You keep dating the same jerks. You think you're fat and you're not. You have—ta-da—a blind spot. Martha Beck leads you on a vision quest.

Most of us have such psychological "blind spots," aspects of our personalities that are obvious to everyone but ourselves. There's the mother who complains, "I don't know why little Horace is so violent—I've smacked him for it a thousand times." Or your gorgeous friend who believes she has all the seductive allure of a dung beetle. Or the coworker who complains that, mysteriously, every single person he's ever worked for develops the identical delusion that he's shiftless and incompetent. As we roll our eyes at such obliviousness, some of us might think, What about me?

You can find the answers if you care to—or more accurately, if you dare to. This is the roughest mission you can undertake: a direct seek-and-destroy attack on your own pockets of denial. Denial is far trickier than simple ignorance. It isn't the inability to perceive information but the astonishing ability to perceive information while automatically refusing to allow it into consciousness. Our minds don't perform this magical trick without reason. We only "go blind" to information that is so troubling, so frightening, or so may be so biased against being arrogant that they overlook or dismiss their own best qualities.

Do I have blind spots, and if so, what are they?

• See spot! If the evidence above suggests that you have blind spots, you can try to eliminate them with a simple mindfulness exercise.
• Handling Feedback: Before you even ask for an honest appraisal, you have to have a strategy in place for processing it.