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.”

“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.

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.”

In the box, my whole way was blaming—both my thoughts and my feelings told me Nancy was at fault.

“Whatever I might be ‘doing’ on the surface—whether it be, for example, sitting, observing others, reading the paper, whatever—I’m being one of two fundamental ways when I’m doing it. Either I’m seeing others straightforwardly as they are—as people like me who have needs and desires as legitimate as my own—or I’m not. As I heard Kate put it once:

We call this characteristic “horizontal alignment.” It is a measure of the extent of understanding people have about the objectives, needs, and challenges of those lateral to them in their organizations.

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

“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.

A twenty-question survey instrument called the Arbinger Mindset Assessment measures in a more detailed way where respondents rate their organizations’ mindset and where they rate their own.