Good morning and welcome to the Increase Reimpact Podcast. I'm Justin Stewart.

Episode 1,864 and today I'm going to read to you an excerpt from an article called Not

Everyone's Out To Get You from Farnham Street. It says this, if you ever feel that the

world is against you, you're not alone. We all have a tendency to assume that when anything

goes wrong, the fault lies with some great conspiracy against us. A coworker fails

to give you a report in time. They must be trying to derail your career and beat you

to promotion. Your child drops and breaks an expensive plate. They must be trying to

annoy you and waste your time. Wi-Fi in a coffee shop not working. The staff must be

lying about having it to lure you in and sample their espresso. But the simple fact is that

these explanations, which we tend to jump to, are rarely true. Maybe your coworker thought

today was Tuesday, not Wednesday. Maybe your child had sticky hands from playing with

Play-Doh. Maybe the Wi-Fi router is actually broken. This is what happens when we jump

to conclusions. The remedy to this is to apply something called Hanlon's razor, which

is never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by neglect. A lot

of times we jump to conclusions when we think about people who are sliding us or we think

they're out to get out to get us. It's important in these, when you don't know someone's intentions,

you always want to assume positive intent. Now you might be thinking, well, what if it

is a bad person? You don't know these people, Justin. You don't know my situation. Now,

positive intent, yes, could be for the other person. But most importantly, positive intent

protects you. Your stress, your focus, your attitude, your mindset. Because you don't

know someone's intentions. You don't know why they did something. So rather than assume

and jump to conclusions as we tend to do as humans and leaders and parents and coaches

...