Blind Spots: The Strategies for Clear Sight

What are blind spots? Claudia Shelton, author of Blind Spots: Achieve Success by Seeing What You Can't See, explains that they “are patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving we often do unconsciously that can negatively influence our relationships with other people. They often show up when we are under stress and overuse our greatest strengths. So why are blind spots a big deal? Blind Spots can become possible problems in our working processes and relationship and if left unchecked, they can become serious obstacles to our progress.

Shelton has developed a plan to help us develop what she terms Clear Sight by first recognizing our blind spots and then turning them into strengths. This book is an excellent tool to help you to see yourself differently and thereby increase your self-awareness. What you don’t see is holding you back. She presents five strategies for turning each of the five most common blind spots into strengths. Here is an overview:

Identify Your Strengths
Not being clear about your strengths is a major blind spot. It can undercut your confidence and reduce your energy and vitality. Your strengths are the anchor of your self-confidence.

Check Old Habits
Old habit blind spots are often developed in adolescence when they prove successful in helping us reach our adolescent goals. Blind spots may keep us from realizing that these old habits are not part of who we are; they are just habits that do not serve today’s goal. They block us from developing a clear sense of who we are. Old habits are hard to recognize because they are so familiar to us and so comfortable.

Address Stress
We may be experiencing stress that we believe others can’t see. They do see it and it interferes with our goals and relationships. Importantly she cautions, “Constant unchecked stress can make us inflexible, overusing our strengths, increasing our blind spots, and undercutting our relationship every day.” We most often negatively express the stress we feel by criticism, anger and mood swings.

Tune Your Radar
We need to be aware of the nonverbal cues we send out, as well as recognize the non-verbal cues others are sending. When we communicate conflicting non-verbal signals, we lose influence. “When our radar is tuned, we synchronize what we say with how we say it in a way that has positive impact.”

Connect With Others
Our integrity and trustworthiness are often perceived by our ability to connect with other people effectively. “Connection is more than just information sharing….To connect, we need to be able to bring ourselves into the present moment.”

Shelton provides techniques to help you with the principles outlined here. She suggests however, that you focus on only one or two at a time as more than that can become a bit overwhelming.

A Blind Spots Profile and a Blind Spots 360° questionnaire and Workbook are available for purchase on the WhatsMyBlindSpot web site. The tool helps individuals to recognize their strengths—and the potential blind spots that can appear when those strengths are overused. in advance so they can stay working from their strengths. It can be done free (short version) or for $34.99 (long version with early warning signs for blind spots and plans of attack to turn them into strengths) by going to the WhatsMyBlindSpot web site.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:58 AM
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