the story you’re telling yourself is probably wrong…and it’s running your life
crucial conversations
There’s a concept I learned in a course called Crucial Conversations that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since the day I heard it. Not because it was new information exactly, but because someone finally shined light on something I’d been doing my entire life without knowing it.
Here it is: when something happens — when someone says something, does something, doesn’t do something — your brain doesn’t just record the event. It immediately starts writing a story about it.
And then it hands you that story as fact.
The course uses an example that stops people cold every time.
An employee starts missing work. When she does show up, she’s distracted, unfocused, less productive. As her manager, you notice. And almost immediately, without realizing you’re doing it, you start writing a story.
Maybe it’s: she doesn’t care about this job anymore.
Maybe it’s: she’s got one foot out the door.
Maybe it’s: something’s going on in her personal life and she’s bringing it to work.
Whatever story you land on, something interesting happens next. You start believing it. Not as a theory. As fact. You begin treating her differently based on a story you wrote entirely in your own head, with no information other than the raw observation that she’s been absent and distracted.
Then the coursework reveals what’s actually happening.
Her child was just diagnosed with a devastating illness.
Every absence, every distracted moment, every time she seemed somewhere else — she was somewhere else. She was in a hospital waiting room. She was on the phone with a specialist. She was trying to figure out how to keep her world from falling apart while still showing up for yours.
The story you told yourself had nothing to do with reality. And yet you were about to make decisions — about her job, about your relationship with her, about who she is as a person — based entirely on that story.
David and I have been married for thirty years. We manage a senior living community together, which means we work together, live where we work, and are in each other’s orbit approximately twenty-four hours a day. If there were ever two people who needed to understand this concept, it’s us.
Before Crucial Conversations, I didn’t know I was doing this. I just thought I was reading situations accurately. I’m observant. I pay attention. I pick up on things. I was confident in my reads.
What I didn’t understand was that I was picking up on real observations and then filling in everything I didn’t actually know with a story. And that story felt so true, so obvious, so mine, that I rarely questioned it.
I’d watch David’s facial expressions during a conversation and tell myself he was shutting down, pulling away, not interested in what I was saying. That story would make me frustrated. The frustration would change how I responded. And suddenly we were in a completely different conversation than the one we’d started — one shaped entirely by a story I’d written about a facial expression.
The reality? He was thinking. That’s what his thinking face looks like.
Thirty years in and I was still writing fiction about my own husband.
Here’s what the course taught us to do instead, and it’s deceptively simple.
When you catch yourself in a story — and once you know to look for it, you will catch yourself constantly — ask one question:
What don’t I actually know here?
Not what do you suspect. Not what does it look like. What do you actually, factually, know for certain?
In most cases, the honest answer is: very little.
You know what you observed. You don’t know what it means. The space between those two things is where the story lives — and where most of our unnecessary conflict, our snap judgments, our damaged relationships, and our worst decisions are born.
The change is harder than it sounds. The brain is fast. The story writes itself before you’ve even consciously noticed the observation that triggered it. The key to success is to develop the habit of pausing, catching it, and asking the question.
David and I practice this with each other now. Often one of us will say out loud: “the story I told myself is… ” Can we talk about what’s actually happening?*
That one sentence has changed more conversations than I can count. It disarms the defensiveness before it starts. It signals good faith. It says: I know I might be wrong. I want to know what’s true.
We use it with our employees. With our adult children. With each other. With ourselves.
It doesn’t make you less perceptive. It makes you more accurate.
I want to be clear that I’m not a certified Crucial Conversations instructor and I’m not attempting to teach the course here. I’m sharing what changed for us personally, in our real life, in our real marriage and real workplace. If this resonates with you I’d encourage you to look into the course itself — it goes much deeper than anything I can summarize in a blog post, and the tools it gives you are genuinely worth the time.
What I can tell you is this: the moment you understand that you are constantly writing stories, and that those stories are not the same thing as truth, something shifts. You become a little more humble. A little more curious. A little less certain that you already know.
And in my experience, that uncertainty — that willingness to ask what don’t I know — is where almost every good conversation, every repaired relationship, and every changed mind begins.
The course is called Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. It’s available as a book, an online course, and through workplace training programs.
LW