Leadership and Self-Deception

Have you ever scrolled through social media and noted a post from someone struggling? Someone asking for help? Someone battling depression, or that needs a job, or lost a family member?

Perhaps you clicked on the little heart-hugging emoji so they would know you cared. You may have considered sending them a private note, text, or making a call. But then life happened/you were late/the dog needed to go out/your boss was coming and you had to get back to work. It was OK, you told yourself, one note wouldn't have changed anything. So you ignored your inner prompt and moved on with your day.

If that sounds familiar to you, you will enjoy reading the book that changed my life.

This is Self-Deception

The book Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute uses a technique that people who have read Who Moved My Cheese? will recognize: a story where someone is described as they walk through the same lessons the reader encounters.

While some may see it as psychology, others as a business book, I appreciate it as a relationship book that starts with a very fundamental situation: the candid relationship I have with myself. In fact, self-deception can be more easily approached as self-awareness.

Lesson in a Nutshell

There are many lessons in the book, but the one that I most internalized and call myself out on almost each day is seeing myself as more real/important than others. That is the self-deception, and because of it it's easy to ignore the inner prompt to help, to do what's right, and not see people the way they really are.

The book explains that we wall ourselves off (stay in-the-box), judging ourselves by our own perceived virtues and other by their perceived faults. When we see people as less than ourselves, less deserving, less in need, then we ignore our inner prompt to help them. We willingly blind ourselves and stay in our little box of self-justification.

What if We All Stayed in the Box?

We are all 'in the box' at some point, it then becomes our conscious decision if we want to leave it or stay there. Taken to the logical extreme: if we all stayed in the box and saw others as less than ourselves, and we all decided not to alleviate the pain, suffering, and need of others; the world would be a disaster.

I've thought of this book quite often over the past few years, especially as the United States seems more and more 'boxed' and divided along extreme political lines. It is tempting to justify remaining in our 'boxes' by maintaining the elevation of our own point of view and magnifying the faults (real or imagined) of others. Staying in that box cuts us off from seeing each other as people, from recognizing our commonalities, and from building and celebrating communication and understanding.

The way to get 'out of the box' is to recognize our own self-deception, view other's as people (not objects) with needs as important as our own, and act on our instinct to help them.

I've Seen This at Work

My grandmother never read the book, but she was an example of living out of the box. I will never forget this particular day at the beach:

We had gone for a swim and, as was the fashion in the 1970's, hid her purse (because of course she brought it to the beach), in a basket draped with a beach towel. After the swim we could see, as we walked back to the blanket, that the beach towel was askew. Worse- the purse was gone.

Grandchildren were dispersed to find some authority figure, a lifeguard or the police, to search in trash cans, to even check in the car in case we were all mistaken and it hadn't actually been at the blanket at all. I stayed with Gramma, and she calmly looked at me and said "I hope they throw the purse away with the photos of you kiddos still in it. It must be terrible to need money so badly that you'd have to steal it."

I tell you, truthfully, I could not have made that statement. Not then, and not now. But my Gramma could and did; she spent her life looking to ease the pain of others and act on her best impulses.

The rest of us can read the book and start practicing.

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You can but Leadership and Self-Deception at your local bookstore, or order it online from bookshop.org. Bookshop.org uses their profits to benefit local independent bookstores, not in going into space like that place named after a river.

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