For this reason, when two or more people are in their boxes toward each other, mutually betraying themselves, we often call it ‘collusion.’

Remember, people primarily respond not to what we do but to how we’re being—whether we’re in or out of the box toward them.”

Whenever we are in the box, we have a need that is met by others’ poor behavior. And so our boxes encourage more poor behavior in others, even if that behavior makes our lives more difficult.”

“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.”

“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.

And every time I’ve betrayed myself, I’ve seen myself in certain self-justifying ways—just like I did in the story we’ve been talking about. The result is that over time, certain of these self-justifying images become characteristic of me. They’re the form my boxes take as I carry them with me into new situations.”

“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.

“And if I’m already in the box toward someone, I generally won’t have feelings to do things for them. So the fact that I have few senses to help someone probably isn’t evidence that I’m out of the box. It may rather be a sign that I’m deep within it.”

We have discovered that clients are able to understand and apply the concepts we teach more easily if we characterize our work in terms of “mindset change” rather than “way-of-being change.”