Lately I’ve been really busy with school, friends, family,
and life in general. Hence a little
neglect on my part as far as updating my blog goes. Fortunately for me, this
last week has been filled to the brim with moments that have inspired and lead me
to formally recognize a lot of truths that I had already known. The gears in my mind have been spinning at
full speed. While I was thinking about these truths, many people asked me
whether not I was ok; a pensive mind gives off that vibe I suppose. It’s slightly
comical to see people’s reactions when I get into these “grooves”.
Anyways back to the inspiration. I would like to talk about
a couple of different books I have read over the course of this week. In this
post I would like to mention some of the ideas found in Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Outside the Box by the
Arbinger Group. This post will be the foundation for a new series that I’m
going to write. The series of posts will tie all of these things that I have
learned together and establish what I might call “my life philosophy”. These
different insights have changed the way I think about people, and I hope that
as I share them with you the may do the same.
So without further adieu, let me explain the box.
Imagine that every person has an imaginary box around them.
This box is around us. It may differ from person to person. Or in other words,
for each individual we come in contact with, we have a distinct and individual
box for them around us. We all have them.
We’ll put a label on this box: self-deception.
Now, before I go on any further trying to explain what the
box is exactly, I’d like to give some common examples of how we interact with
others so I can clearly explain the box
to you. I want you to think of two people. First, think of someone who you just
can’t seem to get along with, someone who just seems to be able to push every
button you have. Someone who you find critical, obnoxious, spiteful, or just
irksome (it can be a co-worker, your boss, a neighbor, or maybe a student…
whoever).
Now, that you have this person in mind, think of someone
with whom you get along really well. Someone who if they asked you a favor, you
would bend over backwards to help them out. Great. Now that you have both
individuals identified, what makes the one more appealing to be around than the
other? Why is one of them a source of frustration and the other an esteemed
hero? Both of these people are living, breathing individuals who go about their
daily lives in a way that might not be all that different from one another.
Yet,
for some reason we have disdain towards the one and admiration towards the
other…
From one we gladly receive correction and advice; the other
we find critical and disregard everything they try to tell us. They may even
give us the same criticism in the same manner, yet we will only listen to one.
The other will probably just lead us to continue what we are doing, either in
retaliation against them or to spite them.
Let me see if I can shed some light on “why” this
predicament exists. This may help us to change how we fundamentally see others,
how we treat them, and our attitudes towards them. All of us have an innate
ability to sense when someone is being genuine with us or whether they are just
blowing smoke. Just think about it; we can tell what people are thinking, or
how they fill about us more from their body language than the actual words that
they say. This concept of how we view other people is at the very core of this
issue. When we know that someone truly cares for us and our well-being, we will
take their criticism, bend over backwards to help them, or do anything to
maintain their trust. All because we know that they see us as people. They see us for who we are: a
living being with our own feelings, needs, and wants not objects or a means to
an end for themselves.
So, in short, those who see us as people become our friends
and closest allies, while those who see us as objects or a means to an end
become our enemies and rivals.
This idea is the vision and foundation upon which this
philosophy is based. Do we see people as objects or as human beings? Ask
yourself, while walking down the street or while driving in your car, do you
see the people for what they are or rather objects impeding you from achieving
your goals?
Now that we have established this base, let’s move on to
what the Arbinger Group calls self-betrayal. For the purpose of this post, I will call it
self-betrayal, but personally I would give it a different name: the Light of
Christ. (For those of you who are Christians, or even more specifically
Mormons, I may have just thrown you through a loop but continue reading and
then after I explain, watch this link and it should all make sense.)
To define self-betrayal, let’s think of another universal example
to illustrate what it is exactly. There is moment in time when each of us have
a thought or a feeling come to us to do something for another person, for an
example let’s say do the dishes for your roommates. Now when this happens we
have two choices: one, act on it and do the dishes for them or two, remain
motionless and do nothing. Each yields
an important consequence to how we view those whom the feeling or thought
involved.
First we are going to address what happens when we act
contrary to that feeling. As we sit
there we begin to think things like: well, they should really do their dishes…
they are so lazy. Or maybe we begin to think that they are inconsiderate and
self-centered, while we are always doing things for them. They should be doing
our dishes because we are such good roommates. They suddenly begin to become
the messiest, sloppiest, and dirtiest people upon the face of the planet, while
we are the cleanest, tidiest, and most organized people alive. You see what
just happened? We just entered into the box towards our roommates.
Remember the
box is self-deception; we begin to inflate their faults while our virtues suddenly
seem much larger than they really are. Our vision is skewed.
The act of not
doing what we felt we should do for them is what the books calls self-betrayal,
or in other words we betray our own intuition (or the Light of Christ as I
would call it) and it leads us into the box of self-deception and our vision is
skewed. If we continue to act contrary to our intuition eventually we will end
up in a box so thick that the reality is we won’t even recognize that we are in
it. Those people cease to be people to us and they suddenly become objects in
our way to success. This causes rifts in relationships, gaps in friendships,
and fissures in the work place. We begin to focus solely on ourselves rather
than on other people.
Now if we decide to act upon those feelings we get from our
intuition, we will be “out-of-the-box” towards those people. We see them as people:
imperfect and preoccupied, yet important and friendly. We truly consider their
needs along with our needs rather than objects obstructing our own success.
Their success in life becomes just as, if not more important than our own. We
are able to co-exist in harmony and peace, rather than discord and frustration.
That is the difference between those two people you
identified earlier, one you are in the box towards, and the other you are out
of the box towards. When we are in the box we will always look for ways to
justify our own actions, while placing the blame on the other person for being
unbearable and unreachable. Now if you
begin to think or justify saying, “But that person really is unbearable and rude…” just think about what I’ve said, I promise
you that it is us rather than them. I
am not saying, however that we are always to blame, rather that we should take
a hard look inwards before we assign blame to someone.
We need to try and change. When we come to this realization
we immediately leave the box and can change our perspective of them and help
them to change as well. While being in the box, we invite others to be in the
box towards us because they are able to pick up on our feelings towards them
via body language and other things, thus making it a perpetual problem that
never is solved until we are able to change how we see them.
Reading this book has led me to do a self-evaluation, and I
have a lot of changing to do. There are a lot of people who I saw as objects,
but now I realize that I need to change. I
need to leave the box. So I have decided to change, and will I be perfect
at this? Obviously not, but I will be willing to make up for my mistakes,
apologize when necessary and take responsibility for my own faults and wrong
behaviors rather than point a finger and blame another.
If we can all just change how we see one another I know that
this world would be extremely different. We would all be more willing to help
one another out and change other people’s lives. That’s my hope and wish, and I know its Gods
hope and wish as well.
As always,
With love,
Will Glade
The one walking beside you.
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