It’s hard to be honest about flaws in yourself you don’t see…

I often walk near a pasture that contains horses. They’re pretty friendly and come up to me out of curiosity or maybe if my wife is with me to see if she brought them a treat.

I’ve noticed that when you are walking towards them they might turn their heads sideways or lift and lower them as they check you out. I found myself wondering why so I trotted off to google and typed in “horse vision”.

A horse’s eyes are not positioned like mine, they are further back along their heads to give them almost 360 degree vision because they have many natural predators and can’t afford to be caught by surprise. This also gives them about a four foot blind spot directly in front of their face and another blind spot directly behind them, hence the shifting of their heads to see me when I am directly in front of them.

Then I looked at my face…
Human vision has a massive blind spot anywhere behind us, add to that the urgency of a flight or fight scenario which physically causes us to lose much of the peripheral vision we had in the first place when we are threatened by something, and we have a unique problem.

It hit me that we get so focused on the accident or disaster directly in front of us that we no longer lift our heads to the danger coming from our blind spots or check the back trail to see why it happened in the first place, which could help us avoid pain tomorrow.

And then I had a REAL thought that startled me…

I can’t see in my own blind spot. I physically wasn’t made to do it.

What if I’ve made a flawed assumption and built everything else in my life around it? How could it even be possible? I started checking my back trail against some considerable experience with the lives of other people and found something I didn’t like.

In our society we make a common unspoken statement:
“I CAN SEE SO LET ME HELP YOU SEE”

This flaw reveals itself in a few ways, maybe you’ve experienced one of them?

1. We don’t look for danger until it is upon us.
     
2. We don’t ask for help until disaster strikes because we honestly don’t see that we need it.

3. We go out of our way to tell others what they should do because we think we’re smarter than they are.

We pride ourselves on our honesty, but it’s hard to be honest about flaws in yourself you don’t see. I want to push you a little with a personal realization I didn’t like…

I wasn’t designed to see my own blind spots. Ouch. Truth hurts.

The first step to lighting this dark alley is the next thought I had…

Self awareness rarely starts with self.