Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception obscures the truth about ourselves, corrupts our view of others and our circumstances, and inhibits our ability to make wise and helpful decisions. To the extent that we are self-deceived, both our happiness and our leadership are undermined at every turn, and not because of the furniture.
Our experience in teaching about self-deception and its solution is that people find this knowledge liberating. It sharpens vision, reduces feelings of conflict, enlivens the desire for teamwork, redoubles accountability, magnifies the capacity to achieve results, and deepens satisfaction and happiness.
I pondered the question. “I doubt it. It’s kind of tough to agree with people when they’re criticizing you. You probably would have felt defensive if someone had accused you like that.”
“You’d better believe it,” he said. “And how about being committed, engaged, and catching the vision? Do you see that from my perspective, not only was I committed, but I just might’ve been the most committed person on the deal? Because from my point of view, no one had as many challenges to deal with as I had. And I was working hard in spite of them.”
“Remember the problem. I was uncommitted, was disengaged, hadn’t caught the vision, and was making things more difficult for others on the deal. That’s all true. And that’s a problem—a big problem. But there was a bigger problem—and it’s this problem that you and I need to talk about.”
He had my full attention.
“The bigger problem was that I couldn’t see that I had a problem.”
“There is no solution to the problem of lack of commitment, for example, without a solution to the bigger problem—the problem that I can’t see that I’m not committed.”
In one sense, I was ‘stuck’ in my experience in San Francisco. I was stuck because I had a problem I didn’t think I had—a problem I couldn’t see. I could see only from my own closed perspective, and I was deeply resistant to any suggestion that the truth was other than what I was thinking. So I was in a box—cut off, closed up, blind. Does that make sense?”
Identify someone with a problem, and you’ll be identifying someone who resists the suggestion that he has one. That’s self-deception—the problem of not knowing and resisting the possibility that one has a problem.
You can’t make headway solving problems if the people causing those problems refuse to consider how they might be responsible.
the discovery of the cause of self-deception amounts to the revelation of a sort of unifying theory, an explanation that shows how the apparently disparate collection of symptoms we call ‘people problems’—from problems in leadership to problems in motivation and everything in between—are all caused by the same thing. With this knowledge, people problems can be solved with an efficiency that has never been possible before. There is a clear way to attack and solve them—not one by one but in one disciplined stroke.”
“ ‘I want you to consider something, Gabe,’ I said to him. ‘Really think about it. When you’re going out of your way to do all those things for Leon so that he’ll know you have an interest in him, what are you most interested in—him or his opinion of you?’
“I think Gabe was a little surprised by the question. ‘Perhaps Leon thinks you’re not really interested in him,’ I continued, ‘because you’re really more interested in yourself.’
“That’s right. My words said, ‘I’m sorry,’ but my feelings didn’t, and it was the way I was feeling—revealed as it was through my voice, my gaze, my posture, my level of interest in her needs, and so on—it was that that she was responding to.”
And we typically resent it. In the workplace, for example, it won’t matter if the other person tries managing by walking around, sitting on the edge of the chair to practice active listening, inquiring about family members in order to show interest, or using any other skill they may have learned in order to be more effective. What we’ll know and respond to is how that person is regarding us when doing those things.”
“As we’ve been talking about, no matter what we’re doing on the outside, people respond primarily to how we’re feeling about them on the inside. And how we’re feeling about them depends on whether we’re in or out of the box concerning them. Let me illustrate that point further with a couple of examples.
“But notice how different this similar experience was for me and for this woman. I minimized others; she didn’t. I felt anxious, uptight, irritated, threatened, and angry, while she appeared to have had no such negative emotions at all. I sat there blaming others who might be interested in my briefcase’s seat—maybe one looked too happy, another too grim, another had too many carry-ons, another looked too talkative, and so on. She, on the other hand, seemed not to have blamed but to have understood—whether happy, grim, loaded with carry-ons, talkative, or not—they needed to sit somewhere. And if so, why shouldn’t the seat next to her—and in her case, even her own seat—be as rightly theirs as any others?
“Whatever I might be ‘doing’ on the surface—whether it be, for example, sitting, observing others, reading the paper, whatever—I’m being one of two fundamental ways when I’m doing it. Either I’m seeing others straightforwardly as they are—as people like me who have needs and desires as legitimate as my own—or I’m not. As I heard Kate put it once: One way, I experience myself as a person among people. The other way, I experience myself as the person among objects. One way, I’m out of the box; the other way, I’m in the box. Does that make sense?”
