Monday, September 8, 2008

Self Deception - A Common Problem

I'm in the process of re-reading the book, "Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box," by The Arbinger Institute. This book explains that our lives are shaped and determined by our personal self-deception. I love the examples that is shared in the preface of the book:
"To give you an idea of what's at stake, consider the following analogy. An infant is learning to crawl. She begins by pushing herself backward around the house. Backing herself around, she gets lodged beneath the furniture. There she thrashes about -- crying and banging her little head against the sides and undersides of the pieces. She is stuck and hates it. So she does the only thing she can think of to get herself out -- she pushes even harder, which only worsens her problem. She's more stuck than ever.
"If this infant could talk, she would blame the furniture for her troubles. She, after all, is doing everything she can think of. The problem couldn't be hers, But of course, the problem is hers, even though she can't see it. While it's true she's doing everything she can think of, the problem is precisely that she can't see how she's the problem. Having the problem she has, nothing she can think of will be a solution."
Each of us falls into this category at some level or another. We are getting ourselves into problems, trying harder to get ourselves out and don't realize that we are the problem. Nothing we do will get us out of the problem we have created for ourselves. This books goes into the root of this problem and shows how this self-deception affects our lives and why we can't see the problem we're creating until we know what the problem is. I would recommend the book to everyone.

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