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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Kelly Boys. Kelly Boys directed the launch of Google’s Search Inside Yourself leadership training program for neuroscience-based emotional intelligence and mindfulness. She’s taught war veterans, women in prison, cancer survivors, those with substance abuse addictions, humanitarian workers, and psychotherapists. With Sounds True, Kelly Boys has written a new book called The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What’s Right in Front of You, where she explores are many kinds of blind spots—from the physical to the interpersonal—how we get them, how to reveal them, and how to work with our newfound awareness.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Kelly and I spoke about different kinds of blind spots and the biggest blind spot of all: feeling like a separate self. She also took us into a guided experience where we could begin to identify at the level of our felt sense how we are contracted and holding energy and information out of our consciousness. We also talked about the endowment effect—how we hold on to what is familiar even when it causes us suffering. We also talked about how to identify blind spots in our love life, why we need self-compassion to illuminate our blind spots, and, finally, how this work can lead to a deep type of kindness towards all other human beings and the blind spots we all have. Here’s my conversation with Kelly Boys:
Right here at the beginning, Kelly, I’d love to know how you became so passionate and interested in illuminating blind spots.
Kelly Boys: Well, I’ve always actually been very curious about how people cannot notice something about themselves that is obvious to everyone else. I tend to, for whatever reason, just see people’s blind spots. I didn’t really think of this overtly as I’ve gone through my life, but when I look back I can see that this is a topic that’s been of interest to me for a long time.
A couple of years ago, I had a situation—a life situation—where I was suddenly let go from a job, and I was ending a relationship at the same time, and the same pattern showed up in both places. So, I went to a therapist and was talking about what was going on. He just looked at me and said, “Do you want to see your blind spot or do you want to just keep repeating this pattern?” In that moment, I was hooked. I saw so completely clearly that there was something that I had been fully missing about my own relational and communicative life that was driving my behavior and causing me to play out these patterns that were completely unconscious to me.
So, because that happened—kind of a double-whammy—I got really interested in: what is it about blind spots that we don’t see what’s so obvious sometimes to others, but when we really look, also to ourselves?
TS: In terms of seeing other people’s blind spots and having a lifelong proclivity for that, I’ve often called people like that “shadow busters”—that somehow they see other people’s shadows. What’s the relationship between your take on blind spots and what people would refer to as the shadow?
KB: Yes, I like that frame and it’s similar—shadow busters and seeing blind spots. It’s basically illuminating what is in the dark and what is shadowed. And, for some reason, some people have a knack for it. They can see what might not be obvious to others. I am one of those people. So, I would interchange those phrases—shadow and blind spots—although in the book, I’m talking about blind spot in other ways (visually, attentionally, cognitively, emotionally, and in love). So, I do a bit more of a broad overview.
But absolutely yes. Shadow is where they lurk.
TS: And tell me more what you discovered in that therapist’s office about your own blind spot pattern, if you will.
KB: Sure. I saw that there was a way throughout my entire life that I’ve not acknowledged what I see and know to be true in certain situations. I learned this young, growing up in a church environment where what I saw and knew to be true wasn’t congruent with what was told to me was happening. As a result, I shut down connection with that inner knowing and with my own authenticity and voice, in order to play along, stay in the group, not rock the boat.
Later in my life—only in certain scenarios; this is why blind spots are interesting to me. They tend to show up and patterned ways where they’ll not show up at all one place and then will in another.
So, when I found myself in a scenario where someone was unconscious themselves to some way that they were having impact on people, I would not acknowledge to myself what I was seeing about that. I would sort of collude with them and hide my knowing so that I didn’t rock the boat in order to stay connected.
Then, eventually I would sort of blurt out when it got intolerable. “This is your blind spot!” This uncharacteristic speaking of the truth finally just doesn’t go over well with people, and it would cause these scenarios to rupture in relationships too.
So, I don’t know if that’s clear, but the original blind spot was something just around suppressing or losing touch with or pushing into shadow what I was actually seeing with great clarity. But I think that we all have and we all share the capacity to do that.
TS: Now, Kelly, I’d love to spend this whole hour talking about other people’s blind spots. I really would. But you’re very clear in the book that the investigation that you direct people to in The Blind Spot Effect is really looking for our own blind spots, which is of course a lot more edgy and terrifying, and brings up a lot more of our material. Right here at the beginning, I can imagine someone saying and feeling, “OK, this is what we’re going to do in this hour [and] in this conversation. We’re going to look at our own blind spots. I’m both interested—excited—but maybe also a little scared.” What would you say to that part of someone that’s feeling scared about this?
KB: Yes. Well, it’s natural. I think everyone has that reaction of, “Oh, I really want to know, and this scares the crap out of me that I would be seen.” The irony is you’re seen anyway. People see us anyways. It’s ourselves that have a hard time seeing ourselves.
So, what I would say to that person is this isn’t a witch hunt; this is like a treasure hunt. That’s how I frame it—that there are these incredible gifts that we can glean and discover when we’re able to make that turn and look inside.
Having this kind of sense of self-compassion for the process of it helps a lot because often what can happen is the inner critic voice comes up and goes, “Oh no, I can’t be seen.” Then the exact same voice that’s likely driving our blind spot starts to take over. So, taking a moment to notice both the excitement and the nervousness—or the terror—of seeing oneself and giving a little space for it, self-compassion, and then taking the leap and saying, “OK, I’m going to look.”
TS: You’re actually right. This is a quote from the book—that self-compassion and clear insight into blind spots are strongly interwoven. Why is that?
KB: Well, I don’t think that we can really see clearly patterns that have been hidden from us for a long time without having a gentleness and a softness to the looking and the seeing. When there’s a rigidity to the looking or to the inquiry because I want to get rid of that darn blind spot and change and fix myself, that’s going to add static in the system, and an un-clarity in the vision. It’s kind of an equation—that if I am looking from an agenda to change and fix myself, I’m not going to see everything that’s there because I’m focused on an outcome. Whereas when there’s this gentle, self-compassionate kind of holding gaze or presence, from that looking, I can see so much more that’s there because it’s not obscured by my agenda.
TS: OK. Well, that being said, let’s dive in. Now, you mentioned that there are different types of blind spots that you investigate in the book. Let’s go through some of those different types. You said “visual or perceptual blind spot.” How can we start identifying those in our experience? I imagine there are gajillions in any moment. I mean, we can’t take in everything that’s happening in our visual or perceptual field. Can we?
KB: Well, that’s right. The first thing is we have an actual physical blind spot in our eye. It’s right [at] the place on the retina where the optic nerve passes into the optic disc and there are no photoreceptor cells in that one spot to see light. So, we actually walk around with blind spots. We can’t see it just when we’re walking around. But there’s actually a test on Google; you can search for “find my blind spot” and print off a cross in a circle. You move this piece of paper toward your eyes and away from your eyes while covering one eye, and you actually see on the dark spot where you lose touch with it. So, you can actually see your own physical blind spot. It’s very interesting. I find it interesting that our physical blind spot actually helps us see. So, I think of it in a way that the blind spots that we have, have assisted us in our lives to survive and get by and to see well.
But back to your question: it’s interesting to me that attentionally, we can blink out on something that’s right in front of us. There have been studies on the phenomenon called “attentional blink” where you have participants that are asked to look directly at a screen right in front of them and they have different things flashed before their eyes. There could be a series of numbers and then a letter, and then more numbers. And often, the participants that take this attentional blink test will blink out on the letter if it’s presented right after the number within 100 milliseconds.
What was interesting to me is that Richie Davidson out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison did a study on meditators and found that meditators actually catch that “second target”—is what they call it—and that people who had been practicing this kind of attention training and mindfulness over a long course of time were actually able to catch more data in their visual field.
So, it’s not that we need to try to just see everything that’s in front of us because our brain and our nervous system is amazing at filtering out what’s not important. But I do think that slowing down and doing these kinds of mindfulness practices can help us see more clearly what is there and help us stop seeing what’s not there—the stuff that we sort of hallucinate because of our fixed ideas about things.
TS: If somebody wanted to try to investigate in their own experience what they’re filtering out from their environment—maybe they’re filtering it out because it doesn’t fit some expectation or some notion about what’s happening—how would you even go about that?
KB: Well, factoring in our own ignorance does a lot. So, just even acknowledging there’s something that I’m not seeing right now. There’s something that I don’t acknowledge. I’m not acknowledging right now that I may be aware of [this] in the periphery. But for whatever reason, I may be over-focusing on one thing or another, whether it’s something in my physical environment or an emotion or a thought.
So, simply the act of making space and opening to what I don’t know allows me to start to see more of that salient, relevant information that I’m looking for.
TS: OK. Now, you also talked about cognitive blind spots. Tell me a bit about that.
KB: For me, these are beliefs. They’re fixed ideas that we’ve held about ourselves and the world around us. Often, we carry these through our entire lives. The interesting thing is we have these cognitive blind spots such as, “I’m not OK as I am,” or, “I’m a fraud, and if people really got to know me, they’d reject me.” We don’t know that these are driving us underneath the surface. So they filter our entire experience—or they only come out in certain scenarios where they strongly filter our experience.
Making space for what we might be holding as a really strong view about ourselves or the world around us—”It’s not safe,” et cetera—can help us start to see how we’re actually filtering our world and then expecting and predicting certain things from our environment and from ourselves as a result of those cognitive blind spots.
I also speak in the book to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work around cognitive biases, [as well as] this kind of lightning-fast thinking system that we have that helps us navigate life. But sometimes systematically it takes us off course.
So, there’s the original cognitive blind spot that’s the fixed idea we have about ourselves or a core belief about ourselves. Then there’s more generally speaking this way that we move through life cognitively trusting our own ideas and not seeing where we systematically go wrong in that.
TS: Now, you mentioned, Kelly, at the beginning of our conversation that often other people can see our blind spots very clearly even though we can’t. They can see our fixed ideas and our investments in this or that way of being, or our deep fears. So, why don’t we just go ask other people what our blind spots are? Wouldn’t that save a lot of time?
KB: Well, I do have a chapter in the book on that. I do think it’s helpful to ask other people because they do tend to see us clearly. But the bummer is they also have blind spots and they’re seeing us with all kinds of projection as well.
So, doing the inner work first and really looking here first helps when I then do reach out to loved ones or friends or acquaintances even, and ask, “Do you see something that’s blind here?” I’m more able to both withstand what I hear and meet it with a kind of grace because I’m open to listening, and I also have a handle on what I think is my own area for growth.
So, it’s important—and I do really go into that chapter of asking for feedback—to do it in such a way that you’re not just trying to have someone else tell you something that you actually can unearth within yourself. Often people only see the behaviors of your blind spot, and they can’t get all the way down to what those core beliefs or a hidden felt senses of shame or vulnerability are. That’s our work to do.
TS: OK. So, let’s say someone’s listening and they do want to approach some people that they know and say, “Hey, help me. Help me see what you see that I can’t see.” You have a section that you called “Guidelines for the Ask.” What are some of those guidelines?
KB: Yes. So, well, what I like to say for sure is: ask someone that you trust and someone who’s given you really solid feedback and reflection over time. Don’t just put it out there.
I actually did it because I was writing the book. I put it on Facebook. I asked my entire family, a bunch of friends. I said, “Hey, what’s my blind spot?” It was quite interesting, which is why I wrote the chapter in the way I did—to say it’s probably a good idea to ask people that you feel really see you so that you’re not just getting the ways that people want you to change so they can feel better about themselves. It’s more motivated by someone who you trust wanting to help you grow [and] that doesn’t want to make you change who you are.
TS: One of the things you write about, Kelly, is discovering what you call “our core blind spot.” What do you mean by this? What’s our core blind spot?
KB: I would say our core blind spot is the way we actually hold the world together—the way we hold our perception of ourselves and the world around us together. It’s very subtle and I don’t think it’s easily seen. But it can be something that—if seen through—fundamentally can change and transform all of the rest of our blindness because now we’ve hacked (in a way) all the way through to the core of how we’ve been holding ourself as this separate, isolated individual moving through the world.
The blind spot there for me is around that sense of separation. The more fluid way to see that would be that I’m a more dynamic occurring—an occurrence—than something very static and fixed.
So, it’s really nice to be able to bring in a little bit of ambiguity—surfing ambiguity, surfing the unknown—because that starts to loosen up that core blind spot that is very natural. But also I haven’t seen it really—other than developmentally—be helpful once someone is doing this work. I haven’t seen it continue to be helpful—this way of holding one’s self apart from everything else.
TS: Could you help our listeners actually engage into an inquiry—right now, here on the spot—about how they could start to investigate their own sense of a core blind spot?
KB: Sure. I could do a quick guided thing.
TS: Yes.
KB: Would you like me to do that?
TS: Yes, let’s do it.
KB: OK. So, take a moment and get comfortable wherever you are and sense your whole body. Maybe you’re sitting or standing up or lying down. Feel yourself if possible, at rest, alert and relaxed. Open your attention in a way where you’re receiving the sound, the shadow or light across your eyelids—this felt sense of your body being here, your own breath. So, sensing what it feels like in your whole body simply to be open with a sense of curiosity.
Then notice where you may be holding a quality of tension or contraction around who you are. A thought may come to you, “I’m not enough,” or, “I’m not safe,” or, “I’m not OK,” or, “The world is unsafe.” There may be a felt sense and contraction with that. Or it could be that you just generally feel a way that you organize your experience that that has a sense of anxiety or contraction to it. So, whatever that is, welcome it to be there. Just notice it. Get to know it a little bit.
Then, just as if you’re your fists were tight—so maybe even bringing the palm of your hand into a fist—begin to release and open, allowing yourself to hold the way that you’re holding your inner world together, trying to keep it together or believing this thing about yourself. You sense a quality of space around it.
As you do that, this is a fertile place for an exploration of what’s more deeply true. If I can sense and feel the way that I get tight and take myself so seriously and get anxious about things, and I sense through it, it’s within my experience. “What do I know most deeply to be true right now about this?”
Give time for that knowing to appear. It may be a felt sense that’s more of a spaciousness or a holding kind of a presence. Or it could be another phrase that comes or image. I’m not actually completely identified with what I think I am. I’m actually something more than that—that includes that, but that’s not all of who I am. There might be some spaciousness or some brightness or aliveness—feelings of power and voice that come in holding the whole spectrum here.
I would say to listeners: feel free to return to this. You can explore this at any time on your own as you—even if it’s just as you’re going through your day and you notice, “Oh, there’s that contraction again. What is that? What is that? What am I doing here?” just with a gentleness and a holding presence. What’s really alive here? What really wants to be seen? It’s like clearing the way to be able to see something that is also there that I’m missing.
So there’s one way.
TS: In this practice we just did, you’re helping people make a connection between physical contractedness and tension in their body and blind spots that they have, [as well as] their ability to know and perceive. Is that correct?
KB: Yes. We know and perceive through our body. So often, we’re lost in our minds. There may be different things going on in our body, and we don’t really have access to those cues and that information because we’re focusing on other things or we’re driven by these stories that we don’t even know we’re driven by. So, making the space for gives access to that natural wisdom of the body that speaks when it knows it’s going to be listened to in different ways, whether it’s a felt sense or an image that comes or a knowing—a clear insight. When we make the space, it comes.
I do think that people even like Einstein and other scientists who had these massive discoveries—it’s come in that space between. Right when you wake up or when you’ve just come up from a nap, or you’re daydreaming or walking down the street. That’s when these insights emerge. They don’t emerge when you’re binge-watching Netflix.
TS: Now, you also touched on that we can identify our blind spots in love and that that’s a topic you address in the book. I think that’s an area where most people can relate. “I dated the same kind of person three different times with the same kind of outcome. It was clear that there was some blind spot happening for me that I kept choosing these types of partners who disappointed me in the same way.” How can you help people find patterns in their love life where there are clearly blind spots at work?
KB: Yes. Well, this is a big topic. I feel like there could be—and people have written books on this. I’m certainly not an expert on it, although I’ve made a lot of mistakes—mistakes that turned into . . . they’re not real mistakes. But, where I’m acting from a pattern and didn’t know it.
One of the things that can help is those same practices of mindfulness, of kind of just slowing down and being way more present in the moment when those—when you’re in a situation where you’re wondering, “Am I doing a pattern here or not?” Where you’re willing to acknowledge what you already know and what you already see, but that you might be pushing down in favor of staying in connection—or in favor of not staying in connection.
So, this is a tricky one, especially with first impressions. There’s this thing called “the halo effect” where if we meet someone for the first time, we have this very positive impression of them. Then over time, if they give evidence that actually that’s not as much their character—their character more is to hurt people or be unconscious and act out—because the halo effect is so strong (we really believed our first impression) that we just insist they must be a good person, that we don’t actually let in the truth that they’re not being kind or they’re not listening or they don’t have empathy. Because of our own blindness to this first impression thing with the halo effect, we don’t actually have strong access to those signals that would tell us when things are off. This is more speaking to the beginning of a relationship, but that’s one example for how to eliminate blindness in love.
I think so much of it is about slowing down, listening to what’s present, and really acknowledging it, then being able to speak it and seeing, “Is it received or is there some patterned way now that I’m getting into a dynamic where I’m either losing my voice or imposing my voice or not feeling met or not meeting another?” Where there’s some kind of a disconnection happening there. That’s a good place to explore.
TS: One of the things I’m curious about: as I was reading The Blind Spot Effect, I kept tuning into more and more blind spots in different areas of my life. Then I asked you a question here in this conversation that on the one hand, it’s kind of ridiculous—like, “How could I ever receive all the information that’s currently right here in the visual field?” Meaning it’s not possible. And, you said, “Yes, it’s not. Our eyes aren’t even made that way.”
I think of people who can hear, in a very sensitive way, things that I could never hear or can see multi-dimensionally in ways. So, my question here that I’m coming to is: won’t we always be riddled with blind spots? Is that just part of being human? It’s always like that.
KB: Yes, it is. It’s always like that, and we all have them. That was part of why I wanted to write this book—is to level the playing field—because my thing is that we hurt each other when we don’t acknowledge that we have them. That’s where we suffer. That’s where we make ourselves suffer, and that’s where we make others suffer.
They’re going to always be with us. It is something that’s so inherent to just being human. It’s not like trying to ferret out everything that’s “bad or wrong,” or that we’re not seeing clearly about ourselves so that we can come to this spiritual, idealized image of perfection—but rather to live with the fallibility and the trustability of being human.
I think there’s something so interesting about living at the edge of our own horizon—what we don’t exactly see—and also being willing to just know, “I’m just human. I make mistakes.” This is going to help me take responsibility when I do something that hurts someone else because if I’m totally fused with a blind spot and I don’t see myself as a person that hurts other people, I won’t be able to acknowledge it in that moment.
So, it feels so kind to be able to say, “Hey, we’re all in this together. We’ve all got them. We’ll all always have them. We’ll illuminate them and work with them.” But being able to be that kind of self-honest and playful, and even lighthearted about where we go blind. That’s what I’m trying to get to in this book.
TS: That’s very helpful. Now you said “our fallibility as humans,” which I’m completely getting from this conversation. All the things I can’t see and know that are happening in this moment. Where does the trustability—I don’t know if that’s a word, but I think that was what you were basically pointing to: that trustworthiness in our experience—where does that come from?
KB: Well, I think it comes from the same place that leads us off base, and that’s our body and mind. I like looking at it like we’re these learning algorithms. We’re these processing thingies that operate within an environment that is more complex than ourselves. We’re always learning for better or for worse. Why is it that two people in the same situation will face the same hardship and one will find a creative, spontaneous solution for it, and another person will keep doing the same thing over and over again, and keep suffering and feel a victim?
There’s something about if we’re open and if we’re able to know that we’re learning and we’re like an algorithm in this complex environment making decisions—doing our best—then there’s a way that our experience gets more trustworthy because we are being self-honest, we are seeing where we’ve gone off. “Where we’ve gotten off the mark” is the definition I’ve heard is what sin means. It’s just being off. Something feels off.
If I’m able to acknowledge it in a moment—so, I have to be clear enough and see some of my blind spots enough to be able to acknowledge when something feels off. There I have a chance to learn. There’s where the trustworthiness or trustability comes in. I’m fallible; I’m going to go off. But when I go off, what do I do?
In those moments, that’s where, for me, it’s suffer or grow. I’d like to grow. If I’m not taking myself too seriously, I tend to have a much higher chance of being able to grow—and then, in those next moments that come after that, have more access to more of the right information because I’ve learned something. In that, there’s a trustworthiness.
So, by now for me, my thing is I’ve just been a whole, life-long process of learning to trust—learning this sense of self-trust—because I think that I was taught by our culture and otherwise that you can’t trust yourself. You have to give your power elsewhere. You give your authority elsewhere. You were told something, and then you can trust that. But yourself? No way. You’ve got all kinds of ways your body will go wrong. So, you can’t trust that.
Well, I’ve just learned, actually, that’s where our most valuable information comes from if we learn how to sort out the signal from the noise. Maybe not everybody is interested in doing this, but I am. I love that thing of being able to see, “Oh, here’s where I went off in that conversation with someone.” I started to go to sleep to myself in some way, and now I can learn. Next time I’m in a similar situation, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to try something else and see what happens. But the system here—this body-mind—is actually helping me know as I learn.
TS: When you say that we’re like an algorithm, can you help me understand that?
KB: An algorithm is a learning function or it’s a way to process data. It’s usually associated with computers. It operates by a few rules that can learn from its environment. The more input you have with it, the more it learns. In this way, I feel like if we can view ourselves as little algorithms—that we have our own ways to learn and to process data—the more we engage and interact with the data that’s coming in, the more accurate actually our outputs will be, or our decisions or whatever it is. The more ease we’ll have in a conversation because we’re able to understand the inherent complexity within which we’re operating.
TS: OK. Now, Kelly, when we were talking about investigating our core blind spots, we went into the super deep end where you were identifying a core blind spot being really the sense of feeling separate that we have. I want to go into that more. But before we do, I want to talk some [more] about the emotional level of blind spots, where I think a lot of people spend a lot of their time. Meaning I don’t really want everyone to know that I don’t feel good about myself in this way or that way. So, my career is a compensation or X, Y, Z is a way that I want to present this other image. I kind of know there’s this thing lurking down there, but I don’t even really want to talk to myself about it. As you mentioned, I’d rather watch some kind of Netflix series and just hope other people aren’t noticing that what’s really driving me is some sense of lack—or something like that.
So, I’d love if you could help our listeners go into those blind spots that are maybe semi-conscious in their own experience. They kind of have a sense of it—like, “I’m always jealous of the same kind of people. They’re doing something I’m not doing,” or, “I know that I’m really attracted to these kinds of people because it fills some hole in me,” or something like that kind of material.
KB: Yes. I think the key there—the first doorway in—is through vulnerability. So, through the willingness to be open and undefended to what we discover, including all of the defense and including all of the resistance to even wanting to look. If the way I’m filtering this is, “No no no. I don’t want to look, I don’t want to look,” that’s a moment of resistance.
So, if I can step back and open to vulnerability and welcome the resistance that I have to even looking, then there’s a little more space. Often, what I find when I look are these really tender parts—places of shame, places where I was actually vulnerable in a moment and shared that when I was young, and it didn’t get received or mirrored or held in any way. So, it felt actually like it was unwanted, and in that it went underground.
So, these are the places that we’re getting in touch with. Often, they don’t have—it’s not a clear path to get to them. So, we just open. We go, “Why is it that in this,” as you said, “I always am feeling jealous of this one particular type of person? What is that here?” If I really open with vulnerability, I’ll find most likely a sense of shame, a sense of not being enough.
In that place of shame—not being enough—feeling vulnerable is often our own power and our own unique expression. Maybe there’s something in someone else that I’m resisting because I pushed it down in myself. So, when I actually meet my resistance [and] feel whatever kind of vulnerability, helplessness, shame is there, then I’ll have closer access to these elements of power, and authentic expression, [as well as] what it is that I’m refusing or overvaluing in another person and that I’m undervaluing in myself—or refusing in another person that I’m refusing in myself.
So, there’s always kind of a mirror pointing back—being able to see where it is that I’m suffering in my life, and then to look and see what the [is] gift here. What is it? Most likely, if I really meet the shame and vulnerability, it’s going to be an element of actually aliveness that I wasn’t also allowed to feel when I was younger, for instance—or power or truth.
When those things get some air time, things really do shift in our lives. So, I think it’s a defense mechanism not to look because it’s easier to stay in our patterns than not to. There’s this thing called “the endowment effect” in behavioral economics where we hold onto what we have and we weight it more strongly than what we’ll gain when we give it up. It’s just what we do as humans.
Like, I don’t want to sell this house even if I sell the house, what it is that I’m going to gain by doing that is much more. It feels familiar, so I want to cling onto it. We do that with our beliefs and with our shame, with our tenderness—with our tender parts that we’re hiding from. We’d rather just stay with the status quo than actually give up some negative belief that we have about ourselves—”I’m not enough”—and discover what’s actually true, which is there’s a lot of power and authenticity and aliveness here. Were I to acknowledge that, I might have to actually act on it.
TS: So, this endowment effect—endowment phenomenon; “I want to hold on to what I have even if it’s painful.” It’s out of a sense of safety. It makes us feel more secure. Is that what’s underneath it?
KB: Makes us feel more secure. It’s more familiar and we actually weight it more significantly and heavily than we do what we’ll gain if we give it up. I think often with these core beliefs and these blind spots that we have, we don’t know what we’re going to gain actually. So, it’s easier to hold onto what we have because at least it’s known and the unknown can be scary.
So, if I really look at this and see it, acknowledge it, and also see through it, and let it go and feel what life is here—”I don’t know if I want that because I don’t know what I’m in for.” The truth is we don’t know what we’re in for.
So, I get it. It’s actually [that] these defense mechanisms can be helpful sometimes in keeping us from ourselves. But, I don’t want to live like that. I think we on our planet don’t really have time to live like that. It’s like we’ve got stuff to do here. There are massive global issues and real lives at stake that we’re operating from these ginormous blind spot in, and it feels really worth giving up these old structures that don’t serve us anymore to find what’s more alive.
TS: So far Kelly, you’ve given us some great pointers. You took us into our body with a meditation to help us see where we’re holding tension. You talked about the importance of self-compassion, being gentle with ourselves. Now we’re peering—if you will—around the corner at something that we know is there. We can feel it. We can sense it—that it’s been directing some of our life. Maybe some sense of inadequacy, or as you said, some sense of shame that some of our behaviors are coming from. How do we inquire? What kinds of questions are useful to take our investigation another step?
KB: Well, I actually have a ton of exercises in the book—in each chapter—that walk through different ways to inquire with emotional blind spots, with our core stories we’re carrying around, with our fear of the unknown, that kind of thing. So yes, I’d say if there’s some kind of a sense of it, and there’s the being in touch with the vulnerability of looking and of sensing, “Yes, there is something there.”
One thing is you can walk through the whole book and do the process and see what comes to you. Also, simply making space. I can’t emphasize this enough. Simply making space for what isn’t clear to become clear feels really important. There’s a way sometimes we can go in with too much of an agenda or like, “OK, if I answer these three questions, I’m going to find my blind spot, get to the heart of it.”
I hope that something like that can help people, but it also feels to me more of a journey into the unknown where we’re meeting ourselves and then opening again. OK, what wants to be seen now? That’s a beautiful question actually to ask yourself. What wants to be acknowledged now? What wants to be seen now? It’s more in that way of being in orientation that some of these tough ones get unearthed—along with conversations with trusted friends, and journaling, as there are many a journaling prompts and different exercises in the book.
One thing: if you do know basically what your core belief is you’ve been carrying around with you—for instance, I was just teaching a retreat with John Prendergast at Esalen. We were teaching on the great intimacy. We were talking about core beliefs. A middle-aged woman came and she said she’s a grandma and she said, “I had never even thought of a core belief, and I just found my core belief, and I’m so excited about it,” because that gave her some kind of a sense of power to actually be in touch with how she’d been disempowered.
One thing you can do if you do have this core belief emerging to you—”I’m not OK. I’m not OK as I am. People won’t accept me. I’m not OK. I’m not lovable,”—then one thing that you can do is—I have a thing where I say, “Flip it to find the gift.” You can ask what’s more true or you can just flip it. “I’m lovable just as I am.” What does that feel like to know that, and acknowledge that? What if that actually drove my behavior? What if I was being driven by this core knowing that “just as I am is good enough.” It’s perfect as is, and could use a little improvement as whoever—that Zen guy—says. That’s one quick little hack: to flip it to find the gift. The inverse—and often our blind spot—the inverse of the belief is where the juice is.
TS: Yes. So let’s say we flip it, but we don’t believe the positive statement about ourselves.
KB: Yes. It’s definitely not just trying to replace it with a positive because that won’t work. So, that’s great news. If you don’t believe it, then you’re really in touch with this thing that feels so believable and the opposite does not feel believable. So, there are ways to work with this thing that you’re holding—really look at it, look how it’s driving your life, look at the different patterns that it plays out, and then ask yourself, “Is this working for me? How’s this working for me?”
From almost a really just functional perspective, go, “Yes. How am I in my own way with this?” So, it’s actually seeing that truthfully this belief is causing me to suffer. Even though I don’t believe it’s opposite or I don’t have some “positive belief” instead, I can see how it’s just fundamentally not working in my life and it’s causing issues. So, there must be something about it that’s not true.
So in that, I have space to be able to acknowledge, “There’s something here that wants to be seen.” It might not be the exact opposite, it may be something like pointing me more to acknowledge the shame that’s there and not once hung out with until it feels like it’s really met and I’m not going to refuse it. Then the gift starts to emerge. So, these can be lifelong processes where we’re meeting ourselves in this way with this quality of presence and tenderness.
TS: OK. We talked about the core blind spot being this sense of feeling like a separate self—separate from the world, separate from other people, separate from the energy of life. You write that this is the biggest blind spot of all. Now, somebody could flip this and yet still not get underneath it all. Do you know what I’m saying? They could say, “I’m interdependent with everything. I am life itself.” But the sense of “me” is still running around. Talk some about the unveiling—and really you could say this is spiritual awakening—of this biggest blind spot of all.
KB: Well, you’re right. What happens is even if we have that insight—even if it is a real, genuine insight sometimes into the nature of who I am that I have been not in touch with, and suddenly I just sense, “I’m really not as small and confined as I thought I was. I have an even deep insight into that.” I know you know this well—that spiritual bypassing is a thing where people can just suddenly go, “Well, I’ve had this insight and spiritual awakening. So because of seeing that, I’m just going to fuse with that side of things. Who cares about this me that’s running around doing things because it’s not even me anyway.”
To me, that’s not spiritual awakening. It’s something else. It’s spiritual bypassing, bless our hearts, and we all do it from time to time. Or some of us really live in that because it’s scary to be human.
It’s a little funny that in acknowledging this deepest, clearest seeing into the biggest blind spot of all is—to me—an invitation into all of the humanness and into meeting all of it because otherwise it’s—I mean, for me it’s meaningless. You may have an insight and gain a sense of freedom, but if it’s not transposed into life and then into the relational world, I don’t know what meaning it has.
Again, I come back to this sense of where we are globally. I feel an urgency to help people see through what is holding them back most essentially in order to release ourselves into a shared way to address the problems that we face. I don’t hear spiritual bypassing in that. It’s like I feel that there’s even actually more responsibility to attend to the me that has all these associated ideas and beliefs and emotions with it through the awakening process.
TS: You know, Kelly, I think what I’ve been most moved by in our conversation is when you talked about your underlying motivation in helping people start investigating [and] looking at their blind spots. I have this image of taking off lids in the sidewalk everywhere, or something. Like, “What’s underneath? What’s underneath? What’s in here?” That it would create more kindness in the world, more understanding between us. Help me understand how this process as you see it would result in the kind of kindness that you’d really like to see more of in the world.
KB: Yes. If I’m being kind because I’m a Buddhist or a Christian or a Muslim, and I’m told to be kind, that’s going to go so far because it’s just this moralistic, “You should be kind.” It’s not the deeper kind of kindness that I’m talking about here. That’s good. It’s great. Teach kids to be kind.
But what I’m talking about is seeing the sameness, seeing our similarities, seeing how we’re all in this together. Look at us—billions of us carrying these self-images as if we’re all these separate cells walking around on the planet with our problems and our idealized image that we have to live up to. Then we’re disappointed when people don’t see our idealized image. Or maybe it’s the opposite of an idea that, “I’m a bad person, but I’m going to carry that around with me.”
If you just picture it like in math—billions of people doing this. It’s like we’re keeping ourselves from the essential work of kindness, which is I think that when we’re able to see, we’re all in this together [and] nobody’s perfect. Nobody. Not a single person, especially not people who say they’re spiritual teachers and awake. Nobody is perfect.
There’s something that I feel strongly driven to help us get together on, which is if we are able to—with more fluidity and more presence and love—attend to our own fallibility in the places where we mess up and we suffer and we hurt, that automatically translates into kindness for others. If it doesn’t, then where I’m withholding in kindness to another helps me again point right back to where I’m not giving it to myself. So, it’s this kind of feedback loop.
I think that if we’re all able to engage with our fallibility and also just the act of being human, where we’re living at the edge of what we don’t know, what’s unknown actually starts to feel like the new safety. Whereas I think right now most of us are operating from the safety [that] comes from this sense of self, and from having our life organized in a certain way that keeps that intact.
The invitation here is to say that’s not safe actually. We’re causing all kinds of issues for ourselves and each other in huge levels. What if we got on board with the new safety—opening to ambiguity, to the unknown, to our own wild—one wild precious life as Mary Oliver calls it. That’s like doing our best in this moment. Then I can’t help but think that that will be helpful at a scale—I would love to see it at a scale that is going to have impact and change for our planet.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Kelly Boys. She’s the author of the new book The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What’s Right in Front of You. Kelly, thank you so much for being a guest on Insights at the Edge, and thank you for all of your good work. Thank you.
KB: Thanks Tami. It’s good to be here.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
