I recently finished watching Netflix’s Making a Murderer. I won’t spoil the details of the series, but I can definitely tell you that I gasped more than once “what the actual fuck is going on here?” It’s an unbelievable story of someone being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, and of a criminal justice system that screws him over and over and over again.
As I was watching the show, I frequently asked myself “why are people not seeing his innocence?” Until at some point it dawned on me that maybe it’s me who is not seeing it. After all, I am consuming the narrative of the filmmaker, which by default is filled with bias. So what if the blind spot is on me, and not on them? While I wasn’t able to fully resolve this situation, I was glad that I got to a point where I started “checking myself” and questioning my own viewpoint on the story.
I think one of the more important skills as a leader (or even just as a thoughtful human being walking through life) is having the understanding that blind spots exist, and having the awareness to “check yourself” for those.
I once got feedback from a manager that I should shift the focus from spotlighting my own voice to spotlighting the voices of others. The feedback didn’t make any sense to me at that time, because that perspective was so incongruent from the way how I thought I was showing up. Well, not until I started counting the ‘I’s and ‘We’s in emails I had written. That’s when it hit me that I was truly walking around with a blind spot.
“Checking yourself” is not the same as “checking IN with yourself,” while the latter is more about assessing your feelings and emotional state of mind, the former is more about surfacing blindspots you might be carrying around with you. It’s an attempt to uncover the “unknown unknowns,” and questioning the assumptions you carry around that might be preventing you from seeing the full picture.