Insightful Blindspots

In the leathery scent of a rental car, I checked over my shoulder. There was something about driving this thing, even in the familiar parking lot of my workplace, where I’ve spent the last three years. It felt new and, frankly, a bit unnerving.

I’ve been thinking about insights lately – the ability to tap into an understanding of why we behave the way we do. What I’ve noticed is that when we lack this understanding, we often end up pushing people away, isolating and making things tougher for ourselves without even realizing it.

Sitting in my cold car, yet to warm up on the drive home, I can’t help but wonder: What exactly is insigh?

Into a voice recorder I vocalize my thoughts over the clicking of the left and right blinker signal. Later with headphones on I’ll transcribe it word for word. I won’t be impressed with the run on, and repetitive sentences, but that’s how alone in the car Jaclynn’s spoken thoughts sound, so I keep them unedited.

“Also, how can we raise our insight, especially to behave or take actions in ways that are going to produce the results we want whether it’s getting the date or getting hired for a job? There are so many ways that having insight into ourselves produces an ability to gauge our environment, to be successful or unsuccessful, and to remove ourselves from an unrewarding spending of time or money.

I don’t think I’ve realized just how valuable insight is.

It seems we don’t understand what they don’t understand. Like, we all have blindsides, meaning knowing why we act the way we do.

What if we’re getting strokes to our ego but by engaging in those strokes we’re also getting burned? Having insight that we’re getting burned is really important! Yet we’ll minimize that we’re getting burned because we’re getting the reward at the same time.

So how do we increase our insight? How do we find out what our blind spots are? It’s an anomaly, isn’t it?

Self-discovery is when we get into situations and we go “I wouldn’t do that, that’s not like me.” Or if somebody else tells you, “Hey that’s not like you,” or maybe you’re reeling afterwards trying to understand something about yourself. And that’s ok. It’s okay to not understand. Then the problem, I think, comes from when we give ourselves some sort of answer that really doesn’t increase insight.

It’s just a filler.

So to really increase insight is to know that we’re always on a journey of self-discovery. Sometimes big sometimes small, but ultimately it is a journey. Secondly, sometimes we’re not going to have somebody point a finger and say “Aha! There! That’s your blind spot.” We’re going to come across it ourselves after making a fool out of ourselves, saying the wrong thing, or doing something dumb. And that kind of sucks because it’s not a super fun way to find what our blind spots are. That said, once we find out what they are, they’re there. Then we can do something about them. Now, I think the other thing I notice is that once people have raised their insight a bit there is this desire to put it back in pandora’s box, like if I double down and keep doing things the same way, it’ll…

No! When we discover a blindspot, now the work begins, there’s something for us to begin changing that behavior so we can be more focused and targeted in getting the results we want.

That’s it for today. Love, Jaclynn