Blindspots – Friend or Foe?

We can all laugh about the emperor who led the public parade in the “altogether” because he failed to listen to an advisor who tried to point out his nakedness.  But what about us?  When a true friend comes with a message that doesn’t fit well within our picture of reality (or how we WANT the world to be), do we WELCOME or SHOOT the messenger?  It’s often a lot easier to criticize or paint the messenger who is trying to warn and protect us, with a negative label, than to welcome the insight and check  out it’s validity.  That’s because when someone surprises us with an unexpected view into one of our “blind spots,” we really aren’t prepared for that.  More on blind spots in a moment, but first here are some familiar examples.

 

The old style “seat of the pants” CEO was generally proud of his ability to control his company.  That typically meant he had to keep his finger personally in most of the pies.  Just the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt who said to first find some good men, tell them what you want done, then move out of the way and let them get it done.  But the controlling style CEO typically feels threatened by culture changes such as Total Quality Management, and its chief tenant of Continuous Quality Improvement.  Just buzz words and fluff, he labels, as he quickly moves to “cut the fat” (or reduce non-value-added efforts) in order to prove he knows all about “how to control things”.  But if we are to find something practical for ourselves in such observations, we need to ask some tough relevant questions like “WHY does he feel threatened?”  And similarly, why do WE feel so threatened by someone who recommends improvements and changes, that our first line of defense is to label them as “insensitive to our situation, inexperienced, not educated enough, and even not enough like us to understand us?”  Our defenses are up, because they have peeked inside one of our Bind Spots where they see more clearly than we do, and provided us a snapshot of something we couldn’t see and don’t want to see since it doesn’t fit within the neatly packaged view that we have comfortably held onto, before they came along with their upsetting “snapshot.” 

 

Actually we feel doubly threatened.  We feel vulnerable to such “competition” which seems to want to change things as we know them, and we also feel the “fear of the unknown” since their experience and ideas lie outside our past experience.  For example, we would only feel comfortable accepting their “snapshot” and improvement recommendations if we could “objectively” see this for ourselves, and  if we had previously had success with such changes.  Hence we run into a “Catch 22” where we require the result of improvement, before we are even willing to TRY to switch to new methods to try to achieve improvement.  So let’s move from here to review some Blind Spot material.  We actually all have two general Blind Spot areas, one known to others, and one unknown to everyone but God, as reviewed below.

 

 

Our  BLIND SPOTS  need  the  light  of awareness   shed  by  the  feedback  from  others  who  know  us best, like our mates and close friends. Our  FACADES  (Cover-ups)  need  to  be  cracked  open and exposed so others can see behind our masks.  We need to realize  that we benefit  greatly  from sharing  and learning from a close friend, not  from  hiding behind a mask.  Ironically  we  all tend to try to “hide  from  God,”  or ignore Him, pretending He can’t see through us, when obviously He is the only One who is aware of certain of our  strengths and weaknesses which neither others, nor  ourselves,  can see!   His Spirit can uniquely show us things about ourselves that we  could never otherwise see.  By the way, He is the One  who  uniquely created  us  with our individual set of strengths  and  weaknesses,  and similarly He can transform our temperament, character, personality,  and our  respect for ourselves, others, and God Himself, way beyond our wildest imagination.   God specializes in  transforming  our  weaknesses  into corresponding strengths.  Read all about Blind Spot transformations in the lives of Peter  and  Paul  in  the New Testament.  See  both  before  and  after  they submitted their lives to Jesus Christ.