Author: Malachi Thompson / Source: Lifehack
In the back of your retina in each eye, there is a small surface area which contains no photoreceptor nerve cells. These cells receive light signals that your brain transmutes into images so can make sense of the world around you. However, there is a tiny area at the back of your retina surrounding your optic nerve completely void of these photoreceptors: your blind spot.
Your brain cleverly assesses the light signals coming in from around the blind spot and projects similar information in place of it, so you get a full image of what you’re focusing on. Just as your eyes have these permanent blind spots, you also have blind spots throughout your life.
For example, despite being into your third marriage, arguments tend to start around the same issues. Burnout has set in at your last three jobs and it’s only when every ounce of confidence, dignity and self-worth has been torn to shreds that you’ve resigned.
Unlike the permanent blind spot in your eyes, blind spots in your life are malleable to resolve. So how to find your blind spot?
Your growing deeper awareness of them only spawns greater self-mastery to transform those blind spot into new strengths. As you continue to grow, you’ll uncover new blind spots. With more progress at discovering them and transforming them into new superpowers, you’ll soon be welcoming them with open arms!
1. Discover potential blind spots by reviewing your wheel of life.
It’s virtually impossible to achieve change without first having clarity on where making changes will most help you. You need to learn how to discover your blind spots. But how can you center your focus on something you can’t see?
If you have ever worked with a life coach, completing an introductory Wheel of Life[1] review will be familiar to you.
If you haven’t, the good news is you don’t need to! By simply putting pen to paper, you can create and review your own Wheel of Life like the one below:
First, allocate a life category to each main segment. Examples might be:
- Money or finances
- Career or work
- Spiritual and personal growth or religion
- Intimate relationships (i.e. significant other, partner or spouse)
- Family relationships and social friendships
- Recreation, leisure activities and hobbies; and
- Health, physical and mental
- Another way you categorize a significant area of your life.
Think about what enjoyment and fulfillment you currently experience in each area. Take your time reflecting on each in depth. Also, think about the things you don’t experience fulfillment on. Jot these down also. We need to look at both sides of the equation.
Noting that each section has a rating scale from 0 to 10 (0 being the least and 10 being the most) ask yourself the following two questions whilst.
- a) What level of satisfaction do I currently experience?
- b) What level of satisfaction would I like to experience in the future?
Now, look at your ratings. If you have areas you gave middle-road or good ratings but something inside you is asking you if those ratings are genuine, turn the spotlight here.
Explore further. There’s likely something beneath your immediate consciousness that’s inviting you to probe further. Working with a coach who can probe objectively can be particularly helpful.
Look at those areas you rated low for the first question but gave a higher rating for the second question. The size of the rating gap indicates there are blind spots primed for transformational changes.
Your next stepping stone is setting your priorities for what changes you want and what action steps to start with.
2. Undertake psychometric tests to help you recognize strengths and weaknesses
If trying to randomly brainstorm what possible blinds spots draws a cognitive blank, a structured personal development questionnaire can be a helpful reference to start from.
However, be careful of gravitating toward assessments which merely provide a fluffy summarized classification of your preferences. Certainly don’t take the results of these as gospel, either.
Gallup’s Clifton Strengths Finder (CSF) and the VIA Character Strengths survey are popular examples of tools that can help you explore your strengths. However, there are limits with tools like these.
If you find the CSF reveals your top strengths as creativity, for example, this does not mean you are creative in comparison with other people. For example, there will be reasons (i.e. blind spots) why your handmade Christmas cards are still sitting on your market stall table whilst your competitor’s a few tables down are selling like hotcakes!
As your results are not summarized in comparison with population data, drawing such a conclusion can give you a false sense of your competency.[2]
It does, however, mean you are more creative in comparison with the other categories the CSF tool explores. You can still see that there are…
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