In its book, “Leadership and Self-Deception,” the Arbinger Institute brilliantly addresses self-deception and its effect in every aspect of life. They define self-deception as a kind of “insistent blindness” that puts the blinded or self-deceived “in the box.” Their findings indicate that when people “are in the box” that they do not solve problems effectively, but actually create problems and provoke people to resist them, suggesting that when we only have distorted information about reality, we are not equipped to solve problems because we are in effect blind to the true causes of those problems.

This systematically incorrect view of reality is embedded in most of our institutions, families, and human resources management. So, is it any wonder why our society can’t seem to solve its problems?

Author Paul Bishop suggests that everyone has experienced negative confrontations with co-workers, classmates, store clerks, or the like. After walking away from the situation, we frequently find ourselves thinking about the things we should have said or done if we’d only had the presence of mind. But by the time we relate the incident to a spouse or another sympathetic third party, our retelling of the incident not only includes all of the events, but the afterthoughts as well, and they are all expressed as “just the facts.” This is such a common practice that author Linda Barry coined a term to cover this phenomenon. Her term “autobifictionalography” means my life the way it should have been.

Changing the particulars of an incident to place ourselves in the best light possible appears to be part of human nature. We want our friends and acquaintances to understand our outrage. We want them to admire how brilliantly we handled a situation — or, as we justify to ourselves, how brilliantly we would have handled it if we had it to do all over again. While on the surface there may not seem to be much threat associated with this practice, the long term consequences of this self-delusion can be damaging to us in many ways, because the reality is we did not handle the situation brilliantly, and to present it as if we did is to lose any opportunity to learn and change from the experience.

Self-deception touches every aspect of life - in fact, it seems to determine our experience of life and blinds us to:

- a perception of others as they really are
- the effect we have on others
- and corrective feedback from the experience of life.

Bishop further suggests that our natural tendencies toward self-deception have been magnified to exorbitant proportions by the secular media. Whole new careers in public relations have been created by this perceived need to put every decision or action made or taken by a public figure into a positive perspective — garnering kudos without acknowledging responsibility for any negative causation or blame.

The term spin itself has emerged from American politics to now cover this behavior in all phases of life. Journalist William Safire is generally credited with popularizing the term in 1986. At first used to describe public relations manipulation by public relations spokesmen — or spin doctors — spin has expanded to include any attempt to control a message, avoid political fallout, or use obvious or obscure propaganda to promote a cause.

Safire himself describes spin as slang for deceit. He hypothesized its origin as a truncation of the phrase to spin a yarn. Within current language usage, spin has been transformed into a noun meaning a story has been angled or slanted to serve the purposes of the person or organization advocating it. While pervasive in our modern society, spin is little more than an attempt to doctor a problem with a product, a statement, or an incident in the same way a crooked accountant cooks the books to achieve a desired outcome and cover up criminal actions.

All too often, we use self-deception to protect ourselves from painful truths. We don’t want to admit we were in the wrong, were foolish, or didn’t act or respond in a manner we wish we had. This behavior jeopardizes not only our personal and spiritual salvation, but it can bring our secular businesses crashing down around us.

Spinning the reasons behind why we won or lost a contract, why business is good or bad, how glitches in a product are actually benefits, or why a competitor’s product or service is inferior, can stop a business from making a truthful assessment of its own position in the marketplace.

If we are truthful with ourselves in business, we can see these actions for the excuses they are. If you take an honest look at the services your business provides, or the flaws in your products would the results be so bad? Maybe, but you would at least have a starting point for improvements that could lead to major success. Spinning flawed business decisions in an attempt to ignore their implications can only make a bad situation worse.

While it may be natural, at times even inadvertent, to fictionalize our role in the events of our lives. We use rationalizations and self-deception to convince ourselves and others we were in the right, or we were the wronged party in a recounted incident; when this becomes a habit, we continually run all our experiences through a mental filter so they fit into the world as we want to see it.

As we conduct our business and our lives, may we be mindful of the realities and the messages we display - not like the sign innocently displayed at a local auto shop which read: “Honesty is the best policy. – Our policy is second best!”