There’s a great line from Ted Lasso that we can all learn from.
In the scene, Ted has learned that his ex-wife is going to Paris with her boyfriend. It’s the City of Love, so Ted concludes there’s going to be a proposal in the offing and starts to spiral, in the mild and well-mannered way that Ted spirals.
Leslie Higgins, watching this happen, offers him the following: “If anything, you should find out before you flip out.”
We are built to jump to conclusions.
Your brain’s job is to keep you safe, and to do that quickly, it has to fill gaps with assumptions. Left to its own devices, it fills them pessimistically, because a brain that assumes danger and is wrong costs you an afternoon of anxiety, while a brain that assumes safety and is wrong costs you considerably more.
So in the absence of real information, you write a story. Your boss’s two-word reply means she’s unhappy with the work. The reorg conversation you weren’t invited to means your scope is being cut. The peer who pushed back in the meeting is building a case against you. Blah, blah, blah…
Then, you start acting on the story as though it were all factual.
This is also, incidentally, why communication during organizational change matters so much. People will not sit patiently in an information vacuum. They’ll create a narrative so that their ego and nervous system can figure out what to do next.
I worked with a client a while back who had a version of this that was costing him his leadership brand and future potential. When things weren’t going the way he thought they should, he’d react, visibly and immediately. His colleagues found him difficult, meetings got tense, and his reputation was becoming “brilliant, but you have to manage him.”
What he came up with to reverse this was simple. Before forming an opinion or reacting to anything, he committed to asking three clarifying questions.
The questions had to be ones he didn’t already know the answer to, and they had to be benign enough that they didn’t put anyone on the defensive. He kept a few in his back pocket for when his mind went blank.
- Can you say more about that?
- What do you see as the main benefit here?
- How would you suggest we tackle it?
His strategy worked.
The first and most immediate benefit was physical. 90 seconds is roughly how long it takes for an initial emotional surge to pass. Asking the questions gave his mind something to do while his nervous system recalibrated.
The second was that after practicing this approach for a bit, he realized his assumptions in the moment were often wrong. Not always, but often enough to give him pause. Which, in turn, helped him dial down the emotional response.
The third was reputational. His goal was to stop being reactive, and in the process he became curious. Eventually, news traveled to him sooner because people stopped being afraid to tell him bad news or things he wouldn’t like, out of fear of his reaction. It was a win-win situation.
He set out to stop being reactive and ended up being seen as curious. People started bringing him things earlier, because they were less afraid of delivering bad news or telling him something he might not want to hear.
So the next time you catch yourself building a case against a person or institution, pause to separate fact from fiction.
“Find out before you flip out.”
