Leadership and Self-Deception

This felt like an exploration of psychology approached from an everyday and practical perspective. Initially I wasn’t sure what to expect (maybe boredom?) but it was pleasantly intriguing. It wasn’t hard to follow, even though at times they did dig into some introspective topics.

It’s a business oriented book, set in a corporation and aimed at improving work results, however we quickly see that it’s near impossible to truly separate our work from our home lives. How we show up in one place will affect how we show up everywhere. How people experience us is connected to how we experience them, how we filter them through whatever mental lens is active at the time. Are we seeing them as people? Or are we seeing them as a means to an end? They refer to this concept as “being in the box”, and they carefully demonstrate the mechanics of the box, and ultimately how to get out of it.

One thing I appreciated about the concept of “being in the box” is that it’s something to always work at. You don’t learn about the box and are instantly freed from it. Instead, we must always be attentive of our box, exercising getting out of it like a muscle. And while we may be out of the box towards one person, we may be in the box for another. The mind is a fickle thing.

I listened to this as an audiobook, and one of the downsides of this experience was the narrator. They had a nice voice that wasn’t hard to listen to, but sometimes it was tricky distinguishing which character was speaking. I suppose you could also lend some of this blame to the author, but it didn’t kill the book for me.