Everybody has blind spots. They arise from the fact that, as human beings, we are situated in a world that elicits responses from us at all times – often without providing an opportunity to stop and think about how we go about responding. In other words, we all have a default way of acting in the world. We all do things out of habit that we are not aware of doing. This is what it means to have a blind spot – to go about one’s daily routine without necessarily being aware of the way that one does this.
So if we want to grow our knowledge pool, the only way to do that is to create a spacewhere people who come from different backgrounds and have different sorts of knowledge feel comfortable sharing that knowledge. This means we have to identify our blind spots and actively work the ones that might have a negative impact on the people around us.
How Can we Identify and Rectify our Blind Spots?
The hardest thing about blind spots is that, most of the time, we don’t even know that we have them. When it comes to other people, this means that we might be making them uncomfortable without even knowing we are doing it. Nothing in our life experience has ever taught us that the way we are behaving is potentially hurtful, so we have no reason to believe that it might be.
This is why we need to have allies who are capable of recognizing these blind spots and pointing them out for us. We need someone around to point out our failings in engaging with others so that we can begin to improve upon them. These allies can help us overcome our blind spots by helping us to understand the impact of our habitual behaviour on the way that other people relate to us.