Check Your Assumptions

I was walking through a favorite store recently and bumped into a display I hadn’t seen before. An employee who was watching this said, “you are on your cellphone.” And I held up what I had in my hand and said, “my cellphone’s in my pocket, this is a pair of sunglasses.”  

It’s an easy mistake to make because the brain is highly efficient and will fill in gaps in perception with things that we’re already familiar with.

So, the employee seeing something in my hand figured it was a cellphone when, upon a little further investigation, if they had checked, they would have seen that it wasn’t.

In life, we often assume something from a little bit of information like a part of a text message, or something somebody said, or maybe a sideways glance we think we got.

That can cause us to become upset unnecessarily if we assume and don’t follow up on that assumption to investigate a little further.

If you do find yourself upset by something that seems like a slight, or some kind of something else that makes you feel bad, and use those emotions as a signal to investigate a little further, you might be surprised if what you thought was one thing, turns out to be something else entirely.