Our Stories Don’t Need to Be Our Reality

One of the interesting parts of life is the relationships with have with other people in our own heads.

We know other people and we interact with them, and through these interactions, we form judgments about what the other person thinks of us.

But our experience of the world includes us at the center, so we are typically interpreting events through a lens that overestimates our impact on things.

For example, you’re at a cafe, and you run into someone you know, but haven’t seen for a while. They are in a rush and wave and say hello, but don’t stop to talk. You’ve been meaning to reach out and feel a bit guilty about not having checked in with in a while and so after that, you feel bad. Your mind immediately jumps to “they must be mad at me” or “What’s wrong with them, being passive-aggressive with me because I haven’t reached out! They haven’t reached out either!”

There are many other ways to interpret the events–maybe they are very late for an appointment or sick and need to rush home–but we have the instinct to jump to one based on our past.

In order to create meaningful progress in your relationships, it’s critical to start to first notice the stories we are creating and run them through a filter of other possible explanations. Then you can choose the stories that are most likely to be true and that create the most possibility for you.