I was looking at my own blog archive last week. Six titles in a column, going back about six weeks.

Back to the Log. Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways. The Pitcher We Are Becoming. The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With. The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else. The Problem Was Never Being Right.

Six subjects. Six weeks. And reading them in a row, I realized I had written the same post six times without noticing.

What surprised me was that there was a thread emerging for me where I had not seen one before. Six separate things I thought I was writing about, and one thing I was actually writing about.

The same shape underneath

Every one of them has the same shape.

Something was going on in me. I had an explanation for what was going on in me. The two were not the same thing — and I was the only person in the room who couldn’t tell.

In The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With, the line was failure is not an option. I experienced that as discipline. The people working for me experienced it as pressure they couldn’t put down. Most of them went on to successful lives in spite of me. A few are still bitter, and they have a right to be.

In The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else, a client went quiet on me and my first thought was what did I do. I thought I was being accountable. I was being cruel in a way I would never have been to a stranger.

In The Problem Was Never Being Right, I watched someone early in their coaching and thought, that person should not be a coach. I thought I was exercising discernment. I was protecting a position.

And Back to the Log is the one about the log itself — my dad bringing a piece of wood out of the forest and starting there, taking it back when the slope of a cheek wasn’t right. That post was supposed to be about writing. It wasn’t.

The reasonable person in the story

Here is the part worth sitting with.

In none of those was I confused about myself. I wasn’t walking around wondering what my problem was. I had an answer ready. Discipline. Accountability. Discernment. High standards.

The answers were wrong, and they were wrong in one consistent direction: every single explanation made me the reasonable person in the story.

That is not a character flaw. That is how the equipment works.

There is a piece of research I keep coming back to. In 1988 two researchers named Harris and Schaubroeck pooled every study they could find comparing how people rate their own job performance against how their peers and their supervisors rate them.

Peers and supervisors agreed with each other at .62 — strong agreement, two independent groups of people seeing roughly the same person.

Your own rating agreed with your supervisor’s at .35. With your peers’, at .36.

Read that again. The people around you agree with each other about you nearly twice as much as either of them agrees with you.

You are not in the conversation about who you are. You are the subject of it.

Why emotional intelligence doesn’t reach this

Emotional intelligence, as most people learn it, teaches you to name what you feel. That is real work, and most of us genuinely cannot do it. Naming the feeling is worth every hour it takes.

But look back at those four failures. Not one of them was a failure of naming.

I could have told you I was frustrated with that coach. I could have told you exactly what the anxiety felt like when the client went quiet. The feeling was available to me the whole time. The feeling was never the problem.

The problem was the story I had built on top of the feeling — and the story was invisible precisely because I was standing inside it.

That is the gap. And that gap is the first domain of what Lynette and I call spiritual emotional intelligence: Awareness.

Self-awareness asks: what am I feeling?

Awareness asks: what is this feeling pointing at, and what is it protecting?

The second question is harder, because it assumes something uncomfortable — that you are not a reliable narrator of yourself. Not because you are dishonest. Because nobody is. The instrument you would use to check is the same instrument that generated the story.

So what do you actually do

Three things.

Use the Enneagram as a prediction, not a label. Most people treat their number as a description of who they are. It is more useful as advance warning about which story you will reach for when you are squeezed. Mine always reaches for the competent one. Knowing that does not stop it. It does mean I can catch it about forty seconds sooner than I used to.

Ask a narrower question than you want to ask. “How am I doing?” gets you nothing, because nobody answers it honestly. The question worth asking is: what is it like to be on the other side of me when I am under pressure? It is specific enough that people can answer, and uncomfortable enough that the answer is usually real. If you want to find your own gap, that question will get there faster than a year of journaling.

Turn the examen sideways. End of the day, two questions instead of the usual ones. Where today did I feel most like myself? Where today was I performing? You do not have to do anything with the answers for a while. Just notice that there is a gap, and that the gap is always in the same place.

Back to the log

My dad would carry a log out of the woods and start there. Not with the piece — he did not have the piece yet. With the log. He would work the slope of a cheek for days and then take the whole thing back and begin again.

I used to think that was perfectionism. I do not think that anymore.

I think he knew he could not trust his own eye at close range. So he would set it down, walk out of the studio, come back the next morning and look at it the way a stranger would. That is not perfectionism. That is a man building a workaround for a limitation he had the sense to admit.

You cannot see your own face. You can only see what it does to the room.

Six posts in six weeks, and I was the last one to know what I was writing about.

---

Take this further

Finding the Story You Are Standing Inside is a free four-part workbook built on this post — an inventory of four incidents, the direction your explanations bend, the narrow question to put to two people, and the examen turned sideways. Download the workbook (PDF).

Post 1 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Next: Belonging — ninety identical trucks and ninety different lives. Then: Insight — what is actually mine to do.

Peace and every good.

---

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Harris, M. M., & Schaubroeck, J. (1988). A meta-analysis of self-supervisor, self-peer, and peer-supervisor ratings. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 43–62. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1988.tb00631.x — self–supervisor ρ = .35, self–peer .36, peer–supervisor .62.

Fleenor, J., Smither, J., Atwater, L., Braddy, P., & Sturm, R. E. (2010). Self-other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(6), 1005–1034 — the standard review of this literature, for readers who want more.