Hello and welcome to the Mindful Kind podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Cable, author of the

Mindfulkind book, Mindfulness Teacher and blogger at Rachelcable.com. Each week this podcast will bring

meaningful tips, tools and strategies so you can manage stress and live more mindfully in the modern world.

Hello and welcome to episode 314 of the Mindful Kind podcast.

In the previous episode called Exciting Plans for the New Year, where I talked about some

of the key things I'm focusing on in 2022, I mentioned that I'd like to start practicing

giving people the benefit of the doubt more. And when I first started thinking about this concept,

I actually did some of my own research and found some really interesting things, which I'm

excited to share with you in this episode. But first of all, I'd like to explain why I think

it can be important to give people

the benefit of the doubt. I don't think this is something I tend to do naturally because I still

find it really easy to jump to conclusions, often negative conclusions. For example, if I spend

time with someone and they're acting disinterested or disengaged, I might start

thinking that they don't like me or that I've said something wrong.

If I don't know the person very well, I might assume that they're unfriendly or cold.

Now, this can also be known as an attributional style.

Someone's attributional style is the way that they describe life events to themselves,

and this is a super interesting topic that really deserves its own episode. So stay tuned for

next week's episode of The Mindful Kind, which will focus on attributional styles and how to

nurture a more positive attributional style. But back to this episode for now, so there are a few

potential problems with jumping to negative conclusions about other people. First of all, I don't

know that I'm right when I jump to a conclusion. Of course, it feels like I'm right, but just because

...