Self-deception actually determines one’s experience in every aspect of life.
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.
“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.”
“That’s usually the case. 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.
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.
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.
One way, I experience myself as a person among people. The other way, I experience myself as the person among objects.
everyone else has duplicated all of that stuff, but they’ve yet to duplicate our results. And that’s because they don’t know how much smarter smart people are, how much more skilled skilled people get, and how much harder hardworking people work when they see, and are seen, straightforwardly—as people.
“As for knowing her,” Bud continued, “I don’t really, except that I try to know the names of as many people as I can around the company.
Remember, people primarily respond not to what we do but to how we’re being
There’s something deeper than behavior that determines our influence on others—it’s whether we’re in or out of the box. You don’t know much about the box yet, but when we’re in the box, our view of reality is distorted—we see neither ourselves nor others clearly. We are self-deceived. And that creates all kinds of trouble for the people around us.
“They’re all examples of self-betrayal—times when I had a sense of something I should do for others but didn’t do it.”
backed away from the board, “my thoughts and feelings will begin to tell me that I’m justified in whatever I’m doing or failing to do.”
If you seem to be in the box in a given situation but can’t identify a sense you betrayed in that moment, that’s a clue that you might already be in the box. And you may find it useful to wonder whether you’re carrying around some self-justifying images that are feeling threatened.”
“What I need most when I’m in the box is to feel justified. Justification is what my box eats, as it were, in order to survive. And if I’d spent my whole night, and really a lot longer even than that, blaming my son, what did I need from my son in order to feel ‘justified,’ to feel ‘right’?”
I saw in myself a leader who was so sure of the brilliance of his own ideas that he couldn’t allow brilliance in anyone else’s, a leader who felt he was so ‘enlightened’ that he needed to see workers negatively in order to prove his enlightenment, a leader so driven to be the best that he made sure no one else could be as good as he was.”
“In the moment we cease resisting others, we’re out of the box—liberated from self-justifying thoughts and feelings. This is why the way out of the box is always right before our eyes—because the people we’re resisting are right before our eyes. We can stop betraying ourselves toward them—we can stop resisting the call of their humanity upon us.”
Tom—acting on the sense or feeling I have recovered of what I can do to help another—is the key to staying out of the box. Having recovered that sense, I am out of the box; by choosing to honor it rather than betray it, I am choosing to stay out of the box.”
The leaders that people choose to follow are the leaders who are out of the box.
Rather, we’re living it when we’re using it to learn how we can be more helpful to others