Many of us are too busy focusing on ourselves instead of others
- Many of us value results primarily for the purpose of creating or sustaining our own stellar reputations.
- We generally don’t feel other people’s results are as important as our own.
- Most people aren’t nearly as happy when others in the organization succeed as they are when they themselves do.
- So we run all over people trying to get our own results with devastating effects.
We betray ourselves and others when…
- We withhold information which gives others reason to do the same.
- We try to control others which provokes the very resistance that we need to control all the more
- We withhold resources from others who then feel the need to protect resources from us.
- We blame others for dragging their feet and in so doing, give them reason to feel justified in dragging their feet all the more, and so on.
Self-betrayal is the germ that creates the disease of self-deception
- Self-deception has many symptoms from lack of motivation and commitment to stress and communication problems.
- Relationships and organizations die or severely cripple by those symptoms and that happens because those who carry the germ don’t know they’re carrying it.
Re-source: Reflection
We need to honor others as people
- As a person with needs, hopes, and worries as real and legitimate as our own
- Once we have a feeling of something we should do to help another, we can choose to honor that sense rather than to betray it
- It doesn’t mean that we are suddenly bombarded with burdensome obligations because of the fundamental change in our way of being with others and seeing others as they are
Reflect whether you…
- Are opened or closed to correction
- Actively sought to learn and enthusiastically taught when you could have
- Held yourself fully accountable
- Took or shifted responsibility when things went wrong
- Moved quickly to solutions or instead found perverse value in problems
- Earned trust form those around you
craving and resource from “Leadership and Self-Deception” – Getting out of the box – by The Arbinger Institute