What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Blind Spots: The Invisible Contributors

Have you ever found yourself tripped up while working on something, seemingly for no reason? You’re pretty sure you’re doing everything right. But you’re just really not feeling the results. And you can’t say you feel like repeating the process either if it might just end up wrong again. In situations like this, there might be suffering from a blind spot. 

Blind spots aren’t easily visible- that’s in the name. And that makes them a bit hard to concretely define. In a broad sense, a blind spot is an area of ignorance or unawareness that can lead to negative outcomes. 

These blind spots aren't just minor inconveniences; they can seriously hold us back. They get in the way of our personal growth, block our career development, and can even lead us to accidentally sabotage our own goals. At their roots, blind spots might come from unconscious biases, procrastination, or an aversion to change. 

How do you tackle something you aren’t aware of? Follow along with CLCI Live as Jen Long (ACC), Anthony Lopez (MCPC), Brooke Adair Walters (ACC), Jerome LeDuff (MCLC), and Lisa Finck (MCC) highlight the importance of recognizing blind spots and discuss practical questions for self-reflection. The key to turning this self sabotage around is a mix of understanding ourselves and being open to what others see in us.

Blind Spots and Self-Sabotage: The Interplay of Values, Attitudes, and Behaviors

A blind spot on its own isn’t an attitude or behavior at all. But they can contribute to negative attitudes or behaviors in ways we aren't all that aware of. To get into what this means, let’s take a look at the problem we’re more broadly hoping to tackle: self-sabotage. 

Self-sabotage can be defined as behaviors that undermine personal goals and/or interfere with daily life. They often stem from procrastination or even rebellion against a person’s own desires (a tricky situation that can lead to experiencing cognitive dissonance). The attitudes and beliefs we hold are unseen, even as they steer many of our actions in one way or another. Here are just a few of the types of blind spots you or a client might encounter in your life:

Unconscious biases are a significant blind spot. Also known as implicit biases, these are associations we hold but don’t realize we do. Unlike explicit biases, they’re outside of our conscious awareness and in some ways, control. In fact, unconscious biases can go completely opposite to the attitudes we say we hold and actions choose to make. Nobody is immune: unconscious biases affect everyone. 

Common unconscious biases range from the halo effect to affinity bias and more (check out this Harvard pamphlet if you want to see examples!). Our unconscious biases affect our perceptions of others even when we don’t know it. They influence our understanding, actions, and behaviors, ultimately affecting our decision making. 

An unconscious bias can interfere with our life or goals negatively, all while we are unaware of its existence and how it is limiting us. Visible or hidden, biases have significant consequences. 

Another issue is being unaware of our own limitations. It’s hard to ask yourself what you can’t do and then accept the resulting answer. But we close off our own growth if we hide from our areas of difficulties. Self reflection means finding our weaknesses and limitations, not just positives. Avoiding introspection doesn’t make a limitation go away, it just makes it invisible. And that can make it all the harder to deal with when it starts interfering with our goals. 

Then there’s our reflection on our actions. Plenty of blind spots exist in between a negative behavior, and later repeating that same, self-sabotaging behavior. For example, there’s confabulation: the fabrication of reasons for an action. Imagine a poor decision has negative consequences and puts you further from a goal. It’s not easy to accept that your action was the wrong one. It never is, for anyone! The sunk cost fallacy is just one popular manifestation of our human tendency towards self-justification of poor decisions. 

In a similar vein, there’s cognitive dissonance; when someone's actions conflict with their beliefs. Maybe the action is driven by an unconscious bias. Maybe the action was a conscious decision made begrudgingly because it’s expected as the only way to meet their goal. When attitudes and behaviors aren’t on the same page, cognitive dissonance is the resulting discomfort and pain and it always requires something to give: either the belief, or the behavior. Without self-reflection, it’s all too easy for the former route to win out without our say. 

Emotional blind spots can manifest in consistent negative patterns in relationships. We might not be seeing the exact issue hiding in that blind spot, but we know it’s there because we see its consequences over and over again. These types of blind spots indicate deeper issues that need exploration. Once again, self-reflection is our key to slowing down and uncovering what’s there and what we need to do about it.

Checking Blind Spots

Imagine two cars driving side-by-side, one in the other's blind spot. So long as the driver in the lead doesn’t look to check their blind spot or adjust their speed, they won’t know there’s a danger, let alone know any details about the other vehicle. Slowing down or looking is key. This is what we have to do internally.

We can ask ourselves questions like: "What am I afraid to know?" and "What is the one thing I least want to accept?" Or we can be prompted by someone else to ask ourselves these types of questions. The more we do, and the more we really work to answer these, the greater self awareness we can gain. Introspection isn’t easy, but it’s a skill that can grow easier like any other: with practice.

Why is introspection so important? Because recognizing blind spots is going to require checking in with oneself and being open to feedback from others. In fact, the more feedback you can get, the better! Having a diverse group of individuals can prevent echo chambers, providing varied perspectives that illuminate blind spots. It’s easy to fall into an echo chamber. Polarization can take an unconscious bias and strengthen it without our knowledge. But with modern affordances, we also have the chance to hear very different voices from our own.

If a client has reached out and established a client-coaching relationship, then they already have one of those additional voices. Rather than giving direct advice and feedback, coaches should facilitate personal growth and self-awareness for their client. Encourage your client to self-reflect. What are their answers to those types of questions introduced earlier? The coaching space can foster your client’s curiosity and acceptance of themselves so that even when they’re on their own, they’re used to exploring what might be in their blind spots. After awareness, overcoming the self-sabotaging behaviors interfering with goals is a tangible, and very doable challenge, not a fight against the invisible.

As a coach, you have the opportunity to facilitate and encourage this growth in your clients. As a person, we encourage you to engage in self-exploration yourself: reflect and seek feedback and the invisible attitudes driving self sabotaging behaviors can be rooted out.

Thank you,

Jen Long (PCC), Anthony Lopez (MCPC), Brooke Adair Walters (ACC), Jerome LeDuff (MCLC), and Lisa Finck (MCC)

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