Blind Spots

Lettuce in your teeth is no big deal, but it stings to learn about it after the meeting, when everyone saw it, and nobody said a word. People stay quiet because pointing out someone's flaw feels rude. If it's that hard to mention lettuce, imagine how rarely anyone tells you you're on the wrong career path, or marrying the wrong person. And you wouldn't want to hear it from them anyway. What do they know?

Here's what I keep running into, though. The signs are usually there. The selfish partner is the same one who stiffed the server on the third date. The eighty-hour job started with an interview that asked for a dozen examples of how you go above and beyond. When you miss the signs, it isn't that they weren't there. Something in you did not need to see them.

The blind spots that run deepest come from beliefs set so early they feel like the marrow of you. Bigger is better. Hard work earns your worth. Needing things is weakness. You don't examine these. You live by them.

My friend Jamie pivoted her business and got good feedback on the vision, but she couldn't sell it past the early adopters. She pushed harder. Hard work had always paid off for her before. She wanted to build a multimillion-dollar company, double revenue for ten years, and employ a big team.

Two things stayed hidden from her. In front of her, the market wasn't ready for what she was building. Inside her, her gut kept saying the real work was with her clients, not an empire. She ignored her gut for a long time. Then she hit a wall, overstretched and burned out, and couldn't ignore that working harder wasn't working.

When she stepped back, she saw what had been driving her. She had always measured her worth by what she achieved. Grades, money, title. If she didn't hit the goals, she'd let people down, and letting people down might mean she wasn't good enough. So she looked hard at "good enough" and found it was a moving target she could never reach.

She asked a different question. What if I'm good enough already? What's really in front of me, and what do I want?

The CEO she was trying to become had not come from her. It came from school, from her family, from the places she'd worked. It was a rule she never chose, running her life from a spot she couldn't see.