Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box

“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.”

If people act in ways that challenge the claim made by a self-justifying image, we see them as threats. If they reinforce the claim made by a self-justifying image, we see them as allies. If they fail to matter to a self-justifying image, we see them as unimportant.

mistreated but because we’re in the box, and the box lives on the justification it gets from our being mistreated.

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.”

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

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.