The Stories You Tell Yourself and Believe Are True

The hidden assumptions shaping your decisions, relationships, and life

Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version by Jon:

Your phone buzzes. You glance down.

‘Fine’

A sinking feeling hits your stomach.

‘Damn she’s annoyed with me. I must have said something wrong’ flashes through your mind. That’s not the response you were expecting. You start to ask what did I do wrong?

But pause. What actually happened?

You received a single word. Everything else you invented. Your brain filled a gap with a story, then sold it to you as fact.

You made an assumption.

The reality? Your friend was in a busy meeting and just sent you a quick response to your text.

An assumption is a belief you’ve accepted before it’s checked. The mind makes them constantly. Most pass you by. Yet they quietly shape what you feel, what you do, and what you believe is possible.

You can’t stop making assumptions. That’s not possible. The goal is to catch them so they don’t warp your reality of what’s actually true.

‘We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.’
Stephen R. Covey

Why the mind jumps to conclusions

Your brain is a prediction engine. It doesn’t record what’s in front of you, it anticipates it.

Every moment, you’re absorbing more information than you could possibly process in full: body language, words, memories, your environment, risks, sights, sounds, smells… If you had to consciously process all of it, you’d meltdown in seconds.

So the brain relies on mental shortcuts like assumptions, quick pattern-matches drawn from your past experience to create a workable version of events fast enough to act on.

The problem is that the stories they create can be wrong.

Confirmation bias makes this worse; once you believe something, you start favouring evidence that supports it and discounting evidence that doesn’t. Which means once you’ve formed an assumption however wrong, you start collecting evidence for it.

If you believe a colleague is lazy, you’re more likely to notice instances that confirm that assumption and overlook times they work hard. This self-reinforcing loop can make assumptions very hard to shake.

How assumptions change behaviour

Assumptions don’t stay in your head. They shape your reality.

1. They create what they predict. Jane decides her draft short story isn’t good enough and stops working on it before anyone else has seen a word. She tinkers at the edges, loses heart, and quietly shelves it.
   
   The assumption of its lack of worth buried it. The same thing happens everywhere: people abandon pieces they assume won’t land, silence ideas they assume will be met with indifference.
   
   The assumption closes the door before a single reader has had the chance to decide for themselves.
   

2. They distort relationships. A friend doesn’t reply to any of your messages all day. You assume you’ve offended them somehow. You pull back, become guarded. They sense the shift the next day, and grow confused. Real distance opens from nothing.
   
   The reality? Their phone battery died and they couldn’t charge it until they got home after work.
   
   See how easy it is to misread a situation and build a story around someone else’s behaviour.
   

3. They define who you think you are. Some assumptions go deeper than opinions about others; they become opinions about yourself.
   
   ‘I’m not creative’. ‘I’m not the kind of person who is good at presenting’. These beliefs don’t describe fixed truths. They describe past experiences you use as predictions about yourself.
   
   Once you accept them as fact, they begin to limit you. You stop trying the things that would stretch you and help you grow. You make your life smaller.

What you gain when you catch assumptions early

Assumptions feel like observations. That’s what makes them hard to catch. But certain signs reliably hint that they are present.

1. Notice your leaps. Thoughts like ‘She must think I’m useless’ or ‘This will definitely fail’ sound like you have automatically judged the outcome without evidence.

2. Strong emotions are telling you something important. Anxiety, frustration, and embarrassment are often less about what happened and more about the story you’ve told yourself about what happened. When strong emotions bubbles up, ask: what am I assuming right now?

3. Split fact from interpretation. Take any situation and separate it into two parts: what happened, and what you think it means.
   
   For example:
   Fact: My manager replied with a one sentence email to my report.
   Interpretation: She thought the work was poor.
   
   Naming the interpretation gives you more objectivity. Ask yourself is the assumption fair based on past behaviour?
   

4. Look for patterns. If you frequently assume judgement, rejection, or failure, regardless of the situation you may have triggered an habitual pattern rather than a balanced reading of what actually happened.

A simple check before you react

Once you catch your thinking might be an assumption, slow down. Breathe.

Take a few seconds to question your thoughts:

The 10-second check

1. What do I actually know? State the facts only; what happened, not what it means.

2. What am I assuming? Name the assumption in simple terms.

3. What else could explain this? Come up with at least two or three alternatives.

4. What’s the easiest way to find out? Ask a question. Wait. Gather information.

What changes when you pay attention

Assumptions will always be there. They’re hardwired into you.

But when you learn to catch them sooner, you give yourself something important. The ability to pause between what happens and what you decide it means.

Your decisions become clearer, relationships are less prone to misunderstandings and you have a more balanced perspective on life.

Reflect on your day, what assumptions did you make? And ask yourself, what else could be true?