Not long ago, I sent an email and didn’t hear anything back.
By the following day, I’d convinced myself they’d lost interest. Maybe it wasn’t a priority anymore or maybe I’d said something wrong. Perhaps they simply weren’t interested.
The day after that, they replied apologising. They’d been on annual leave.
Nothing about the situation had changed, only the story I’d created in the absence of the facts.
The more I thought about it afterwards, the more I realised how often we all do this. We send an email and don’t get a reply. A colleague gives us a short answer in a meeting. Our manager asks if they can “have a quick chat.” Before anything else happens, our mind starts filling in the gaps.
“They’re annoyed with me. I must have done something wrong. They don’t value my opinion.”
The interesting thing is that none of those thoughts are facts. They’re simply the meaning we’ve attached to a situation we don’t yet fully understand.
Our minds don’t particularly like unanswered questions. When information is missing, we instinctively look for meaning. Most of the time, that’s incredibly helpful. It helps us make decisions, spot patterns and navigate an increasingly complex world.
Sometimes though, the meaning we attach to a situation says more about what’s happening inside our own mind than what’s actually happening around us.
Executive coaches Carol Kauffman and David Noble wrote:
“Perspective is the only thing that can change the results without changing the facts.”
It’s one of those sentences that becomes more powerful every time you read it.
The meeting doesn’t change. The feedback doesn’t change. The conversation doesn’t change. The facts remain exactly as they were. What changes is the perspective we bring to them.
We’ve probably all experienced worrying that someone was upset with us, only to discover later they were dealing with something completely unrelated. Or assuming a piece of feedback was criticism, before realising it was actually an invitation to grow.
It reminded me of something Gavin said recently:
“Now and again I’ve walked off stage thinking, ‘That didn’t land at all,’ only to have someone come up afterwards and tell me it was exactly what they needed to hear.”
It’s such a simple example, but it captures this perfectly. Nothing about the session had changed. Only the story he’d told himself before he knew the full picture.
Sometimes that’s enough to completely change what happens next.
Perspective isn’t about pretending difficult situations don’t exist or forcing ourselves to think positively. It’s about recognising that there is often more than one way to interpret the same situation, and that the interpretation we choose will often shape what happens afterwards.
This matters just as much in leadership as it does in everyday life.
A leader might tell themselves that their team is resisting change, when in reality the team is simply looking for more clarity. A colleague might appear disengaged when they’re actually overwhelmed. Someone who stays quiet in a meeting may have plenty to say; they may simply need more time to think before contributing.
The challenge is that once we’ve settled on an explanation, we often stop looking for others. Instead, we begin collecting evidence that confirms the conclusion we’ve already reached.
One of my favourite ideas from Brené Brown is a simple phrase:
“The story I’m making up is…”
Those six words create space. They remind us that our perspective is just that, a perspective, not necessarily the truth. They encourage curiosity before certainty and conversation before assumption.
Imagine how many conversations might change if we started there.
“The story I’m making up is that you’re unhappy with the proposal. Have I understood that correctly?”
Or…
“The story I’m making up is that this project isn’t a priority anymore.”
It’s amazing how often those stories turn out to be wrong. Even when they’re partly right, asking the question is almost always better than assuming the answer.
I also wonder whether this has become even more important as AI becomes part of our everyday working lives.
AI is becoming an incredible thinking partner. It can help us organise ideas, explore different viewpoints, challenge our reasoning and accelerate our thinking in ways that simply weren’t possible a few years ago.
What it can’t do is tell us whether the assumptions we’ve built into the question are true.
If I ask AI,
“How do I deal with a colleague who clearly doesn’t respect me?”
it will do its best to help.
But hidden inside that question is an assumption that may never have been true in the first place. AI isn’t working from reality, it’s working from the version of events I’ve given it.
A more useful question might be:
“Here’s what happened. Can you help me think of three other possible explanations?”
Nothing about the situation has changed. I’ve simply become more curious about it.
The quality of the answer depends, in part, on the quality of the thinking that came before the question. Which is why I think self-awareness is one of the most valuable skills we can develop. Not because it removes uncertainty, but because it helps us ask better questions.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if self-awareness isn’t actually about having fewer stories but noticing that we’re creating them in the first place.
Perhaps that’s where curiosity really begins. It’s the willingness to pause, question the story we’ve already written and stay open a little longer.
Maybe the best learners, and the best leaders, aren’t the people who reach conclusions the fastest. Maybe they’re the people who stay curious long enough to discover there might be another way of seeing exactly the same situation.
