Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box

by The Arbinger Institute

Self-deception actually determines one’s experience in every aspect of life.

Sounds like the story we tell ourselves

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse.

“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.”

self-deception—the problem of not knowing and resisting the possibility that one has a problem.

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.

I saw others as less than they were—as objects with needs and desires somehow secondary to and less legitimate than mine. But I couldn’t see the problem with what I was doing.

How self deception manifests emotionally

One way, I experience myself as a person among people. The other way, I experience myself as the person among objects. One way, I’m out of the box; the other way, I’m in the box.

We can be hard and invite productivity and commitment, or we can be hard and invite resistance and ill will. The choice isn’t to be hard or not, it’s to be in the box or not.”

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.

I betrayed my own sense of how I should be toward another person. So we call such an act ‘self-betrayal.’

If you seem to be in the box in a given situation but can’t identify a sense you betrayed in that moment, that’s a clue that you might already be in the box. And you may find it useful to wonder whether you’re carrying around some self-justifying images that are feeling threatened.”

Every time we betray ourselves, we go in the box, and it doesn’t matter whether we betray ourselves at home, at work, at the store, or wherever. The box—self-deception—will itself cause all the same kinds of problems in every one of those situations that it caused in this one.

We blame others not to help them but to help ourselves.