The Quiet Beliefs Driving You and Why You'd Disagree With Most of Them

I used to make fun of guys who retired and just played golf.

Finish the race, I'd think. Paul didn't lay down his work to focus on his short game. There's a Kingdom to build. And you're out here chasing a little white ball into the woods?

But I've played four times recently.

And for the first time in my life, I'm actually having fun on a golf course.

I've hit some great shots. I've hit some genuinely terrible ones. The difference between now and the version of me who used to play decades ago has almost nothing to do with my swing. It's in my head.

When I hit a bad shot now, I don't let it live there. I look at what I did wrong, file it, and step up to the next one. I'm not trying to impress anyone. I'm trying to learn and enjoy myself. I'm okay with bad shots.

Part of what cracked it open was watching the Masters. These are the best players on the planet, and they blow shots. They card double bogeys. Triple bogeys. This isn't a secret about professional golf. It's been true my entire life. Somehow, decades ago, it just didn't register.

Because I wasn't actually playing golf back then. I was performing for an identity.

Hidden assumptions in leadership

In The Expectation Gap, Steve Cuss unpacks the hidden assumptions we carry, the quiet beliefs that quietly govern how we relate to God, to others, and to ourselves. We can recite scripture that says one thing. We can preach it. We can teach it. And then we can turn around and behave according to a completely different operating system buried somewhere underneath.

That's why we believe one way and behave another.

My old assumption about golf was simple, and it was running the entire show: my golfing ability is a reflection of my identity. If I'm not good, I'm less of a person. That's why I'd freeze when someone was watching. I'd lose every ounce of confidence I had. I wasn't trying to hit a ball. I was trying to defend who I was.

And the truth is, that assumption was never just about golf.

Here Are Some Of My Assumptions I Have Found Thus Far

As I've gotten older, my assumptions have been revised, not because I sat down and decided to revise them, but because life kept exposing them.

In my twenties, I believed God loved me more when I made him a priority. Serve well, get more love. Have a good quiet time, get more care. That belief was a piece of why I left GM for seminary. Becoming a pastor felt like a way to climb closer to a God who would, in return, climb closer to me.

It took years of actual life to find out it doesn't work that way. God's love isn't transactional. It's transformational. You can build a case for transactional love in parts of the Old Testament, but even there, passages like Lamentations 3:19–25 quietly dismantle the equation. In the New Testament it's unmistakable: his love doesn't move with our performance. We respond to it, and that response changes us — but the love itself isn't on a scoreboard.

A second assumption: if I was really good at something, people would respect, admire, and praise me, and that's where my worth came from. Performance as identity.

The strange part is that it only applied to certain things. Sports mattered. Academics mattered. Looks mattered. Art didn't. Drama didn't. Head size didn't. Height mattered. Shoe size didn't. Running speed mattered. Spelling speed didn't.

I'm deconstructing this assumption as I type it, and I can feel its grip loosen in real time. Why those categories and not others? I don't really know. Probably something my family, friends, or culture applauded was what I adopted.

A third assumption: my worth equaled the admiration I could collect. That's why I needed to be "special." The trait I chose to be special kept changing, walking on my hands, running fast, being quick-witted, planting a large church, running multiple marathons, getting a PhD, brewing kombucha, roasting my own coffee beans. I enjoy trying new things that make me different.

However, all had the same potential drive to be admired, applauded, and important. It isn’t wrong to pursue any of these, but it was the motive that should be suspect.

And a fourth: the praise of some people counts, and the praise of others doesn't. I don't know exactly when I drew that line, but I drew it, and it's pushed me to do plenty of things that ran straight against the pressures around me.

I'm listing these not because they're yours, they probably aren't, but to show you how loud these things are once you actually hear them. Most of them live below our level of consciousness. And every one of them is shaping who you're becoming, and how you lead.

Why This Matters for Leaders

In our work, we say unexamined leadership produces sick organizations, and designed leadership produces healthy ones.

It's the unexamined assumption running silently underneath your decisions, the one that tells you a bad quarter means you're a bad leader, that the elder who praises you matters more than the one who challenges you, that your worth rises and falls with your latest sermon, board meeting, staff review, or savings account balance. You can quote scripture about identity in Christ all day and still lead from an operating system that was installed before you were twelve.

You can't design leadership at the outside until you've examined the assumptions on the inside. They'll keep leaking into everything, who you hire, who you trust, which feedback you can hear, which board member you defer to, which staff member you can never quite confront. Leadership by default isn't a theological problem. It's an assumption problem.

Your assumptions will look nothing like mine. They'll be just as influential.

Cuss's book is a good place to start naming them. Naming them is much of the work. Once an assumption sees daylight, once you write it down in a sentence you'd never say out loud — its grip begins to loosen. I felt mine loosen this morning, sitting here typing about it. I'll feel another one loosen on the next bad tee shot.

That's the head game. That's the leadership game.

Bad shots aren't the problem. The story you tell yourself about the bad shot is.