In business and life we choose to accept certain beliefs. After their initial acceptance we keep adding onto those beliefs making them more integral and complex. The brain naturally does this as a form of validating our “smart decisions.” The resulting problem is after the first idea you pile up more ideas or beliefs on top of the original one that makes it more challenging when one of the beliefs in the stack stops working. Beliefs or ideas that are “untrue” but someone believes them is what I call a “blind lie.” It’s not that someone is lying, it’s that its incorrect and as more beliefs pile to support that original blind lie, the system fails. It is much like building on a bad foundation. The challenge with the lie or untruth is it can put “rosy colored glasses” on our vision that distorts beliefs and ideas from there on out. We don’t see reality as our brain is trying to validate through rose-colored glasses.
In business or life when you experiment to find models that work, sometimes you have to go back and say “maybe the real problem is the original blind lie.” Sometimes you have to throw the baby out with the bath water. One experiment we ran in a business setting, involved trying a whole new medium for our marketing. We tried to build a model around the concept and all attempts failed. In the end we had to realize the original blind lie was the problem, believing that THIS marketing type would work for us was wrong. The main mistake many entrepreneurs make is they stick to one model trying to make the blind lie work, until they run out of money. They live and die with the original blind lie.
People also do this in communication and life. Their rose-colored glasses keep them believing the original lie that taints their perception, beliefs and decisions. With communications, someone recently began a debate with me on something I’d said. The person had made an extreme embellishment of their interpretation of what I said through the perception of their rose-colored glasses. At first I wasnt aware of this “original lie” and kept reiterating my communication was as simple as the words being used, nothing more. In the end we found the person had established a definition of their own remote kind, to 2 particular words I was using in a sentence. Where most people refer to the dictionary for definition, this person had made up their own crazy meanings you could never guess.
Their problem was the original blind lie of making up meanings to words found in my communication that 99% of the population would never take out of context. Once I was able to identify their original blind lie, I quit debating and moved on. The only worst thing crazier than a crazy person, IS someone who argues with a crazy person. But understanding this did help me understand their position of communication which can be important when dealing with employees and relationships. Until you can drill down to that core original belief, there can be a ton of crazy junk and noise you have to cut through. Have you ever been yelled at by your girlfriend for leaving your socks on the floor. You can argue with her about it for hours, but she’s probably not arguing about the socks. You can save a lot of damage if you can figure people out.
Business negotiating can be the same way. Sometimes someone wants something that you can’t or wont give up. If you can get it the core of that issue and help the person identify its unreasonable and they could live without it, you maybe be able to create a win-win situation.
The examples of being wrong can be extreme. Someone I knew joined a cult. After a number of years they could see the problems and falsehood of the cult. BUT they couldn’t leave because that would mean their original blind lie would be wrong and that was too hard to face. Plus, they believed in the original spirit of the cult. For some people it can be hard if you’ve subscribed to a belief for decades and then decide maybe it was wrong.
The story of the newlywed and the generations of turkey cooking points to this. A guy gets married into a family and inquires as to why for generations the wifes have cut off and tossed out the legs of the turkey before cooking it. They go back through the generations and find that originally it was done because “old time” stoves were not big enough to hold a whole turkey. All that turkey wasted over all those generations just because of an original blind lie, that no one questioned.
Trying to focus in on what the “real” problem is, the blind lie is something that has saved me a hundred times in business and life. Being able to try to understand by looking deeper into the core helps me find solutions quicker. Many people don’t know why they do things and if you’re a leader you have to be self actualized to see their real issues if you can. It will help you, salespeople, employees and significant others if you do this well. Its kind of like the story of the angry lion with the thorn in his paw. Many times its up to you to reach in and get the thorn out.
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