I don’t care who you are or how great your store of wisdom, there are times in your life when you are clueless about how you represent yourself. And those times of befuddlement occur at a frequency rate directly correlated to your estimation of your own self-knowledge. The more you think you know, the higher the likelihood that you know yourself less.
Years ago, a friend of mine and I spent an entire fourteen hours in deep, intense exploration of the question, “Is there any way to know, really know for sure, if one is or is not deluding oneself?” That philosophical question was not answered affirmatively in our marathon of existential pioneering. Nor in the 35 years since.
An example from my own life is required. It was 1997. Our consulting firm, HRG, was employee-owned. We had a fine team. Our annual retreat was in Sedona. During a break in the planning day’s agenda, the CFO asked to take a walk with me. Lajuan was a consummate professional, and a unique individual. From the outside, she looked like a very experienced and mature professional. Not so well known were her penchants for sky-diving and SCUBA. Lajuan was unafraid of direct communication.
So we’re walking along the creekside trail, the October chill rustling the yellow Aspens, and she says, “Stan, some of us have discussed this and we need to bring something to your attention.”
Well, this was a first. I anticipated all sorts of complaints about my leadership, the direction of the company, some key aspect of our business model, some mistake I had made on an important project, a lack of bookings attributable to my poor performance, or some other disappointment I had visited on my valued colleagues. Lajuan looked me straight in the eye and said, “We want you to trim your eyebrows.”
“Excuse me…?” I said, not sure if I actually heard correctly what she said.
“They’re growing longer and curling up on the ends, sort of like horns. It makes you look craggy, even sinister”, she explained. “We think it’s hurting business.”
As I had gotten older, my body had gone about its normal transformation where hair that shouldn’t be growing started to, and hair that should be stopped. My work was all-consuming as well. I was doing 70-80 hour workweeks. I focused on the content of our advice, developing staff, bringing in new clients and projects, creating tools, etc. During this intense work, I apparently was fiddling with my eyebrows, curling them up like a mustache on a Vaudeville villain. I had no idea how I was representing myself. After Lajuan’s brave confrontation, I went back to my lodge room and looked in the mirror, seemingly for the first time. There they were, two horns of plenty, suitable for any Halloween party. No wonder bookings were down.
While this may be a somewhat rudimentary example, there are many others that come to mind when I did not realize the impact I was having on others or the way I was being perceived. Humans are very perceptive in picking up on others’ messages and portrayals. We have a blind spot when it comes to seeing ourselves.
And how could we not? Can a fish actually see himself in the bowl? Of course not. So that is why I have concluded that self-delusion is something that cannot be discerned by the subject. It must be revealed by an observer. Unfortunately, the task of telling the King that he is without clothing–or the CEO that his eyebrows are scary–falls to the bravest of those who actually care about him. The reward for such loving honesty can be painful indeed. But if the love is great, the pain will be accepted without resentment.
If you are interested in minimizing the number of actions you later regret, if you want to eliminate the phrase “I had no idea….!” from your conversations, if you want to reduce the times you embarrass yourself in public, then I suggest you treat those lovely people who respectfully confront you with your own behavior like the gifts they truly are.