Leadership and Self Deception
The Arbringer Institute has produced a profound text, one that promises to change your self-perception and to teach you how to improve your self-awareness. It certainly has for me and I can say that it is one of the 5 most powerful books I have ever read. Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box was a text created in an effort to train executives and upper management personnel to take a good, long hard look at their work environment interaction and to make improvements based on their self-discovery.
The book is not only an excellent text for management personnel, but it can help any individual make significant life improvements. Likening self-deception to “being inside a box,” the book teaches the reader how to break out of the self-deceptive box and open him or herself to external feedback from coworkers and colleagues. Using the external feedback, the individual can then make significant improvements in how they communicate, as well as how they function in the work environment.
Leadership and Self Deception will teach you how to view others as equals, how to treat colleagues with the respect they deserve, and how to interact with others in a positive fashion. You will learn about your own motivations as you examine what is considered the 7 acts of self-betrayal:
1. An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of “self-betrayal”.
2. When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self- betrayal.
3. When I see a self-justifying world, my view of reality becomes distorted.
4. So - when I betray myself, I enter the box.
5. Over time, certain boxes become characteristic of me, and I carry them with me.
6. By being IN the box, I provoke others to be in the box.
7. In the box, we invite mutual mistreatment and obtain mutual justification. We collude in giving each other reason to stay in the box.
Then, Leadership and Self Deception will teach you innovative methods for avoiding self-betrayal and deception. You can learn how to break out of old habits, how to change your awareness, increase and improve your personal perception, and how to motivate yourself as well as others. But do not kid yourself. You will feel and see immediate changes in your life but to keep it sustainable, you need to practice, practice, practice. It works.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Picture from Amazon.com
