Originally appeared on: http://web.archive.org/web/20220527194637/https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/relationships/professional/how-to-find-and-fix-relationship-blind-spots
What’s your greatest weakness? Knowing it can become a strength. Get-It-Done Guy explains how to find and address the blind spots that can sabotage your relationships.
February 18, 2019
It’s not enough to anticipate what you need to do to work well together. The flip side, which we almost never talk about, is anticipating how things might break. And since zombies are made of rotting flesh, let’s just say they break a lot more easily than you’d expect.
Vulnerability Is Key
Talking about how things break takes courage. You have to admit that things might break. In our culture, we always want to project an aura of absolute certainty and confidence.
(If you’re under 30 listening to this, I have a horrible life spoiler for you: Very few people actually know what they’re doing. Job title is no predictor of ability. Confidence is no predictor of ability. Some of the most competent people have the lowest confidence. Have you heard of Impostor Syndrome? And many of the least competent people have high confidence. Very high confidence. The best confidence.)
None of us wants to admit we’re not perfect. It opens us up and makes us vulnerable.
So I’ll go first.
Access Your Inner Hippie
I moved a lot as a kid. I grew up in a traveling New Age commune. We would move into a town and start a psychic growth center. Word would spread, and lickity-split, none of the kids would be allowed to play with me. You’ve heard of the kids from the other side of the tracks? Ta da! That’s me!
For 12-year-old me, this was really hard. Middle school is hard enough for kids who are well-adjusted, popular, and into sports. When you’re small for your age, smart, have zero *social skills, and were raised as a conscientious objector, let’s just say you get an awful lot of “feedback” from your peers.
I ended up emotionally scarred for life. But scar tissue is tough. So now, being open is easy for me. The Ambassador to the Court of Saint James invites me to a “black tie” New Years Eve reception. I grab a thick piece of black rope and tie it around my waist to keep my loincloth on. When I don’t win the best-dressed award, it doesn’t crush my ego. I just make a note to myself: “The phrase ‘black tie’ does not mean what you think it means.”
Be me. Seriously. Just, be me. Pretend you’ve already* been made fun of, pushed down the stairs, ridiculed for wearing glasses, beaten up for being weird. And you survived.
But also keep enough of you to be realistic. You don’t want to learn the loincloth lesson. Trust me. Got it? Are you me, yet? Good. Now you’re ready to be vulnerable enough to establish stronger relationships with others.
Start Relationships With a Risk Analysis
Since you listened to episode 513, you’re already having your process conversation at the start of a new relationship.
For relationships where you and the other person must depend on each other, consider going deeper. Zombie recruit and supervillain is a symbiotic relationship, like teammates, or boss/subordinate. Or even like a romantic relationship or polycule.
For these deeper relationships, conduct a risk assessment.
Each person in the relationship should answer the following question: What is your blind spot? If the project or relationship were to fail because of you, what would be the most likely cause?
Start with yourself, so you can set an example of honesty.
Here’s my real-life answer. If a project were to fail because of me, it would be because I get caught up in perfectionism. When 70% is good enough, I’ll shoot for 99%, and spend as much time getting from 70% to 99% as it took to get to 70% in the first place.
My zombie recruit might answer, #@$&#&?&. (Translation: “If a project were to fail because of me, it would be because I have no higher brain functions and my limbs keep falling off.”)
Complement Each Other
Since their weakness is an unfortunate lack of body cohesion, I can easily leave space in my backpack. If their body parts fall off during meetings, I can discreetly toss them in the backpack for the zombie to reattach later, in the privacy of their own office.
Your Tasks Illuminate Your Blind Spots
You might not know what your own blinds spots are. After all, they’re blind. Some self-reflection will help. The best way to figure this out is to examine your tasks.
What kind of tasks never seem to get done around you? If you scan your task list for undone tasks, is there any pattern? Are the prospecting and sales tasks still not done? Is administrative paperwork still pending, six months later? Have you been saying “I really need to organize the folders on my desktop” for more than six years? These give you insight into your blind spots.
Possible Blind Spots to Address
Here’s a list of things that are everywhere in life. Everywhere. Most of us only notice some of these, however. Consider them. Any of these that you don’t notice are, by definition, blind spots.
Interpersonal considerations. How people react to what’s going on around them. How teams get along. How people treat each other. What emotional signals they send, intentionally or not.
Process considerations. Are things being done efficiently? Does the process make sense? Is it repeatable?
Quality. Some people are super-concerned about quality. They’ll happily hold up your company’s revenue for three months just to make sure that every I is dotted and every T is crossed.
Deadlines. Other people are deadline-driven. The self-driving car is still accidentally targeting pedestrians when it goes through an intersection? Not a problem. We’ll just take out insurance. Now get that thing on the market in time for our Q2 analyst call.
Under-confidence. Maybe you don’t really know what you’re capable of. So you don’t step up when you could do something amazing and incredible.
Over-confidence. Perhaps you are really confident. About everything. Especially things you thought of. Whether or not you were qualified to think of those things. Like, rocket science. Or brain surgery. Or brain surgery on a rocket ship. You saw it in a movie so how hard can it be?
Strive for Mutual Success
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast, an iTunes top-10 business podcast, from 2007 to 2020. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
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