When we were young, my brother carried around his blanket everywhere we went. It wasn’t really a blanket, it was a satin pillowcase. But you would never see my brother separated from his “blankie”.

In fact, even when it was hopelessly frayed and holes throughout, blankie traveled everywhere we went.

And if it temporarily got misplaced (such as when my mom washed it), my brother would cry until his blanket was safely returned.

As adults, we would never get so attached to any of our possessions. Would we?

Of course we do.

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One evening an elder Cherokee chief shared an important lesson with his grandson. “Inside of everyone is two wolves,” the old chief began. “One of them is Fear. He carries anger, envy, regret, resentment, worry, inferiority, false pride, and judgment.”

“The other wolf is Love. He represents compassion, joy, serenity, kindness, and hope.”

The man continued, “There is an ongoing battle between these two wolves. Each one is vying for your attention, but only one of them can win.”

The young boy thought about this predicament and timidly asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

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When I first became a manager, I absolutely hated giving performance feedback.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care for the employees – in fact many of them were dear friends. It was that I saw so little value in the annual Human Resources forced ritual of rating employees.

The company I worked for at the time had a required performance ranking distribution. 10% of my employees must be ranked at the bottom, 10% at the top, and the remaining masses in the middle.

But the real reason I despised giving feedback wasn’t just because I had to “force” people into an arbitrary bucket. It was because I didn’t like giving an honest, direct critique of their performance.

The superstars are going to be great, no matter what I say. And all the others aren’t going to improve their performance by very much, so why bother going to all the effort of putting together truly constructive feedback.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Which made me a horrible manager at the time.

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I can’t draw. In fact, I’m so bad at drawing that anytime I played the game Pictionary, none of my teammates could ever guess what I was attempting to represent.

It was a bit embarrassing, but I was fully aware of my artistic limitations. Anything beyond basic stick figures was completely out of my realm.

Yet with zero training and no practice, I just drew a fairly close representation of Pablo Picasso’s sketch of Igor Stravinsky.

When I finished my drawing, I was totally shocked by what I saw – so much so that it gave me goosebumps.

How did I perform such a feat?

By getting into the right hemisphere of my mind and reproducing Picasso’s sketch upside down.

Yes, upside down.

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Each of us has a severely debilitating limitation – the desire be right.

My opinion is correct. The candidate I voted for is the better choice. My worldview is accurate. You should heed my advice.

Being right is highly validating. Especially when others acknowledge our acuity.

The challenge with wanting to be right is that we often fall into the trap of self-deception.

How easy is it to deceive ourselves?

Consider this experiment in which participants were measured on the maximum amount of time they could keep their arms in cold water. Once the baseline was established, then each of the participants listened to a short lecture on heart health.

Participants learned that there are two types of hearts, namely Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is associated with poorer health and higher risk of heart disease whereas Type 2 the exact opposite: better health, longer life expectancy, and reduced risk of heart disease.

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