Seeing My Blind Spots

Physician, Heal Thyself

I met him through a mentoring program at work, where within a few minutes he had spilled everything out of his mind. The deeper issue, the one that had driven him toward this restlessness in the first place, had never actually been addressed. Near the end of our conversation, he said something I didn't expect: “All you have to do is help me see my blind spots--the things I keep stumbling over that limit how far I can go.” I remember thinking, at the time, that this was a request for me to diagnose him. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize it was also an invitation to examine myself.

The problem in that company--the same problem in most companies--was that his insistence on “doing things right,” and the strong opinions that came with it, were read by most leaders as a bad attitude. His work was good. He delivered results on time and accurately. Still, most of his leaders were content to jot a vague “improvement” note at his performance review and quietly pass him over.

What none of those leaders seemed to notice was their own blind spot in the exchange. Most managers will tell you they're not looking to solve people's problems — they just want the job done. But aren't most managers really looking for the job to be done the way they think it should be done, with themselves quietly given the credit for it? That's not so different from what they were diagnosing in him. He wanted recognition too. The blind spot wasn't only his. It ran both ways, and neither side could see it in the other because neither side could see it in themselves.

A Different Kind of Planning Conversation

That same pattern--a blind spot hiding behind what looks like someone else's problem--showed up again in an entirely different conversation, this one with a friend named Ray. Ray is a bright, tenderhearted man, and the very picture of a pastor, which is exactly the role he fills. I sat down hoping to help him with something that had frustrated me for a while: his apparent lack of interest in pulling his church's ministries together under a shared vision, with any kind of strategic plan behind them.

As I pressed him--my wife tells me I have the subtlety of a Gatling gun when I'm curious about something--to say plainly what he saw for the church's future, he suddenly stopped. The color drained from his face. I waited, a little puzzled, and it became clear I'd struck a nerve. What I hadn't seen, until that moment, was my own blind spot: I had walked in assuming his resistance to planning was a management deficiency, something to be corrected. It never occurred to me to ask what it was protecting him from.

What I was looking at, once I finally saw it, was a hurt man — someone who had spent years trying to recover from a wound inflicted by another pastor, a man he'd trusted as a mentor but who had turned out to have an agenda of his own. Ray had been embarrassed, years earlier, on this very point of planning. In trying to teach him what I thought he needed to know, I very nearly repeated his old mentor's mistake — mistaking a wound for a weakness, and pressing on it instead of asking about it.

The One Story Where Everyone's Blind Spot Shows

There's a moment in John’s Gospel Chapter 8 where this plays out in a single scene, with more clarity than I've ever managed in one conversation. A woman is dragged before Jesus, caught in adultery, thrown down in front of a crowd that already knows what it wants to do with her. Her sin is not in question. It's on full display, by design-- that's the whole point of dragging her there. But Jesus doesn't answer the accusation. He bends down and writes in the dirt, then says one sentence: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). One by one, beginning with the oldest, the accusers leave.

Notice what happened. The woman's sin was never hidden--it was the accusers' blind spot that needed exposing. Jesus didn't excuse what she'd done; He told her plainly to leave her life of sin (John 8:11). But He refused to let the crowd's surface judgment stand in for the deeper reckoning every one of them needed and none of them wanted. He saw two things in the same moment: her failure, and their blindness to their own.

Redemptive leadership, if it's honest, has to keep both of those in view at once. A few things follow from that, thoughts worth carrying into any conversation where you're the one holding the higher ground, even briefly:

• Jesus exposed the accusers' blindness without shaming them into a corner--He gave them room to walk away rather than forcing a confession (John 8:9).
• He refused to let the woman's visible failure excuse the crowd's invisible one, or the reverse--both got named, in their turn.
• He emptied Himself of the authority He could have claimed in that moment, choosing a quiet sentence in the dirt over a public verdict (Philippians 2:6–7).
• He gave the guilty party --in that story, everyone in the crowd--the chance to recognize it themselves rather than announcing it for them.

That's a harder discipline than simply extending grace downward to someone whose failure is easy to see. It asks the one doing the seeing to stay alert to what they can't see in themselves — the credit they want, the wound they're protecting, the old mentor's mistake which is one impatient question away from repeating.

Instruments in the Master's Hands

Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote his best-selling book (Kushner, 1981) after his fourteen-year-old son died from a rare disease that caused premature aging. Christians have their disagreements with parts of Kushner's theology, but one observation of his fits this theme exactly: “The person who knows his or her flaws all too well is open to God's love and God's presence… Imperfection is the wound that lets God in” (Kushner, 1981, pp. 53–54). That's true of the dreamer and the manager both. It's true of Ray, and it was true of me, standing in his living room realizing I'd nearly done to him what his old mentor had already done once.

None of us gets to stand permanently on the seeing side of that exchange. We are complex souls, all of us different, and God has made each of us-flaws and blind spots included--to be His instruments. The dreamer needed someone to notice the wound behind his swagger. I needed Ray's silence to notice mine. Redemptive leadership isn't a gift one person hands down to another from a position of clear sight. It's two people, in turn, willing to be taught to see below the surface--and both of them, if they let it, being made a little more whole for the experience.

Sources:

Kushner, H. (1981). When bad things happen to good people. Schocken Books.