Book: Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute

Synopsis: Through a story everyone can relate to about a man facing challenges on the job and in his family, the authors expose the fascinating ways that we can blind ourselves to our true motivations and unwittingly sabotage the effectiveness of our own efforts to achieve success and increase happiness.

Through narrative writing, this book teach us about handling communication and interpersonal relationship. What I like about this book is it force me to reflect on the way I live and how I treat others. Sometimes we unknowingly "self-betrayed" ourselves, a situation where we had a sense of doing something that we should for others but didn’t do it. By this, we entered “into a box” where we are blinded by the true causes of problems and see others as mere objects. For example:

Tom was on a flight with open seating. While boarding, he overheard the boarding agent saying the plane was not sold out but there would be very few unused seats. He found a window seats with a vacant seat beside it. Passengers still in need of seats continued streaming down the aisle and scanning and evaluating the desirability of their dwindling seating options. Tom set his briefcase on the vacant seat and started to read his newspaper. He kept peering over the top corner of the paper at the people who were coming down the aisle and set his paper as wide as possible to make the vacant seat as undesirable as possible.

In the above scenario, we can see that Tom saw the people coming down the aisle as threats, nuisances or problems. He considers his needs as primary while others are secondary. He see people as less than they were, as objects with needs and desires somehow secondary to and less legitimate than his.

In another scenario, Tom was on another flight with his wife that was mostly full and the flight attendant was having difficulty trying to find a way to seat both of them together. When they try to figure a solution, a lady came from behind and offered her seat that has a vacant seats beside to them in exchange for one of their seat.

In this scenario, the lady do not see them as threat, nuisance or problems. She see them as people in need of seats who would like to sit together. She saw others as they were, as people like herself, without bias, with similar needs and desire.  

This books also provides some scenarios to explain that when we are "in the box", the blinded thoughts, solution and actions that we can think of to solve the problems actually make the situation worse. We blame others and in order to make our self feel good, we find negative reason of others to justify our self-betrayal. All these factors might have been the reasons that is hindering our success in work and personal life.

In summary, this book explain the definition of self-betrayal, its problems, and  its consequences which can be very harmful. After reading it, I am more aware of my own actions in order not to fall into "my own box". No harm giving this book a go!