7   •   THE ROOT CAUSE

At that moment, there was a knock at the door. “Come in!” Theo called.

The door swung open, and in walked Zagrum’s CEO, Kate Stenarude. She looked to be in her fifties, and the room felt bigger when she entered. She gave Theo a friendly double pat on the shoulder, then shook Ana’s and Tom’s hands.

“I should apologize for barging in uninvited. My eleven o’clock fell through, and I thought I’d make sure Theo wasn’t feeding you any falsehoods. How’s it going? Where are you at?”

“Theo was just describing self-deception as a disease of perception,” Ana said, “and Tom had asked what causes it.”

“Oh, good,” Kate said. “You’re going to tell the story about your son crying? I love this part.”

“Kate loves all the stories where I make mistakes and have to learn things,” Theo said to Tom and Ana.

“That is 100 percent true,” Kate laughed.

“Believe me, it’s not something I’m proud of,” Theo said, “but it does illustrate what we’re about to dive into. The story Kate’s talking about happened when my son David was still a baby, maybe four or five months old. It can’t have been long after I came home from San Francisco.

“One night, I woke up to the sound of him crying in the room next to ours and glanced at the clock. It was 1:00 a.m. I was groggy, but I knew I should get up to comfort him and let Tracie keep sleeping.

“But you know what? I didn’t get up. I knew what I should do, but I just stayed in bed, listening to David wail.

“And then, I started to think about Tracie in bed next to me, and I got mad. She knew I had an important meeting in the morning and that I needed a good night’s sleep, and she was still on maternity leave, so she could catch up on sleep when David was napping during the day, right?”

Tom raised his eyebrows, and Ana grimaced.

“And was Tracie even sleeping anyway,” Theo continued, “or just pretending to be?”

“Wow,” Ana said. “Why not just get up? Isn’t this all sort of dramatic when the only thing that needed to be done was to go take care of the baby?”

“It is a bit dramatic!” Theo said, laughing. “But I hope you recognize the sort of mental progression of sensing something you ought to do and finding reasons not to.”

“Theo’s story illustrates something called self-betrayal,” Kate said. “If we think of self-deception as a disease, then self-betrayal is the germ that causes it. It is the root cause of our distorted perceptions. And unfortunately, it’s extraordinarily common. We betray ourselves anytime we fail to act on or honor the helpful senses we have toward other people.”

“It’s the kind of thing that happens every day,” Theo said. “You feel like you should offer someone an apology, but you don’t. The performance of someone on your team starts to decline, and you have a sense that you should ask them what’s going on, but you put it off. People start talking about someone behind their back, and you know you shouldn’t join in, but you do anyway. You have a sense to wait until after a meeting to pull someone aside for a sensitive conversation, but you bring up the issue in front of everyone.”

“Just the other day,” Kate added, “I was at Rockefeller Center in New York for a meeting. And as I got into an elevator, I saw someone skid around the corner and dash toward us.

“I knew I should hold the doors for them, but no one else in the elevator moved, so I just let the doors slide shut and avoided eye contact. I don’t know if the person was late to a big meeting or had an interview, but a few seconds of my time and they might have made it.”

“Good example,” Theo said. “Kate didn’t hold the elevator. I didn’t move to help my son. These are examples of self-betrayal.”

Kate stood up and wrote a definition on the whiteboard:

Figure 2: The definition of self-betrayal

“So what happened with the baby?” Ana asked. “Did Tracie get up?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Theo said. “On this particular occasion, I eventually rolled out of bed and went to David’s room, grumbling to myself and not bothering to step quietly. The little guy had lost his pacifier, and one of his arms had slipped out of his swaddle. It probably took thirty seconds to get him settled, and he was back to sleep.

“But it took me a long time to drift off again, thinking about the inconvenience and feeling resentful. The next morning, I was out the door before Tracie woke up. And anytime I felt tired during the day, I felt angry again.

“So even though I ended up doing the thing I had felt I should do, the way I did it and the way I felt toward Tracie were dead giveaways that I had betrayed myself.”

“Well,” Ana said, looking at the board, “isn’t self-betrayal a strong label?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “After all, you ended up getting out of bed, and it’s not like Kate sliced the tires on someone’s car or did something malicious.”

“A germ doesn’t seem like much either,” Kate responded, “until it compromises the immune system. Some examples of self-betrayal may look small at first glance, but they open the doorway to self-deception and all its accompanying problems.”