Leadership and Self-Deception - By The Arbinger Institute
So there I was - trying to shoot and for the life of me unable to see the target. Just when I thought I had it, nope, I missed. After sitting out for a bit observing my dad and daughter continue to shoot, I finally decided to give it another try. As I peered down the gun’s barrel once again, I just wasn’t matching up the line of sight - until - I shut my left eye and tried seeing the target with my right. BULLSEYE! I had been closing the wrong eye (ugh!). Little did I realize this whole time that I just needed to change my perspective.
I guess there seems to be no coincidence that I also happened to be finishing up the book Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute during this time. In this book, the authors seek to sharpen the vision, reduce feelings of conflict, enliven the desire for teamwork, redouble accountability, magnify the capacity to achieve results and deepen overall satisfaction and happiness by educating people to basically change their perspective.
The authors challenge us to “see yourself, others, and your challenges differently, and to solve problems that have stubbornly resisted solution.” To do so, they take us through a story everyone can relate to about a man facing challenges on the job and in his family. They help us discover our true motivations and uncover our unknown self-sabotage ways. Often we provoke resistance from others or perhaps we, ourselves, resist others in justification to our thoughts and feelings as result of our own self-betrayal. What may appear as relevant at the moment, may in fact be a view of reality that has become distorted by our own self-betrayal. Through such times the authors show us we begin to be self-deceived as we:
inflate others’ faults
inflate own virtue
inflate the value of things that justify our self-betrayal
produce blame
This self-justifying, in time, becomes a characteristic of us and as result we tend to carry them throughout life - in the workplace and at home. This whole concept is referred to throughout the book as either being in the box, or out of the box. It simply means that we need to see and appreciate others as people.
Bonus! Included in this book is a resource for you to take the Mindset Assessment for FREE. This assessment will help you measure your self-deception gap. Overall, a good read to help challenge your mindset and encourage you to see leadership from a different perspective.
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