Don't Make Assumptions

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” –Henry Winkler

When I taught Emotional Intelligence courses with Teams and Leaders, my favorite part of our two-day seminar tapped into my latent acting skills. (My specialties are melodrama, and anything that allows me to bring out my geeky side.)

The lesson began this way: I stood at the front of the room, and stated, “I have been with Teams and Leaders for some time now, and of all the things I have learned, this one lesson has been most meaningful to me….” Then I paused, put my hands to my face, bowed my head slightly, and was silent. After a length of time, which was inevitably uncomfortable for everyone in the room, I would look up, turn to the white board, and ask, “Ok, what just happened?”

Depending on how good my acting skills were that day, the classroom would respond by saying variations of, “you were about to cry,” “you were overcome by emotion,” “you forgot what you were going to say” or “you got all melodramatic on us”. Occasionally, some of the answers were complete detailed anecdotes about my behavior that a particular person –or the entire class—projected onto me.

Once we had a good sized list from the class written on the board, I asked, “Of all these things, which of them are actual facts?” In most classes, as in most of our lives, it took some time before the class was willing to let go of the idea that the list of their interpretations was NOT already fact. But once they caught on, they began stating the actual truths about what they saw and heard. “You were silent.” “You put your hands to your face.” “You bowed your head.”

We go through our entire lives interpreting the things we experience with our five senses, making assumptions based on prior experiences or future projections. Unfortunately, because the world is so complex, (and because one different choice today can lead to a new outcome tomorrow) this doesn’t always serve us well.

As an example, I confess that I had myself an unexpected good cry a couple weeks ago based on something I saw and the assumptions I made. I woke up the next morning, still sad, but remembered the lesson and decided to take the risk and ask the person about what I’d seen. The truth was very different than my imagined scenario, and I had to laugh at myself for tripping over my own favorite life lesson.

The lesson, stated, is easy: make no assumptions. However, it is a difficult lesson to master. We all tend to treat history, experience, concepts and ideas as facts, instead of realizing that we have no idea what another person is thinking, experiencing or believing until we ask them.

As Don Miguel Ruiz states in his book The Four Agreements, “all the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally… if others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fill our need to know … if we hear something and we don’t understand, we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions.”

My request to you is muster up the courage to ask hard questions. Find a voice to ask for what you want instead of assuming that the other person will know. Check in with the person you are making assumptions about to find out their truth about the situation. You might not get the answer you hope for, but by having the courage to ask, you free yourself from much drama and sadness, and can move more easily into a life of freedom. Make this a habit, and you have the power to transform your life.