Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
Or the sort of person who’s important or competent or hardworking or the smartest. Or being the sort of person who knows everything or does everything, or doesn’t make mistakes or thinks of others, and so on. Almost anything can be perverted into a self-justifying image.”
The Arbinger Institute • Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
“By blaming, I invite others to get in the box, and they then blame me for blaming them unjustly. But because I feel justified in blaming them while I’m in the box, I feel that their blame is unjust and blame them even more.
The Arbinger Institute • Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
mistreated but because we’re in the box, and the box lives on the justification it gets from our being mistreated.
The Arbinger Institute • Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
The more people we can find to agree with our side of the story, the more justified we will feel in believing that side of the story. I might recruit my spouse to join with me in blaming my son, for example, or I might gossip about others in order to gather allies at work in my collusion against another person or department.
The Arbinger Institute • Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
“Exactly, Tom, and as long as I am focused on myself, I can’t fully focus either on results or on the people to whom I am to be delivering those results.
The Arbinger Institute • Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
“Yes. I want you to think about how and whether you really focused on results during the time you worked with him. I want you to consider whether you were open or closed to correction, whether you actively sought to learn and enthusiastically taught when you could have. Whether you held yourself fully accountable in your work, whether you took or s
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Self-betrayal is the germ that creates the disease of self-deception.
The Arbinger Institute • Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
The out-of-the-box nature of your experience with Bud and Kate invited you to do something that we never do in the box—it invited you to question whether you were in fact as out of the box as you had assumed you were in other areas of your life.
The Arbinger Institute • Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
“That’s why skill training in nontechnical areas often has so little lasting impact,” Lou said. “Helpful skills and techniques aren’t very helpful if they’re done in the box. They just provide people with more-sophisticated ways to blame.”