What Are Your Blind Spots Costing You?
At InsightGlobal, our central mission is to uncover the blind spots in our client’s lives and, once understood, assist our clients in determining how to best address these blind spots. This is done by either dealing with them head on through a variety of proven processes and techniques, or by simply learning to negate the impact of their blind spots on their personal and professional lives.
What are Blind Spots?
Blind spots come in just two varieties: prejudice or ignorance.
Blind spots stemming from prejudice are those that center on our values and beliefs as well as our formal and informal education. Basically, these blind spots are created when you hold to a thought that simply is not true, true for some but not for others, or no longer true at all.
Examples include:
- Because Karen had troubles in the past with her old staff, she thinks that she needs to micro-manage her new staff members if any work is going to get done.
- Because a women grew up in a family where her father, uncles and brothers were all very dismissive of her, she now expects other men in her life to treat her the same way, often setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Jim’s father told him that members of his family would always be poor since “you need money to make money in life.” Jim never challenges this belief and thus never even thinks about applying to college or to seek a more lucrative job throughout his life.
Blind spots stemming from ignorance are those that center around a lack of awareness of your blind spots or, even if you are aware of them, an ignorance of the degree that your blind spots are affecting your performance or your relationship with others. Some examples of these types of blind spots are:
- Being oblivious that you nervously rap your fingers in meetings to allay your anxiety.
- You regularly interrupt others in conversation thinking what you have to say is “obviously” more important.
- You know that you drink a bit too much at business dinners and at office parties but you have no idea that it is beginning to turn off customers and jeopardize your job.
Blind spots can cause severe disruption in your personal and professional happiness and success. Over the next couple of weeks, I will discuss how you can uncover your personal blind spots and what you can to do about them so that they don’t cause havoc in your relationships or your job.
By the way, as a teaser for next week, one technique to uncover some of your own blind spots is to simply ask others whom you trust what they perceive to be some of your more significant blind spots. Asking others is the quickest way to begin the process of dealing with your own blind spots. We ALL have blind spots. What we don’t all have is the openness and courage to ask others what they may be.
Tags: 360 degree feedback, blind spots, personal development
