even scratched the surface on that topic yet. Right. Because you and I both know that only 15% of us are self, aware, according to a Harvard study. But that exercise helps people become more self aware. And I just wanted to share that with you to kind of get your. Your reaction to that approach, because it’s. Every time I go through it with people in a workshop setting, it’s fascinating to see the reaction.
Bernie Borges [00:19:35]:
What are your thoughts on that?
Gavin Finn [00:19:37]:
Well, I think it’s a fantastic exercise to go on, go through, not just in your workshop, but in your daily life. I think part of what we also recognize is that as we move through life, this journey, some of the things we care about change, Some of our value systems change. So I think taking stock of what’s important to us, at what stage of our life, at what, what are the circumstances, what, what do we prioritize? I think it’s a very valuable lesson because it also challenges that notion of, are we being honest with ourselves? Are we being true to ourselves? My most favorite Shakespearean quote is, to thine own self be true from Hamlet. And I think that’s very, very hard in life.
Bernie Borges [00:20:29]:
It is. It is.
Gavin Finn [00:20:31]:
If you’re asking the questions, you’re asking the participants in your seminars to answer, there’s no point in even being there if they’re not going to be true to themselves.
Bernie Borges [00:20:41]:
Right.
Gavin Finn [00:20:42]:
Of course it’s a vulnerable position to put yourself in, and it’s hard. And I think that it takes a certain amount of evolution. Some people are born with that and they have that capacity, and others have to learn. And as I mentioned with you, I certainly had to learn throughout my life. I think the hardest part is really when expressing it the way you’ve Asked. And writing it down then makes you think about, am I really comporting myself according to these values?
Bernie Borges [00:21:15]:
Yeah. I tell people the only wrong answers are the answers that are not true to yourself. So to your point, let’s touch on the leadership aspect of this whole conversation. Gavin, because you’ve been in a leadership role now for quite some time, leading your own company, and I’m sure in a corporate career before that. How does a leader drive his or her team to engage, perform, do good work and be aligned with the values of the organization, but also have a distinction between those values and their own identity?
Gavin Finn [00:21:57]:
In any well run organization? And I know you’ve led teams like this, you’ve led organizations and you’ve seen and participated in them. There’s a very clear set of values that everybody understands. And these are not necessarily what you see on the posters in the hallway when you walk down the office, but it’s how people behave. So when you, when we just talked about, you know, what people say they care about, that’s one thing. But the true nature of what their values are is how they behave. Right. And that’s really how you can. So if you take for example, I don’t know if you remember the diesel scandal from Volkswagen about 10 or 12 years ago, where the organization was found to have faked their emissions tests and so that they could sell the engines that they, the diesel engines that they sold as being conforming with the emissions requirements, but in fact they had built into the cars a method to actually fake when the emissions are being tested.
Gavin Finn [00:23:07]:
And it’s a long story, of course, but ultimately the CEO went to jail. And the reason that is an example of how leadership sort of allows you to look at value systems. The court determined it was in Germany, that the software engineer who made those changes would never have made them without somebody else knowing, because there’s always QA and controls. So the fact that that person made those changes, then their manager or their QA team allowed them to persist, and then somebody else in the team validated that that was acceptable, meant that those people were hired knowing that those were their value systems. Crossing that line was okay. And that doesn’t happen unless those value systems exist all the way through the chain of command, all the way to the executive leadership. So by definition, if I work for you, you’re not going to hire me if I don’t share the core values that we care about, whether it’s ethics or caring about people or whatever the, the core values that you want this company to embody. You’re not going to hire me if I just don’t behave that way, I might say, I do.
Gavin Finn [00:24:24]:
Then you hire me. I’m not going to last very long. So it was determined that those values were established by the executive leadership as being the core values of the company. And the reverse is also true. When you establish how you behave with people, with customers, with employees, with investors, with members of the community, that’s what people watch and they see what the values are, not. When they walk down the hall and see the posters on the wall and they then make a decision, are those values consistent with my values? And if they are, then I’m going to operate within the framework of those values. That has nothing to do with me being my own creative person, but bringing my own personality. What it does is it sets a framework of what we all care about, those shared values.
Gavin Finn [00:25:18]:
It actually frees you up because you don’t have to worry about, am I in the right place? How do I fit in all of those things? We’ve already determined that we share these values. Then it gives you the opportunity to be an independent thinker, a free thinker about how you’re going to solve problems because nobody has to worry about, did they cross the line? Did they plagiarize? Did they. Whatever it is, those things are completely off the table. And I think in any organization, you want people to be free thinkers to find solutions to problems that others couldn’t find, to identify opportunities that others couldn’t find, and to engage with each other and with the community and customers in a way that brings their authentic personality to the table. And that’s how these organizations develop their culture. It’s a combination of the individuality of the people and their shared value systems.
Bernie Borges [00:26:15]:
So, Gavin, in my world, where my platform is what I call fulfillment centric leadership, it’s all around the emotion of fulfillment. And I define fulfillment in the following way. I say that fulfillment is the emotion that we experience when. When either we have an achievement of some sort or we’re doing something with purpose. We may not necessarily have an achievement, but because we have purpose, we experience the emotion of fulfillment. And there’s a dot that I’m connecting in this conversation, and I’d like to run it by you to make sure that you can validate or invalidate this dot that I’m connecting. And that is that when one has the purpose of being true to themselves and living according to their values and not having an identity that has been sort of mandated to them, but living their own values, that that is purpose. And that alone can be a strong sense of fulfillment.
Bernie Borges [00:27:15]:
Thoughts?
Gavin Finn [00:27:16]:
100% agree. There’s a lot of research that shows that when people find meaning in what they’re doing, that by itself is reward enough. So, yes, we get motivated by financial compensation, we get motivated by titles and by opportunities to travel and all those other kinds of things that are often considered incentives. But the primary, the base of that entire validation system has to do with whether you find meaning in the work that you’re doing. And I think people often mistake the concept of meaning from being sort of a grandiose purpose. It’s oncology research. I mean, doing this meaning can be found and is found in very, very wide varieties of actions, of jobs, of tasks. And one of the things that you mentioned, I think is really important is identifying that you’re doing this in a way that comports with your value system that gives you meaning.
Gavin Finn [00:28:26]:
If you think, for example, that the culture in your team or your organization is to strive for excellence in everything that you do, you don’t always achieve the outcomes that you intend. But when you look back and you say, did we do everything we could to deliver with excellence, to be the best service organization for our customers, to be the best technical development team to deliver with excellence in how we wrote our documentation and everything else. And the act of attempting to deliver with that framework that gives meaning to people. And what we found is that then the people who achieved their goal or didn’t achieve their goal, it’s less about are they fulfilled because they achieved the goal or not, than whether they did it in a way that represented their authentic effort, their authentic framework.
Bernie Borges [00:29:22]:
Exactly. Exactly. It’s my turn to say, agree 100%. And that’s well said. That’s well said, Gavin. This is a fascinating conversation. Any. Any closing thought for the listener, any takeaway you want to.
Bernie Borges [00:29:36]:
You just want to impart on the listener.
Gavin Finn [00:29:38]:
I’d like to amplify something you said earlier and maybe add a little twist. You said you have the freedom to think to yourself. A lot of times we may not think we do. You’re in a seventh grade class and your teacher’s telling you X, Y, and Z. And so you’re. You’re sort of constrained by that structure, at least in your own mental framework. And I would first of all recommend that we all think about teaching and frameworks as being sets of guidelines and principles that should not in any way impinge on our ability to think for ourselves. It might give us the benefit, and it should give us the benefit of generations or thousands of years of human learning.
Gavin Finn [00:30:25]:
But in no way does that change our ability to and the freedom to think for ourselves. And the twist is I think of it less as freedom and more of a responsibility. I think we have a responsibility to think for ourselves because if we’re trying to solve little problems or big problems in our society, we’re not going to do that by becoming conformists for the sake of conforming. If we agree with a certain principle or a community or an idea, then it ought to be because we’ve come to that conclusion legitimately, authentically, intellectually, on our own. And then we can identify with that group or that team or that body. We have a responsibility to do this. Otherwise we’re going to end up in a world where we lose the ability to both engage with ourselves and others and also to evolve in a purposeful and objectively better way. Because if you tell me there’s this transformation you’re trying to affect is better and I’m opposed to it because I’ve concluded before I even met you or joined the room that it’s wrong and it’s different from what I want, then how are we ever going to get to the best answer? All we’re going to do is we’re going to negotiate belief systems.
Gavin Finn [00:31:53]:
The responsibility is ours to find the best answer, even if it’s opposite from what we thought or what we wanted or what we were striving for. We’re not going to get there if we’re not thinking for ourselves.
Bernie Borges [00:32:06]:
So two thoughts on that, Gavin. One is that not everyone is willing to put in the work. Some people are just going to find it easier to conform because they just don’t want to put in the work to do the discovery, the research, whatever you want to call it, to come to their own conclusion on whatever the topic might be. The other thought is the Pareto principle. I believe the Pareto principle is in play all around us in life. And as I’m sure you know, it’s not meant to be literal. It doesn’t mean that it’s 80% of something or 20% of something, but it’s generally this imbalance. And what I don’t know, because I don’t have any data to suggest whether it’s 80% of people ish.
Bernie Borges [00:32:51]:
That are willing to put in the work to be a free thinker or if it’s 20%, I don’t know. But that’s where my mind went. I think the Pareto principle might in fact be in play here.
Gavin Finn [00:33:02]:
I Think we’re in trouble if it is, we need more than 20% of the people.
Bernie Borges [00:33:08]:
I agree.
Gavin Finn [00:33:11]:
I think that I am willing to accept anybody’s belief system, no matter whether it comports with mine, so long as it’s their own.
Bernie Borges [00:33:21]:
And being willing to have an adult conversation about it, not an antagonistic conversation, whatever the topic might be, just having civil conversation about it.
Gavin Finn [00:33:32]:
I think the way to have that civil conversation is to start with the core, core values. Because what you’ll find is most people share core values, or at least if they don’t, they don’t disagree completely with that core value. Right. What they have is a belief system that they potentially don’t share. And if we start with those shared values, then we can disagree about certain things. You have a beautiful purple shirt or most shirt on, and some people might like that color and some people might not. But it is not an affront to my sense of identity. Whether you’re wearing a collar that I like or don’t like, it’s a.
Gavin Finn [00:34:13]:
It’s an opportunity to have not just disagreements, but variety, which we should have. What I think is challenging is when somebody says, I don’t like it when somebody’s wearing that thing or that color, and it offends me. And I think what we have to get back to is what’s important to us, what do we care about? And let’s make sure that everybody is within that same framework. The culture that we were talking about in your organization, when you’re talking about the reward of doing something with purpose, that gives people a sense of community as well. If they all feel maybe it’s a different purpose for each individual, but they have that sense of purpose. That community is bound by stronger ties than any of the more superficial sort of dogma that I think a lot of leaders try to use as a way to bring people together.
Bernie Borges [00:35:19]:
I think it’s a great point for us to wrap on Gavin, but before we do that, I’d just like to invite you to share with the listener. If somebody wants to connect with you, just kind of get into your world. Where would you like to send them?
Gavin Finn [00:35:31]:
I have a LinkedIn that everybody’s free to connect with me on Gavin.
Bernie Borges [00:35:37]:
This has been a fascinating conversation. I thoroughly enjoy it. There’s a tremendous amount of alignment in the way that we think, and I think a lot of people will really resonate with. With the conversation, regardless of where they may fit into or with their. Their own way of thinking, but a lot to. To. To think about. So thank you so much Gavin, it’s
Gavin Finn [00:35:59]:
been such a pleasure. Bernie, thanks for making me think and for the very engaging conversation.
