Lettuce in your teeth: it’s no big deal, but it sucks to find out after that important meeting where everyone else saw it while you yammered away, blissfully unaware. Why didn’t anyone tell you? Because most people want to be nice to their fellow humans. We’ve been told, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Pointing out someone else’s flaws, foibles and embarrassing bits feels uncomfortable and scary.
Considering how hard it can be for people to alert you to a little greenery in your smile, imagine how rarely you’ll find someone who will tell you that you’re marrying the wrong person or are on the wrong career path. And honestly, you don’t want to hear this from someone else. What do they know, anyway? No, these are things that are best realized for yourself, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Here’s the thing. The signs are always there and you often can see them clearly in retrospect. The no-good, selfish partner was the same person who stiffed the server on your third date. The soul-sucking, 80-hour a week job started with interviews that asked for 108 examples of how you go above and beyond. If you didn’t see the signs, it’s not that they weren’t there. It was that you had a blind spot, something got in the way of you seeing.
The “It’s Gotta Be a Certain Way” Blind Spot
Sometimes blind spots are the result of being attached to having things a certain way. You’ve been on 50 first dates that went nowhere. This woman is hotter than Austin in August, laughs at all your jokes and learned how to cook from her Sicilian grandmother. She was a little dismissive about your commitment to Crossfit and maybe knows a little too much about whiskey, but she knows how to have a good time and you need more good time in your life. You really want this to be something, so you brush aside, discount and flat out ignore what doesn’t fit.
The “Self-Image” Blind Spot
Some blind spots arise out of a need to see yourself in a certain way. If you grew up in a chaotic family where your role was to keep the peace, you likely have some blind spots around conflict. Peacemakers often confuse being diplomatic with being good at conflict or they mistakenly believe that engaging in any conflict is pointless. Articulating your own needs won’t come naturally if you grew up taking care of a volatile parent. To engage in healthy conflict, you need to be able to be direct about what you are feeling and want; that runs counter to the role and self-image of a peacemaker.
The “Ambiguity and Uncertainty” Blind Spot
Other blind spots arise out of the innate human discomfort with the unfamiliar, ambiguity and uncertainty. We like for the situations and people around us to be tidy and easy. Our brains don’t like venturing into the unknown. It’s dangerous territory. Change has a way of stimulating all kinds of difficult emotions: resistance, fear, sadness and anger. We’re wired to resist leaving our comfort zone. We’re also hyper-attuned to signs of danger—this kept our ancestors alive, but it means we can sometimes overestimate risks and negative intent.
I see this a lot with people who are considering starting their own business. No matter how much due diligence they’ve conducted, as they prepare to leave the security of a paycheck for the unknown, they start ruminating on doubts and all the things they will be walking away from: money, work friends, a favorite lunch spot. A vision of opportunity becomes eclipsed by fear of the unknown. Life begins right outside the comfort zone; it takes courage to step into it.
It also comes up whenever there is a big change, and it doesn’t have to be a “bad” change. Winning the lottery can be as disorienting as going bankrupt. Change creates power shift. I know of a tight knit company that underwent a management change during an economic downturn. When the new boss came in, colleagues who had practically whistled while they worked together began undercutting each other to gain the favor of the new boss. Fear took over: fear of losing status, fear of betrayal, fear of being left behind. There was so much fear, it was impossible for these former friends to see opportunities to come together.
The “Personal Truth” Blind Spot
Then there are the blind spots created by assumptions and beliefs that go deep into the marrow of your being, so enmeshed with your identity that they are difficult to see. These are the ideas that were imparted to you when you were small and lessons learned in a painful way: bigger is better, hard work creates success and vulnerability is weakness.
Our beliefs and assumptions don’t just create blind spots. They block us from the present moment. In the here-and-now, our thoughts and feelings are allies to guide us. Your ultimate challenge is to see things as they are without judgement, attachment or expectation.
Take every opportunity to examine your beliefs and assumptions. You must understand which ones are in play both when you are struggling and when you are succeeding. You can’t create or lead if you are operating with a Swiss cheese picture of the present moment.
My friend Jamie made a hard decision to pivot her business. She got a lot of positive feedback about her vision, but she struggled to sell it beyond early adopters. She pushed ahead full throttle. Hard work, commitment and optimism had always secured success for her in the past. Her ideal was to build a multimillion dollar company that supported a team of full time employees and continued doubling revenue year-over-year for at least the next ten years. She envisioned building a corporate culture that celebrated everyone and set trends.
From the start, she received enthusiastic guidance and support from an investor who believed in her and her vision. She felt responsible for giving him and her hard-working team a great return.
But these things were obscuring two important things: what was in front of her and what was inside her gut. In front of her: her target market wasn’t ready for the revolution she was building. In her gut: she felt the right thing to do was to focus on her clients, not build a corporate empire.
She ignored these whispering doubts for a long time.
She crossed a line where she felt overstretched financially and burned out. It became impossible to ignore that working harder towards the objective wasn’t working. Jamie stepped back and looked at what was driving her. She had always been a Type-A person who defined her worth by measurable achievement: academic, financial and professional.
If she was really honest with herself, Jamie saw that she harbored a belief that if she failed to attain the specific goals that she set for herself, she would let other people down and it might mean that she wasn’t good enough. She examined this idea of “good enough” — what it meant and how she would know when she achieved it. She realized that “good enough” was a moving, unachievable target and so she asked herself a different question: “What if I were good enough already? What’s really here in front of me right now? And what do I really want right now?”
By looking honestly, she was able to perceive more and clarify what was coming from where. She realized that her sense of fulfillment came from serving her clients not building a big company. This idea of being a CEO didn’t come from her own true sense of purpose. It came from expectations she had picked up along the way: in school, from her family and the work cultures she had spent so much of her life.